John

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

If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else and what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day, they're not nearly as big of a deal. What are our big rocks? And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. It's so fun to watch myself for two minutes before I preach every week during this series. This is the third part in our series, Big Rocks, where we're talking about the large priorities in life. And this week, I want to talk about having a Jesus-centered home and a Jesus-centered family. So this, I will tell you up front, is family-centric. But it applies to having a Jesus-centered marriage. If you're a single person, there are principles here that we can absolutely apply to having a Jesus-centered life. But when I throw out that term, Jesus-centered home, I think a lot of us would go, yeah, we have one of those. Like our home is a Jesus-centered home. But I want to kind of challenge you up front on that by just making this simple point. A pro-Jesus home is not the same as a Jesus-centered home. A home that's pro-Jesus, if we would say, yeah, we got a Jesus-centered home, well, is it a pro-Jesus home or is it a Jesus-centered home? For instance, the Rector House, our home, is a Kyle Tolbert pro-home. We are pro-Kyle Tolbert. Thank you. Thank you for that. He's running sound today for me, so a little less pro-Kyle right now. But overall, the Rector Home is a pro-Kyle home. We like him. We hope things work out for Kyle. I bet most of the homes in this church are pro-Kyle homes. We want the best for the guy, right? We hope things work out for Kyle. We hope that he has good days. We're fans of what he does. We like DJ KT and Christmas Kyle and Easter Kyle and Summer Extreme Kyle. We like all the versions of Kyle, right? But it's not a Kyle-centered home. We don't pray every day that John and Lily will become more and more like Kyle as they age. We don't wake up going, what can we do? What can we implement in our home to get our children to be closer to Kyle, right? Like we don't do that stuff. We don't have WWKD bracelets, right? We don't have what would Kyle do, like anywhere in our home home. We're pro-Kyle home. We're not a Kyle centered home. I think a lot of us have pro-Jesus homes. We're foreign. We hope things work out for him. We want his will to be done. We might pray that sometimes. We support, in this house, we support Jesus. There's no more, I don't mean to step on any toes. If I do, I'm a little bit sorry, not a lot of it, sorry. There's no more pro-Jesus sign in a home than at Christmas time when you see the poster or the postcard or whatever it is of Santa kneeling at the cross. Like in this house, first Jesus, then Santa. Santa kneels to Jesus here. We are pro-Jesus, even during Christmas. Good job, right? We have pro-Jesus homes. Do we have Jesus-centered homes? Do we have Jesus-centered conversations? Do we wake up every day thinking, what can we do? What can we implement so that our children grow more closely to Jesus? What can I do to make Jesus the center of my life? What can we do to make Jesus the center of our marriage? What kinds of things can we implement to make sure that the relationships in this house, the things that happen in this home are things that revolve around Christ? And so to that end, I wanted to talk this morning about actually having a Jesus-centered home. And I'll tell you this up front, okay? As I was thinking about the sermon and the best way to approach it, and really, most of the time when I'm thinking about a sermon, I'm thinking, how can this be maximum helpful to the people who got up and showered and brushed their teeth and came today? Like, how can this be maximum helpful for you? And so as I thought about that, I really didn't think it was worth investing a ton of our time in this idea of having a Jesus-centered home. I didn't want to come in this morning and try to convince you to have a Jesus-centered home or leave with this compelling vision of what can happen when Jesus is the center of your home. Not because I don't think a compelling vision is worth having, but because I think you're probably already with me on that. Like you got up in the summertime and you came to church and your kids are over there or you're here or whatever it took you to get here, you're here. So I think I'm going to assume that a majority of us, I'm not saying that everyone in here is in on this hook, line, and sinker, but a majority of us in here, if I could talk to you and say, do you want to have a Jesus-centered home, you would say yes. So I'm going to assume that we came this morning, you didn't wake up thinking, boy, I really want a Jesus-centered home. But when I first started mentioning it, I'm going to assume that you're with me and that this is a thing that you'd like to pursue. This is something that you'd like to implement. So to that end, a couple things. First of all, my goal for you today, if you have someone to drive home with today, is to have a family meeting in the car. It's to schedule a family meeting in the car on your way home. If you have children, I want you guys, my goal is for you guys to schedule something with your children to talk about some things that you're going to do. I want mom and dad to talk about how can we make this a more Jesus-centered home. I want husbands and wives to look at this and go, okay, there's some things that we can implement. How do you want to, which of those seem practical? Which of these seem like something that we can actually do? So my goal is for you guys, to whom it's applicable, to have family meetings as a result of today to talk about how to implement some of these things. Also because of that, this is just a ridiculously practical sermon. I'm going to give you six suggestions of things that you can do to have a Jesus-centered home. Because again, I wanted it to be maximum helpful. I didn't want to bring you in, talk to you about having a Jesus-centered home, and then send you home with no practical ideas, just leave you to search Google and figure it out on your own. So this is the place where we're going to do that. Our guiding passage today is found in Deuteronomy chapter six. So if you have a Bible, it's the fifth book of the Bible. Deuteronomy chapter six is just a sideline. This doesn't mean anything. Deuteronomy, the word Deuteronomy literally means the law repeated. So Deuteronomy is like a synopsis of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. Okay. So if you really want to know what's going on in those three books, Deuteronomy will kind of give you the highlights for better or for worse. And it finishes up the narrative of that portion of scripture. But in this portion of Deuteronomy, they had just received the law, and Moses is telling them how they are to teach it to their families, how they are to implement this as a culture. How are we going to learn this law, to breathe this law, to obey this law as a culture? Here's how we're going to do it. This is what he says. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. He's talking about the law. You shall teach them diligently to your children. And you shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand. They shall be as frontlets between your. When Moses is telling them, this is the law of God, this is our religion, this is our faith. Here's how we're going to implement this countrywide, nationwide. To us, it'd be nationwide. To them, it was peoplewide. The Hebrew people, this is how we're going to implement that law. You're going to teach it to your children. You're going to write it in your homes. You're going to keep it on your hands and on your head. To this day, if you go to Jerusalem, you go to the wailing wall, you will see some Orthodox Jews, some men who have it, literally, phylacteries, I think is what they're called, tied to their head and tied to their wrists with these elaborate leather bands in obedience to this. This is how they said that we are going to learn God's word and learn the law and learn our faith. And what's interesting to me is he does not say, diligently take your family to church, diligently go to synagogue, diligently go to the tent when we set it up and we have the sacrifices. No, no, no. And he doesn't say, listen to your pastor, listen to your priest. He doesn't say, make sure the kids get to youth group. What's he say? He puts it all on the parents. You teach it to your children. How's this faith going to go forward? You teach it to your kids. You teach it in your house. You teach it in your house. We'll teach it in our house. And the next generation will do the same thing. And somewhere along the lines, we kind of lost this a little bit. Where we bring our families to church and that's where they get their Jesus. But our families need to be learning Jesus from us, from the parents. So the other thing that I want to say about this as we apply it to our lives, this verse is talking about the law, the Ten Commandments, the law of God. However, the New Testament teaches us that Jesus perfected the law. Jesus himself said that he did not come to overthrow the law, but to fulfill it. Romans tells us that he perfected it. And so not in every case in the Old Testament, but in this particular case and others like it, I think it's fair to apply what God wanted his people to do with the law, to apply that to his New Testament people and say, this is what God wants people to do with his word and with his son. So teach our kids the word. Talk about it. Write it on our houses. Keep it in your head. Keep it in your hands. This is how we are to have a Jesus-centered home. This is how we are to be obedient to this command in Deuteronomy. I think the same impetus still sits on us to center our lives and our homes around Jesus and around God's word. So how can we do that? What are the practical ways to be obedient to Deuteronomy, to have not just a pro-Jesus home, but to have a Jesus-centered home? Well, the first thing is the most obvious one. It's where all of your heads went, so I just thought I would go ahead and get it out of the way and say it up front. Family devotions. Have family devotions. In your marriage, read something together. Talk about what you're reading in the Bible. Even if you're not reading the same thing, you're not on the same reading plan, you're doing different small groups, you're doing whatever, read it and talk about it together. But for those who still have children in the home, have family devotions. And I know that that feels intimidating. I don't even have my own devotions. How am I going to do a family devotion? This is a good way to learn them. And here's the thing. Your kids have never had a family devotion either. They don't know that it sucks. They don't know that you're not good at it. So just start. They're not going to know that you're not any good at it. And you'll get better. And you'll figure it out. And here's the thing that I bet most of the parents in this room don't know. Do you know that every week, one of Erin Winston, our children's pastor, one of her volunteers, every week, puts a piece of paper in your hand when you pick up your child that has prompts, that has devotional prompts on it for three to five days of the week. Age appropriate according to what they talked about in that room and in that room over there on the other side of the aquarium store. According to what they talked about, she puts a piece of paper in your hand with prompts that are age appropriate. They get more and more detailed as your child ages to help you have these conversations and have devotions in your home. She also last summer gave to all the families a devotional book and has a ton of resources for you. So a devotion is just a time where you sit down, you read usually just a verse of scripture, you reflect on it as a family, and you move on. So if we want to have a Jesus-centered home, one of the first things we can do is implement some regular family devotions in our house. You can do it. Moms, dads, step up to the plate. It'll be all right. You can do it. Married people, have your quiet times. Don't hold each other accountable. Don't pester each other about it. That doesn't work. I don't think that works in a marriage. If that works in your marriage, that's fine. I'm not advocating that, but every now and again, you should say, hey, what have you been reading? What have you been learning? That's a good conversation to have. The next thing that I would tell you to do to have a Jesus-centered home is to have public quiet times. Have public quiet times. And what I mean by that is quiet times that are visible to the rest of your family. I don't mean put on your cool jeans and go to Sola and read your Bible like a lonely hipster. I don't mean that. I mean, read your Bible in a place where your family can see you. I've told you guys this before. Growing up, I would come downstairs to go to school in the morning as a teenager, And every morning I would see my mom's Bible open to a different portion of scripture. And I would see a mug of coffee that was almost all the way gone every morning. And I knew that she was praying for me every day. And I knew that she was reading God's word every day. And I'm going to tell you something. When she told me the Bible says this, or I think God says this, or I think you need to do this, I gave her words more weight because I knew that she was reading her Bible. My dad traveled all the time, but when he would travel, he would take his Bible with him. I saw that in my parents. I knew that they knew their Bible. I have been meaning to, I read my Bible when I get into the office. That's my quiet space because we have two young children. But I'm going to try, you can hold me to this, I'm going to try to intentionally shift to sit in the chair that you can see. I can see the stairs so that when Lily wakes up, she'll see me there doing my devotions. Steve, our worship pastor, he gave me this idea, and it's a great one. He listens to scripture on his phone. He's got a great porch with a great view of some woods. He'll turn Scripture on on his phone on the Bible app and just let that read it to him. So you could do that on your way to work or whatever, but he'll sit there, have his cup of coffee, and let the Bible app read Scripture to him. And I thought it was such a great idea that me and John, my three-month-old, listened to Colossians four or five times through this week while I was feeding him in the mornings or whenever else. And while he's doing that, sometimes his son Grayson will come outside and he'll say, what are you listening to? And he's saying, First Thessalonians. And he's like, can I listen too? Yeah, sure. So then they talk about it. Have public quiet times. Let your spouse see you doing that. Let your kids see you doing that. Make it a part of the regular rhythm of your home. It's not a thing that needs to be hidden. Another very simple thing to do to make your home a Jesus-centered home is to write scripture on your wall. It's simple. It's easy. But it's important. Pick a verse. Pick a passage that characterizes your family. That really depicts. Maybe it's the fruit of the Spirit that you want to hang on the hallway. Not so that your children will have the fruit of the Spirit, but so that you'll be reminded to have the fruit of the Spirit with your children, right? Put the verses in visible places in your home so that they become a part of your family life. When I walk in the door every day, one of our favorite verses is on the wall right when you walk in from the garage door, and it's a phrase out of Psalm 1611. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. Now, neither me nor Jen put that there so that we could walk in and go, ah, fullness of joy. We didn't think about that. We just put it there because it's small and it fits on that wall. That's why we put it there. But when I walk in and I see it, there are times when I see it and it reminds me. In God's presence, there's a fullness of joy. And I remember that my family is one of God's biggest blessings to me. And so the joy that he intends for me is found in this place. It grounds me. Jen may not say that that feels true to her, but it's true sometimes. She doesn't know what I would be like if I didn't read that verse. Put it on your wall. We have something that we're going to put on our wall. It's written out. It's a prayer from Paul that we've had. Her cousin wrote it out. I've got to get it framed, and that's going to sit in our living room wall and kind of be our family verse. If you go into all of the children's rooms, Erin has selected a verse that's appropriate for that season of life, and she's put it on the wall. If you walk back through the hallway into the kids' room back there, the one thing you see down the hallway is love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. You see scripture everywhere. Put it in your home. Display it. Go into Hobby Lobby in Kirkland, those stores that are filled with what I call old lady clutter. There's tons of it there. Go look at the old lady clutter because some of it has scripture on it. Buy some pretty old lady clutter and then put it in your home. It's an easy, easy way to have things, to make, to follow this prescription from Deuteronomy that says write it on your walls. So legitimately do it. Find a verse, find a scripture, find a passage that's encouraging to you, find something that you want to implement with your kids and display that on your home and those verses will stick with them and they will stick with you. It's an easy, easy way to do it. Pray together. Number four is pray together often and about everything. Pray together often and about everything. Do we pray for our meals? Let's start there. Let's pray for our meals and let's do it in such a way that we're actually remembering who got us there and why we're there. Do we pray in the morning before we take them to school or camp or wherever it is they're going? Do we pray at night before they go to bed? Do you pray with your spouse? When your spouse is stressed, is your knee-jerk as a couple, let's go to Lord in prayer on this. Or is it the same, that stinks, and keep talking about whatever else. Listen, I'm not good at this either. But if we want to have Jesus-centered homes, I think one of the easiest things to do is to pray often and to pray about everything. Hey, I got a text. So-and-so got a bad diagnosis. Let's pray for them real quick. Hey, I got a text. So-and-so is pregnant. Let's pray that God, let's celebrate and then pray that God keeps this pregnancy safe. I'm stressed about this at work. I'm stressed about this for our kids at school. I'm unsure about this thing. Okay, well, let's stop and let's pray together. And to that end, I would just throw this out for you guys. Give your spouse permission to suggest that you pray. Give your spouse permission to grab the kid and pray about something. And here's why I'm saying that. Because if you exist in a relationship where there's never any prayer at all, and after hearing this sermon, your husband, the next time something comes up, reaches over and says, well, let's stop and let's pray about this. Your inclination is going to be to go, who the heck are you? What? It's weird. No. I'll pray about it later. Your inclination is going to be to look at them like they're a hypocrite. And it's going to be to say, you're only doing this because Nate said we should do it. Yeah. That's the reason. If it wasn't happening before today and it happens after today, then yeah, it's happening because I brought it up. All right? So let's just accept that up front and let's let prayer be brought into our marriages and into our homes. This refocuses us consistently and constantly on the Father. It refocuses us on his throne, on who he is and on who we are. It reminds you this is out of your hands anyways. There's nothing that you can do about this. It settles down control freaks and people who like to worry. If you do it with your children, doesn't it set this incredible pattern for them and their own life to go to the Lord in prayer all the time? To have this ongoing conversation with the Father? Doesn't it set them on a pace to be obedient to the instruction in Thessalonians when he tells us that we should pray without ceasing? To have a continual conversation with the Father. Let's implement prayer more in our homes. Let's give each other permission to work on this, to do this well together, to not look at each other like we're hypocrites when we suggest it. Let's start modeling that and bring our attention to God as spouses and then model bringing attention to God for our children. So that one day when they're grown up and they hear a sermon about incorporating prayer in the home, it doesn't feel like a weird, awkward thing for them. All right? We're already, we've lost. Okay, we're done. We failed, but they have a chance. Let's pray and teach it to them in that way as well. Number five, and I'm excited to get into this today. Know your role. I wanted to talk to you guys about gender roles in the house this morning. I'm just kidding around, I'm not doing that. Know your role. We're not talking about roles in the home. It's an easy way to say and to remember this idea. You are in your spouse's life. You are in your children's lives. You are in your family's lives. As a tool to be used by God to help them become the person that he created them to be. That's your role. Do you see why I reduced it to know your role? You're married to your husband because God is sanctifying him. God is changing him. God is working in him. God is developing his character and his spiritual maturity. And he is trying to learn to walk with God more and more every day. And the world is trying to get him to not do that. And you've been placed in that marriage by God to help him become the godly man that God wants him to be and created him to be. Husbands, you are in your marriages to help your wives become the most beautiful version of themselves, which is to say the most spiritually healthy version of themselves. You have been placed by God in that marriage to help them walk more closely with the Father than they ever have before. That's your primary role for your spouse, is to cultivate their spiritual life and their spiritual health and to see them flourish and become people who are passionately following Jesus. That's why God placed you in that marriage. It's not for you. It's not because you're a good decision maker or you're a bad decision maker or I'm not good at directions and she's good at directions, or we both like the same music, or any of that stuff, God placed you in that marriage first and foremost to be used as a tool by him to fashion your spouse into the person that God created them to be. To help them see more and more that they are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that they might walk in them. That's why he placed you in that marriage. And I think that sometimes we lose sight of that. I know I do. But when we think about our spouses, if we want to have a Jesus-centered marriage, our very first thought towards them ought to be, how can I help them grow into the person that God created them to be? The thing that we love most about them ought to be how much they love Jesus. It ought to be a heart for the Father. These should be regular things that happen in our marriages. And then the next step is our children. Know your role with your children. I'm going to say this to particularly parents with young kids. We have a five-and-a-half-year-old. Sometimes we like her more than we did when she was three, sometimes less. The summer entering into kindergarten is a challenging one. And there are things that Lily needs to learn. But I need to be constantly aware of and reminded of. My goal in parenting is not to have a six-year-old who behaves herself so that I don't get embarrassed in public circles. My goal is to raise a daughter, excuse me, who fiercely loves Jesus and requires as little counseling as possible. That's my goal. My goal is to raise a son and a daughter who care about the people around them, who love Jesus better than I do, who are humble, kind, meek, gracious adults. That's my goal. And if we get so caught up in parenting our children as if the goal was for them to not embarrass us when there's people around, as if the goal was for them to not be inconvenient during this season, which goodness, that's a great goal. But if we'll parent them knowing that the goal is to release grown-ups into the wild who love Jesus fiercely, who we respect because of that. So when Lily does something that she shouldn't do, when she displays an attitude that she shouldn't display, as a loving, godly parent, it's my role and my job to find the good part of that attitude that she just displayed. Well, you're very defiant. This can be good because you're going to be willing to stand up for yourself when you need it. Try not to stand up for yourself right now. That's not needed here. But at some point, it will be. Our role as parents is to fashion our children into the people that God created them to be as well. And, you know what's funny? That's why they're in your life too. I was talking with a buddy of mine, Shane, over there outside, and he just made mention to me. He said, man, I tell you, I just can't pray for enough patience right now. These kids are driving me nuts. And I just made the joke like, yeah, I never pray for patience. Because when you pray for patience, God just puts things in your life that requires patience, right? So I pray that God, would you give me grace and the patience that you're teaching me and can it be enough yet? Like I never pray for more patience. I'm happy with the current amount that I have because to get more stinks. But in a very real way, those children are shaping his patience into being a more gracious version of Shane. And God is using them as tools. All of the family dynamics are there to bring us closer to God, closer to the Father, closer to Jesus. So let's know our role within those dynamics and see that as our goal to help the people in our families and in our lives become the version of themselves that God created them to be by helping them to walk more closely with Jesus. That's your primary role in your home. Finally, number six is have Jesus-centered conversations. Talk about them. This goes back to the devotions. What are you reading? What are you learning? How's your faith? What'd you think of the sermon? What's your favorite worship song? What do you think God's teaching you right now? How's so-and-so's faith doing? Have Jesus-centered conversations. I saw this in the Bible. I didn't know this. Did you know this? I didn't know that this passage linked to this passage. Did you know that those passages linked together? Have conversations about it. Talk to your children about Jesus. Just bring them up in conversation. Erin puts out, our children's pastor, again, she puts out parent cues. Just these short little one-sentence things, I think on Instagram, she can give you a bunch of them if you reach out to her. Just little prompts to have spiritual conversations. And here's the thing about having Jesus-centered conversations, okay? You've got to bring them up a lot to have a good one. If you have a kid, you know that having a good conversation with your child is a really life-giving thing. It's also a fleeting thing. It's hard to do. Hopefully, if you have older children, you're having better, longer conversations with them, and you're getting to a place where sometimes you have really meaningful conversations with them. But those are still fleeting. And you know that to get to a good conversation with your child, whether they're four years old or whether they're 20 years old, to find a good one, you've just got to have a lot of them. I can talk with Lily all day long. Give me a Saturday. We can talk all day long about this and that as she runs in and out and whatever it is. And then at the end of the night when I think she's about to go to sleep and I'm ready to go downstairs and do something else, she starts talking. I'm there. I'm present. I don't know when the conversation's going to hit, so I'm just here for them. Jen is far better at that than I am. It works the same with Jesus-filled conversations. You want to have a good spiritual conversation with your spouse? You want to have a good spiritual conversation with your children? Bring them up a lot. Talk about it a lot. Make Jesus feel like a regular figure in your home so that it's not foreign when we start talking about spiritual things. And then you know what? They'll know how to talk about spiritual things too. And really and truly, it's not really possible to have these Jesus-centered conversations if we aren't ourselves Jesus-centered. So if you want to have a Jesus-centered home, it starts with having a Jesus-centered life. If you want to have a Jesus-centered home, it starts with having a Jesus-centered life. That's as simple as it could possibly be. All of these things, one through six, you could put, you could implement all of them in your house. You could have family devotions, public quiet times, write scripture on the wall, pray together often and always. You can know your role in fashioning others, and you can have Jesus-centered conversations. But if you're not centered on Jesus in your own life, all that's going to feel fake. All of it's going to feel fabricated. All of it's going to feel like you're trying to push a rope up a hill, and you're just going to stop. You're not going to do it. These things have to pour out of you. Now, the good news is they work synergistically. It's impossible to do those six things and that not orient you more on Christ and him be more the center of your life. But you can't do these things if he's not. It's going to feel unnatural and you're going to quit. So if we want to have Jesus-centered homes, and I think we do because you're still looking at me, then we've got to have a Jesus-centered life. Jesus talks about this in John 15 when he says, abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. Don't worry about anything else. Don't worry about these six things. You abide in me. And if we're having a Jesus, if we have a Jesus-centered heart, he's going to spill out of it. We're going to talk about him all the time. We're going to want to read his word. We're going to get caught reading the Bible. We're going to want to go to him in prayer in every instance. If we have Jesus as the center of our life, then we're going to want to fashion other people in a way that he becomes the center of their life too. It would be like Psalm 1 when it talks about the man whose delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law he meditates day and night and he is like a tree planted by streams of water and everything that he does he prospers. If we want to have Jesus-centered homes we have to have a Jesus life. And if we'll do that, these things will pour out of us naturally. So, I hope you'll do some of these things. I hope you'll have a family meeting. I hope that you'll allow non-hypocritical prayer into your life. Not be hard on each other. Let's be supportive of each other. Let's have family meetings. Let's do it today. Before we go to bed at night, let's talk about this or let's commit to a time where we're going to talk about this. And if it seems intimidating to do all of this stuff, pick two. Do them this week. See what your home feels like when you do that. Let me pray for you. Father, we love you and are grateful for you. We confess sometimes that we have pro-Jesus homes. Would you help us grow to a place where we have Jesus-centered homes? Would you fill our hearts so much with you that you are what spills out? God, give us the discipline and the determination to have devotions with our family. Give us the openness, the honesty, and the desire to have spiritual conversations with one another. Would you fill our hearts and our lives and our homes more and more and more, God, so that what happens here on Sunday is simply a small supplement to what's been going on every day in our lives and in our homes. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else and what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day, they're not nearly as big of a deal. What are our big rocks? And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. It's so fun to watch myself for two minutes before I preach every week during this series. This is the third part in our series, Big Rocks, where we're talking about the large priorities in life. And this week, I want to talk about having a Jesus-centered home and a Jesus-centered family. So this, I will tell you up front, is family-centric. But it applies to having a Jesus-centered marriage. If you're a single person, there are principles here that we can absolutely apply to having a Jesus-centered life. But when I throw out that term, Jesus-centered home, I think a lot of us would go, yeah, we have one of those. Like our home is a Jesus-centered home. But I want to kind of challenge you up front on that by just making this simple point. A pro-Jesus home is not the same as a Jesus-centered home. A home that's pro-Jesus, if we would say, yeah, we got a Jesus-centered home, well, is it a pro-Jesus home or is it a Jesus-centered home? For instance, the Rector House, our home, is a Kyle Tolbert pro-home. We are pro-Kyle Tolbert. Thank you. Thank you for that. He's running sound today for me, so a little less pro-Kyle right now. But overall, the Rector Home is a pro-Kyle home. We like him. We hope things work out for Kyle. I bet most of the homes in this church are pro-Kyle homes. We want the best for the guy, right? We hope things work out for Kyle. We hope that he has good days. We're fans of what he does. We like DJ KT and Christmas Kyle and Easter Kyle and Summer Extreme Kyle. We like all the versions of Kyle, right? But it's not a Kyle-centered home. We don't pray every day that John and Lily will become more and more like Kyle as they age. We don't wake up going, what can we do? What can we implement in our home to get our children to be closer to Kyle, right? Like we don't do that stuff. We don't have WWKD bracelets, right? We don't have what would Kyle do, like anywhere in our home home. We're pro-Kyle home. We're not a Kyle centered home. I think a lot of us have pro-Jesus homes. We're foreign. We hope things work out for him. We want his will to be done. We might pray that sometimes. We support, in this house, we support Jesus. There's no more, I don't mean to step on any toes. If I do, I'm a little bit sorry, not a lot of it, sorry. There's no more pro-Jesus sign in a home than at Christmas time when you see the poster or the postcard or whatever it is of Santa kneeling at the cross. Like in this house, first Jesus, then Santa. Santa kneels to Jesus here. We are pro-Jesus, even during Christmas. Good job, right? We have pro-Jesus homes. Do we have Jesus-centered homes? Do we have Jesus-centered conversations? Do we wake up every day thinking, what can we do? What can we implement so that our children grow more closely to Jesus? What can I do to make Jesus the center of my life? What can we do to make Jesus the center of our marriage? What kinds of things can we implement to make sure that the relationships in this house, the things that happen in this home are things that revolve around Christ? And so to that end, I wanted to talk this morning about actually having a Jesus-centered home. And I'll tell you this up front, okay? As I was thinking about the sermon and the best way to approach it, and really, most of the time when I'm thinking about a sermon, I'm thinking, how can this be maximum helpful to the people who got up and showered and brushed their teeth and came today? Like, how can this be maximum helpful for you? And so as I thought about that, I really didn't think it was worth investing a ton of our time in this idea of having a Jesus-centered home. I didn't want to come in this morning and try to convince you to have a Jesus-centered home or leave with this compelling vision of what can happen when Jesus is the center of your home. Not because I don't think a compelling vision is worth having, but because I think you're probably already with me on that. Like you got up in the summertime and you came to church and your kids are over there or you're here or whatever it took you to get here, you're here. So I think I'm going to assume that a majority of us, I'm not saying that everyone in here is in on this hook, line, and sinker, but a majority of us in here, if I could talk to you and say, do you want to have a Jesus-centered home, you would say yes. So I'm going to assume that we came this morning, you didn't wake up thinking, boy, I really want a Jesus-centered home. But when I first started mentioning it, I'm going to assume that you're with me and that this is a thing that you'd like to pursue. This is something that you'd like to implement. So to that end, a couple things. First of all, my goal for you today, if you have someone to drive home with today, is to have a family meeting in the car. It's to schedule a family meeting in the car on your way home. If you have children, I want you guys, my goal is for you guys to schedule something with your children to talk about some things that you're going to do. I want mom and dad to talk about how can we make this a more Jesus-centered home. I want husbands and wives to look at this and go, okay, there's some things that we can implement. How do you want to, which of those seem practical? Which of these seem like something that we can actually do? So my goal is for you guys, to whom it's applicable, to have family meetings as a result of today to talk about how to implement some of these things. Also because of that, this is just a ridiculously practical sermon. I'm going to give you six suggestions of things that you can do to have a Jesus-centered home. Because again, I wanted it to be maximum helpful. I didn't want to bring you in, talk to you about having a Jesus-centered home, and then send you home with no practical ideas, just leave you to search Google and figure it out on your own. So this is the place where we're going to do that. Our guiding passage today is found in Deuteronomy chapter six. So if you have a Bible, it's the fifth book of the Bible. Deuteronomy chapter six is just a sideline. This doesn't mean anything. Deuteronomy, the word Deuteronomy literally means the law repeated. So Deuteronomy is like a synopsis of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. Okay. So if you really want to know what's going on in those three books, Deuteronomy will kind of give you the highlights for better or for worse. And it finishes up the narrative of that portion of scripture. But in this portion of Deuteronomy, they had just received the law, and Moses is telling them how they are to teach it to their families, how they are to implement this as a culture. How are we going to learn this law, to breathe this law, to obey this law as a culture? Here's how we're going to do it. This is what he says. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. He's talking about the law. You shall teach them diligently to your children. And you shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand. They shall be as frontlets between your. When Moses is telling them, this is the law of God, this is our religion, this is our faith. Here's how we're going to implement this countrywide, nationwide. To us, it'd be nationwide. To them, it was peoplewide. The Hebrew people, this is how we're going to implement that law. You're going to teach it to your children. You're going to write it in your homes. You're going to keep it on your hands and on your head. To this day, if you go to Jerusalem, you go to the wailing wall, you will see some Orthodox Jews, some men who have it, literally, phylacteries, I think is what they're called, tied to their head and tied to their wrists with these elaborate leather bands in obedience to this. This is how they said that we are going to learn God's word and learn the law and learn our faith. And what's interesting to me is he does not say, diligently take your family to church, diligently go to synagogue, diligently go to the tent when we set it up and we have the sacrifices. No, no, no. And he doesn't say, listen to your pastor, listen to your priest. He doesn't say, make sure the kids get to youth group. What's he say? He puts it all on the parents. You teach it to your children. How's this faith going to go forward? You teach it to your kids. You teach it in your house. You teach it in your house. We'll teach it in our house. And the next generation will do the same thing. And somewhere along the lines, we kind of lost this a little bit. Where we bring our families to church and that's where they get their Jesus. But our families need to be learning Jesus from us, from the parents. So the other thing that I want to say about this as we apply it to our lives, this verse is talking about the law, the Ten Commandments, the law of God. However, the New Testament teaches us that Jesus perfected the law. Jesus himself said that he did not come to overthrow the law, but to fulfill it. Romans tells us that he perfected it. And so not in every case in the Old Testament, but in this particular case and others like it, I think it's fair to apply what God wanted his people to do with the law, to apply that to his New Testament people and say, this is what God wants people to do with his word and with his son. So teach our kids the word. Talk about it. Write it on our houses. Keep it in your head. Keep it in your hands. This is how we are to have a Jesus-centered home. This is how we are to be obedient to this command in Deuteronomy. I think the same impetus still sits on us to center our lives and our homes around Jesus and around God's word. So how can we do that? What are the practical ways to be obedient to Deuteronomy, to have not just a pro-Jesus home, but to have a Jesus-centered home? Well, the first thing is the most obvious one. It's where all of your heads went, so I just thought I would go ahead and get it out of the way and say it up front. Family devotions. Have family devotions. In your marriage, read something together. Talk about what you're reading in the Bible. Even if you're not reading the same thing, you're not on the same reading plan, you're doing different small groups, you're doing whatever, read it and talk about it together. But for those who still have children in the home, have family devotions. And I know that that feels intimidating. I don't even have my own devotions. How am I going to do a family devotion? This is a good way to learn them. And here's the thing. Your kids have never had a family devotion either. They don't know that it sucks. They don't know that you're not good at it. So just start. They're not going to know that you're not any good at it. And you'll get better. And you'll figure it out. And here's the thing that I bet most of the parents in this room don't know. Do you know that every week, one of Erin Winston, our children's pastor, one of her volunteers, every week, puts a piece of paper in your hand when you pick up your child that has prompts, that has devotional prompts on it for three to five days of the week. Age appropriate according to what they talked about in that room and in that room over there on the other side of the aquarium store. According to what they talked about, she puts a piece of paper in your hand with prompts that are age appropriate. They get more and more detailed as your child ages to help you have these conversations and have devotions in your home. She also last summer gave to all the families a devotional book and has a ton of resources for you. So a devotion is just a time where you sit down, you read usually just a verse of scripture, you reflect on it as a family, and you move on. So if we want to have a Jesus-centered home, one of the first things we can do is implement some regular family devotions in our house. You can do it. Moms, dads, step up to the plate. It'll be all right. You can do it. Married people, have your quiet times. Don't hold each other accountable. Don't pester each other about it. That doesn't work. I don't think that works in a marriage. If that works in your marriage, that's fine. I'm not advocating that, but every now and again, you should say, hey, what have you been reading? What have you been learning? That's a good conversation to have. The next thing that I would tell you to do to have a Jesus-centered home is to have public quiet times. Have public quiet times. And what I mean by that is quiet times that are visible to the rest of your family. I don't mean put on your cool jeans and go to Sola and read your Bible like a lonely hipster. I don't mean that. I mean, read your Bible in a place where your family can see you. I've told you guys this before. Growing up, I would come downstairs to go to school in the morning as a teenager, And every morning I would see my mom's Bible open to a different portion of scripture. And I would see a mug of coffee that was almost all the way gone every morning. And I knew that she was praying for me every day. And I knew that she was reading God's word every day. And I'm going to tell you something. When she told me the Bible says this, or I think God says this, or I think you need to do this, I gave her words more weight because I knew that she was reading her Bible. My dad traveled all the time, but when he would travel, he would take his Bible with him. I saw that in my parents. I knew that they knew their Bible. I have been meaning to, I read my Bible when I get into the office. That's my quiet space because we have two young children. But I'm going to try, you can hold me to this, I'm going to try to intentionally shift to sit in the chair that you can see. I can see the stairs so that when Lily wakes up, she'll see me there doing my devotions. Steve, our worship pastor, he gave me this idea, and it's a great one. He listens to scripture on his phone. He's got a great porch with a great view of some woods. He'll turn Scripture on on his phone on the Bible app and just let that read it to him. So you could do that on your way to work or whatever, but he'll sit there, have his cup of coffee, and let the Bible app read Scripture to him. And I thought it was such a great idea that me and John, my three-month-old, listened to Colossians four or five times through this week while I was feeding him in the mornings or whenever else. And while he's doing that, sometimes his son Grayson will come outside and he'll say, what are you listening to? And he's saying, First Thessalonians. And he's like, can I listen too? Yeah, sure. So then they talk about it. Have public quiet times. Let your spouse see you doing that. Let your kids see you doing that. Make it a part of the regular rhythm of your home. It's not a thing that needs to be hidden. Another very simple thing to do to make your home a Jesus-centered home is to write scripture on your wall. It's simple. It's easy. But it's important. Pick a verse. Pick a passage that characterizes your family. That really depicts. Maybe it's the fruit of the Spirit that you want to hang on the hallway. Not so that your children will have the fruit of the Spirit, but so that you'll be reminded to have the fruit of the Spirit with your children, right? Put the verses in visible places in your home so that they become a part of your family life. When I walk in the door every day, one of our favorite verses is on the wall right when you walk in from the garage door, and it's a phrase out of Psalm 1611. In your presence, there's fullness of joy. Now, neither me nor Jen put that there so that we could walk in and go, ah, fullness of joy. We didn't think about that. We just put it there because it's small and it fits on that wall. That's why we put it there. But when I walk in and I see it, there are times when I see it and it reminds me. In God's presence, there's a fullness of joy. And I remember that my family is one of God's biggest blessings to me. And so the joy that he intends for me is found in this place. It grounds me. Jen may not say that that feels true to her, but it's true sometimes. She doesn't know what I would be like if I didn't read that verse. Put it on your wall. We have something that we're going to put on our wall. It's written out. It's a prayer from Paul that we've had. Her cousin wrote it out. I've got to get it framed, and that's going to sit in our living room wall and kind of be our family verse. If you go into all of the children's rooms, Erin has selected a verse that's appropriate for that season of life, and she's put it on the wall. If you walk back through the hallway into the kids' room back there, the one thing you see down the hallway is love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. You see scripture everywhere. Put it in your home. Display it. Go into Hobby Lobby in Kirkland, those stores that are filled with what I call old lady clutter. There's tons of it there. Go look at the old lady clutter because some of it has scripture on it. Buy some pretty old lady clutter and then put it in your home. It's an easy, easy way to have things, to make, to follow this prescription from Deuteronomy that says write it on your walls. So legitimately do it. Find a verse, find a scripture, find a passage that's encouraging to you, find something that you want to implement with your kids and display that on your home and those verses will stick with them and they will stick with you. It's an easy, easy way to do it. Pray together. Number four is pray together often and about everything. Pray together often and about everything. Do we pray for our meals? Let's start there. Let's pray for our meals and let's do it in such a way that we're actually remembering who got us there and why we're there. Do we pray in the morning before we take them to school or camp or wherever it is they're going? Do we pray at night before they go to bed? Do you pray with your spouse? When your spouse is stressed, is your knee-jerk as a couple, let's go to Lord in prayer on this. Or is it the same, that stinks, and keep talking about whatever else. Listen, I'm not good at this either. But if we want to have Jesus-centered homes, I think one of the easiest things to do is to pray often and to pray about everything. Hey, I got a text. So-and-so got a bad diagnosis. Let's pray for them real quick. Hey, I got a text. So-and-so is pregnant. Let's pray that God, let's celebrate and then pray that God keeps this pregnancy safe. I'm stressed about this at work. I'm stressed about this for our kids at school. I'm unsure about this thing. Okay, well, let's stop and let's pray together. And to that end, I would just throw this out for you guys. Give your spouse permission to suggest that you pray. Give your spouse permission to grab the kid and pray about something. And here's why I'm saying that. Because if you exist in a relationship where there's never any prayer at all, and after hearing this sermon, your husband, the next time something comes up, reaches over and says, well, let's stop and let's pray about this. Your inclination is going to be to go, who the heck are you? What? It's weird. No. I'll pray about it later. Your inclination is going to be to look at them like they're a hypocrite. And it's going to be to say, you're only doing this because Nate said we should do it. Yeah. That's the reason. If it wasn't happening before today and it happens after today, then yeah, it's happening because I brought it up. All right? So let's just accept that up front and let's let prayer be brought into our marriages and into our homes. This refocuses us consistently and constantly on the Father. It refocuses us on his throne, on who he is and on who we are. It reminds you this is out of your hands anyways. There's nothing that you can do about this. It settles down control freaks and people who like to worry. If you do it with your children, doesn't it set this incredible pattern for them and their own life to go to the Lord in prayer all the time? To have this ongoing conversation with the Father? Doesn't it set them on a pace to be obedient to the instruction in Thessalonians when he tells us that we should pray without ceasing? To have a continual conversation with the Father. Let's implement prayer more in our homes. Let's give each other permission to work on this, to do this well together, to not look at each other like we're hypocrites when we suggest it. Let's start modeling that and bring our attention to God as spouses and then model bringing attention to God for our children. So that one day when they're grown up and they hear a sermon about incorporating prayer in the home, it doesn't feel like a weird, awkward thing for them. All right? We're already, we've lost. Okay, we're done. We failed, but they have a chance. Let's pray and teach it to them in that way as well. Number five, and I'm excited to get into this today. Know your role. I wanted to talk to you guys about gender roles in the house this morning. I'm just kidding around, I'm not doing that. Know your role. We're not talking about roles in the home. It's an easy way to say and to remember this idea. You are in your spouse's life. You are in your children's lives. You are in your family's lives. As a tool to be used by God to help them become the person that he created them to be. That's your role. Do you see why I reduced it to know your role? You're married to your husband because God is sanctifying him. God is changing him. God is working in him. God is developing his character and his spiritual maturity. And he is trying to learn to walk with God more and more every day. And the world is trying to get him to not do that. And you've been placed in that marriage by God to help him become the godly man that God wants him to be and created him to be. Husbands, you are in your marriages to help your wives become the most beautiful version of themselves, which is to say the most spiritually healthy version of themselves. You have been placed by God in that marriage to help them walk more closely with the Father than they ever have before. That's your primary role for your spouse, is to cultivate their spiritual life and their spiritual health and to see them flourish and become people who are passionately following Jesus. That's why God placed you in that marriage. It's not for you. It's not because you're a good decision maker or you're a bad decision maker or I'm not good at directions and she's good at directions, or we both like the same music, or any of that stuff, God placed you in that marriage first and foremost to be used as a tool by him to fashion your spouse into the person that God created them to be. To help them see more and more that they are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that they might walk in them. That's why he placed you in that marriage. And I think that sometimes we lose sight of that. I know I do. But when we think about our spouses, if we want to have a Jesus-centered marriage, our very first thought towards them ought to be, how can I help them grow into the person that God created them to be? The thing that we love most about them ought to be how much they love Jesus. It ought to be a heart for the Father. These should be regular things that happen in our marriages. And then the next step is our children. Know your role with your children. I'm going to say this to particularly parents with young kids. We have a five-and-a-half-year-old. Sometimes we like her more than we did when she was three, sometimes less. The summer entering into kindergarten is a challenging one. And there are things that Lily needs to learn. But I need to be constantly aware of and reminded of. My goal in parenting is not to have a six-year-old who behaves herself so that I don't get embarrassed in public circles. My goal is to raise a daughter, excuse me, who fiercely loves Jesus and requires as little counseling as possible. That's my goal. My goal is to raise a son and a daughter who care about the people around them, who love Jesus better than I do, who are humble, kind, meek, gracious adults. That's my goal. And if we get so caught up in parenting our children as if the goal was for them to not embarrass us when there's people around, as if the goal was for them to not be inconvenient during this season, which goodness, that's a great goal. But if we'll parent them knowing that the goal is to release grown-ups into the wild who love Jesus fiercely, who we respect because of that. So when Lily does something that she shouldn't do, when she displays an attitude that she shouldn't display, as a loving, godly parent, it's my role and my job to find the good part of that attitude that she just displayed. Well, you're very defiant. This can be good because you're going to be willing to stand up for yourself when you need it. Try not to stand up for yourself right now. That's not needed here. But at some point, it will be. Our role as parents is to fashion our children into the people that God created them to be as well. And, you know what's funny? That's why they're in your life too. I was talking with a buddy of mine, Shane, over there outside, and he just made mention to me. He said, man, I tell you, I just can't pray for enough patience right now. These kids are driving me nuts. And I just made the joke like, yeah, I never pray for patience. Because when you pray for patience, God just puts things in your life that requires patience, right? So I pray that God, would you give me grace and the patience that you're teaching me and can it be enough yet? Like I never pray for more patience. I'm happy with the current amount that I have because to get more stinks. But in a very real way, those children are shaping his patience into being a more gracious version of Shane. And God is using them as tools. All of the family dynamics are there to bring us closer to God, closer to the Father, closer to Jesus. So let's know our role within those dynamics and see that as our goal to help the people in our families and in our lives become the version of themselves that God created them to be by helping them to walk more closely with Jesus. That's your primary role in your home. Finally, number six is have Jesus-centered conversations. Talk about them. This goes back to the devotions. What are you reading? What are you learning? How's your faith? What'd you think of the sermon? What's your favorite worship song? What do you think God's teaching you right now? How's so-and-so's faith doing? Have Jesus-centered conversations. I saw this in the Bible. I didn't know this. Did you know this? I didn't know that this passage linked to this passage. Did you know that those passages linked together? Have conversations about it. Talk to your children about Jesus. Just bring them up in conversation. Erin puts out, our children's pastor, again, she puts out parent cues. Just these short little one-sentence things, I think on Instagram, she can give you a bunch of them if you reach out to her. Just little prompts to have spiritual conversations. And here's the thing about having Jesus-centered conversations, okay? You've got to bring them up a lot to have a good one. If you have a kid, you know that having a good conversation with your child is a really life-giving thing. It's also a fleeting thing. It's hard to do. Hopefully, if you have older children, you're having better, longer conversations with them, and you're getting to a place where sometimes you have really meaningful conversations with them. But those are still fleeting. And you know that to get to a good conversation with your child, whether they're four years old or whether they're 20 years old, to find a good one, you've just got to have a lot of them. I can talk with Lily all day long. Give me a Saturday. We can talk all day long about this and that as she runs in and out and whatever it is. And then at the end of the night when I think she's about to go to sleep and I'm ready to go downstairs and do something else, she starts talking. I'm there. I'm present. I don't know when the conversation's going to hit, so I'm just here for them. Jen is far better at that than I am. It works the same with Jesus-filled conversations. You want to have a good spiritual conversation with your spouse? You want to have a good spiritual conversation with your children? Bring them up a lot. Talk about it a lot. Make Jesus feel like a regular figure in your home so that it's not foreign when we start talking about spiritual things. And then you know what? They'll know how to talk about spiritual things too. And really and truly, it's not really possible to have these Jesus-centered conversations if we aren't ourselves Jesus-centered. So if you want to have a Jesus-centered home, it starts with having a Jesus-centered life. If you want to have a Jesus-centered home, it starts with having a Jesus-centered life. That's as simple as it could possibly be. All of these things, one through six, you could put, you could implement all of them in your house. You could have family devotions, public quiet times, write scripture on the wall, pray together often and always. You can know your role in fashioning others, and you can have Jesus-centered conversations. But if you're not centered on Jesus in your own life, all that's going to feel fake. All of it's going to feel fabricated. All of it's going to feel like you're trying to push a rope up a hill, and you're just going to stop. You're not going to do it. These things have to pour out of you. Now, the good news is they work synergistically. It's impossible to do those six things and that not orient you more on Christ and him be more the center of your life. But you can't do these things if he's not. It's going to feel unnatural and you're going to quit. So if we want to have Jesus-centered homes, and I think we do because you're still looking at me, then we've got to have a Jesus-centered life. Jesus talks about this in John 15 when he says, abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. Don't worry about anything else. Don't worry about these six things. You abide in me. And if we're having a Jesus, if we have a Jesus-centered heart, he's going to spill out of it. We're going to talk about him all the time. We're going to want to read his word. We're going to get caught reading the Bible. We're going to want to go to him in prayer in every instance. If we have Jesus as the center of our life, then we're going to want to fashion other people in a way that he becomes the center of their life too. It would be like Psalm 1 when it talks about the man whose delight is in the law of the Lord and on his law he meditates day and night and he is like a tree planted by streams of water and everything that he does he prospers. If we want to have Jesus-centered homes we have to have a Jesus life. And if we'll do that, these things will pour out of us naturally. So, I hope you'll do some of these things. I hope you'll have a family meeting. I hope that you'll allow non-hypocritical prayer into your life. Not be hard on each other. Let's be supportive of each other. Let's have family meetings. Let's do it today. Before we go to bed at night, let's talk about this or let's commit to a time where we're going to talk about this. And if it seems intimidating to do all of this stuff, pick two. Do them this week. See what your home feels like when you do that. Let me pray for you. Father, we love you and are grateful for you. We confess sometimes that we have pro-Jesus homes. Would you help us grow to a place where we have Jesus-centered homes? Would you fill our hearts so much with you that you are what spills out? God, give us the discipline and the determination to have devotions with our family. Give us the openness, the honesty, and the desire to have spiritual conversations with one another. Would you fill our hearts and our lives and our homes more and more and more, God, so that what happens here on Sunday is simply a small supplement to what's been going on every day in our lives and in our homes. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

All right, well, good morning. It's good to see all of you. I know those lights hit you, they're bright, goodness gracious. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here, and it's so good to see you. Thanks for being here for the second service and for the last part of our series in John. When we started the series in February, this is, I think, 12 weeks, so it's been one of our longer ones, but I hope that you've enjoyed it. I hope, and my prayer for you has been that you now, as we leave the series, feel a little bit closer to Jesus than you did when we started, that you know him better than you did when we started. I know that there are some themes from the book of John that I will probably always remember that stuck out to me as we went through it as a church this time around. I hope that you can relate to that. Originally, when we had planned the series, we wanted to end it on Easter. At the end on Easter Sunday, that'd be the resurrection story. That's the end of the story of Jesus. Boom, we're done. It's a nice, clean, tidy ending. But as I was studying the book, there's a story in John that's unique to the book of John. It's not in the other gospels, Matthew, Mark, or Luke. It's just in John almost as an addendum. And it's the restoration of Peter. And it's to me one of the most hopeful, life-giving, inspiring, restorative messages and stories that we find from the life of Jesus. And so I thought if it's good enough to be an addendum for John, then it's good enough to be an addendum for grace. And so we came back one extra week in John to look at this story of the restoration of Peter. To appreciate the story, we need to understand what goes into this moment. Eventually, we're going to get to John chapter 21. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there and we're going to be at the end of that chapter. If you don't have one, there's one in the seat back in front of you. If you don't like that option, there's a free one on your phone just seconds away. All right. To understand the story at the end of John, we need to understand who Peter was and what's going on in that story. Peter was kind of the de facto leader of the disciples. Many people think he was probably the oldest disciple. He was, some believe, the only one with a wife when they were called. He was a little bit further on in life than the rest of the disciples were. Peter was one of these guys that would always talk first and think later. He was a ready, fire, aim kind of guy. He's my people. I understand Peter, right? When Jesus walks on the water, what does Peter do? He jumps out of the boat. Well, shoot, I'm doing this too, right? Peter always just said things with confidence and everybody around him was like, well, I guess that's right. Jen asked me, my wife asked me sometimes, like, how do you say things with so much confidence? Like, how do you know that to be true? And I'm like, I don't. I'm just saying it. And people seem to go along with things. That's Peter, man. I can relate to him. He just always the first to answer, always the first to have the idea, always out front, kind of regardless of consequences. One of my favorite stories to kind of illustrate the character of Peter, one day Jesus decides, he gathers the disciples together and he says, hey, you guys, I'm going to wash your feet today. Which is like, that's the lowest of the low job. That's like the summer intern as the servant job. That's what you do. And so Peter, responding with some pomposity, with some piety, says, no, Jesus, never. I can never let you wash my feet. I will never let that happen. And Jesus looks at him and he says, okay, Peter, but unless I wash your feet, you cannot enter into the kingdom of God. And then Peter immediately does a 180. Well, then don't stop at my feet. Wash my head and my hands as well. Like that's Peter, okay? And so at the Last Supper, right before Jesus is arrested and tried and crucified, the last time they spend some good time together, Jesus looks at Peter, the leader of the disciples, and he tells him, before the rooster crows in the morning, you will have denied me three times. And Peter's response is what you would expect Peter's response to be. Never, Lord. I would never deny you. I would not do that. And Jesus says, you're going to. And Peter says, this is a loose paraphrase, agree to disagree, which you never want to agree to disagree with Jesus. You're not in a good spot when that's what you choose. So they leave. Jesus goes and he prays. He brings Peter to pray with them, but Peter falls asleep. John falls asleep. James falls asleep. And then Jesus gets arrested, and he's taken off to the courtyard of the high priest, a guy named Caiaphas. And three weeks ago, we talked about this in the crucifixion story. It was in the courtyard of Caiaphas where Jesus is put on trial, and there were two disciples that actually followed him there. The rest of the disciples dispersed. They ran away. They started worrying about their own necks, and so they ran away to hide so that they wouldn't get arrested too. They figured if they're arresting Jesus, then they're coming for us next, right? And so they all dispersed except for two disciples, Peter and another unnamed disciple, make it to the courtyard of Caiaphas' house. And it's in this courtyard that Jesus was put on trial, that he was falsely accused, that they told lies about him. The one person who's ever existed who deserved this treatment least was getting this treatment. They were blindfolding him and punching him and saying, who hit you, Jesus? You're a prophet. Prophesy about who hit you. And then Jewish tradition says that they were ripping out his beard. So he's beaten up and he's in a moment where he is incredibly loved. This is a man that Jesus has followed every day for three years. He loves this man. He cares for nothing on earth more than this man, and now he's watching him suffer in this way. And Peter's around a campfire as this is happening. And when he gets there, the Bible says there's a servant girl who looks at him and says, hey, don't you know him? Aren't you like in his little group? And Peter says, no, I've never met the man. That's one. A little while later, somebody else says the same thing. Hey, haven't I seen you with him before? Peter says, no, I don't know what we're talking about. I've never met the man. That's twice. And then the Bible says about an hour after that, someone really begins to press him. Hey, aren't you from Galilee? I can tell by your accent, you have to know that man. And Peter gets emphatic. No, I swear I've never met him. And then it says that this is actually, there's this passage in Luke. That's to to me, one of the most intense passages in Scripture. It's something that you may have read before, but we kind of gloss over it. But look at what it says in Luke. Chapter 22, verse 60, it says, But Peter said, Man, I do not know what you are talking about. That's the third time. And immediately while he was still speaking, the rooster crowed. And then verse 61, and the Lord turned and looked at Peter. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? The time when Jesus most needed people around him who loved him. You are his leading disciple and you just denied him three times because you're scared. And his bloody face turns and looks you dead in the eye. Peter remembered the saying of the Lord how he said to him, before the rooster crows you'll deny me three times. And he went out and he wept bitterly. Can you imagine how Peter must have felt? He had betrayed his Jesus. He had let him down. He had denied him. He had told Jesus over and over again, you can count on me. For three years, Jesus had been prepping him and training him and grooming him to take over the church, to step into his ministry. He was to see Jesus and to help lead the church after Jesus' death. And in the moment when he most needed him, he betrayed him and he let him down. And Jesus turned and looked at Peter. You cannot imagine that eye contact. It says he went away and he wept bitterly. I love this story because I so identify with Peter. And to me, if you're a believer, if you're a Christian, then you can identify with him too. If you're here this morning and you're not a Christian, then the good news is that you don't have to feel bad about any of this. You can just take it all in and watch us as we squirm and feel bad. But if you're a believer, then you know this feeling too. If you're a believer, then you know what it is to feel like you've betrayed Jesus, don't you? Has there ever been a time in your life, maybe in a corporate setting, maybe around some clients, maybe with some new friends that you've made, maybe with some old buddies where you kind of fall back into who you used to be, where you took that part of your identity, your Christianity, and you kind of tucked it away back here and kind of didn't wear it on your sleeve for that week or for that night or for that season because you didn't really want them to know who you were associated with? Have you ever in your life tucked away your identity as a believer because you were kind of ashamed and embarrassed if people were to find out that that's who you were because you had not been acting that way? Can I just tell you? I hope that you don't get too disappointed in me for this, but I've been doing ministry for about 20 years. There have definitely been times in my life when because of how I had been acting or what I had been saying or doing or whatever it was, I kind of tucked away my identity as a pastor. I didn't really want to share it with the group of people that I was with. So when Peter betrays Jesus and denies knowing him, I can relate. When we get this sense of betrayal, I've let my Jesus down. To be a Christian is to be familiar with that. I think we've all had different times and different seasons where we feel like we've let Jesus down a little bit. Maybe we've told him. Maybe we've been moved in worship. Maybe we've been moved by a sermon, probably at another church, and we decided that what we were going to do, we were going to start a new discipline. We were going to start a new thing. We had been moved to conviction. And we say, yes, Jesus, I'm going to get up and I'm going to read the Bible. I'm going to get up early. I'm going to make time for you. I'm going to spend time in prayer. I'm going to spend time in your word. That's going to be a discipline in my life. And so we get up and we start to read it. We're following along, but maybe we don't really understand it. We don't hear the angels audibly sing. And so we think we must be doing it wrong. Or we wake up and we kind of do the drop and flop. Like, Jesus, you just show me what you want me to read. And it turns out that because Psalms is in the middle and it's the longest book in the Bible, that God wants us to read Psalms like a lot. So we just, we read that, right? And we don't really know what's going on or what's happening. And for whatever reason, we fall away from that discipline. And then we've told Jesus for however many times, this is going to be a part of my life. And then we fail. And we betray him and we let him down. Or we tell him that we're going to start to give. We understand that believers should give generously, that we should be conduits of God's generosity to us, that we're stewards of the resources that he gives us, and that we should be generous to those that we think Jesus would want to help and serve. And we commit to do this, but things come up and then we don't, and we fall away from that discipline or from that commitment. And we hesitate to even make the commitment again because we messed up the last time, and we don't have much reason to believe that we're going to do better the next time. Right? Or we have things in our life that we don't want there. And so we tell Jesus, I'm done with that. I'm drawing the line in the sand. I'm not going to do that thing again. I'm moved. I'm convicted. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for who I am. I don't want that to be a part of my life. I don't want that to be a part of who I am. Jesus, I'm done with that. I'm moving on by the power of your spirit. Please allow me to be done with that thing. And we move away from that thing. And then three days later or weeks later or maybe months later, we fall back into the thing. So I wonder this morning, have you ever felt like you've betrayed Jesus? Can you relate to Peter? Aren't you glad that in the moment of the height of your betrayal, Jesus isn't looking you in the eye? I think we can all relate to Peter in this moment. The good news is that it gets better. But I think that we can all relate to this idea of letting Jesus down, of betraying him and feeling what Peter must have felt when God looked at him and he went away and he wept bitterly. Which, by the way, when you're confronted with your sin, that's the appropriate response to go away and to weep bitterly. That's a good and right response. And I don't believe that God would steal that response from Peter. I don't think that God would go to him and say, hey, you don't need to do that. I think that's the good and right response when we realize who we are. But he goes away and he weeps bitterly. And then we pick up this story in John chapter 21. In John chapter 21, Jesus has died, he's resurrected, he's appeared to the disciples a couple of times, and then in John chapter 21, he appears to them while they're fishing. And it's interesting to me that they're fishing. Because if you think back, my Bible scholars in the room, you know the answer to this. At the beginning of Jesus' ministry, when he's calling the disciples, and he goes to this guy named Simon, son of John, and he renames him Peter, and he says, come and be my disciple. What was Peter doing? He was fishing. For three years while he followed Jesus, what did he not do anymore? Fish. Why? He had a new job. His new job was to follow Jesus. His new job was to be in ministry. His new job was to do what Jesus did, to go around telling people about Jesus, to cast out demons and to perform miracles and to teach the people of Israel about the Messiah that was now here. That was his new job. And so for three years, he hadn't done his old job. He walked away from that because that wasn't him anymore. But after Jesus dies and Peter is walking around with this shame because he let his Jesus down, what does he do? He goes back to his old job. He disqualifies himself. Peter should have been leading the church. Peter should have been gathering the disciples together and saying, hey, this isn't over. Jesus has risen from the dead. We need to continue to serve him. We need to continue to build his kingdom. We have a purpose. We're not done, guys. But instead, what does he do? He gets back in the boat. What I want us to see is that Peter allowed his shame to shrink his vision of what Jesus wanted him to do. He allowed his shame, he allowed what he had done and how badly he felt for it to shrink his vision about what Jesus wanted him to do. Jesus had purposed him and prepared him and groomed him to lead his church. It's what Jesus wanted him to do. It's why he was working with him for three years, why he was putting up with all of his Peter-isms so that he could lead the church. And Peter, because he felt bad, because he felt shame, he walked away from that. He disqualified himself, which in all honesty is the exact same thing that we would do. Would you look at Peter after he betrayed Jesus at the height of his need and go, yep, you're still the guy. You should still lead the church. Would you still want that guy to be in charge of everybody? Would you still want that guy leading the council of the disciples like he is in Acts along with James? Is that what you would still want? Wouldn't you think that Peter would need to enter into some sort of probationary period? Okay, you're good, Peter, but we're just going to keep our eye on you for a minute. Wouldn't you do what Peter did? Wouldn't you step away and kind of slink away quietly and be like, I'm so sorry that I messed up. I understand. I don't even expect you to reinstate me anymore. I'm just going to fish and I'm going to love on you the best I can. Wouldn't you expect that of Peter? Doesn't that seem like the fair human reaction? Don't we do that to ourselves? When we mess up and we know who we are, we know where we come from and we know the we bring into every room, and we know the things that are hiding in the corners and the shadows of our life. When we know those things, don't we do what Peter did and disqualify ourselves? Don't we allow our shame to shrink our vision for who we are and what God created us to do? Can I just tell you that I think the Bible teaches that every one of you who are believers were created, and the non-believers too, we're just waiting for you to get on board. You were created with a purpose and with a set of gifts, with the sole intention of building God's church. With the sole intention of going to heaven one day and on your way there bringing as many people with you as you possibly can. That's the only reason you're alive. It's the only reason you walk on the face of the earth. The Christian life is a progressive revelation of just how true that is. Hopefully you realize now it's more true than you did five years ago and hopefully more than 10 years ago. The only reason you're here, the only reason that Jesus doesn't snatch you into heaven the instant you are saved is to leave you here so that you can bring as many people with you as possible on the way. And I believe that God has imbued each of you with a set of gifts. I believe that God has uniquely prepared you in your life through the circumstances that you have walked through to be effective at reaching other people. And I believe that God has a big vision and a big plan for how he wants to use you in his kingdom. I believe those of you who have jobs that you are the pastors of those teams. That God has put you there to be a light in the dark places, to encourage the other light that is there and to cast light on those who might not know him yet. That simply by watching you, they may give glory to the Father who is in heaven. Those verses are all over scripture. But what do we do? We know our past. We know who we are. And so we allow our shame to shrink our vision of who Jesus created us to be. We excuse those things away. If I said that, I would never be believed. They're going to think I'm a hypocrite. Maybe we want to start a devotional with our kids at the house. Maybe we just want to start exposing our children to Scripture in the home, but then we have that thought, yeah, buddy, but you don't even read the Bible every day on your own, you hypocrite. Well, start then, and then start the Bible study, man. God has these things that I believe He wants us to do, that He's purposed us to do, but we back off of them because of our shame, because we know who we are. And then we just exist in these little holes. God, I'm not going to do that thing. I'm just going to be a fisherman. I'm just going to work in sales. I'm just going to work in accounting. I'm just going to have my job. I'm just going to do my thing. I'm going to go to church and be a good Christian. But that work that you have to do in the kingdom, that's for other people who haven't messed up. And listen, if that's true, if the only people who get to do ministry and get used in God's kingdom are those who have never let Jesus down, then the church would be run by four-year-olds, man. We've got just a slight upgrade here. But that's what we do. We allow our shame and how we feel about ourselves to shrink our vision about what God wants us to do, which is why Jesus's response to Peter is so amazing. Look at what Jesus says in John chapter 21. I'm going to read you the whole conversation and then we'll talk about it a little bit. Jesus had shown up. They were fishing out on the Sea of Galilee. And that's louder than normal. They were fishing out on the Sea of Galilee. They had been out all night. They hadn't caught anything, right? And then Jesus appears on the shore after they bring the nets in. Still not catching anything. And they don't know it's Jesus. It's just some dude. And he's like, hey, cast your nets on the other side of the boat, which is ridiculous. It's almost like making fun of them. The boat's like 12 feet wide. It's not going to make a difference when they put them on the other side of the boat. But for whatever reason, they listen to the guy, they do it, and then they catch more fish than they've ever caught in their life. 30 years later, 30-plus years later, old man John still remembers that they caught exactly 153 fish that day. That wasn't a big deal to John. They pull in the fish, they go in, they have breakfast together, and then Jesus sidles up to Peter for a conversation. This is the first one-on-one conversation that they have had since Peter's betrayal. And let me just ask you before we read the conversation, what would you expect Jesus to say in that moment? What would you expect the conversation to be? Put yourself in Peter's shoes. You did that to Jesus. You've betrayed him. Put yourself in your own shoes. Take yourself to the place where you feel like you've let Jesus down the most. And right after letting him down for however many upteenth times you've done it, he comes up to you. He sidles up next to you and he puts his arm around you and you and him have a conversation. What do you expect him to say? I would expect him to go to Peter. I would expect him to come to me and say, hey, are you sorry? Right? Jesus is good. He's gracious. I don't think that we would expect Jesus to just come down hard on us. We don't know that in his character. But I think we would expect him to put his arm around us and look at Peter and go, hey, Peter, are you sorry for what you did? Isn't this what we do with our children? When Lily messes up, I've got a three-year-old daughter named Lily, when she messes up, which is more frequently lately because she's three, and apparently that's what three-year-olds do. And she hollers and she gets mad. What do I do? I pick her up and I hold her right here. I calm her down. And I say, Lily, are you sorry? And she says, yes, Daddy. I go, okay. And I put her down. I say, go tell your mom you're sorry. We forgive you. Isn't that what we do? Isn't that what we would expect Jesus to do to us? Hey, are you sorry? And then we would expect to go, yeah, I'm sorry. And we would expect to hear him say to Peter, okay, you're forgiven. Because he's Jesus and that's what he does, right? You're forgiven. That's what we would expect. But look at what happens. Verse 15, when they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these? Do you love me more than these fish? I see you've gone back to fishing. That's an interesting choice. I didn't know that you had a new career now. Do you love me more than these fish? Do you love me more than what you're doing? Interesting question. He said to him, yes, Lord, you know I love you. He said to him, feed my lambs. He said to him a second time, Simon, son of John, do you love me? He said to him, yes, Lord, you know that I love you. He said to him, tend my sheep. Verse 17, he said to him the third time, Simon, son of John, do you love me? Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, do you love me? And he said to somebody put it, you done boogered up, son. He messed up bad. He felt terrible. And he walked away from what God called him to because he felt like he had disqualified himself for messing up. And Jesus goes and he finds him. And we would expect Jesus to say, Peter, are you sorry? That's not what he says. He says, Peter, do you love me? Do I still have your heart or has this sin taken it from me? Do you love me? He says, yes, of course I love you. He says, good. Feed my sheep. This is a remarkable statement. Because in John 10, Jesus paints himself as the good shepherd. And he says that the sheep are his flock or the church or people who believe in him. His sheep are the Christians. And so the shepherd looks after the Christians. And so what he's saying is, Peter, for three years you watched me do ministry. You watched me tend to my sheep. And I told you that you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church. I told you that one day I won't be here. When I'mores you. He doesn't just forgive Peter. He doesn't say, are you sorry? He says, do you love me? I know you're sorry. Because if you love me, then of course you're sorry. And then we would expect him to say, okay, you're forgiven, but sit over here in this probationary period. I'll keep an eye on you for a couple years and see if we can trust you again. That's not what he does. You're forgiven. You're restored. Go and do the thing I created you to do. Go and be the person I created you to be. He says, Peter, you may have disqualified yourself. You may have shrunken back from my plans for you, but I have not. I still have plans for you. I still want you to do these things. You are reinstated. You are restored. And he does it three times. I love the symmetry of those statements. How many times did Jesus deny Peter? Three. How many times did Jesus ask Peter if he loved him? Three. It's like he's saying, Peter, without even saying the words, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know that I love you. You're forgiven. Go and work. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then you're forgiven. Go and be who I created you to be. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know that I love you. Okay, good, because that's three times that you said that. It's three times I've forgiven you. You can say it as many more times as you want to. I'll forgive you and restore you all those times. Now go and be who I created you to be. And I believe that he says the same thing to us this morning. I believe that he asks us the same question. Do you love Jesus? Grace, do you love Jesus? However mired in sin you might be, however much shame you might bring into the room, whatever might have happened in the past, whatever habits you bring, however many times you've made a commitment that you didn't keep, listen, put all that aside and let's just ask you grace. Do you love Jesus? Then go and be who he created you to be. Go and do the thing he purposed you to do. Say, but Jesus, I've done this and this and this. I'm not qualified. I used to be an addict. I used to do this thing. I'm mired in this right now. And Jesus says, listen, listen, listen, I'm not worried about that. Do you love me? Because if you love me, it means you're sorry. And if you've shrunk away, it means that you feel shame. And Jesus says, go and be the person that I created you to be. Go and do the thing that I intended for you to do. Quit disqualifying yourself. Quit feeling the shame that is not from me. And just answer the question, do you love me? Then go and do the thing that I purposed you to do. Go and feed his sheep. Go and build his church. Go and use the gifts that he's imbued you with. Go live out the reason that he leaves you here. Go and run your race. What I want you to understand this morning is Jesus is far more concerned with what he wants you to do than what you have done. He's already taken care of what you have done. He's removed that from you as far as the east is from the west. Because of that removal, you are free and have the freedom to operate in his love. And if you love him in return, then go and do the thing that he created you to do. Go and be who he created you to be. And that's where I would leave us at the end of the series in John with that simple question. After all the 12 weeks, after everything that we've experienced, after all that we've seen of Jesus, after what we know of him and how he loved us. Do you love him? Does he have your heart? If he does, grace. Go be who he created you to be. You're not just forgiven, you're restored. Let's pray. Father, we sure do love you. You sure are good to us. God, we can't fathom this idea that you would not just forgive us, but that you would restore us. Lord, if there are folks in here who walked into the room carrying a little bit of shame, God, if we are certain that if we could see you face to face, the first thing you would express in us is disappointment. God, I pray that you would take that from us today. That we would see that we are loved, that you care about us, that we would identify with Peter, not just in his betrayal, but in his restoration, that we would feel your arms around us, that we would simply respond to that question of, do we love you? Give us the faith to believe that you forgive us. Give us the eyes to see ourselves as you do. And give us the courage and the strength to go live out and be the people that you created us to be and do great things to the folks here at Grace. It's in your son's name we pray all of these things. Amen.

All right, well, good morning. It's good to see all of you. I know those lights hit you, they're bright, goodness gracious. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here, and it's so good to see you. Thanks for being here for the second service and for the last part of our series in John. When we started the series in February, this is, I think, 12 weeks, so it's been one of our longer ones, but I hope that you've enjoyed it. I hope, and my prayer for you has been that you now, as we leave the series, feel a little bit closer to Jesus than you did when we started, that you know him better than you did when we started. I know that there are some themes from the book of John that I will probably always remember that stuck out to me as we went through it as a church this time around. I hope that you can relate to that. Originally, when we had planned the series, we wanted to end it on Easter. At the end on Easter Sunday, that'd be the resurrection story. That's the end of the story of Jesus. Boom, we're done. It's a nice, clean, tidy ending. But as I was studying the book, there's a story in John that's unique to the book of John. It's not in the other gospels, Matthew, Mark, or Luke. It's just in John almost as an addendum. And it's the restoration of Peter. And it's to me one of the most hopeful, life-giving, inspiring, restorative messages and stories that we find from the life of Jesus. And so I thought if it's good enough to be an addendum for John, then it's good enough to be an addendum for grace. And so we came back one extra week in John to look at this story of the restoration of Peter. To appreciate the story, we need to understand what goes into this moment. Eventually, we're going to get to John chapter 21. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there and we're going to be at the end of that chapter. If you don't have one, there's one in the seat back in front of you. If you don't like that option, there's a free one on your phone just seconds away. All right. To understand the story at the end of John, we need to understand who Peter was and what's going on in that story. Peter was kind of the de facto leader of the disciples. Many people think he was probably the oldest disciple. He was, some believe, the only one with a wife when they were called. He was a little bit further on in life than the rest of the disciples were. Peter was one of these guys that would always talk first and think later. He was a ready, fire, aim kind of guy. He's my people. I understand Peter, right? When Jesus walks on the water, what does Peter do? He jumps out of the boat. Well, shoot, I'm doing this too, right? Peter always just said things with confidence and everybody around him was like, well, I guess that's right. Jen asked me, my wife asked me sometimes, like, how do you say things with so much confidence? Like, how do you know that to be true? And I'm like, I don't. I'm just saying it. And people seem to go along with things. That's Peter, man. I can relate to him. He just always the first to answer, always the first to have the idea, always out front, kind of regardless of consequences. One of my favorite stories to kind of illustrate the character of Peter, one day Jesus decides, he gathers the disciples together and he says, hey, you guys, I'm going to wash your feet today. Which is like, that's the lowest of the low job. That's like the summer intern as the servant job. That's what you do. And so Peter, responding with some pomposity, with some piety, says, no, Jesus, never. I can never let you wash my feet. I will never let that happen. And Jesus looks at him and he says, okay, Peter, but unless I wash your feet, you cannot enter into the kingdom of God. And then Peter immediately does a 180. Well, then don't stop at my feet. Wash my head and my hands as well. Like that's Peter, okay? And so at the Last Supper, right before Jesus is arrested and tried and crucified, the last time they spend some good time together, Jesus looks at Peter, the leader of the disciples, and he tells him, before the rooster crows in the morning, you will have denied me three times. And Peter's response is what you would expect Peter's response to be. Never, Lord. I would never deny you. I would not do that. And Jesus says, you're going to. And Peter says, this is a loose paraphrase, agree to disagree, which you never want to agree to disagree with Jesus. You're not in a good spot when that's what you choose. So they leave. Jesus goes and he prays. He brings Peter to pray with them, but Peter falls asleep. John falls asleep. James falls asleep. And then Jesus gets arrested, and he's taken off to the courtyard of the high priest, a guy named Caiaphas. And three weeks ago, we talked about this in the crucifixion story. It was in the courtyard of Caiaphas where Jesus is put on trial, and there were two disciples that actually followed him there. The rest of the disciples dispersed. They ran away. They started worrying about their own necks, and so they ran away to hide so that they wouldn't get arrested too. They figured if they're arresting Jesus, then they're coming for us next, right? And so they all dispersed except for two disciples, Peter and another unnamed disciple, make it to the courtyard of Caiaphas' house. And it's in this courtyard that Jesus was put on trial, that he was falsely accused, that they told lies about him. The one person who's ever existed who deserved this treatment least was getting this treatment. They were blindfolding him and punching him and saying, who hit you, Jesus? You're a prophet. Prophesy about who hit you. And then Jewish tradition says that they were ripping out his beard. So he's beaten up and he's in a moment where he is incredibly loved. This is a man that Jesus has followed every day for three years. He loves this man. He cares for nothing on earth more than this man, and now he's watching him suffer in this way. And Peter's around a campfire as this is happening. And when he gets there, the Bible says there's a servant girl who looks at him and says, hey, don't you know him? Aren't you like in his little group? And Peter says, no, I've never met the man. That's one. A little while later, somebody else says the same thing. Hey, haven't I seen you with him before? Peter says, no, I don't know what we're talking about. I've never met the man. That's twice. And then the Bible says about an hour after that, someone really begins to press him. Hey, aren't you from Galilee? I can tell by your accent, you have to know that man. And Peter gets emphatic. No, I swear I've never met him. And then it says that this is actually, there's this passage in Luke. That's to to me, one of the most intense passages in Scripture. It's something that you may have read before, but we kind of gloss over it. But look at what it says in Luke. Chapter 22, verse 60, it says, But Peter said, Man, I do not know what you are talking about. That's the third time. And immediately while he was still speaking, the rooster crowed. And then verse 61, and the Lord turned and looked at Peter. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? The time when Jesus most needed people around him who loved him. You are his leading disciple and you just denied him three times because you're scared. And his bloody face turns and looks you dead in the eye. Peter remembered the saying of the Lord how he said to him, before the rooster crows you'll deny me three times. And he went out and he wept bitterly. Can you imagine how Peter must have felt? He had betrayed his Jesus. He had let him down. He had denied him. He had told Jesus over and over again, you can count on me. For three years, Jesus had been prepping him and training him and grooming him to take over the church, to step into his ministry. He was to see Jesus and to help lead the church after Jesus' death. And in the moment when he most needed him, he betrayed him and he let him down. And Jesus turned and looked at Peter. You cannot imagine that eye contact. It says he went away and he wept bitterly. I love this story because I so identify with Peter. And to me, if you're a believer, if you're a Christian, then you can identify with him too. If you're here this morning and you're not a Christian, then the good news is that you don't have to feel bad about any of this. You can just take it all in and watch us as we squirm and feel bad. But if you're a believer, then you know this feeling too. If you're a believer, then you know what it is to feel like you've betrayed Jesus, don't you? Has there ever been a time in your life, maybe in a corporate setting, maybe around some clients, maybe with some new friends that you've made, maybe with some old buddies where you kind of fall back into who you used to be, where you took that part of your identity, your Christianity, and you kind of tucked it away back here and kind of didn't wear it on your sleeve for that week or for that night or for that season because you didn't really want them to know who you were associated with? Have you ever in your life tucked away your identity as a believer because you were kind of ashamed and embarrassed if people were to find out that that's who you were because you had not been acting that way? Can I just tell you? I hope that you don't get too disappointed in me for this, but I've been doing ministry for about 20 years. There have definitely been times in my life when because of how I had been acting or what I had been saying or doing or whatever it was, I kind of tucked away my identity as a pastor. I didn't really want to share it with the group of people that I was with. So when Peter betrays Jesus and denies knowing him, I can relate. When we get this sense of betrayal, I've let my Jesus down. To be a Christian is to be familiar with that. I think we've all had different times and different seasons where we feel like we've let Jesus down a little bit. Maybe we've told him. Maybe we've been moved in worship. Maybe we've been moved by a sermon, probably at another church, and we decided that what we were going to do, we were going to start a new discipline. We were going to start a new thing. We had been moved to conviction. And we say, yes, Jesus, I'm going to get up and I'm going to read the Bible. I'm going to get up early. I'm going to make time for you. I'm going to spend time in prayer. I'm going to spend time in your word. That's going to be a discipline in my life. And so we get up and we start to read it. We're following along, but maybe we don't really understand it. We don't hear the angels audibly sing. And so we think we must be doing it wrong. Or we wake up and we kind of do the drop and flop. Like, Jesus, you just show me what you want me to read. And it turns out that because Psalms is in the middle and it's the longest book in the Bible, that God wants us to read Psalms like a lot. So we just, we read that, right? And we don't really know what's going on or what's happening. And for whatever reason, we fall away from that discipline. And then we've told Jesus for however many times, this is going to be a part of my life. And then we fail. And we betray him and we let him down. Or we tell him that we're going to start to give. We understand that believers should give generously, that we should be conduits of God's generosity to us, that we're stewards of the resources that he gives us, and that we should be generous to those that we think Jesus would want to help and serve. And we commit to do this, but things come up and then we don't, and we fall away from that discipline or from that commitment. And we hesitate to even make the commitment again because we messed up the last time, and we don't have much reason to believe that we're going to do better the next time. Right? Or we have things in our life that we don't want there. And so we tell Jesus, I'm done with that. I'm drawing the line in the sand. I'm not going to do that thing again. I'm moved. I'm convicted. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for who I am. I don't want that to be a part of my life. I don't want that to be a part of who I am. Jesus, I'm done with that. I'm moving on by the power of your spirit. Please allow me to be done with that thing. And we move away from that thing. And then three days later or weeks later or maybe months later, we fall back into the thing. So I wonder this morning, have you ever felt like you've betrayed Jesus? Can you relate to Peter? Aren't you glad that in the moment of the height of your betrayal, Jesus isn't looking you in the eye? I think we can all relate to Peter in this moment. The good news is that it gets better. But I think that we can all relate to this idea of letting Jesus down, of betraying him and feeling what Peter must have felt when God looked at him and he went away and he wept bitterly. Which, by the way, when you're confronted with your sin, that's the appropriate response to go away and to weep bitterly. That's a good and right response. And I don't believe that God would steal that response from Peter. I don't think that God would go to him and say, hey, you don't need to do that. I think that's the good and right response when we realize who we are. But he goes away and he weeps bitterly. And then we pick up this story in John chapter 21. In John chapter 21, Jesus has died, he's resurrected, he's appeared to the disciples a couple of times, and then in John chapter 21, he appears to them while they're fishing. And it's interesting to me that they're fishing. Because if you think back, my Bible scholars in the room, you know the answer to this. At the beginning of Jesus' ministry, when he's calling the disciples, and he goes to this guy named Simon, son of John, and he renames him Peter, and he says, come and be my disciple. What was Peter doing? He was fishing. For three years while he followed Jesus, what did he not do anymore? Fish. Why? He had a new job. His new job was to follow Jesus. His new job was to be in ministry. His new job was to do what Jesus did, to go around telling people about Jesus, to cast out demons and to perform miracles and to teach the people of Israel about the Messiah that was now here. That was his new job. And so for three years, he hadn't done his old job. He walked away from that because that wasn't him anymore. But after Jesus dies and Peter is walking around with this shame because he let his Jesus down, what does he do? He goes back to his old job. He disqualifies himself. Peter should have been leading the church. Peter should have been gathering the disciples together and saying, hey, this isn't over. Jesus has risen from the dead. We need to continue to serve him. We need to continue to build his kingdom. We have a purpose. We're not done, guys. But instead, what does he do? He gets back in the boat. What I want us to see is that Peter allowed his shame to shrink his vision of what Jesus wanted him to do. He allowed his shame, he allowed what he had done and how badly he felt for it to shrink his vision about what Jesus wanted him to do. Jesus had purposed him and prepared him and groomed him to lead his church. It's what Jesus wanted him to do. It's why he was working with him for three years, why he was putting up with all of his Peter-isms so that he could lead the church. And Peter, because he felt bad, because he felt shame, he walked away from that. He disqualified himself, which in all honesty is the exact same thing that we would do. Would you look at Peter after he betrayed Jesus at the height of his need and go, yep, you're still the guy. You should still lead the church. Would you still want that guy to be in charge of everybody? Would you still want that guy leading the council of the disciples like he is in Acts along with James? Is that what you would still want? Wouldn't you think that Peter would need to enter into some sort of probationary period? Okay, you're good, Peter, but we're just going to keep our eye on you for a minute. Wouldn't you do what Peter did? Wouldn't you step away and kind of slink away quietly and be like, I'm so sorry that I messed up. I understand. I don't even expect you to reinstate me anymore. I'm just going to fish and I'm going to love on you the best I can. Wouldn't you expect that of Peter? Doesn't that seem like the fair human reaction? Don't we do that to ourselves? When we mess up and we know who we are, we know where we come from and we know the we bring into every room, and we know the things that are hiding in the corners and the shadows of our life. When we know those things, don't we do what Peter did and disqualify ourselves? Don't we allow our shame to shrink our vision for who we are and what God created us to do? Can I just tell you that I think the Bible teaches that every one of you who are believers were created, and the non-believers too, we're just waiting for you to get on board. You were created with a purpose and with a set of gifts, with the sole intention of building God's church. With the sole intention of going to heaven one day and on your way there bringing as many people with you as you possibly can. That's the only reason you're alive. It's the only reason you walk on the face of the earth. The Christian life is a progressive revelation of just how true that is. Hopefully you realize now it's more true than you did five years ago and hopefully more than 10 years ago. The only reason you're here, the only reason that Jesus doesn't snatch you into heaven the instant you are saved is to leave you here so that you can bring as many people with you as possible on the way. And I believe that God has imbued each of you with a set of gifts. I believe that God has uniquely prepared you in your life through the circumstances that you have walked through to be effective at reaching other people. And I believe that God has a big vision and a big plan for how he wants to use you in his kingdom. I believe those of you who have jobs that you are the pastors of those teams. That God has put you there to be a light in the dark places, to encourage the other light that is there and to cast light on those who might not know him yet. That simply by watching you, they may give glory to the Father who is in heaven. Those verses are all over scripture. But what do we do? We know our past. We know who we are. And so we allow our shame to shrink our vision of who Jesus created us to be. We excuse those things away. If I said that, I would never be believed. They're going to think I'm a hypocrite. Maybe we want to start a devotional with our kids at the house. Maybe we just want to start exposing our children to Scripture in the home, but then we have that thought, yeah, buddy, but you don't even read the Bible every day on your own, you hypocrite. Well, start then, and then start the Bible study, man. God has these things that I believe He wants us to do, that He's purposed us to do, but we back off of them because of our shame, because we know who we are. And then we just exist in these little holes. God, I'm not going to do that thing. I'm just going to be a fisherman. I'm just going to work in sales. I'm just going to work in accounting. I'm just going to have my job. I'm just going to do my thing. I'm going to go to church and be a good Christian. But that work that you have to do in the kingdom, that's for other people who haven't messed up. And listen, if that's true, if the only people who get to do ministry and get used in God's kingdom are those who have never let Jesus down, then the church would be run by four-year-olds, man. We've got just a slight upgrade here. But that's what we do. We allow our shame and how we feel about ourselves to shrink our vision about what God wants us to do, which is why Jesus's response to Peter is so amazing. Look at what Jesus says in John chapter 21. I'm going to read you the whole conversation and then we'll talk about it a little bit. Jesus had shown up. They were fishing out on the Sea of Galilee. And that's louder than normal. They were fishing out on the Sea of Galilee. They had been out all night. They hadn't caught anything, right? And then Jesus appears on the shore after they bring the nets in. Still not catching anything. And they don't know it's Jesus. It's just some dude. And he's like, hey, cast your nets on the other side of the boat, which is ridiculous. It's almost like making fun of them. The boat's like 12 feet wide. It's not going to make a difference when they put them on the other side of the boat. But for whatever reason, they listen to the guy, they do it, and then they catch more fish than they've ever caught in their life. 30 years later, 30-plus years later, old man John still remembers that they caught exactly 153 fish that day. That wasn't a big deal to John. They pull in the fish, they go in, they have breakfast together, and then Jesus sidles up to Peter for a conversation. This is the first one-on-one conversation that they have had since Peter's betrayal. And let me just ask you before we read the conversation, what would you expect Jesus to say in that moment? What would you expect the conversation to be? Put yourself in Peter's shoes. You did that to Jesus. You've betrayed him. Put yourself in your own shoes. Take yourself to the place where you feel like you've let Jesus down the most. And right after letting him down for however many upteenth times you've done it, he comes up to you. He sidles up next to you and he puts his arm around you and you and him have a conversation. What do you expect him to say? I would expect him to go to Peter. I would expect him to come to me and say, hey, are you sorry? Right? Jesus is good. He's gracious. I don't think that we would expect Jesus to just come down hard on us. We don't know that in his character. But I think we would expect him to put his arm around us and look at Peter and go, hey, Peter, are you sorry for what you did? Isn't this what we do with our children? When Lily messes up, I've got a three-year-old daughter named Lily, when she messes up, which is more frequently lately because she's three, and apparently that's what three-year-olds do. And she hollers and she gets mad. What do I do? I pick her up and I hold her right here. I calm her down. And I say, Lily, are you sorry? And she says, yes, Daddy. I go, okay. And I put her down. I say, go tell your mom you're sorry. We forgive you. Isn't that what we do? Isn't that what we would expect Jesus to do to us? Hey, are you sorry? And then we would expect to go, yeah, I'm sorry. And we would expect to hear him say to Peter, okay, you're forgiven. Because he's Jesus and that's what he does, right? You're forgiven. That's what we would expect. But look at what happens. Verse 15, when they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these? Do you love me more than these fish? I see you've gone back to fishing. That's an interesting choice. I didn't know that you had a new career now. Do you love me more than these fish? Do you love me more than what you're doing? Interesting question. He said to him, yes, Lord, you know I love you. He said to him, feed my lambs. He said to him a second time, Simon, son of John, do you love me? He said to him, yes, Lord, you know that I love you. He said to him, tend my sheep. Verse 17, he said to him the third time, Simon, son of John, do you love me? Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, do you love me? And he said to somebody put it, you done boogered up, son. He messed up bad. He felt terrible. And he walked away from what God called him to because he felt like he had disqualified himself for messing up. And Jesus goes and he finds him. And we would expect Jesus to say, Peter, are you sorry? That's not what he says. He says, Peter, do you love me? Do I still have your heart or has this sin taken it from me? Do you love me? He says, yes, of course I love you. He says, good. Feed my sheep. This is a remarkable statement. Because in John 10, Jesus paints himself as the good shepherd. And he says that the sheep are his flock or the church or people who believe in him. His sheep are the Christians. And so the shepherd looks after the Christians. And so what he's saying is, Peter, for three years you watched me do ministry. You watched me tend to my sheep. And I told you that you are Peter and on this rock I will build my church. I told you that one day I won't be here. When I'mores you. He doesn't just forgive Peter. He doesn't say, are you sorry? He says, do you love me? I know you're sorry. Because if you love me, then of course you're sorry. And then we would expect him to say, okay, you're forgiven, but sit over here in this probationary period. I'll keep an eye on you for a couple years and see if we can trust you again. That's not what he does. You're forgiven. You're restored. Go and do the thing I created you to do. Go and be the person I created you to be. He says, Peter, you may have disqualified yourself. You may have shrunken back from my plans for you, but I have not. I still have plans for you. I still want you to do these things. You are reinstated. You are restored. And he does it three times. I love the symmetry of those statements. How many times did Jesus deny Peter? Three. How many times did Jesus ask Peter if he loved him? Three. It's like he's saying, Peter, without even saying the words, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know that I love you. You're forgiven. Go and work. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then you're forgiven. Go and be who I created you to be. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know that I love you. Okay, good, because that's three times that you said that. It's three times I've forgiven you. You can say it as many more times as you want to. I'll forgive you and restore you all those times. Now go and be who I created you to be. And I believe that he says the same thing to us this morning. I believe that he asks us the same question. Do you love Jesus? Grace, do you love Jesus? However mired in sin you might be, however much shame you might bring into the room, whatever might have happened in the past, whatever habits you bring, however many times you've made a commitment that you didn't keep, listen, put all that aside and let's just ask you grace. Do you love Jesus? Then go and be who he created you to be. Go and do the thing he purposed you to do. Say, but Jesus, I've done this and this and this. I'm not qualified. I used to be an addict. I used to do this thing. I'm mired in this right now. And Jesus says, listen, listen, listen, I'm not worried about that. Do you love me? Because if you love me, it means you're sorry. And if you've shrunk away, it means that you feel shame. And Jesus says, go and be the person that I created you to be. Go and do the thing that I intended for you to do. Quit disqualifying yourself. Quit feeling the shame that is not from me. And just answer the question, do you love me? Then go and do the thing that I purposed you to do. Go and feed his sheep. Go and build his church. Go and use the gifts that he's imbued you with. Go live out the reason that he leaves you here. Go and run your race. What I want you to understand this morning is Jesus is far more concerned with what he wants you to do than what you have done. He's already taken care of what you have done. He's removed that from you as far as the east is from the west. Because of that removal, you are free and have the freedom to operate in his love. And if you love him in return, then go and do the thing that he created you to do. Go and be who he created you to be. And that's where I would leave us at the end of the series in John with that simple question. After all the 12 weeks, after everything that we've experienced, after all that we've seen of Jesus, after what we know of him and how he loved us. Do you love him? Does he have your heart? If he does, grace. Go be who he created you to be. You're not just forgiven, you're restored. Let's pray. Father, we sure do love you. You sure are good to us. God, we can't fathom this idea that you would not just forgive us, but that you would restore us. Lord, if there are folks in here who walked into the room carrying a little bit of shame, God, if we are certain that if we could see you face to face, the first thing you would express in us is disappointment. God, I pray that you would take that from us today. That we would see that we are loved, that you care about us, that we would identify with Peter, not just in his betrayal, but in his restoration, that we would feel your arms around us, that we would simply respond to that question of, do we love you? Give us the faith to believe that you forgive us. Give us the eyes to see ourselves as you do. And give us the courage and the strength to go live out and be the people that you created us to be and do great things to the folks here at Grace. It's in your son's name we pray all of these things. Amen.

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

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking Him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the senior pastor here. And it's been really refreshing for me to go through this Lenten season with you guys as a church. So I said at the beginning of the series in the first sermon that really I hoped that the Lord would move in your heart and in your lives through the devotionals that we're doing during the week, through our own prayer, through our own discipline of fasting, through the worship, and through what other people are coming and sharing in the services, which Kirk, thanks for that story about it as well. I love the background of that song, and it makes it all the more rich when we sing it. So I hope that you've been ministered to in ways other than just the sermon as we've gone through this series together. This week, if you read your devotionals, you know that we were focused on prayer. And so in preparation for the sermon this week, obviously I'm thinking about the topic of prayer. And just a little bit about me when I have to prepare a sermon. Before Lent, we did Colossians. I would do series like Colossians just every time to know it for the rest of my career if I could. Because when you prepare a sermon by opening up the Bible and reading a chapter and going, all right, God, what do you have for grace in this chapter? That is way easier than just talk about prayer, buddy. Like it's such a huge topic. It's really difficult to decide where to land and how to approach it and what passage will we use and where are we going to kind of spring out of in the Bible. I'd much rather just open a passage and preach the passage. When you give me a topic, it's kind of a hassle. So I've had this rattling around in my head for a while. What do we need to say about prayer? What does grace need to hear about prayer? And as I was thinking about this discipline of prayer, and whenever the discipline of prayer comes up, I always feel inadequate. I always kind of wince a little bit because I never feel like I do it enough. And you might be asking yourself, how much is enough prayer? Well, I would say probably just a little bit more. Whatever you're doing, just a little bit more is probably good. So I never feel great about prayer. And then my mind went to the other things in Scripture that we are told to do that sometimes we fall short of. Because I was thinking about the instruction in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. And that's kind of like a mindset of prayer, an ongoing daily conversation with God all the time. And I've never quite mastered that, right? And then there's plenty of things in Scripture that I've never quite mastered, if we're going to be generous with that phrase. That I've just never gotten down. There's a prayer that David prays where he says, search me, oh God, show me where there's sin in my life so that I can repent of it. I was joking with somebody last week. I have never prayed that prayer. Like I've never needed to like, oh God, just if you could just show me where I'm wrong, I don't see anything. Search my heart, make it apparent. Like God, I'm good. Please don't do that., I'm good. We've got a lot of lessons before we get there. And there's a lot of things in Scripture that we're told to be that if we're being honest as believers that we know we fall short of. I mentioned a verse last week, Philippians 4, 8, whatsoever things are right and noble and faithful and trustworthy and are a good report, think on these things and don't let our minds think about things that are not those. Well, I don't know how to keep my mind focused on the things of God to that degree. I just haven't figured that one out yet. Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that if our right hand causes us to sin, that we should cut it off so it can't do that anymore. If our eyes cause us to sin, we should gouge them out. And like, we're not doing that. We don't take it that seriously. I haven't gotten to that level of repentance yet. We see in scripture that we're to be people of prayer. We see in scripture that we are to delight ourselves in the laws of the Lord. We see in scripture that we are to go off and plant ourself near God, like a tree planted by streams of water, that we are to forsake everything else and seek out wisdom. We're told to be generous people, to give of our time and our talents and our treasures. We're told that our kingdom is not our kingdom, that it's God's kingdom. We're told that when someone strikes us that we should turn the other cheek and that vengeance is mine, says the Lord. That doesn't belong to us. We're told that if someone asks us to walk a mile with them that we should go an extra mile. That if someone asks us for our shirt we should offer our jacket as well. When you are a student of Scripture and you read the things that are peppered throughout the Bible that we're supposed to do, you can only come to one logical conclusion, I think, which is it is literally impossible to be everything that we are called to be. It is literally impossible to be and do everything that as believers we are called to be and do. We're leading a marriage small group right now. And one of the things we're talking about in that small group is that this marital love, that commitment is meant to reflect God's love. It's a picture. The way that we love our spouses in this sacrificial, self-giving love is designed by God to be a picture of his love for us. Our marriages are miniature gospels. They're pictures of the gospel. Your marriage needs to be so good that people look at it and go, man, what do they have? We're not there yet. Jesus tells us that when other people see our good works, that they should glorify our Father who is in heaven. That when we are believers, that when other people just watch you, when you just enter into and out of their presence and they just get to experience you a little bit, they go, man, I want whatever God that person has. And I bring all those things up because if I mention those things and you feel inadequate, if I mention those things and remind you of what Scripture teaches and you think to yourself, I'm really not doing great there. Look around. You have company. Everyone here feels that way. As a matter of fact, if anybody didn't feel that way, I read off all, I just listed off just a fraction of the things that we're supposed to do as believers. And you're sitting there going, I mean, I feel like I'm nailing it so far. Like, what else you got? You come preach, all right? Like, you come do this. I want to listen to you. We're all missing it. There is no possible way to be and do all that we are called to be and do except unless we have Jesus. And maybe that's why Jesus told the disciples in John 15 what he told them. The passage that Mike just read to us. I'll bring our attention to it again. John 15, verse 4. Abide in me and I in you as a branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine. Neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. Listen. For apart from me you can do nothing. For apart from Christ you can do nothing. All the things, all the big long list of things that we feel like we're supposed to be able to do as Christians, be a good husband, be a good wife, disciple our children, raise them up well, be kind and gracious and compassionate people, enter into the public sphere with grace and generosity and don't make jerks of ourselves on Facebook. Enter into political discussions with humility and with honor, like to be who we need to be, to be generous of our time, to be generous with our spirit, to be generous with our finances, to be and do the things that we know we need to be and do is impossible without Christ. Without Christ fueling those things. And some of us, I would be willing to bet, if we feel like we have a spiritual life at all right now, came in here on fumes. And I just wonder if it's because we're trying to do and be all the things and we're not abiding in Christ. Because Christ says, abide in me and I in you and you'll do fine. You can do all the things. You'll bear much fruit. Don't worry about all the things. Just focus on me and the things will happen. But I think some of us get so focused on the things that we forget about Jesus and we just come in here on fumes wondering why things aren't working out for us, wondering why we don't seem to be living the spiritual life that we feel like we could or should live. And Jesus is very clear. Apart from me, without abiding in me, you can do nothing. And so the question becomes, well, what does it mean to abide in Christ? And we've talked about this before. And certainly we can experience the presence of Jesus in myriad ways. I believe that he's with us in the service. I believe that he speaks to us out of our word. I believe that out of his word, I believe that we find Jesus in service to him. That when we do the work that he does, that he is found there. Jesus says, whatever we do to the least of these, we do unto him. So when we help those who cannot help themselves, we find Jesus there. But I would still contend that the primary way to abide in Christ, to meet with him, to experience his presence, is in prayer. If we want to abide in Christ, I would contend with you that that begins in earnest prayer. And I believe that for a couple of reasons. First of all, we're told that as Jesus goes back up into heaven, where he is now waiting for us, that he sits at the right hand of the Father and he is interceding for us. So when we pray, Jesus is in God's ear going, here's what they really need. Here's what they really mean. Here's what I think about this person. I died for this person. I love this person. I'm covering over this person. He's sitting next to God, interceding for you. We're also told in Romans that the Holy Spirit translates our prayers to the Father in groanings that are too deep for words. Because we don't even know what to pray for. We don't even know how to pray as we ought. We don't know what to ask God for. And so the Holy Spirit listens to our prayers and says, Father, here's what he needs. Here's what he means. And Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and he intercedes for us. So if we want to meet with Jesus, if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to pursue his presence, if we want to experience his spirit, then the first place we go is prayer because Jesus and his spirit and God the Father are waiting for us in prayer. So as soon as we kneel, as soon as we close our eyes, as soon as we begin to speak to him, dear heavenly Father, we enter into the presence of God. We enter into a divine space where the spirit and the son wait for us. It's part of the stillness that we talked about last week, that God creates a stillness so that he might meet us in it. So if you're going to ask me, how do we abide in Christ? Well, we begin with prayer. And I don't just think that that's true because of where Christ is positioned in heaven. I think it's true because of the practice and the pattern that we see in Jesus during his life. If we look at the life of Christ, here is, he was fully man and fully God. So here is a man who certainly has a relationship with his father, who certainly is abiding in God. Of course, he knew how to do that. Of course, he was with God in his service. Of course, he was with God as Jesus would reflect on his word. Of course, all the other ways he was with God and connected to the Father, but Jesus, even though he was as connected to God as anyone has ever been, even though he knew better how to abide in the Father than anyone has ever known, he still went off regularly to pray. We see time after time after time where Jesus does ministry and then he goes off to a quiet place and he gets up early in the morning and he goes off to pray. We see him pray in intense moments in his life. Before he begins his ministry, he goes out into the desert to fast and to what? To pray for 40 days. He sets up the model for the Lenten fast that we're observing now. The night he was crucified or the night that he was arrested, he goes to the garden of Gethsemane and he prays. Before he leaves, before he gets arrested and he sets in motion the series of events that are going to lead to his arrest and to his crucifixion, he sits down with the disciples in this same discourse where he's talking to them about I am the vine, you are the branches, John chapter 15, two chapters over in John 17, we see what I think is the greatest prayer in all of Scripture is Jesus' high priestly prayer that he prays over the disciples and the ones that they would reach in the future. So he prays for you and for me in John 17. Before Jesus commissions them to do their work, what does he do? He goes and he covers it in prayer. And so if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to be connected to the Father, if we want to be filled by, if we want to be connected with the Spirit, if we want to be able to hear the Spirit, the first place we go is prayer. It has to begin and end there. And I thought, no wonder we struggle so much with all the other things that we're supposed to do, because we're not blanketing them in prayer. We're not doing this fundamental thing, or at least I'm not. And not only did I just kind of think about this myself, but sometimes on a big topic like this, I'll go back and I'll read the old dead guys and I'll say, what did they say about prayer? C.S. Lewis and Charles Spurgeon and John Piper, who he's not, John Piper is still alive, praise Jesus. Tim Keller and C.S. Lewis. I'll go read guys that I go to so often, these pastors and theologians and scholars that I go to, and I'll say, what do they say about prayer? Maybe that will spark something in me. And what they said to a man over and over and over again is, you need to do it more. You need to do it more. You need to cover everything in prayer. You need to be a people of prayer. How could we possibly seek to take on the eternal, to do and be all the things we're supposed to do and be without prayer? One guy even wrote, Charles Spurgeon, he wrote that a pastor that is not spending two hours a day in prayer over his people is shortchanging them and they deserve better. And I'd just like to tell you, I'm doing three, baby, so you guys are good. No, I'm sorry. I'm not praying for you guys two hours a day. I read stories about that, about people who manage to do stuff like that, like pre-screens, and I'm jealous of them. But the overwhelming sense that I got from the people that I read was that we just need to do it more. And as I read scripture and think about what scripture has to say about prayer and how Jesus models prayer and how Paul, with almost every letter that he writes, accompanies that letter with a specific prayer that he prays for the church. I became convinced that we need to do it more. We need to go to the Father more. And one of the primary reasons to do that is that prayer in and of itself is an admission of inadequacy. Prayer is an admission of inadequacy. When we go to God and we pray, whether we realize it or not, what we are doing is agreeing with him that we can never do and be all the things we think we need to do and be. We are agreeing with him that we are inadequate for those tasks. When we pray and we kneel, which is why, by the way, I think it's a helpful posture to kneel before the Father. If you can, if your knees will let you and your back's good with it, I would highly encourage you to kneel down, get on your knees when you pray. Because it puts you in this posture of submission and of inadequacy. And when we go to God and we ask for things, or we present things to him, it is a tacit admission that we are inadequate for those things. When I kneel beside Lily's bed and I pray for her at night, which I don't do every night, but some nights I sneak in there, and it's one of the great privileges of fatherhood is to be able to kneel beside your sleeping children and pray for them. Some of you have grown children. You don't get to do that anymore, and you miss it. So while we have them, parents with children, let's do that. But when I kneel beside her bed and I think of all the things that I want for her, I pray, one of the things I pray for her almost daily is that she would know God soon and love him well. And that she would know him better than I do. And that she would teach me things about him. When I kneel beside her bed and I pray for that, it's an admission that God, I'm totally inadequate to be the dad she needs me to be. It's totally impossible for me to do that. And it's a reminder that I try way too hard to do it all on my own most of the time. When we get on our knees and we pray for our marriage, God, restore it. God, protect it. God, help us here. God, give us direction there. It's a tacit admission that we're not enough for that. And so when we bow our head and we pray to the Father and we invite him into these areas in our life, into all the places that we need to do and be, and into all the things that we get concerned about, that we care deeply about, when we invite him into those spaces, it is a tacit admission, God, I'm not big enough for this. It's a tacit admission of the first point of this sermon. It is impossible to live the life that you've called me to live without you. So I'm abiding in you. I'm calling on you. I need you for these things. And the more I began to think about this and the necessity of prayer, this occurred to me and I wanted to share it with you, that prayer is to spiritual work what food is to physical work. If you decided randomly to fast, let's say that you had a bunch of yard work you wanted to do that weekend. I mean, I've got to do it at my house. My yard looks a mess. It looks terrible. I haven't touched my grass or anything all winter long, and all of a sudden everything's blooming at once, and I desperately need to get out there, except it's just a soggy mess back there. Anyways, there's a lot of work to do, and you've got to pour the mulch, and you've got to edge, and you've got to trim, and you've got to do all the things. Well, let's say that you decided to get out in your yard, and you decided to do that, or spring cleaning, or whatever it is you do this time of year. But on that same weekend that you decided you were going to do that, you thought, you know what else I'm going to do? I'm going to not eat. Let's just, let's see how this goes. And you haven't eaten since Thursday night and Saturday afternoon, you're out there trying to spread mulch and you can't do it. You've got a headache. You can't focus. You're spreading mulch in the middle of the ground, in the middle of the yard because you're delirious. Like you're not, you can't do it. Is it any wonder why you would struggle to do manual labor if you haven't fueled yourself with food so that you might have the energy and the strength to do it? Well, how come when we start to fail and falter in life and we're spreading mulch in the middle of wherever the heck and because we're just delirious and we are not plugged into God, why don't we stop and pray and admit, how did I ever think I was going to be a good parent without prayer? How did I ever think I was going to be able to navigate my career and all the things I'm supposed to do without prayer? It just, it's made me wonder this week how, why I don't spend closer to two hours a day in prayer over this church. Who am I that I think that being a pastor is so easy that I don't hit the ground every morning when I wake up overwhelmed with the responsibility and offer it to God in prayer? Who are we in our parenthood that we just wake up and shuttle the kids here and shuttle the kids there and don't stop as often as we can to pray for them and to pray for who they're going to become? Who are we in our marriages to think that we can just go through the years and just tie days into weeks into months into years and decades without covering over our marriage and prayer and somehow hoping that it turns out to be this thing that honors God in the way that it's supposed to be? How do we undertake the things that we undertake in our life and we don't absolutely saturate them with prayer and then get surprised when they're not going the way that they should? How can we expect to do things of eternal import without praying. Without covering it in prayer. I heard one pastor, and it stuck with me, so maybe it'll stick with you too, who said, never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. Never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. If you can't cover it in prayer, then maybe we just shouldn't start it. Maybe we just shouldn't do that thing. And I think one of the things that we do with prayer is we kind of treat it like it's optional. Like one day when I'm a better Christian, I'll pray more. Like when I really double down on this life and I really mean it and I set those things aside and as I get older, one day I'm going to pray more. I'm going to pray about that thing more. We'll get moved to do this or that or the other thing, but we treat prayer as if it's this discipline to be gotten later, like it's a diet. Like, I know I should be on one, but I also like cinnamon rolls, so I'm not in this moment on a diet. I know I should pray, but I also like to not be praying, so in this moment, I'm not going to pray, and we treat it like it's optional. And when we treat it like it's optional, I think prayer gets relegated to inflection points and to crises in our life. Something goes really, really wrong. Our marriage feels broken and we're not sure if it's going to work. And so we hit the ground and we pray and say, God, please rescue this. That's good that we're doing that, but how much better could our marriage be if every day we pray that God would protect it? Why wait until it's a mess to fall on our knees and pray about it? Often we relegate prayer to crisis points that could have been prevented if we would have just prayed about them regularly. Why fall on our knees and pray about this huge decision that we have to make in our career when every day we could be getting on our knees and say, Father, my career is your career. Whatever you would have me do, please just make it clear to me. What if we prayed that prayer every day for five years? How much more prepared would our heart be? How much more in tune with Jesus would we be when different opportunities came up? Our kid starts making bad decisions, gets in trouble, whatever the case. And so in desperation, we go to God in prayer, and we should. But are we going to him daily, lifting up that child, asking for wisdom and guidance and grace as we raise them? It made me sad to think about in my own life how, yes, I pray regularly and I try to lift up the church regularly and I try to pray for my family regularly, but what are all the things in my life that I don't pray about until they're a pain point, until it's a big decision or until it's a crisis or until it's a big huge need that I could have been praying for all along. So as we think about prayer this week as a church, let us follow the practices and patterns of Jesus. Do it regularly. Abide in him through prayer. Know that he waits on us in there. Let us not begin things that we have not covered over in prayer. Let us realize that if we feel spiritually famished, if we feel spiritually exhausted, maybe it's because we have not been giving ourselves the fuel of prayer and meeting Jesus there where he waits on us. And let us not, as we close, think optional what God has rendered as essential. Let us not treat prayer as optional when God has told us it is just as essential to your soul as food is to your body. And so, as we go, how much should we pray? Just a little bit more than we are. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we love you so much. And I, for one, am sorry for my patterns of prayer. For sometimes how little I entrust to you or how irregularly I will come to you. God, I'm sorry that there are things in my life that I allow to come to crisis or pain or inflection points. And then and only then do I bring them to you in prayer. God, let us be people of prayer. Let us be people who know your presence well, who are constantly drawn there, who learn how to pray without ceasing. God, for those of us here who may not pray very often or very regularly, let us do that this week and find you in those spaces. Let our souls be revived by seeking your presence in that way. God, make this church, make our grace partners people of prayer. In Jesus' name, amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking Him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the senior pastor here. And it's been really refreshing for me to go through this Lenten season with you guys as a church. So I said at the beginning of the series in the first sermon that really I hoped that the Lord would move in your heart and in your lives through the devotionals that we're doing during the week, through our own prayer, through our own discipline of fasting, through the worship, and through what other people are coming and sharing in the services, which Kirk, thanks for that story about it as well. I love the background of that song, and it makes it all the more rich when we sing it. So I hope that you've been ministered to in ways other than just the sermon as we've gone through this series together. This week, if you read your devotionals, you know that we were focused on prayer. And so in preparation for the sermon this week, obviously I'm thinking about the topic of prayer. And just a little bit about me when I have to prepare a sermon. Before Lent, we did Colossians. I would do series like Colossians just every time to know it for the rest of my career if I could. Because when you prepare a sermon by opening up the Bible and reading a chapter and going, all right, God, what do you have for grace in this chapter? That is way easier than just talk about prayer, buddy. Like it's such a huge topic. It's really difficult to decide where to land and how to approach it and what passage will we use and where are we going to kind of spring out of in the Bible. I'd much rather just open a passage and preach the passage. When you give me a topic, it's kind of a hassle. So I've had this rattling around in my head for a while. What do we need to say about prayer? What does grace need to hear about prayer? And as I was thinking about this discipline of prayer, and whenever the discipline of prayer comes up, I always feel inadequate. I always kind of wince a little bit because I never feel like I do it enough. And you might be asking yourself, how much is enough prayer? Well, I would say probably just a little bit more. Whatever you're doing, just a little bit more is probably good. So I never feel great about prayer. And then my mind went to the other things in Scripture that we are told to do that sometimes we fall short of. Because I was thinking about the instruction in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. And that's kind of like a mindset of prayer, an ongoing daily conversation with God all the time. And I've never quite mastered that, right? And then there's plenty of things in Scripture that I've never quite mastered, if we're going to be generous with that phrase. That I've just never gotten down. There's a prayer that David prays where he says, search me, oh God, show me where there's sin in my life so that I can repent of it. I was joking with somebody last week. I have never prayed that prayer. Like I've never needed to like, oh God, just if you could just show me where I'm wrong, I don't see anything. Search my heart, make it apparent. Like God, I'm good. Please don't do that., I'm good. We've got a lot of lessons before we get there. And there's a lot of things in Scripture that we're told to be that if we're being honest as believers that we know we fall short of. I mentioned a verse last week, Philippians 4, 8, whatsoever things are right and noble and faithful and trustworthy and are a good report, think on these things and don't let our minds think about things that are not those. Well, I don't know how to keep my mind focused on the things of God to that degree. I just haven't figured that one out yet. Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that if our right hand causes us to sin, that we should cut it off so it can't do that anymore. If our eyes cause us to sin, we should gouge them out. And like, we're not doing that. We don't take it that seriously. I haven't gotten to that level of repentance yet. We see in scripture that we're to be people of prayer. We see in scripture that we are to delight ourselves in the laws of the Lord. We see in scripture that we are to go off and plant ourself near God, like a tree planted by streams of water, that we are to forsake everything else and seek out wisdom. We're told to be generous people, to give of our time and our talents and our treasures. We're told that our kingdom is not our kingdom, that it's God's kingdom. We're told that when someone strikes us that we should turn the other cheek and that vengeance is mine, says the Lord. That doesn't belong to us. We're told that if someone asks us to walk a mile with them that we should go an extra mile. That if someone asks us for our shirt we should offer our jacket as well. When you are a student of Scripture and you read the things that are peppered throughout the Bible that we're supposed to do, you can only come to one logical conclusion, I think, which is it is literally impossible to be everything that we are called to be. It is literally impossible to be and do everything that as believers we are called to be and do. We're leading a marriage small group right now. And one of the things we're talking about in that small group is that this marital love, that commitment is meant to reflect God's love. It's a picture. The way that we love our spouses in this sacrificial, self-giving love is designed by God to be a picture of his love for us. Our marriages are miniature gospels. They're pictures of the gospel. Your marriage needs to be so good that people look at it and go, man, what do they have? We're not there yet. Jesus tells us that when other people see our good works, that they should glorify our Father who is in heaven. That when we are believers, that when other people just watch you, when you just enter into and out of their presence and they just get to experience you a little bit, they go, man, I want whatever God that person has. And I bring all those things up because if I mention those things and you feel inadequate, if I mention those things and remind you of what Scripture teaches and you think to yourself, I'm really not doing great there. Look around. You have company. Everyone here feels that way. As a matter of fact, if anybody didn't feel that way, I read off all, I just listed off just a fraction of the things that we're supposed to do as believers. And you're sitting there going, I mean, I feel like I'm nailing it so far. Like, what else you got? You come preach, all right? Like, you come do this. I want to listen to you. We're all missing it. There is no possible way to be and do all that we are called to be and do except unless we have Jesus. And maybe that's why Jesus told the disciples in John 15 what he told them. The passage that Mike just read to us. I'll bring our attention to it again. John 15, verse 4. Abide in me and I in you as a branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine. Neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. Listen. For apart from me you can do nothing. For apart from Christ you can do nothing. All the things, all the big long list of things that we feel like we're supposed to be able to do as Christians, be a good husband, be a good wife, disciple our children, raise them up well, be kind and gracious and compassionate people, enter into the public sphere with grace and generosity and don't make jerks of ourselves on Facebook. Enter into political discussions with humility and with honor, like to be who we need to be, to be generous of our time, to be generous with our spirit, to be generous with our finances, to be and do the things that we know we need to be and do is impossible without Christ. Without Christ fueling those things. And some of us, I would be willing to bet, if we feel like we have a spiritual life at all right now, came in here on fumes. And I just wonder if it's because we're trying to do and be all the things and we're not abiding in Christ. Because Christ says, abide in me and I in you and you'll do fine. You can do all the things. You'll bear much fruit. Don't worry about all the things. Just focus on me and the things will happen. But I think some of us get so focused on the things that we forget about Jesus and we just come in here on fumes wondering why things aren't working out for us, wondering why we don't seem to be living the spiritual life that we feel like we could or should live. And Jesus is very clear. Apart from me, without abiding in me, you can do nothing. And so the question becomes, well, what does it mean to abide in Christ? And we've talked about this before. And certainly we can experience the presence of Jesus in myriad ways. I believe that he's with us in the service. I believe that he speaks to us out of our word. I believe that out of his word, I believe that we find Jesus in service to him. That when we do the work that he does, that he is found there. Jesus says, whatever we do to the least of these, we do unto him. So when we help those who cannot help themselves, we find Jesus there. But I would still contend that the primary way to abide in Christ, to meet with him, to experience his presence, is in prayer. If we want to abide in Christ, I would contend with you that that begins in earnest prayer. And I believe that for a couple of reasons. First of all, we're told that as Jesus goes back up into heaven, where he is now waiting for us, that he sits at the right hand of the Father and he is interceding for us. So when we pray, Jesus is in God's ear going, here's what they really need. Here's what they really mean. Here's what I think about this person. I died for this person. I love this person. I'm covering over this person. He's sitting next to God, interceding for you. We're also told in Romans that the Holy Spirit translates our prayers to the Father in groanings that are too deep for words. Because we don't even know what to pray for. We don't even know how to pray as we ought. We don't know what to ask God for. And so the Holy Spirit listens to our prayers and says, Father, here's what he needs. Here's what he means. And Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and he intercedes for us. So if we want to meet with Jesus, if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to pursue his presence, if we want to experience his spirit, then the first place we go is prayer because Jesus and his spirit and God the Father are waiting for us in prayer. So as soon as we kneel, as soon as we close our eyes, as soon as we begin to speak to him, dear heavenly Father, we enter into the presence of God. We enter into a divine space where the spirit and the son wait for us. It's part of the stillness that we talked about last week, that God creates a stillness so that he might meet us in it. So if you're going to ask me, how do we abide in Christ? Well, we begin with prayer. And I don't just think that that's true because of where Christ is positioned in heaven. I think it's true because of the practice and the pattern that we see in Jesus during his life. If we look at the life of Christ, here is, he was fully man and fully God. So here is a man who certainly has a relationship with his father, who certainly is abiding in God. Of course, he knew how to do that. Of course, he was with God in his service. Of course, he was with God as Jesus would reflect on his word. Of course, all the other ways he was with God and connected to the Father, but Jesus, even though he was as connected to God as anyone has ever been, even though he knew better how to abide in the Father than anyone has ever known, he still went off regularly to pray. We see time after time after time where Jesus does ministry and then he goes off to a quiet place and he gets up early in the morning and he goes off to pray. We see him pray in intense moments in his life. Before he begins his ministry, he goes out into the desert to fast and to what? To pray for 40 days. He sets up the model for the Lenten fast that we're observing now. The night he was crucified or the night that he was arrested, he goes to the garden of Gethsemane and he prays. Before he leaves, before he gets arrested and he sets in motion the series of events that are going to lead to his arrest and to his crucifixion, he sits down with the disciples in this same discourse where he's talking to them about I am the vine, you are the branches, John chapter 15, two chapters over in John 17, we see what I think is the greatest prayer in all of Scripture is Jesus' high priestly prayer that he prays over the disciples and the ones that they would reach in the future. So he prays for you and for me in John 17. Before Jesus commissions them to do their work, what does he do? He goes and he covers it in prayer. And so if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to be connected to the Father, if we want to be filled by, if we want to be connected with the Spirit, if we want to be able to hear the Spirit, the first place we go is prayer. It has to begin and end there. And I thought, no wonder we struggle so much with all the other things that we're supposed to do, because we're not blanketing them in prayer. We're not doing this fundamental thing, or at least I'm not. And not only did I just kind of think about this myself, but sometimes on a big topic like this, I'll go back and I'll read the old dead guys and I'll say, what did they say about prayer? C.S. Lewis and Charles Spurgeon and John Piper, who he's not, John Piper is still alive, praise Jesus. Tim Keller and C.S. Lewis. I'll go read guys that I go to so often, these pastors and theologians and scholars that I go to, and I'll say, what do they say about prayer? Maybe that will spark something in me. And what they said to a man over and over and over again is, you need to do it more. You need to do it more. You need to cover everything in prayer. You need to be a people of prayer. How could we possibly seek to take on the eternal, to do and be all the things we're supposed to do and be without prayer? One guy even wrote, Charles Spurgeon, he wrote that a pastor that is not spending two hours a day in prayer over his people is shortchanging them and they deserve better. And I'd just like to tell you, I'm doing three, baby, so you guys are good. No, I'm sorry. I'm not praying for you guys two hours a day. I read stories about that, about people who manage to do stuff like that, like pre-screens, and I'm jealous of them. But the overwhelming sense that I got from the people that I read was that we just need to do it more. And as I read scripture and think about what scripture has to say about prayer and how Jesus models prayer and how Paul, with almost every letter that he writes, accompanies that letter with a specific prayer that he prays for the church. I became convinced that we need to do it more. We need to go to the Father more. And one of the primary reasons to do that is that prayer in and of itself is an admission of inadequacy. Prayer is an admission of inadequacy. When we go to God and we pray, whether we realize it or not, what we are doing is agreeing with him that we can never do and be all the things we think we need to do and be. We are agreeing with him that we are inadequate for those tasks. When we pray and we kneel, which is why, by the way, I think it's a helpful posture to kneel before the Father. If you can, if your knees will let you and your back's good with it, I would highly encourage you to kneel down, get on your knees when you pray. Because it puts you in this posture of submission and of inadequacy. And when we go to God and we ask for things, or we present things to him, it is a tacit admission that we are inadequate for those things. When I kneel beside Lily's bed and I pray for her at night, which I don't do every night, but some nights I sneak in there, and it's one of the great privileges of fatherhood is to be able to kneel beside your sleeping children and pray for them. Some of you have grown children. You don't get to do that anymore, and you miss it. So while we have them, parents with children, let's do that. But when I kneel beside her bed and I think of all the things that I want for her, I pray, one of the things I pray for her almost daily is that she would know God soon and love him well. And that she would know him better than I do. And that she would teach me things about him. When I kneel beside her bed and I pray for that, it's an admission that God, I'm totally inadequate to be the dad she needs me to be. It's totally impossible for me to do that. And it's a reminder that I try way too hard to do it all on my own most of the time. When we get on our knees and we pray for our marriage, God, restore it. God, protect it. God, help us here. God, give us direction there. It's a tacit admission that we're not enough for that. And so when we bow our head and we pray to the Father and we invite him into these areas in our life, into all the places that we need to do and be, and into all the things that we get concerned about, that we care deeply about, when we invite him into those spaces, it is a tacit admission, God, I'm not big enough for this. It's a tacit admission of the first point of this sermon. It is impossible to live the life that you've called me to live without you. So I'm abiding in you. I'm calling on you. I need you for these things. And the more I began to think about this and the necessity of prayer, this occurred to me and I wanted to share it with you, that prayer is to spiritual work what food is to physical work. If you decided randomly to fast, let's say that you had a bunch of yard work you wanted to do that weekend. I mean, I've got to do it at my house. My yard looks a mess. It looks terrible. I haven't touched my grass or anything all winter long, and all of a sudden everything's blooming at once, and I desperately need to get out there, except it's just a soggy mess back there. Anyways, there's a lot of work to do, and you've got to pour the mulch, and you've got to edge, and you've got to trim, and you've got to do all the things. Well, let's say that you decided to get out in your yard, and you decided to do that, or spring cleaning, or whatever it is you do this time of year. But on that same weekend that you decided you were going to do that, you thought, you know what else I'm going to do? I'm going to not eat. Let's just, let's see how this goes. And you haven't eaten since Thursday night and Saturday afternoon, you're out there trying to spread mulch and you can't do it. You've got a headache. You can't focus. You're spreading mulch in the middle of the ground, in the middle of the yard because you're delirious. Like you're not, you can't do it. Is it any wonder why you would struggle to do manual labor if you haven't fueled yourself with food so that you might have the energy and the strength to do it? Well, how come when we start to fail and falter in life and we're spreading mulch in the middle of wherever the heck and because we're just delirious and we are not plugged into God, why don't we stop and pray and admit, how did I ever think I was going to be a good parent without prayer? How did I ever think I was going to be able to navigate my career and all the things I'm supposed to do without prayer? It just, it's made me wonder this week how, why I don't spend closer to two hours a day in prayer over this church. Who am I that I think that being a pastor is so easy that I don't hit the ground every morning when I wake up overwhelmed with the responsibility and offer it to God in prayer? Who are we in our parenthood that we just wake up and shuttle the kids here and shuttle the kids there and don't stop as often as we can to pray for them and to pray for who they're going to become? Who are we in our marriages to think that we can just go through the years and just tie days into weeks into months into years and decades without covering over our marriage and prayer and somehow hoping that it turns out to be this thing that honors God in the way that it's supposed to be? How do we undertake the things that we undertake in our life and we don't absolutely saturate them with prayer and then get surprised when they're not going the way that they should? How can we expect to do things of eternal import without praying. Without covering it in prayer. I heard one pastor, and it stuck with me, so maybe it'll stick with you too, who said, never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. Never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. If you can't cover it in prayer, then maybe we just shouldn't start it. Maybe we just shouldn't do that thing. And I think one of the things that we do with prayer is we kind of treat it like it's optional. Like one day when I'm a better Christian, I'll pray more. Like when I really double down on this life and I really mean it and I set those things aside and as I get older, one day I'm going to pray more. I'm going to pray about that thing more. We'll get moved to do this or that or the other thing, but we treat prayer as if it's this discipline to be gotten later, like it's a diet. Like, I know I should be on one, but I also like cinnamon rolls, so I'm not in this moment on a diet. I know I should pray, but I also like to not be praying, so in this moment, I'm not going to pray, and we treat it like it's optional. And when we treat it like it's optional, I think prayer gets relegated to inflection points and to crises in our life. Something goes really, really wrong. Our marriage feels broken and we're not sure if it's going to work. And so we hit the ground and we pray and say, God, please rescue this. That's good that we're doing that, but how much better could our marriage be if every day we pray that God would protect it? Why wait until it's a mess to fall on our knees and pray about it? Often we relegate prayer to crisis points that could have been prevented if we would have just prayed about them regularly. Why fall on our knees and pray about this huge decision that we have to make in our career when every day we could be getting on our knees and say, Father, my career is your career. Whatever you would have me do, please just make it clear to me. What if we prayed that prayer every day for five years? How much more prepared would our heart be? How much more in tune with Jesus would we be when different opportunities came up? Our kid starts making bad decisions, gets in trouble, whatever the case. And so in desperation, we go to God in prayer, and we should. But are we going to him daily, lifting up that child, asking for wisdom and guidance and grace as we raise them? It made me sad to think about in my own life how, yes, I pray regularly and I try to lift up the church regularly and I try to pray for my family regularly, but what are all the things in my life that I don't pray about until they're a pain point, until it's a big decision or until it's a crisis or until it's a big huge need that I could have been praying for all along. So as we think about prayer this week as a church, let us follow the practices and patterns of Jesus. Do it regularly. Abide in him through prayer. Know that he waits on us in there. Let us not begin things that we have not covered over in prayer. Let us realize that if we feel spiritually famished, if we feel spiritually exhausted, maybe it's because we have not been giving ourselves the fuel of prayer and meeting Jesus there where he waits on us. And let us not, as we close, think optional what God has rendered as essential. Let us not treat prayer as optional when God has told us it is just as essential to your soul as food is to your body. And so, as we go, how much should we pray? Just a little bit more than we are. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we love you so much. And I, for one, am sorry for my patterns of prayer. For sometimes how little I entrust to you or how irregularly I will come to you. God, I'm sorry that there are things in my life that I allow to come to crisis or pain or inflection points. And then and only then do I bring them to you in prayer. God, let us be people of prayer. Let us be people who know your presence well, who are constantly drawn there, who learn how to pray without ceasing. God, for those of us here who may not pray very often or very regularly, let us do that this week and find you in those spaces. Let our souls be revived by seeking your presence in that way. God, make this church, make our grace partners people of prayer. In Jesus' name, amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking Him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the senior pastor here. And it's been really refreshing for me to go through this Lenten season with you guys as a church. So I said at the beginning of the series in the first sermon that really I hoped that the Lord would move in your heart and in your lives through the devotionals that we're doing during the week, through our own prayer, through our own discipline of fasting, through the worship, and through what other people are coming and sharing in the services, which Kirk, thanks for that story about it as well. I love the background of that song, and it makes it all the more rich when we sing it. So I hope that you've been ministered to in ways other than just the sermon as we've gone through this series together. This week, if you read your devotionals, you know that we were focused on prayer. And so in preparation for the sermon this week, obviously I'm thinking about the topic of prayer. And just a little bit about me when I have to prepare a sermon. Before Lent, we did Colossians. I would do series like Colossians just every time to know it for the rest of my career if I could. Because when you prepare a sermon by opening up the Bible and reading a chapter and going, all right, God, what do you have for grace in this chapter? That is way easier than just talk about prayer, buddy. Like it's such a huge topic. It's really difficult to decide where to land and how to approach it and what passage will we use and where are we going to kind of spring out of in the Bible. I'd much rather just open a passage and preach the passage. When you give me a topic, it's kind of a hassle. So I've had this rattling around in my head for a while. What do we need to say about prayer? What does grace need to hear about prayer? And as I was thinking about this discipline of prayer, and whenever the discipline of prayer comes up, I always feel inadequate. I always kind of wince a little bit because I never feel like I do it enough. And you might be asking yourself, how much is enough prayer? Well, I would say probably just a little bit more. Whatever you're doing, just a little bit more is probably good. So I never feel great about prayer. And then my mind went to the other things in Scripture that we are told to do that sometimes we fall short of. Because I was thinking about the instruction in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. And that's kind of like a mindset of prayer, an ongoing daily conversation with God all the time. And I've never quite mastered that, right? And then there's plenty of things in Scripture that I've never quite mastered, if we're going to be generous with that phrase. That I've just never gotten down. There's a prayer that David prays where he says, search me, oh God, show me where there's sin in my life so that I can repent of it. I was joking with somebody last week. I have never prayed that prayer. Like I've never needed to like, oh God, just if you could just show me where I'm wrong, I don't see anything. Search my heart, make it apparent. Like God, I'm good. Please don't do that., I'm good. We've got a lot of lessons before we get there. And there's a lot of things in Scripture that we're told to be that if we're being honest as believers that we know we fall short of. I mentioned a verse last week, Philippians 4, 8, whatsoever things are right and noble and faithful and trustworthy and are a good report, think on these things and don't let our minds think about things that are not those. Well, I don't know how to keep my mind focused on the things of God to that degree. I just haven't figured that one out yet. Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that if our right hand causes us to sin, that we should cut it off so it can't do that anymore. If our eyes cause us to sin, we should gouge them out. And like, we're not doing that. We don't take it that seriously. I haven't gotten to that level of repentance yet. We see in scripture that we're to be people of prayer. We see in scripture that we are to delight ourselves in the laws of the Lord. We see in scripture that we are to go off and plant ourself near God, like a tree planted by streams of water, that we are to forsake everything else and seek out wisdom. We're told to be generous people, to give of our time and our talents and our treasures. We're told that our kingdom is not our kingdom, that it's God's kingdom. We're told that when someone strikes us that we should turn the other cheek and that vengeance is mine, says the Lord. That doesn't belong to us. We're told that if someone asks us to walk a mile with them that we should go an extra mile. That if someone asks us for our shirt we should offer our jacket as well. When you are a student of Scripture and you read the things that are peppered throughout the Bible that we're supposed to do, you can only come to one logical conclusion, I think, which is it is literally impossible to be everything that we are called to be. It is literally impossible to be and do everything that as believers we are called to be and do. We're leading a marriage small group right now. And one of the things we're talking about in that small group is that this marital love, that commitment is meant to reflect God's love. It's a picture. The way that we love our spouses in this sacrificial, self-giving love is designed by God to be a picture of his love for us. Our marriages are miniature gospels. They're pictures of the gospel. Your marriage needs to be so good that people look at it and go, man, what do they have? We're not there yet. Jesus tells us that when other people see our good works, that they should glorify our Father who is in heaven. That when we are believers, that when other people just watch you, when you just enter into and out of their presence and they just get to experience you a little bit, they go, man, I want whatever God that person has. And I bring all those things up because if I mention those things and you feel inadequate, if I mention those things and remind you of what Scripture teaches and you think to yourself, I'm really not doing great there. Look around. You have company. Everyone here feels that way. As a matter of fact, if anybody didn't feel that way, I read off all, I just listed off just a fraction of the things that we're supposed to do as believers. And you're sitting there going, I mean, I feel like I'm nailing it so far. Like, what else you got? You come preach, all right? Like, you come do this. I want to listen to you. We're all missing it. There is no possible way to be and do all that we are called to be and do except unless we have Jesus. And maybe that's why Jesus told the disciples in John 15 what he told them. The passage that Mike just read to us. I'll bring our attention to it again. John 15, verse 4. Abide in me and I in you as a branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine. Neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. Listen. For apart from me you can do nothing. For apart from Christ you can do nothing. All the things, all the big long list of things that we feel like we're supposed to be able to do as Christians, be a good husband, be a good wife, disciple our children, raise them up well, be kind and gracious and compassionate people, enter into the public sphere with grace and generosity and don't make jerks of ourselves on Facebook. Enter into political discussions with humility and with honor, like to be who we need to be, to be generous of our time, to be generous with our spirit, to be generous with our finances, to be and do the things that we know we need to be and do is impossible without Christ. Without Christ fueling those things. And some of us, I would be willing to bet, if we feel like we have a spiritual life at all right now, came in here on fumes. And I just wonder if it's because we're trying to do and be all the things and we're not abiding in Christ. Because Christ says, abide in me and I in you and you'll do fine. You can do all the things. You'll bear much fruit. Don't worry about all the things. Just focus on me and the things will happen. But I think some of us get so focused on the things that we forget about Jesus and we just come in here on fumes wondering why things aren't working out for us, wondering why we don't seem to be living the spiritual life that we feel like we could or should live. And Jesus is very clear. Apart from me, without abiding in me, you can do nothing. And so the question becomes, well, what does it mean to abide in Christ? And we've talked about this before. And certainly we can experience the presence of Jesus in myriad ways. I believe that he's with us in the service. I believe that he speaks to us out of our word. I believe that out of his word, I believe that we find Jesus in service to him. That when we do the work that he does, that he is found there. Jesus says, whatever we do to the least of these, we do unto him. So when we help those who cannot help themselves, we find Jesus there. But I would still contend that the primary way to abide in Christ, to meet with him, to experience his presence, is in prayer. If we want to abide in Christ, I would contend with you that that begins in earnest prayer. And I believe that for a couple of reasons. First of all, we're told that as Jesus goes back up into heaven, where he is now waiting for us, that he sits at the right hand of the Father and he is interceding for us. So when we pray, Jesus is in God's ear going, here's what they really need. Here's what they really mean. Here's what I think about this person. I died for this person. I love this person. I'm covering over this person. He's sitting next to God, interceding for you. We're also told in Romans that the Holy Spirit translates our prayers to the Father in groanings that are too deep for words. Because we don't even know what to pray for. We don't even know how to pray as we ought. We don't know what to ask God for. And so the Holy Spirit listens to our prayers and says, Father, here's what he needs. Here's what he means. And Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and he intercedes for us. So if we want to meet with Jesus, if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to pursue his presence, if we want to experience his spirit, then the first place we go is prayer because Jesus and his spirit and God the Father are waiting for us in prayer. So as soon as we kneel, as soon as we close our eyes, as soon as we begin to speak to him, dear heavenly Father, we enter into the presence of God. We enter into a divine space where the spirit and the son wait for us. It's part of the stillness that we talked about last week, that God creates a stillness so that he might meet us in it. So if you're going to ask me, how do we abide in Christ? Well, we begin with prayer. And I don't just think that that's true because of where Christ is positioned in heaven. I think it's true because of the practice and the pattern that we see in Jesus during his life. If we look at the life of Christ, here is, he was fully man and fully God. So here is a man who certainly has a relationship with his father, who certainly is abiding in God. Of course, he knew how to do that. Of course, he was with God in his service. Of course, he was with God as Jesus would reflect on his word. Of course, all the other ways he was with God and connected to the Father, but Jesus, even though he was as connected to God as anyone has ever been, even though he knew better how to abide in the Father than anyone has ever known, he still went off regularly to pray. We see time after time after time where Jesus does ministry and then he goes off to a quiet place and he gets up early in the morning and he goes off to pray. We see him pray in intense moments in his life. Before he begins his ministry, he goes out into the desert to fast and to what? To pray for 40 days. He sets up the model for the Lenten fast that we're observing now. The night he was crucified or the night that he was arrested, he goes to the garden of Gethsemane and he prays. Before he leaves, before he gets arrested and he sets in motion the series of events that are going to lead to his arrest and to his crucifixion, he sits down with the disciples in this same discourse where he's talking to them about I am the vine, you are the branches, John chapter 15, two chapters over in John 17, we see what I think is the greatest prayer in all of Scripture is Jesus' high priestly prayer that he prays over the disciples and the ones that they would reach in the future. So he prays for you and for me in John 17. Before Jesus commissions them to do their work, what does he do? He goes and he covers it in prayer. And so if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to be connected to the Father, if we want to be filled by, if we want to be connected with the Spirit, if we want to be able to hear the Spirit, the first place we go is prayer. It has to begin and end there. And I thought, no wonder we struggle so much with all the other things that we're supposed to do, because we're not blanketing them in prayer. We're not doing this fundamental thing, or at least I'm not. And not only did I just kind of think about this myself, but sometimes on a big topic like this, I'll go back and I'll read the old dead guys and I'll say, what did they say about prayer? C.S. Lewis and Charles Spurgeon and John Piper, who he's not, John Piper is still alive, praise Jesus. Tim Keller and C.S. Lewis. I'll go read guys that I go to so often, these pastors and theologians and scholars that I go to, and I'll say, what do they say about prayer? Maybe that will spark something in me. And what they said to a man over and over and over again is, you need to do it more. You need to do it more. You need to cover everything in prayer. You need to be a people of prayer. How could we possibly seek to take on the eternal, to do and be all the things we're supposed to do and be without prayer? One guy even wrote, Charles Spurgeon, he wrote that a pastor that is not spending two hours a day in prayer over his people is shortchanging them and they deserve better. And I'd just like to tell you, I'm doing three, baby, so you guys are good. No, I'm sorry. I'm not praying for you guys two hours a day. I read stories about that, about people who manage to do stuff like that, like pre-screens, and I'm jealous of them. But the overwhelming sense that I got from the people that I read was that we just need to do it more. And as I read scripture and think about what scripture has to say about prayer and how Jesus models prayer and how Paul, with almost every letter that he writes, accompanies that letter with a specific prayer that he prays for the church. I became convinced that we need to do it more. We need to go to the Father more. And one of the primary reasons to do that is that prayer in and of itself is an admission of inadequacy. Prayer is an admission of inadequacy. When we go to God and we pray, whether we realize it or not, what we are doing is agreeing with him that we can never do and be all the things we think we need to do and be. We are agreeing with him that we are inadequate for those tasks. When we pray and we kneel, which is why, by the way, I think it's a helpful posture to kneel before the Father. If you can, if your knees will let you and your back's good with it, I would highly encourage you to kneel down, get on your knees when you pray. Because it puts you in this posture of submission and of inadequacy. And when we go to God and we ask for things, or we present things to him, it is a tacit admission that we are inadequate for those things. When I kneel beside Lily's bed and I pray for her at night, which I don't do every night, but some nights I sneak in there, and it's one of the great privileges of fatherhood is to be able to kneel beside your sleeping children and pray for them. Some of you have grown children. You don't get to do that anymore, and you miss it. So while we have them, parents with children, let's do that. But when I kneel beside her bed and I think of all the things that I want for her, I pray, one of the things I pray for her almost daily is that she would know God soon and love him well. And that she would know him better than I do. And that she would teach me things about him. When I kneel beside her bed and I pray for that, it's an admission that God, I'm totally inadequate to be the dad she needs me to be. It's totally impossible for me to do that. And it's a reminder that I try way too hard to do it all on my own most of the time. When we get on our knees and we pray for our marriage, God, restore it. God, protect it. God, help us here. God, give us direction there. It's a tacit admission that we're not enough for that. And so when we bow our head and we pray to the Father and we invite him into these areas in our life, into all the places that we need to do and be, and into all the things that we get concerned about, that we care deeply about, when we invite him into those spaces, it is a tacit admission, God, I'm not big enough for this. It's a tacit admission of the first point of this sermon. It is impossible to live the life that you've called me to live without you. So I'm abiding in you. I'm calling on you. I need you for these things. And the more I began to think about this and the necessity of prayer, this occurred to me and I wanted to share it with you, that prayer is to spiritual work what food is to physical work. If you decided randomly to fast, let's say that you had a bunch of yard work you wanted to do that weekend. I mean, I've got to do it at my house. My yard looks a mess. It looks terrible. I haven't touched my grass or anything all winter long, and all of a sudden everything's blooming at once, and I desperately need to get out there, except it's just a soggy mess back there. Anyways, there's a lot of work to do, and you've got to pour the mulch, and you've got to edge, and you've got to trim, and you've got to do all the things. Well, let's say that you decided to get out in your yard, and you decided to do that, or spring cleaning, or whatever it is you do this time of year. But on that same weekend that you decided you were going to do that, you thought, you know what else I'm going to do? I'm going to not eat. Let's just, let's see how this goes. And you haven't eaten since Thursday night and Saturday afternoon, you're out there trying to spread mulch and you can't do it. You've got a headache. You can't focus. You're spreading mulch in the middle of the ground, in the middle of the yard because you're delirious. Like you're not, you can't do it. Is it any wonder why you would struggle to do manual labor if you haven't fueled yourself with food so that you might have the energy and the strength to do it? Well, how come when we start to fail and falter in life and we're spreading mulch in the middle of wherever the heck and because we're just delirious and we are not plugged into God, why don't we stop and pray and admit, how did I ever think I was going to be a good parent without prayer? How did I ever think I was going to be able to navigate my career and all the things I'm supposed to do without prayer? It just, it's made me wonder this week how, why I don't spend closer to two hours a day in prayer over this church. Who am I that I think that being a pastor is so easy that I don't hit the ground every morning when I wake up overwhelmed with the responsibility and offer it to God in prayer? Who are we in our parenthood that we just wake up and shuttle the kids here and shuttle the kids there and don't stop as often as we can to pray for them and to pray for who they're going to become? Who are we in our marriages to think that we can just go through the years and just tie days into weeks into months into years and decades without covering over our marriage and prayer and somehow hoping that it turns out to be this thing that honors God in the way that it's supposed to be? How do we undertake the things that we undertake in our life and we don't absolutely saturate them with prayer and then get surprised when they're not going the way that they should? How can we expect to do things of eternal import without praying. Without covering it in prayer. I heard one pastor, and it stuck with me, so maybe it'll stick with you too, who said, never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. Never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. If you can't cover it in prayer, then maybe we just shouldn't start it. Maybe we just shouldn't do that thing. And I think one of the things that we do with prayer is we kind of treat it like it's optional. Like one day when I'm a better Christian, I'll pray more. Like when I really double down on this life and I really mean it and I set those things aside and as I get older, one day I'm going to pray more. I'm going to pray about that thing more. We'll get moved to do this or that or the other thing, but we treat prayer as if it's this discipline to be gotten later, like it's a diet. Like, I know I should be on one, but I also like cinnamon rolls, so I'm not in this moment on a diet. I know I should pray, but I also like to not be praying, so in this moment, I'm not going to pray, and we treat it like it's optional. And when we treat it like it's optional, I think prayer gets relegated to inflection points and to crises in our life. Something goes really, really wrong. Our marriage feels broken and we're not sure if it's going to work. And so we hit the ground and we pray and say, God, please rescue this. That's good that we're doing that, but how much better could our marriage be if every day we pray that God would protect it? Why wait until it's a mess to fall on our knees and pray about it? Often we relegate prayer to crisis points that could have been prevented if we would have just prayed about them regularly. Why fall on our knees and pray about this huge decision that we have to make in our career when every day we could be getting on our knees and say, Father, my career is your career. Whatever you would have me do, please just make it clear to me. What if we prayed that prayer every day for five years? How much more prepared would our heart be? How much more in tune with Jesus would we be when different opportunities came up? Our kid starts making bad decisions, gets in trouble, whatever the case. And so in desperation, we go to God in prayer, and we should. But are we going to him daily, lifting up that child, asking for wisdom and guidance and grace as we raise them? It made me sad to think about in my own life how, yes, I pray regularly and I try to lift up the church regularly and I try to pray for my family regularly, but what are all the things in my life that I don't pray about until they're a pain point, until it's a big decision or until it's a crisis or until it's a big huge need that I could have been praying for all along. So as we think about prayer this week as a church, let us follow the practices and patterns of Jesus. Do it regularly. Abide in him through prayer. Know that he waits on us in there. Let us not begin things that we have not covered over in prayer. Let us realize that if we feel spiritually famished, if we feel spiritually exhausted, maybe it's because we have not been giving ourselves the fuel of prayer and meeting Jesus there where he waits on us. And let us not, as we close, think optional what God has rendered as essential. Let us not treat prayer as optional when God has told us it is just as essential to your soul as food is to your body. And so, as we go, how much should we pray? Just a little bit more than we are. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we love you so much. And I, for one, am sorry for my patterns of prayer. For sometimes how little I entrust to you or how irregularly I will come to you. God, I'm sorry that there are things in my life that I allow to come to crisis or pain or inflection points. And then and only then do I bring them to you in prayer. God, let us be people of prayer. Let us be people who know your presence well, who are constantly drawn there, who learn how to pray without ceasing. God, for those of us here who may not pray very often or very regularly, let us do that this week and find you in those spaces. Let our souls be revived by seeking your presence in that way. God, make this church, make our grace partners people of prayer. In Jesus' name, amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking Him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the senior pastor here. And it's been really refreshing for me to go through this Lenten season with you guys as a church. So I said at the beginning of the series in the first sermon that really I hoped that the Lord would move in your heart and in your lives through the devotionals that we're doing during the week, through our own prayer, through our own discipline of fasting, through the worship, and through what other people are coming and sharing in the services, which Kirk, thanks for that story about it as well. I love the background of that song, and it makes it all the more rich when we sing it. So I hope that you've been ministered to in ways other than just the sermon as we've gone through this series together. This week, if you read your devotionals, you know that we were focused on prayer. And so in preparation for the sermon this week, obviously I'm thinking about the topic of prayer. And just a little bit about me when I have to prepare a sermon. Before Lent, we did Colossians. I would do series like Colossians just every time to know it for the rest of my career if I could. Because when you prepare a sermon by opening up the Bible and reading a chapter and going, all right, God, what do you have for grace in this chapter? That is way easier than just talk about prayer, buddy. Like it's such a huge topic. It's really difficult to decide where to land and how to approach it and what passage will we use and where are we going to kind of spring out of in the Bible. I'd much rather just open a passage and preach the passage. When you give me a topic, it's kind of a hassle. So I've had this rattling around in my head for a while. What do we need to say about prayer? What does grace need to hear about prayer? And as I was thinking about this discipline of prayer, and whenever the discipline of prayer comes up, I always feel inadequate. I always kind of wince a little bit because I never feel like I do it enough. And you might be asking yourself, how much is enough prayer? Well, I would say probably just a little bit more. Whatever you're doing, just a little bit more is probably good. So I never feel great about prayer. And then my mind went to the other things in Scripture that we are told to do that sometimes we fall short of. Because I was thinking about the instruction in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. And that's kind of like a mindset of prayer, an ongoing daily conversation with God all the time. And I've never quite mastered that, right? And then there's plenty of things in Scripture that I've never quite mastered, if we're going to be generous with that phrase. That I've just never gotten down. There's a prayer that David prays where he says, search me, oh God, show me where there's sin in my life so that I can repent of it. I was joking with somebody last week. I have never prayed that prayer. Like I've never needed to like, oh God, just if you could just show me where I'm wrong, I don't see anything. Search my heart, make it apparent. Like God, I'm good. Please don't do that., I'm good. We've got a lot of lessons before we get there. And there's a lot of things in Scripture that we're told to be that if we're being honest as believers that we know we fall short of. I mentioned a verse last week, Philippians 4, 8, whatsoever things are right and noble and faithful and trustworthy and are a good report, think on these things and don't let our minds think about things that are not those. Well, I don't know how to keep my mind focused on the things of God to that degree. I just haven't figured that one out yet. Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that if our right hand causes us to sin, that we should cut it off so it can't do that anymore. If our eyes cause us to sin, we should gouge them out. And like, we're not doing that. We don't take it that seriously. I haven't gotten to that level of repentance yet. We see in scripture that we're to be people of prayer. We see in scripture that we are to delight ourselves in the laws of the Lord. We see in scripture that we are to go off and plant ourself near God, like a tree planted by streams of water, that we are to forsake everything else and seek out wisdom. We're told to be generous people, to give of our time and our talents and our treasures. We're told that our kingdom is not our kingdom, that it's God's kingdom. We're told that when someone strikes us that we should turn the other cheek and that vengeance is mine, says the Lord. That doesn't belong to us. We're told that if someone asks us to walk a mile with them that we should go an extra mile. That if someone asks us for our shirt we should offer our jacket as well. When you are a student of Scripture and you read the things that are peppered throughout the Bible that we're supposed to do, you can only come to one logical conclusion, I think, which is it is literally impossible to be everything that we are called to be. It is literally impossible to be and do everything that as believers we are called to be and do. We're leading a marriage small group right now. And one of the things we're talking about in that small group is that this marital love, that commitment is meant to reflect God's love. It's a picture. The way that we love our spouses in this sacrificial, self-giving love is designed by God to be a picture of his love for us. Our marriages are miniature gospels. They're pictures of the gospel. Your marriage needs to be so good that people look at it and go, man, what do they have? We're not there yet. Jesus tells us that when other people see our good works, that they should glorify our Father who is in heaven. That when we are believers, that when other people just watch you, when you just enter into and out of their presence and they just get to experience you a little bit, they go, man, I want whatever God that person has. And I bring all those things up because if I mention those things and you feel inadequate, if I mention those things and remind you of what Scripture teaches and you think to yourself, I'm really not doing great there. Look around. You have company. Everyone here feels that way. As a matter of fact, if anybody didn't feel that way, I read off all, I just listed off just a fraction of the things that we're supposed to do as believers. And you're sitting there going, I mean, I feel like I'm nailing it so far. Like, what else you got? You come preach, all right? Like, you come do this. I want to listen to you. We're all missing it. There is no possible way to be and do all that we are called to be and do except unless we have Jesus. And maybe that's why Jesus told the disciples in John 15 what he told them. The passage that Mike just read to us. I'll bring our attention to it again. John 15, verse 4. Abide in me and I in you as a branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine. Neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. Listen. For apart from me you can do nothing. For apart from Christ you can do nothing. All the things, all the big long list of things that we feel like we're supposed to be able to do as Christians, be a good husband, be a good wife, disciple our children, raise them up well, be kind and gracious and compassionate people, enter into the public sphere with grace and generosity and don't make jerks of ourselves on Facebook. Enter into political discussions with humility and with honor, like to be who we need to be, to be generous of our time, to be generous with our spirit, to be generous with our finances, to be and do the things that we know we need to be and do is impossible without Christ. Without Christ fueling those things. And some of us, I would be willing to bet, if we feel like we have a spiritual life at all right now, came in here on fumes. And I just wonder if it's because we're trying to do and be all the things and we're not abiding in Christ. Because Christ says, abide in me and I in you and you'll do fine. You can do all the things. You'll bear much fruit. Don't worry about all the things. Just focus on me and the things will happen. But I think some of us get so focused on the things that we forget about Jesus and we just come in here on fumes wondering why things aren't working out for us, wondering why we don't seem to be living the spiritual life that we feel like we could or should live. And Jesus is very clear. Apart from me, without abiding in me, you can do nothing. And so the question becomes, well, what does it mean to abide in Christ? And we've talked about this before. And certainly we can experience the presence of Jesus in myriad ways. I believe that he's with us in the service. I believe that he speaks to us out of our word. I believe that out of his word, I believe that we find Jesus in service to him. That when we do the work that he does, that he is found there. Jesus says, whatever we do to the least of these, we do unto him. So when we help those who cannot help themselves, we find Jesus there. But I would still contend that the primary way to abide in Christ, to meet with him, to experience his presence, is in prayer. If we want to abide in Christ, I would contend with you that that begins in earnest prayer. And I believe that for a couple of reasons. First of all, we're told that as Jesus goes back up into heaven, where he is now waiting for us, that he sits at the right hand of the Father and he is interceding for us. So when we pray, Jesus is in God's ear going, here's what they really need. Here's what they really mean. Here's what I think about this person. I died for this person. I love this person. I'm covering over this person. He's sitting next to God, interceding for you. We're also told in Romans that the Holy Spirit translates our prayers to the Father in groanings that are too deep for words. Because we don't even know what to pray for. We don't even know how to pray as we ought. We don't know what to ask God for. And so the Holy Spirit listens to our prayers and says, Father, here's what he needs. Here's what he means. And Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father and he intercedes for us. So if we want to meet with Jesus, if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to pursue his presence, if we want to experience his spirit, then the first place we go is prayer because Jesus and his spirit and God the Father are waiting for us in prayer. So as soon as we kneel, as soon as we close our eyes, as soon as we begin to speak to him, dear heavenly Father, we enter into the presence of God. We enter into a divine space where the spirit and the son wait for us. It's part of the stillness that we talked about last week, that God creates a stillness so that he might meet us in it. So if you're going to ask me, how do we abide in Christ? Well, we begin with prayer. And I don't just think that that's true because of where Christ is positioned in heaven. I think it's true because of the practice and the pattern that we see in Jesus during his life. If we look at the life of Christ, here is, he was fully man and fully God. So here is a man who certainly has a relationship with his father, who certainly is abiding in God. Of course, he knew how to do that. Of course, he was with God in his service. Of course, he was with God as Jesus would reflect on his word. Of course, all the other ways he was with God and connected to the Father, but Jesus, even though he was as connected to God as anyone has ever been, even though he knew better how to abide in the Father than anyone has ever known, he still went off regularly to pray. We see time after time after time where Jesus does ministry and then he goes off to a quiet place and he gets up early in the morning and he goes off to pray. We see him pray in intense moments in his life. Before he begins his ministry, he goes out into the desert to fast and to what? To pray for 40 days. He sets up the model for the Lenten fast that we're observing now. The night he was crucified or the night that he was arrested, he goes to the garden of Gethsemane and he prays. Before he leaves, before he gets arrested and he sets in motion the series of events that are going to lead to his arrest and to his crucifixion, he sits down with the disciples in this same discourse where he's talking to them about I am the vine, you are the branches, John chapter 15, two chapters over in John 17, we see what I think is the greatest prayer in all of Scripture is Jesus' high priestly prayer that he prays over the disciples and the ones that they would reach in the future. So he prays for you and for me in John 17. Before Jesus commissions them to do their work, what does he do? He goes and he covers it in prayer. And so if we want to abide in Christ, if we want to be connected to the Father, if we want to be filled by, if we want to be connected with the Spirit, if we want to be able to hear the Spirit, the first place we go is prayer. It has to begin and end there. And I thought, no wonder we struggle so much with all the other things that we're supposed to do, because we're not blanketing them in prayer. We're not doing this fundamental thing, or at least I'm not. And not only did I just kind of think about this myself, but sometimes on a big topic like this, I'll go back and I'll read the old dead guys and I'll say, what did they say about prayer? C.S. Lewis and Charles Spurgeon and John Piper, who he's not, John Piper is still alive, praise Jesus. Tim Keller and C.S. Lewis. I'll go read guys that I go to so often, these pastors and theologians and scholars that I go to, and I'll say, what do they say about prayer? Maybe that will spark something in me. And what they said to a man over and over and over again is, you need to do it more. You need to do it more. You need to cover everything in prayer. You need to be a people of prayer. How could we possibly seek to take on the eternal, to do and be all the things we're supposed to do and be without prayer? One guy even wrote, Charles Spurgeon, he wrote that a pastor that is not spending two hours a day in prayer over his people is shortchanging them and they deserve better. And I'd just like to tell you, I'm doing three, baby, so you guys are good. No, I'm sorry. I'm not praying for you guys two hours a day. I read stories about that, about people who manage to do stuff like that, like pre-screens, and I'm jealous of them. But the overwhelming sense that I got from the people that I read was that we just need to do it more. And as I read scripture and think about what scripture has to say about prayer and how Jesus models prayer and how Paul, with almost every letter that he writes, accompanies that letter with a specific prayer that he prays for the church. I became convinced that we need to do it more. We need to go to the Father more. And one of the primary reasons to do that is that prayer in and of itself is an admission of inadequacy. Prayer is an admission of inadequacy. When we go to God and we pray, whether we realize it or not, what we are doing is agreeing with him that we can never do and be all the things we think we need to do and be. We are agreeing with him that we are inadequate for those tasks. When we pray and we kneel, which is why, by the way, I think it's a helpful posture to kneel before the Father. If you can, if your knees will let you and your back's good with it, I would highly encourage you to kneel down, get on your knees when you pray. Because it puts you in this posture of submission and of inadequacy. And when we go to God and we ask for things, or we present things to him, it is a tacit admission that we are inadequate for those things. When I kneel beside Lily's bed and I pray for her at night, which I don't do every night, but some nights I sneak in there, and it's one of the great privileges of fatherhood is to be able to kneel beside your sleeping children and pray for them. Some of you have grown children. You don't get to do that anymore, and you miss it. So while we have them, parents with children, let's do that. But when I kneel beside her bed and I think of all the things that I want for her, I pray, one of the things I pray for her almost daily is that she would know God soon and love him well. And that she would know him better than I do. And that she would teach me things about him. When I kneel beside her bed and I pray for that, it's an admission that God, I'm totally inadequate to be the dad she needs me to be. It's totally impossible for me to do that. And it's a reminder that I try way too hard to do it all on my own most of the time. When we get on our knees and we pray for our marriage, God, restore it. God, protect it. God, help us here. God, give us direction there. It's a tacit admission that we're not enough for that. And so when we bow our head and we pray to the Father and we invite him into these areas in our life, into all the places that we need to do and be, and into all the things that we get concerned about, that we care deeply about, when we invite him into those spaces, it is a tacit admission, God, I'm not big enough for this. It's a tacit admission of the first point of this sermon. It is impossible to live the life that you've called me to live without you. So I'm abiding in you. I'm calling on you. I need you for these things. And the more I began to think about this and the necessity of prayer, this occurred to me and I wanted to share it with you, that prayer is to spiritual work what food is to physical work. If you decided randomly to fast, let's say that you had a bunch of yard work you wanted to do that weekend. I mean, I've got to do it at my house. My yard looks a mess. It looks terrible. I haven't touched my grass or anything all winter long, and all of a sudden everything's blooming at once, and I desperately need to get out there, except it's just a soggy mess back there. Anyways, there's a lot of work to do, and you've got to pour the mulch, and you've got to edge, and you've got to trim, and you've got to do all the things. Well, let's say that you decided to get out in your yard, and you decided to do that, or spring cleaning, or whatever it is you do this time of year. But on that same weekend that you decided you were going to do that, you thought, you know what else I'm going to do? I'm going to not eat. Let's just, let's see how this goes. And you haven't eaten since Thursday night and Saturday afternoon, you're out there trying to spread mulch and you can't do it. You've got a headache. You can't focus. You're spreading mulch in the middle of the ground, in the middle of the yard because you're delirious. Like you're not, you can't do it. Is it any wonder why you would struggle to do manual labor if you haven't fueled yourself with food so that you might have the energy and the strength to do it? Well, how come when we start to fail and falter in life and we're spreading mulch in the middle of wherever the heck and because we're just delirious and we are not plugged into God, why don't we stop and pray and admit, how did I ever think I was going to be a good parent without prayer? How did I ever think I was going to be able to navigate my career and all the things I'm supposed to do without prayer? It just, it's made me wonder this week how, why I don't spend closer to two hours a day in prayer over this church. Who am I that I think that being a pastor is so easy that I don't hit the ground every morning when I wake up overwhelmed with the responsibility and offer it to God in prayer? Who are we in our parenthood that we just wake up and shuttle the kids here and shuttle the kids there and don't stop as often as we can to pray for them and to pray for who they're going to become? Who are we in our marriages to think that we can just go through the years and just tie days into weeks into months into years and decades without covering over our marriage and prayer and somehow hoping that it turns out to be this thing that honors God in the way that it's supposed to be? How do we undertake the things that we undertake in our life and we don't absolutely saturate them with prayer and then get surprised when they're not going the way that they should? How can we expect to do things of eternal import without praying. Without covering it in prayer. I heard one pastor, and it stuck with me, so maybe it'll stick with you too, who said, never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. Never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. If you can't cover it in prayer, then maybe we just shouldn't start it. Maybe we just shouldn't do that thing. And I think one of the things that we do with prayer is we kind of treat it like it's optional. Like one day when I'm a better Christian, I'll pray more. Like when I really double down on this life and I really mean it and I set those things aside and as I get older, one day I'm going to pray more. I'm going to pray about that thing more. We'll get moved to do this or that or the other thing, but we treat prayer as if it's this discipline to be gotten later, like it's a diet. Like, I know I should be on one, but I also like cinnamon rolls, so I'm not in this moment on a diet. I know I should pray, but I also like to not be praying, so in this moment, I'm not going to pray, and we treat it like it's optional. And when we treat it like it's optional, I think prayer gets relegated to inflection points and to crises in our life. Something goes really, really wrong. Our marriage feels broken and we're not sure if it's going to work. And so we hit the ground and we pray and say, God, please rescue this. That's good that we're doing that, but how much better could our marriage be if every day we pray that God would protect it? Why wait until it's a mess to fall on our knees and pray about it? Often we relegate prayer to crisis points that could have been prevented if we would have just prayed about them regularly. Why fall on our knees and pray about this huge decision that we have to make in our career when every day we could be getting on our knees and say, Father, my career is your career. Whatever you would have me do, please just make it clear to me. What if we prayed that prayer every day for five years? How much more prepared would our heart be? How much more in tune with Jesus would we be when different opportunities came up? Our kid starts making bad decisions, gets in trouble, whatever the case. And so in desperation, we go to God in prayer, and we should. But are we going to him daily, lifting up that child, asking for wisdom and guidance and grace as we raise them? It made me sad to think about in my own life how, yes, I pray regularly and I try to lift up the church regularly and I try to pray for my family regularly, but what are all the things in my life that I don't pray about until they're a pain point, until it's a big decision or until it's a crisis or until it's a big huge need that I could have been praying for all along. So as we think about prayer this week as a church, let us follow the practices and patterns of Jesus. Do it regularly. Abide in him through prayer. Know that he waits on us in there. Let us not begin things that we have not covered over in prayer. Let us realize that if we feel spiritually famished, if we feel spiritually exhausted, maybe it's because we have not been giving ourselves the fuel of prayer and meeting Jesus there where he waits on us. And let us not, as we close, think optional what God has rendered as essential. Let us not treat prayer as optional when God has told us it is just as essential to your soul as food is to your body. And so, as we go, how much should we pray? Just a little bit more than we are. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we love you so much. And I, for one, am sorry for my patterns of prayer. For sometimes how little I entrust to you or how irregularly I will come to you. God, I'm sorry that there are things in my life that I allow to come to crisis or pain or inflection points. And then and only then do I bring them to you in prayer. God, let us be people of prayer. Let us be people who know your presence well, who are constantly drawn there, who learn how to pray without ceasing. God, for those of us here who may not pray very often or very regularly, let us do that this week and find you in those spaces. Let our souls be revived by seeking your presence in that way. God, make this church, make our grace partners people of prayer. In Jesus' name, amen.