John

My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. As a pastor, it often falls on me to offer counsel and advice to people. Believe it or not, sometimes people will call the church and ask to talk to a pastor or ask to talk to me or even seek me out individually knowing full well who I am, and they will still ask me for advice on things or what to do in certain situations. And for a long time in those situations at my old church, it was a larger church in the Atlanta area, about 2,000 people. If you called that church, you got funneled to me. I was the one that you would talk to. It was a really talentless staff. So that was my role. And for a long time, my advice in those situations would pretty much default to suck it up. Like, get it together. Quit being a sissy. Let's go. Like, you just got to face the music. You got to stand up. You got to stick your chin out, and you got to take it. And I came by that advice honestly, because for a long time, that's what worked for me. Part of my story is that when I was younger, I was bullied pretty badly. For a couple years, elementary school and then in middle school, there was two kids in my neighborhood who just delighted in tormenting me. And I won't get into all the details of it, but one of the things they would do, just to give you a picture of what fifth grade looked like for Nate, is they were in middle school, so they got home before me. They would hide in the bushes at the bus stop and have an industrial strength rubber band, and they had sniffed it. So it was one big long rubber band, and then when I would get off the bus, they would pop me in the ears and in the neck and in the legs until I would cry or run, and then they would call me names. That was like most days. So we started diversion tactics. I got a letter to get off the bus at other bus stops. My mom would come pick me up at school sometimes, but that was a part of my life, and that was a part of my life for a couple of years. And at some point or another, as a kid, I just realized I can't care so much what they think about me. They would invite me over to play and I'd be like, oh good, we're friends now. And then I would get there and they would just make fun of me until I would go home. And it taught me to have a thick skin. It taught me to not let it affect me when other people pick on me. It taught me to be tough. And at some point in my adolescence, I decided I'm tired of them having this kind of control over me. I'm just going to tough it up. I'm just going to suck it up and figure out how to not care what they think. And that's what I did. And so in adulthood, when an issue came up, my thought was, suck it up. Just don't be a baby. That's what I did. Worked for me. Let's go. And that's kind of the mindset I had several years ago when I got one of those phone calls at the church that I was at. Some guy called the church and just said he was in a real tough way, needed to talk to a pastor. So pick up the phone. Hey, you know, one of the pastors here, what's going on? How can I help you? And he was 31 years old, and he had a girlfriend who had a bit of a drug issue, in his words, and she had just broken up with him. Nobody in his family liked him, liked her, but he was crestfallen over this breakup. And he wanted to know from a pastor, if there is a good God in heaven, how could he allow this girl to break my heart in this way? And I thought, are you freaking kidding me? Like, you're 31. She broke up with you. She's a drug addict. This is a good thing, dude. Get another girlfriend. There's a lot of them. Like, I could not muster any sympathy for this dude. In my life, there was a good friend of mine who had just lost her husband, and I'm comparing and contrasting these tragedies, and I'm like, bro, suck it up. Like take a day, you know, have a beer and then get back to it. It doesn't matter. Like I literally, I was nice to him. I wasn't mean. I had the hardest time caring about this guy's issue. Like the girl broke up with you, man, whatever whatever. And so a couple days after that, I had lunch with a counselor. Every now and again, a counselor will reach out to a pastor and invite you to lunch, and they're basically, they're kind of courting your reference. You want to get to know each other, and they know that I kind of funnel people into counseling, and so that's kind of how that goes. And so we went out to lunch, and we were talking, and I said, hey hey man, let me just ask you a question. So I have to counsel sometimes. Let me get a little bit of advice. I got this call the other day. How would you have handled that? And I told him about the guy's issues and my response. And he kind of thought about it a second and he said, I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, well, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that your parents are together and that you never really had to wonder if they were proud of you. And I said, that's true of me. Yeah, I would say that's true. I said, how'd you know that? And he said, it's just, you just kind of get a sense. I can just tell by the way you carry yourself. He said, I'd be willing to bet that that guy you talked to on the phone probably doesn't have a background like you. He probably doesn't have that family structure to lean on like you did. And he probably values the relationship with that girl and what it did for him and the value that it made him feel a lot more than you ever would. So your ability to detach yourself from that and move on is not the same as his. So I would probably handle that with a little bit more empathy. And I thought, whoa, this dude is smart. I'm going to give him all the referrals. How did he figure that out in 20 minutes of talking to me? I was super impressed. And it also dawned on me in that conversation, because I'm obtuse,ations are always a little bit more nuanced than they seem. And that most of the time when we're talking about issues of mental and emotional health, suck it up is really bad advice. It's really careless and thoughtless and obtuse. And since then, I've rethought about the way that I offer counsel. And that really got my wheels turning on mental health in general. It's something that I care about a lot. I care deeply about how the church engages it because I think historically the church has engaged mental health a little bit like I did. Suck it up and pray it away. Let's go. You're not a good enough Christian. If you were a better Christian, you wouldn't be so sad. So let's lean into God and let's quit being a sissy. And I just think historically that's how we've handled it and that's obtuse. That's not helpful. And more and more, it's being pressed into the national conscience. Last year, we had several athletes come out and say that they were struggling with anxiety, that they were struggling with depression. There was a very high-profile rookie in the NBA who had a terrible rookie year, and he confessed that it was because he struggles greatly with anxiety. There was an offensive lineman, a big, huge bear of a man for the Philadelphia Eagles, I believe, who missed a half of football because he was in the locker room at halftime throwing up because of anxiety attacks and could not get himself out on the field. So more and more we become aware of these things. Every time there's a shooting, then mental health and the epidemic gets thrust into the national conscience. And so as we approached this series and we said, I want a better life, and we thought through the four things that we were going to talk about, I just kind of felt like, based on all of those things, my experiences and what's going on in our culture now, that it would be good to take a Sunday and say, hey, you know what? I want a better me. I want to be more healthy. And so I wanted to take a Sunday and talk to those of you who do struggle with some sort of mental or emotional struggle. I wanted to talk to us as a church, as we encounter and engage and love people in our life who are walking through that struggle. And so as I prepared and thought through what I wanted to say and how I wanted to approach it, I actually had a conversation with my therapist. I started seeing a therapist this last summer. And normally when I tell people that I'm in counseling, I immediately tell them why I'm in counseling because I don't want them to think that I'm broken or crazy or that there's something going on. So I want to be very clear, but it's for this really good reason. But as I prepared for this sermon, I thought, I'm going to quit doing that. Because what do I care what you think about how I go to counseling? We need to destigmatize it anyways. So I had a conversation with my therapist. And he's a believer. And he's got a master's in divinity. And so he's very helpful for me. And I said, hey, man, I'm going to be doing a sermon on mental health. What does the church need to know about mental health? What do you wish pastors would say about it? And he said, well, you know, I don't really hear a lot of sermons on mental health, but the ones that I have heard tend to focus on unhealth and what that's like. And I just think that we do a disservice to the church when we don't paint a picture of what health is. So I would invest my time in that. That's interesting. How would you define health? And he defined it essentially this way. He said, a healthy person walks in a sense of security and worth. He said a healthy person, someone who's mentally and emotionally healthy and stable walks in a sense of security and worth. What he meant is, if we're going to be emotionally stable, if we're going to be mentally healthy, then we need to have a sense of security. We need to feel safe. We need to know that everything's going to be okay. If we're walking around in constant fear, a constant uncertainty, or like we've got our eyes covered and we don't know where our next step is going to go, that that's going to cause some mental instability. So we first need to feel secure, but we also need to feel valuable. We need to feel worth. We need to feel like we're enough. We need to feel like we're good enough for other people, that we have some intrinsic value. We need to understand that about ourselves and walk in an actualization and an acknowledgement of that value. So he said, to be healthy, we need to walk in a sense of security and worth. And then he said something that I thought was really interesting. He said that every person gets their boat rocked a little bit. Every person in their life, all of you, at some point or another, have had times where you felt unsafe and had times where you felt unworthy. We've all had our security compromised. We've all had the rug pulled out from under us. We've all felt like, no, this time it's not gonna be okay. And I think more predominantly in the American culture, we've all had times where we don't feel worthy. Some of us feel that pervasively right now. For some of us, the story of our life is this low simmering sense of unworthiness and lack of value and like we're not good enough. And all we've ever done is claw to show ourselves and the people around us that we are actually good enough. Everybody struggles at times to feel secure and to feel worthy. And what he said is, when that happens, healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to get themselves back on track. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to try to grope for that security and to try to grope for that value. We've seen these unhealthy coping mechanisms, right? Someone feels unsafe, their world feels crazy, and so they become hyper-controlling of their environment all the time. They become, their house has to be clean, and their house doesn't have to be clean because they like a clean house. Their house has to be clean because they've got to exert control over something. And that's not necessarily bad, but it can become unhealthy. Where we see this most is when people exhibit unhealthy coping mechanisms as we lurch for value. This is the girl that far too easily gives herself over to whatever guy will pay attention to her. Because from that guy, she is getting her sense of worth, and that's how she's coping and lurching for that. This is the grown man that still tells you how good of an athlete he was in high school. Because all he's saying is, tell me I'm valuable. Tell me I'm worthy. This is the guy that can't help but brag about whatever it was he did. It's not because he's dumb. It's because he's incredibly insecure and he's groping for value and he doesn't feel it. So he's just looking at you going, can you just tell me I'm awesome? Can you do that, please? He's a 15-year-old kid going, please tell me I'm great. We all do it. As we grow up, we find more nuanced ways to grope for this value, but we do, and it becomes unhealthy. This is where addictions start and get carried on, right? We feel unvaluable. We feel unworthy, we feel unsafe, and so we drink, we medicate, or we find a hobby to numb it, or we refuse to sit in silence. In my research, I saw a great quote from Blaise Pascal that said, all of man's problems can be summed up in his inability to sit in a quiet room alone. Some of us hate the silence. Some of us can't go more than 10 seconds without pulling out our phone to distract ourselves from the things that we don't want to think about. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to bring back and restore that sense of security and worth. And when we think about healthy coping mechanisms, I think this is a good place to insert the spiritual into the conversation as we think about what are some healthy coping mechanisms with a lack of stability or a lack of value that can bring me back to a place of true health. And as I had this conversation with my therapist, I suggested these two things. I said, I think God provides for us these senses in these two ways. And he said, yeah, that's not everything. And I just want to say very clearly, I'm not covering everything that we do and how we handle mental health this morning, but this is a very good start, I think. As we think about healthy coping mechanisms and what it means to be truly healthy, I want to suggest these two things to you, that there's really two pillars of true health. There's security in God's sovereignty and worthiness in God's love. If we want to be healthy people, truly healthy the way that we were designed, we have to walk in a sense of security anchored in God's sovereignty and a sense of worthiness brought about by God's deep and compassionate love for us. That's what true health is. And so a healthy coping mechanism is to acknowledge that God is sovereign, to acknowledge that God is in control, to acknowledge that nothing happens outside of his purview and outside of his will and feel the relief of that. A good coping mechanism is to look around at the people in your life that God has placed in your life who love you and who value you and who are telling you that you are enough and to allow that to be the truth that you hear and not the truth from the detractors. I actually think that these two pillars are some of the greatest things that Christianity has to offer. I think we undervalue the sovereignty of God. One of my favorite verses, group of verses, is Philippians 4, 6, and 7. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, through prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your requests to God, and the God of peace who transcends all understanding will, listen, guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Are you anxious? Are the things keeping you up at night? Does worry characterize you? Pray those things to God. Release them to God. And he says that his peace that passes all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. And what that means is God is saying, I've got it. I'm in control. I'm God. It's going to be okay. Rest easy in my sovereignty. He does this again in Romans 8, where it says, we know that for those who love him and are called according to his purpose, that all things work together for the good of those who love him. Everything works together for the good of those who love him are called according to his purpose. Romans 8.28 tells us everything's going to work out. Even if it doesn't work out now, it will work out eventually. It's a beautiful promise from God. I saw a clip of a pastor doing the funeral for his mother that he lost far too early. And he said some amazing things. He said, you know, with God, all of our prayers are answered. I was praying so much for my mom to live, and then she died. He said it disillusioned him for a little bit. But what he realized was he was thinking about it wrong. And it dawned on him that in God, all his prayers are answered because she knew Jesus. So as he prayed for his mom to live, the truth of it is either she's going to live or she was gonna live. She was gonna be okay or she was gonna be okay. She was gonna be with family or she was gonna go be with family. God is good or God is good. This is the sovereignty that he offers us. And one of my favorite passages that I mentioned often, Revelation 21, paints this beautiful picture where it says the end of days that we will be with God and he will be with his people and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. There is a sovereignty and a peace that God promises throughout scripture. Scripture is replete with these promises. And if we want to be healthy and cling onto a sense of stability and know that everything is okay, even when we don't see how it's going to be okay, then we cling to the sovereignty of God that is laced throughout Scripture, and we know that it's going to be okay, even if it doesn't make sense to me. And I believe that a healthy person reminds themselves of the sovereignty of God and rests easy in that and not in their own control. The next thing we do is we rest in God's love. We know the Bible tells us God loves us. We know John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life. God tells us that not even a sparrow falls to the ground without his knowledge, so how much more does he care about you that the numbers of hairs on your head are numbered? He knows you that well and that intimately. He tells us that if your earthly father knows how to give you a good gift, how much better are my gifts? He tells us that we know that we are loved because while we were still sinners, he died for us. He tells us that we are able to love him because he first loved us. From God, if you listen, is a constant, pervasive, never fatiguing voice that says, you are enough. I love you. You do not have to perform for me. You don't have to be good for me. You don't have to sell for me. You don't have to execute for me. You don't have to impress me. I love you as much as I'm ever going to love you. And to be healthy is to walk in an acknowledgement of that love and not need the accolades of others and not be so desperate for the approval of this group because I'm walking with the approval of my God. And if you give me it too, that's great, but I don't need it because God gives it to me. That's what health looks like. Have you ever met somebody who is so comfortable in their own skin that you just marvel at it? To me, that's a person who walks knowing that God loves me and I'm good. That's what health is. So if we want to be a healthy person, we need to quiet the voices that are telling us we're not enough and listen to the pervasive and persistent voice of God that tells us that we are. As we think about ourselves pursuing mental and emotional health, I think the best, most practical way to do that is to pursue health. We need to identify poor coping mechanisms in our life and pursue healthy ones. If we're going to be mentally healthy, if we're in a state this morning where we feel given towards depression, if we feel given towards anxiety, if we feel given towards just unhealth, I think a good exercise is to identify the unhealthy coping mechanisms that exist in our life. And listen, we all have them. One of the things I'm more certain of than ever, especially in being in counseling, is that we are all a bundle and an alchemy of insecurities and coping mechanisms to present ourselves as enough, all of us. So the best thing we can do is try to identify where these coping mechanisms are and pursue them and pursue healthy ones. But I don't just want to talk about us, how we pursue health. I think one of the big questions the church faces and some of us in our life faces, if I have people in my life who are not healthy, how do I love them towards health? What can we do to love other people towards emotional and mental health? I think two things I would suggest to you this morning. The first would be to offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. To offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. Hebrews tells us that Christ took on flesh, that he bore our infirmities, that he was tempted in the ways that we are tempted, so that he understood our plight, so that when we pray to our Savior, we're not praying to someone who is altogether unfamiliar with the human condition. We're praying to someone who is empathetic with us and therefore compassionate towards us. Do you realize that empathy is the birthplace of compassion? That empathy begats compassion. That the thing that happened with me and that guy that called the church that day, I had zero empathy for him. Therefore, I had zero compassion. It made no sense to me how he was that broken up about that. I could not put myself in his shoes of caring that much that I would doubt the existence of God because a girl dumped me. And so I had no compassion for him. But when I had that conversation with the counselor, and I realized the nuances of what was going on in the conversation that I had with that guy, the thought occurred to me, you know what? If I didn't grow up the way that I grew up in the house that I grew up in, it's entirely possible that I would handle that situation just like he does. And that I'm not tough. I didn't just learn to suck it up. I'm just the benefit of a good environment with good coping mechanisms. And the truth of it is, if you think about me as a little kid, I said I learned to suck it up early. No, I didn't. No, I didn't. I didn't decide as a 12-year-old to get tough. No one gets tough at 12. I was in an environment where I was loved by family and by people at church. And that reminded me of my worthiness. My parents breathed scripture into me and that reminded me of God's sovereignty. And I begun to cling to those things. And I wouldn't have articulated it like this at the time, but all that happened is I had to simply develop healthy coping mechanisms for feeling unsafe and unworthy. And the guy that I was talking to on the phone that day had never had the opportunity to develop those. So the first thing we do with people who are experiencing unhealth is we offer empathy. And we acknowledge and admit that even if we don't understand, even if we've never felt that way before, if you change the alchemy of my life and you make the circumstances the same and you run me through the ringer that they went through, there's a very good chance I would come out the other side feeling and thinking and acting the same way that they do. So don't think that we're for a second better than them or more stable than them or tougher than them or stronger than them. We have a different background than they do. And when we can acknowledge that we would be the same person they are, that produces in us empathy. And out of that empathy comes compassion, where we realize some of the worst possible advice would be to suck it up or to pray it away, that we need to first be empathetic with them and understand. And empathy is also the acknowledgement that sometimes when people are dealing with a mental health issue, it's a chemical imbalance. They are sick. Looking at someone who is depressed and telling them to suck it up is like looking at someone with the flu and telling them to run a couple miles. It's useless advice. All it does is make you look dumb and then feel bad. We've got to offer empathy, which produces in us a Christ-like compassion. To help us offer empathy, I wanted to share with you some statistics that I found in the research that I've been doing. These are from the National Mental Health Institute, Institute of Mental Health. What I learned is that a quarter or 20% of U.S. citizens exhibit some symptoms of mental illness. Now, that's a wide brush. That's mild depression all the way to extreme schizophrenia, okay? But 20%, one in five of you, look down the row within two people and one of them is crazy, right? That's a lot. It affects a lot of us. Now, here's what I think is really interesting. It says that there's 22% of women and 15% of men deal with mental health issues. Now, here's what that doesn't mean, that men have it together more than women do. What it means is they're more honest than us and you're a stubborn jerk. That's what that means. You just can't admit that you're struggling. You just fold your arms and pretend like everything's okay. And it only gets worse because 26% of millennials of 18 to 25 say that they experienced some sort of mental illness or exhibit signs of that. Only 14% of ages 50 and older. Now listen, I don't think for a second that you people who are 50 and older in this room have just have life so figured out and all your coping skills so nailed that you're the healthiest bunch in the room. Listen, if you're a dude over 50 and you're like, I don't struggle with depression. Yes, you do. You're just stubborn. Listen, all of us at some point have experienced a season of melancholy. We all have. If you haven't, you're a psychopath or you're not paying attention. All of us experience anxiety in excessive ways. Everybody in this room has had a suicidal thought. Everybody. The difference with healthy and unhealthy is how we cope with those things. I also thought it was really interesting that 50% of adolescents show sign of a mental disorder. And if we understand that health is to walk in a sense of stability and worth, is it any wonder that half of our high school students have no idea how to cling on to stability and worth? We are all of us broken. We are all of us at times weak and in need of help. There is none of us in here who is singularly and individually strong and healthy. And we need to acknowledge that as we seek to offer empathy to others. The next thing we can do to love people towards health is to celebrate courageous choices. We need to start celebrating courageous choices. When somebody makes a decision to get help, when somebody makes a decision to be vulnerable and confess, we need to praise those things. We need to celebrate those things. We don't need to deride those things. I've talked a lot about counseling in this sermon. One of the things that breaks my heart is that counseling gets such a stigma that people, when you start talking about going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that we automatically think, man, only broken people do that. What's going on in your life? What can you not get together yourself? Why do you need help that you need to go talk to a professional to do that? Are you crazy? What's wrong with you? What have you failed at? How did you ruin your marriage? When did you get fired? We just assume that when people are going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that there's something broken in them. But here's the thing, there's something broken in all of us, so we need to stop it. Sometimes, most of the time, the unhealthy coping mechanisms that we have are so deeply embedded and ingrained in us that we can't see them. We don't know how to find them ourselves. And we need a trained professional to talk with us and help us see those and then help us see a way through them. We need trained professionals who are more than pastors. I'm very quick to go, listen, I wanna try to help you as best I can. I'm gonna pray for you. You need to talk to a therapist, not because you're crazy, but because they're good at it. The other thing I've learned is when you talk to somebody who will say, I should really go speak to a counselor about this. A lot of times they won't. And at first they won't because it's a pride thing. I don't want to do that. I don't want people to see me parking at that office. I don't want people to think that there's something wrong with me. I don't want people to think that I can't handle it or that I'm weak somehow. I don't want all the stuff that goes with seeing a counselor. So I'm not gonna go do that. And it seems like pride. But when you start to peel back the layers, what you find is that it's really fear. I'm convinced that the reason, if you're thinking about seeing a counselor, getting help, working through some unhealth in your life, I'm convinced that one of the big reasons we don't do that is because we know good and well what we're going to have to walk through when we get there. We don't want to have to look at ourselves in the mirror. It is easier to cope. It is easier to demur. It is easier to distract than it is to confront. And so we keep walking away from our unhealthy selves instead of turning and allowing someone to hold up a mirror and show us and work through it and walk through it and emerge on the other side more healthy. It's often fear that keeps us from getting help, not pride. And so I want you to know this morning that I think it takes bravery to go get help. And I actually think, and I would love for our church to start thinking about it this way, that counseling is not for the broken. It's for the brave. Counseling is not for broken people. It's for brave people. If it were for broken people, then we'd all be in it because we're all broken. But at some point or another, you have to take a step and make a decision that I want some help. I want to be healthy. I want somebody else's voice in this conversation helping me identify the unhealthy pockets in my life to restoring me to my God-given sense of security and value and love. And since I can't find my way out of this mess myself, I want to get someone else to speak into it for me. And that takes bravery and courage. The counseling is not the broken. It's for the brave. My prayer is that 2020 will be the healthiest year for you in a long, long time. For those of you who are brave enough to pursue health, I think it begins with acknowledging and identifying the unhealthy ways we bring ourselves a sense of security and worth. And doing the work to replace that coping mechanism with one that pushes us towards God's sovereignty and pushes us towards God's love. If we have people in our lives this year that we're trying to love towards mental health, we need to do it with empathy and compassion. And we need to, as a church and as a Christian subculture, destigmatize what it is to get help and admit that we all need it. And it's not for the broken, it's for the brave. I hope that some of you will make courageous choices, even this week. If you do want to talk to a counselor, email me and I'll work to find you a good one. I'm not going to send you to mine, but somebody. If there's someone in your life who is struggling, please, please offer them empathy. Please offer them compassion. Please offer them understanding. Try the best you can to put yourself in their shoes and love them from that perspective. And let's make this year a healthy year. Let's pray. Father, we do love you. We thank you so much for loving us. God, if there is anybody here who feels unworthy, who feels unvaluable, who feels unloved, God, may they just feel a pervasive sense of your love and your compassion wrapping around them today. Help them to hear the voices in their life that speak for you and tell them that they are enough. God, if we feel unsafe or insecure, I pray that you would restore that sense of security with your sovereignty. God, for those here who are struggling, who are sad, or who are anxious, or dealing with a multitude of other things, help them feel your peace today. Help them feel your hope today. Remind them that that hope, your word says, will not be put to shame. God, I pray that we would be healthy, that we would walk in a sense of security in you, of value in you, and that that would enable us to love other people well on your behalf. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. As a pastor, it often falls on me to offer counsel and advice to people. Believe it or not, sometimes people will call the church and ask to talk to a pastor or ask to talk to me or even seek me out individually knowing full well who I am, and they will still ask me for advice on things or what to do in certain situations. And for a long time in those situations at my old church, it was a larger church in the Atlanta area, about 2,000 people. If you called that church, you got funneled to me. I was the one that you would talk to. It was a really talentless staff. So that was my role. And for a long time, my advice in those situations would pretty much default to suck it up. Like, get it together. Quit being a sissy. Let's go. Like, you just got to face the music. You got to stand up. You got to stick your chin out, and you got to take it. And I came by that advice honestly, because for a long time, that's what worked for me. Part of my story is that when I was younger, I was bullied pretty badly. For a couple years, elementary school and then in middle school, there was two kids in my neighborhood who just delighted in tormenting me. And I won't get into all the details of it, but one of the things they would do, just to give you a picture of what fifth grade looked like for Nate, is they were in middle school, so they got home before me. They would hide in the bushes at the bus stop and have an industrial strength rubber band, and they had sniffed it. So it was one big long rubber band, and then when I would get off the bus, they would pop me in the ears and in the neck and in the legs until I would cry or run, and then they would call me names. That was like most days. So we started diversion tactics. I got a letter to get off the bus at other bus stops. My mom would come pick me up at school sometimes, but that was a part of my life, and that was a part of my life for a couple of years. And at some point or another, as a kid, I just realized I can't care so much what they think about me. They would invite me over to play and I'd be like, oh good, we're friends now. And then I would get there and they would just make fun of me until I would go home. And it taught me to have a thick skin. It taught me to not let it affect me when other people pick on me. It taught me to be tough. And at some point in my adolescence, I decided I'm tired of them having this kind of control over me. I'm just going to tough it up. I'm just going to suck it up and figure out how to not care what they think. And that's what I did. And so in adulthood, when an issue came up, my thought was, suck it up. Just don't be a baby. That's what I did. Worked for me. Let's go. And that's kind of the mindset I had several years ago when I got one of those phone calls at the church that I was at. Some guy called the church and just said he was in a real tough way, needed to talk to a pastor. So pick up the phone. Hey, you know, one of the pastors here, what's going on? How can I help you? And he was 31 years old, and he had a girlfriend who had a bit of a drug issue, in his words, and she had just broken up with him. Nobody in his family liked him, liked her, but he was crestfallen over this breakup. And he wanted to know from a pastor, if there is a good God in heaven, how could he allow this girl to break my heart in this way? And I thought, are you freaking kidding me? Like, you're 31. She broke up with you. She's a drug addict. This is a good thing, dude. Get another girlfriend. There's a lot of them. Like, I could not muster any sympathy for this dude. In my life, there was a good friend of mine who had just lost her husband, and I'm comparing and contrasting these tragedies, and I'm like, bro, suck it up. Like take a day, you know, have a beer and then get back to it. It doesn't matter. Like I literally, I was nice to him. I wasn't mean. I had the hardest time caring about this guy's issue. Like the girl broke up with you, man, whatever whatever. And so a couple days after that, I had lunch with a counselor. Every now and again, a counselor will reach out to a pastor and invite you to lunch, and they're basically, they're kind of courting your reference. You want to get to know each other, and they know that I kind of funnel people into counseling, and so that's kind of how that goes. And so we went out to lunch, and we were talking, and I said, hey hey man, let me just ask you a question. So I have to counsel sometimes. Let me get a little bit of advice. I got this call the other day. How would you have handled that? And I told him about the guy's issues and my response. And he kind of thought about it a second and he said, I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, well, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that your parents are together and that you never really had to wonder if they were proud of you. And I said, that's true of me. Yeah, I would say that's true. I said, how'd you know that? And he said, it's just, you just kind of get a sense. I can just tell by the way you carry yourself. He said, I'd be willing to bet that that guy you talked to on the phone probably doesn't have a background like you. He probably doesn't have that family structure to lean on like you did. And he probably values the relationship with that girl and what it did for him and the value that it made him feel a lot more than you ever would. So your ability to detach yourself from that and move on is not the same as his. So I would probably handle that with a little bit more empathy. And I thought, whoa, this dude is smart. I'm going to give him all the referrals. How did he figure that out in 20 minutes of talking to me? I was super impressed. And it also dawned on me in that conversation, because I'm obtuse,ations are always a little bit more nuanced than they seem. And that most of the time when we're talking about issues of mental and emotional health, suck it up is really bad advice. It's really careless and thoughtless and obtuse. And since then, I've rethought about the way that I offer counsel. And that really got my wheels turning on mental health in general. It's something that I care about a lot. I care deeply about how the church engages it because I think historically the church has engaged mental health a little bit like I did. Suck it up and pray it away. Let's go. You're not a good enough Christian. If you were a better Christian, you wouldn't be so sad. So let's lean into God and let's quit being a sissy. And I just think historically that's how we've handled it and that's obtuse. That's not helpful. And more and more, it's being pressed into the national conscience. Last year, we had several athletes come out and say that they were struggling with anxiety, that they were struggling with depression. There was a very high-profile rookie in the NBA who had a terrible rookie year, and he confessed that it was because he struggles greatly with anxiety. There was an offensive lineman, a big, huge bear of a man for the Philadelphia Eagles, I believe, who missed a half of football because he was in the locker room at halftime throwing up because of anxiety attacks and could not get himself out on the field. So more and more we become aware of these things. Every time there's a shooting, then mental health and the epidemic gets thrust into the national conscience. And so as we approached this series and we said, I want a better life, and we thought through the four things that we were going to talk about, I just kind of felt like, based on all of those things, my experiences and what's going on in our culture now, that it would be good to take a Sunday and say, hey, you know what? I want a better me. I want to be more healthy. And so I wanted to take a Sunday and talk to those of you who do struggle with some sort of mental or emotional struggle. I wanted to talk to us as a church, as we encounter and engage and love people in our life who are walking through that struggle. And so as I prepared and thought through what I wanted to say and how I wanted to approach it, I actually had a conversation with my therapist. I started seeing a therapist this last summer. And normally when I tell people that I'm in counseling, I immediately tell them why I'm in counseling because I don't want them to think that I'm broken or crazy or that there's something going on. So I want to be very clear, but it's for this really good reason. But as I prepared for this sermon, I thought, I'm going to quit doing that. Because what do I care what you think about how I go to counseling? We need to destigmatize it anyways. So I had a conversation with my therapist. And he's a believer. And he's got a master's in divinity. And so he's very helpful for me. And I said, hey, man, I'm going to be doing a sermon on mental health. What does the church need to know about mental health? What do you wish pastors would say about it? And he said, well, you know, I don't really hear a lot of sermons on mental health, but the ones that I have heard tend to focus on unhealth and what that's like. And I just think that we do a disservice to the church when we don't paint a picture of what health is. So I would invest my time in that. That's interesting. How would you define health? And he defined it essentially this way. He said, a healthy person walks in a sense of security and worth. He said a healthy person, someone who's mentally and emotionally healthy and stable walks in a sense of security and worth. What he meant is, if we're going to be emotionally stable, if we're going to be mentally healthy, then we need to have a sense of security. We need to feel safe. We need to know that everything's going to be okay. If we're walking around in constant fear, a constant uncertainty, or like we've got our eyes covered and we don't know where our next step is going to go, that that's going to cause some mental instability. So we first need to feel secure, but we also need to feel valuable. We need to feel worth. We need to feel like we're enough. We need to feel like we're good enough for other people, that we have some intrinsic value. We need to understand that about ourselves and walk in an actualization and an acknowledgement of that value. So he said, to be healthy, we need to walk in a sense of security and worth. And then he said something that I thought was really interesting. He said that every person gets their boat rocked a little bit. Every person in their life, all of you, at some point or another, have had times where you felt unsafe and had times where you felt unworthy. We've all had our security compromised. We've all had the rug pulled out from under us. We've all felt like, no, this time it's not gonna be okay. And I think more predominantly in the American culture, we've all had times where we don't feel worthy. Some of us feel that pervasively right now. For some of us, the story of our life is this low simmering sense of unworthiness and lack of value and like we're not good enough. And all we've ever done is claw to show ourselves and the people around us that we are actually good enough. Everybody struggles at times to feel secure and to feel worthy. And what he said is, when that happens, healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to get themselves back on track. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to try to grope for that security and to try to grope for that value. We've seen these unhealthy coping mechanisms, right? Someone feels unsafe, their world feels crazy, and so they become hyper-controlling of their environment all the time. They become, their house has to be clean, and their house doesn't have to be clean because they like a clean house. Their house has to be clean because they've got to exert control over something. And that's not necessarily bad, but it can become unhealthy. Where we see this most is when people exhibit unhealthy coping mechanisms as we lurch for value. This is the girl that far too easily gives herself over to whatever guy will pay attention to her. Because from that guy, she is getting her sense of worth, and that's how she's coping and lurching for that. This is the grown man that still tells you how good of an athlete he was in high school. Because all he's saying is, tell me I'm valuable. Tell me I'm worthy. This is the guy that can't help but brag about whatever it was he did. It's not because he's dumb. It's because he's incredibly insecure and he's groping for value and he doesn't feel it. So he's just looking at you going, can you just tell me I'm awesome? Can you do that, please? He's a 15-year-old kid going, please tell me I'm great. We all do it. As we grow up, we find more nuanced ways to grope for this value, but we do, and it becomes unhealthy. This is where addictions start and get carried on, right? We feel unvaluable. We feel unworthy, we feel unsafe, and so we drink, we medicate, or we find a hobby to numb it, or we refuse to sit in silence. In my research, I saw a great quote from Blaise Pascal that said, all of man's problems can be summed up in his inability to sit in a quiet room alone. Some of us hate the silence. Some of us can't go more than 10 seconds without pulling out our phone to distract ourselves from the things that we don't want to think about. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to bring back and restore that sense of security and worth. And when we think about healthy coping mechanisms, I think this is a good place to insert the spiritual into the conversation as we think about what are some healthy coping mechanisms with a lack of stability or a lack of value that can bring me back to a place of true health. And as I had this conversation with my therapist, I suggested these two things. I said, I think God provides for us these senses in these two ways. And he said, yeah, that's not everything. And I just want to say very clearly, I'm not covering everything that we do and how we handle mental health this morning, but this is a very good start, I think. As we think about healthy coping mechanisms and what it means to be truly healthy, I want to suggest these two things to you, that there's really two pillars of true health. There's security in God's sovereignty and worthiness in God's love. If we want to be healthy people, truly healthy the way that we were designed, we have to walk in a sense of security anchored in God's sovereignty and a sense of worthiness brought about by God's deep and compassionate love for us. That's what true health is. And so a healthy coping mechanism is to acknowledge that God is sovereign, to acknowledge that God is in control, to acknowledge that nothing happens outside of his purview and outside of his will and feel the relief of that. A good coping mechanism is to look around at the people in your life that God has placed in your life who love you and who value you and who are telling you that you are enough and to allow that to be the truth that you hear and not the truth from the detractors. I actually think that these two pillars are some of the greatest things that Christianity has to offer. I think we undervalue the sovereignty of God. One of my favorite verses, group of verses, is Philippians 4, 6, and 7. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, through prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your requests to God, and the God of peace who transcends all understanding will, listen, guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Are you anxious? Are the things keeping you up at night? Does worry characterize you? Pray those things to God. Release them to God. And he says that his peace that passes all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. And what that means is God is saying, I've got it. I'm in control. I'm God. It's going to be okay. Rest easy in my sovereignty. He does this again in Romans 8, where it says, we know that for those who love him and are called according to his purpose, that all things work together for the good of those who love him. Everything works together for the good of those who love him are called according to his purpose. Romans 8.28 tells us everything's going to work out. Even if it doesn't work out now, it will work out eventually. It's a beautiful promise from God. I saw a clip of a pastor doing the funeral for his mother that he lost far too early. And he said some amazing things. He said, you know, with God, all of our prayers are answered. I was praying so much for my mom to live, and then she died. He said it disillusioned him for a little bit. But what he realized was he was thinking about it wrong. And it dawned on him that in God, all his prayers are answered because she knew Jesus. So as he prayed for his mom to live, the truth of it is either she's going to live or she was gonna live. She was gonna be okay or she was gonna be okay. She was gonna be with family or she was gonna go be with family. God is good or God is good. This is the sovereignty that he offers us. And one of my favorite passages that I mentioned often, Revelation 21, paints this beautiful picture where it says the end of days that we will be with God and he will be with his people and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. There is a sovereignty and a peace that God promises throughout scripture. Scripture is replete with these promises. And if we want to be healthy and cling onto a sense of stability and know that everything is okay, even when we don't see how it's going to be okay, then we cling to the sovereignty of God that is laced throughout Scripture, and we know that it's going to be okay, even if it doesn't make sense to me. And I believe that a healthy person reminds themselves of the sovereignty of God and rests easy in that and not in their own control. The next thing we do is we rest in God's love. We know the Bible tells us God loves us. We know John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life. God tells us that not even a sparrow falls to the ground without his knowledge, so how much more does he care about you that the numbers of hairs on your head are numbered? He knows you that well and that intimately. He tells us that if your earthly father knows how to give you a good gift, how much better are my gifts? He tells us that we know that we are loved because while we were still sinners, he died for us. He tells us that we are able to love him because he first loved us. From God, if you listen, is a constant, pervasive, never fatiguing voice that says, you are enough. I love you. You do not have to perform for me. You don't have to be good for me. You don't have to sell for me. You don't have to execute for me. You don't have to impress me. I love you as much as I'm ever going to love you. And to be healthy is to walk in an acknowledgement of that love and not need the accolades of others and not be so desperate for the approval of this group because I'm walking with the approval of my God. And if you give me it too, that's great, but I don't need it because God gives it to me. That's what health looks like. Have you ever met somebody who is so comfortable in their own skin that you just marvel at it? To me, that's a person who walks knowing that God loves me and I'm good. That's what health is. So if we want to be a healthy person, we need to quiet the voices that are telling us we're not enough and listen to the pervasive and persistent voice of God that tells us that we are. As we think about ourselves pursuing mental and emotional health, I think the best, most practical way to do that is to pursue health. We need to identify poor coping mechanisms in our life and pursue healthy ones. If we're going to be mentally healthy, if we're in a state this morning where we feel given towards depression, if we feel given towards anxiety, if we feel given towards just unhealth, I think a good exercise is to identify the unhealthy coping mechanisms that exist in our life. And listen, we all have them. One of the things I'm more certain of than ever, especially in being in counseling, is that we are all a bundle and an alchemy of insecurities and coping mechanisms to present ourselves as enough, all of us. So the best thing we can do is try to identify where these coping mechanisms are and pursue them and pursue healthy ones. But I don't just want to talk about us, how we pursue health. I think one of the big questions the church faces and some of us in our life faces, if I have people in my life who are not healthy, how do I love them towards health? What can we do to love other people towards emotional and mental health? I think two things I would suggest to you this morning. The first would be to offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. To offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. Hebrews tells us that Christ took on flesh, that he bore our infirmities, that he was tempted in the ways that we are tempted, so that he understood our plight, so that when we pray to our Savior, we're not praying to someone who is altogether unfamiliar with the human condition. We're praying to someone who is empathetic with us and therefore compassionate towards us. Do you realize that empathy is the birthplace of compassion? That empathy begats compassion. That the thing that happened with me and that guy that called the church that day, I had zero empathy for him. Therefore, I had zero compassion. It made no sense to me how he was that broken up about that. I could not put myself in his shoes of caring that much that I would doubt the existence of God because a girl dumped me. And so I had no compassion for him. But when I had that conversation with the counselor, and I realized the nuances of what was going on in the conversation that I had with that guy, the thought occurred to me, you know what? If I didn't grow up the way that I grew up in the house that I grew up in, it's entirely possible that I would handle that situation just like he does. And that I'm not tough. I didn't just learn to suck it up. I'm just the benefit of a good environment with good coping mechanisms. And the truth of it is, if you think about me as a little kid, I said I learned to suck it up early. No, I didn't. No, I didn't. I didn't decide as a 12-year-old to get tough. No one gets tough at 12. I was in an environment where I was loved by family and by people at church. And that reminded me of my worthiness. My parents breathed scripture into me and that reminded me of God's sovereignty. And I begun to cling to those things. And I wouldn't have articulated it like this at the time, but all that happened is I had to simply develop healthy coping mechanisms for feeling unsafe and unworthy. And the guy that I was talking to on the phone that day had never had the opportunity to develop those. So the first thing we do with people who are experiencing unhealth is we offer empathy. And we acknowledge and admit that even if we don't understand, even if we've never felt that way before, if you change the alchemy of my life and you make the circumstances the same and you run me through the ringer that they went through, there's a very good chance I would come out the other side feeling and thinking and acting the same way that they do. So don't think that we're for a second better than them or more stable than them or tougher than them or stronger than them. We have a different background than they do. And when we can acknowledge that we would be the same person they are, that produces in us empathy. And out of that empathy comes compassion, where we realize some of the worst possible advice would be to suck it up or to pray it away, that we need to first be empathetic with them and understand. And empathy is also the acknowledgement that sometimes when people are dealing with a mental health issue, it's a chemical imbalance. They are sick. Looking at someone who is depressed and telling them to suck it up is like looking at someone with the flu and telling them to run a couple miles. It's useless advice. All it does is make you look dumb and then feel bad. We've got to offer empathy, which produces in us a Christ-like compassion. To help us offer empathy, I wanted to share with you some statistics that I found in the research that I've been doing. These are from the National Mental Health Institute, Institute of Mental Health. What I learned is that a quarter or 20% of U.S. citizens exhibit some symptoms of mental illness. Now, that's a wide brush. That's mild depression all the way to extreme schizophrenia, okay? But 20%, one in five of you, look down the row within two people and one of them is crazy, right? That's a lot. It affects a lot of us. Now, here's what I think is really interesting. It says that there's 22% of women and 15% of men deal with mental health issues. Now, here's what that doesn't mean, that men have it together more than women do. What it means is they're more honest than us and you're a stubborn jerk. That's what that means. You just can't admit that you're struggling. You just fold your arms and pretend like everything's okay. And it only gets worse because 26% of millennials of 18 to 25 say that they experienced some sort of mental illness or exhibit signs of that. Only 14% of ages 50 and older. Now listen, I don't think for a second that you people who are 50 and older in this room have just have life so figured out and all your coping skills so nailed that you're the healthiest bunch in the room. Listen, if you're a dude over 50 and you're like, I don't struggle with depression. Yes, you do. You're just stubborn. Listen, all of us at some point have experienced a season of melancholy. We all have. If you haven't, you're a psychopath or you're not paying attention. All of us experience anxiety in excessive ways. Everybody in this room has had a suicidal thought. Everybody. The difference with healthy and unhealthy is how we cope with those things. I also thought it was really interesting that 50% of adolescents show sign of a mental disorder. And if we understand that health is to walk in a sense of stability and worth, is it any wonder that half of our high school students have no idea how to cling on to stability and worth? We are all of us broken. We are all of us at times weak and in need of help. There is none of us in here who is singularly and individually strong and healthy. And we need to acknowledge that as we seek to offer empathy to others. The next thing we can do to love people towards health is to celebrate courageous choices. We need to start celebrating courageous choices. When somebody makes a decision to get help, when somebody makes a decision to be vulnerable and confess, we need to praise those things. We need to celebrate those things. We don't need to deride those things. I've talked a lot about counseling in this sermon. One of the things that breaks my heart is that counseling gets such a stigma that people, when you start talking about going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that we automatically think, man, only broken people do that. What's going on in your life? What can you not get together yourself? Why do you need help that you need to go talk to a professional to do that? Are you crazy? What's wrong with you? What have you failed at? How did you ruin your marriage? When did you get fired? We just assume that when people are going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that there's something broken in them. But here's the thing, there's something broken in all of us, so we need to stop it. Sometimes, most of the time, the unhealthy coping mechanisms that we have are so deeply embedded and ingrained in us that we can't see them. We don't know how to find them ourselves. And we need a trained professional to talk with us and help us see those and then help us see a way through them. We need trained professionals who are more than pastors. I'm very quick to go, listen, I wanna try to help you as best I can. I'm gonna pray for you. You need to talk to a therapist, not because you're crazy, but because they're good at it. The other thing I've learned is when you talk to somebody who will say, I should really go speak to a counselor about this. A lot of times they won't. And at first they won't because it's a pride thing. I don't want to do that. I don't want people to see me parking at that office. I don't want people to think that there's something wrong with me. I don't want people to think that I can't handle it or that I'm weak somehow. I don't want all the stuff that goes with seeing a counselor. So I'm not gonna go do that. And it seems like pride. But when you start to peel back the layers, what you find is that it's really fear. I'm convinced that the reason, if you're thinking about seeing a counselor, getting help, working through some unhealth in your life, I'm convinced that one of the big reasons we don't do that is because we know good and well what we're going to have to walk through when we get there. We don't want to have to look at ourselves in the mirror. It is easier to cope. It is easier to demur. It is easier to distract than it is to confront. And so we keep walking away from our unhealthy selves instead of turning and allowing someone to hold up a mirror and show us and work through it and walk through it and emerge on the other side more healthy. It's often fear that keeps us from getting help, not pride. And so I want you to know this morning that I think it takes bravery to go get help. And I actually think, and I would love for our church to start thinking about it this way, that counseling is not for the broken. It's for the brave. Counseling is not for broken people. It's for brave people. If it were for broken people, then we'd all be in it because we're all broken. But at some point or another, you have to take a step and make a decision that I want some help. I want to be healthy. I want somebody else's voice in this conversation helping me identify the unhealthy pockets in my life to restoring me to my God-given sense of security and value and love. And since I can't find my way out of this mess myself, I want to get someone else to speak into it for me. And that takes bravery and courage. The counseling is not the broken. It's for the brave. My prayer is that 2020 will be the healthiest year for you in a long, long time. For those of you who are brave enough to pursue health, I think it begins with acknowledging and identifying the unhealthy ways we bring ourselves a sense of security and worth. And doing the work to replace that coping mechanism with one that pushes us towards God's sovereignty and pushes us towards God's love. If we have people in our lives this year that we're trying to love towards mental health, we need to do it with empathy and compassion. And we need to, as a church and as a Christian subculture, destigmatize what it is to get help and admit that we all need it. And it's not for the broken, it's for the brave. I hope that some of you will make courageous choices, even this week. If you do want to talk to a counselor, email me and I'll work to find you a good one. I'm not going to send you to mine, but somebody. If there's someone in your life who is struggling, please, please offer them empathy. Please offer them compassion. Please offer them understanding. Try the best you can to put yourself in their shoes and love them from that perspective. And let's make this year a healthy year. Let's pray. Father, we do love you. We thank you so much for loving us. God, if there is anybody here who feels unworthy, who feels unvaluable, who feels unloved, God, may they just feel a pervasive sense of your love and your compassion wrapping around them today. Help them to hear the voices in their life that speak for you and tell them that they are enough. God, if we feel unsafe or insecure, I pray that you would restore that sense of security with your sovereignty. God, for those here who are struggling, who are sad, or who are anxious, or dealing with a multitude of other things, help them feel your peace today. Help them feel your hope today. Remind them that that hope, your word says, will not be put to shame. God, I pray that we would be healthy, that we would walk in a sense of security in you, of value in you, and that that would enable us to love other people well on your behalf. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. As a pastor, it often falls on me to offer counsel and advice to people. Believe it or not, sometimes people will call the church and ask to talk to a pastor or ask to talk to me or even seek me out individually knowing full well who I am, and they will still ask me for advice on things or what to do in certain situations. And for a long time in those situations at my old church, it was a larger church in the Atlanta area, about 2,000 people. If you called that church, you got funneled to me. I was the one that you would talk to. It was a really talentless staff. So that was my role. And for a long time, my advice in those situations would pretty much default to suck it up. Like, get it together. Quit being a sissy. Let's go. Like, you just got to face the music. You got to stand up. You got to stick your chin out, and you got to take it. And I came by that advice honestly, because for a long time, that's what worked for me. Part of my story is that when I was younger, I was bullied pretty badly. For a couple years, elementary school and then in middle school, there was two kids in my neighborhood who just delighted in tormenting me. And I won't get into all the details of it, but one of the things they would do, just to give you a picture of what fifth grade looked like for Nate, is they were in middle school, so they got home before me. They would hide in the bushes at the bus stop and have an industrial strength rubber band, and they had sniffed it. So it was one big long rubber band, and then when I would get off the bus, they would pop me in the ears and in the neck and in the legs until I would cry or run, and then they would call me names. That was like most days. So we started diversion tactics. I got a letter to get off the bus at other bus stops. My mom would come pick me up at school sometimes, but that was a part of my life, and that was a part of my life for a couple of years. And at some point or another, as a kid, I just realized I can't care so much what they think about me. They would invite me over to play and I'd be like, oh good, we're friends now. And then I would get there and they would just make fun of me until I would go home. And it taught me to have a thick skin. It taught me to not let it affect me when other people pick on me. It taught me to be tough. And at some point in my adolescence, I decided I'm tired of them having this kind of control over me. I'm just going to tough it up. I'm just going to suck it up and figure out how to not care what they think. And that's what I did. And so in adulthood, when an issue came up, my thought was, suck it up. Just don't be a baby. That's what I did. Worked for me. Let's go. And that's kind of the mindset I had several years ago when I got one of those phone calls at the church that I was at. Some guy called the church and just said he was in a real tough way, needed to talk to a pastor. So pick up the phone. Hey, you know, one of the pastors here, what's going on? How can I help you? And he was 31 years old, and he had a girlfriend who had a bit of a drug issue, in his words, and she had just broken up with him. Nobody in his family liked him, liked her, but he was crestfallen over this breakup. And he wanted to know from a pastor, if there is a good God in heaven, how could he allow this girl to break my heart in this way? And I thought, are you freaking kidding me? Like, you're 31. She broke up with you. She's a drug addict. This is a good thing, dude. Get another girlfriend. There's a lot of them. Like, I could not muster any sympathy for this dude. In my life, there was a good friend of mine who had just lost her husband, and I'm comparing and contrasting these tragedies, and I'm like, bro, suck it up. Like take a day, you know, have a beer and then get back to it. It doesn't matter. Like I literally, I was nice to him. I wasn't mean. I had the hardest time caring about this guy's issue. Like the girl broke up with you, man, whatever whatever. And so a couple days after that, I had lunch with a counselor. Every now and again, a counselor will reach out to a pastor and invite you to lunch, and they're basically, they're kind of courting your reference. You want to get to know each other, and they know that I kind of funnel people into counseling, and so that's kind of how that goes. And so we went out to lunch, and we were talking, and I said, hey hey man, let me just ask you a question. So I have to counsel sometimes. Let me get a little bit of advice. I got this call the other day. How would you have handled that? And I told him about the guy's issues and my response. And he kind of thought about it a second and he said, I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, well, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that your parents are together and that you never really had to wonder if they were proud of you. And I said, that's true of me. Yeah, I would say that's true. I said, how'd you know that? And he said, it's just, you just kind of get a sense. I can just tell by the way you carry yourself. He said, I'd be willing to bet that that guy you talked to on the phone probably doesn't have a background like you. He probably doesn't have that family structure to lean on like you did. And he probably values the relationship with that girl and what it did for him and the value that it made him feel a lot more than you ever would. So your ability to detach yourself from that and move on is not the same as his. So I would probably handle that with a little bit more empathy. And I thought, whoa, this dude is smart. I'm going to give him all the referrals. How did he figure that out in 20 minutes of talking to me? I was super impressed. And it also dawned on me in that conversation, because I'm obtuse,ations are always a little bit more nuanced than they seem. And that most of the time when we're talking about issues of mental and emotional health, suck it up is really bad advice. It's really careless and thoughtless and obtuse. And since then, I've rethought about the way that I offer counsel. And that really got my wheels turning on mental health in general. It's something that I care about a lot. I care deeply about how the church engages it because I think historically the church has engaged mental health a little bit like I did. Suck it up and pray it away. Let's go. You're not a good enough Christian. If you were a better Christian, you wouldn't be so sad. So let's lean into God and let's quit being a sissy. And I just think historically that's how we've handled it and that's obtuse. That's not helpful. And more and more, it's being pressed into the national conscience. Last year, we had several athletes come out and say that they were struggling with anxiety, that they were struggling with depression. There was a very high-profile rookie in the NBA who had a terrible rookie year, and he confessed that it was because he struggles greatly with anxiety. There was an offensive lineman, a big, huge bear of a man for the Philadelphia Eagles, I believe, who missed a half of football because he was in the locker room at halftime throwing up because of anxiety attacks and could not get himself out on the field. So more and more we become aware of these things. Every time there's a shooting, then mental health and the epidemic gets thrust into the national conscience. And so as we approached this series and we said, I want a better life, and we thought through the four things that we were going to talk about, I just kind of felt like, based on all of those things, my experiences and what's going on in our culture now, that it would be good to take a Sunday and say, hey, you know what? I want a better me. I want to be more healthy. And so I wanted to take a Sunday and talk to those of you who do struggle with some sort of mental or emotional struggle. I wanted to talk to us as a church, as we encounter and engage and love people in our life who are walking through that struggle. And so as I prepared and thought through what I wanted to say and how I wanted to approach it, I actually had a conversation with my therapist. I started seeing a therapist this last summer. And normally when I tell people that I'm in counseling, I immediately tell them why I'm in counseling because I don't want them to think that I'm broken or crazy or that there's something going on. So I want to be very clear, but it's for this really good reason. But as I prepared for this sermon, I thought, I'm going to quit doing that. Because what do I care what you think about how I go to counseling? We need to destigmatize it anyways. So I had a conversation with my therapist. And he's a believer. And he's got a master's in divinity. And so he's very helpful for me. And I said, hey, man, I'm going to be doing a sermon on mental health. What does the church need to know about mental health? What do you wish pastors would say about it? And he said, well, you know, I don't really hear a lot of sermons on mental health, but the ones that I have heard tend to focus on unhealth and what that's like. And I just think that we do a disservice to the church when we don't paint a picture of what health is. So I would invest my time in that. That's interesting. How would you define health? And he defined it essentially this way. He said, a healthy person walks in a sense of security and worth. He said a healthy person, someone who's mentally and emotionally healthy and stable walks in a sense of security and worth. What he meant is, if we're going to be emotionally stable, if we're going to be mentally healthy, then we need to have a sense of security. We need to feel safe. We need to know that everything's going to be okay. If we're walking around in constant fear, a constant uncertainty, or like we've got our eyes covered and we don't know where our next step is going to go, that that's going to cause some mental instability. So we first need to feel secure, but we also need to feel valuable. We need to feel worth. We need to feel like we're enough. We need to feel like we're good enough for other people, that we have some intrinsic value. We need to understand that about ourselves and walk in an actualization and an acknowledgement of that value. So he said, to be healthy, we need to walk in a sense of security and worth. And then he said something that I thought was really interesting. He said that every person gets their boat rocked a little bit. Every person in their life, all of you, at some point or another, have had times where you felt unsafe and had times where you felt unworthy. We've all had our security compromised. We've all had the rug pulled out from under us. We've all felt like, no, this time it's not gonna be okay. And I think more predominantly in the American culture, we've all had times where we don't feel worthy. Some of us feel that pervasively right now. For some of us, the story of our life is this low simmering sense of unworthiness and lack of value and like we're not good enough. And all we've ever done is claw to show ourselves and the people around us that we are actually good enough. Everybody struggles at times to feel secure and to feel worthy. And what he said is, when that happens, healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to get themselves back on track. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to try to grope for that security and to try to grope for that value. We've seen these unhealthy coping mechanisms, right? Someone feels unsafe, their world feels crazy, and so they become hyper-controlling of their environment all the time. They become, their house has to be clean, and their house doesn't have to be clean because they like a clean house. Their house has to be clean because they've got to exert control over something. And that's not necessarily bad, but it can become unhealthy. Where we see this most is when people exhibit unhealthy coping mechanisms as we lurch for value. This is the girl that far too easily gives herself over to whatever guy will pay attention to her. Because from that guy, she is getting her sense of worth, and that's how she's coping and lurching for that. This is the grown man that still tells you how good of an athlete he was in high school. Because all he's saying is, tell me I'm valuable. Tell me I'm worthy. This is the guy that can't help but brag about whatever it was he did. It's not because he's dumb. It's because he's incredibly insecure and he's groping for value and he doesn't feel it. So he's just looking at you going, can you just tell me I'm awesome? Can you do that, please? He's a 15-year-old kid going, please tell me I'm great. We all do it. As we grow up, we find more nuanced ways to grope for this value, but we do, and it becomes unhealthy. This is where addictions start and get carried on, right? We feel unvaluable. We feel unworthy, we feel unsafe, and so we drink, we medicate, or we find a hobby to numb it, or we refuse to sit in silence. In my research, I saw a great quote from Blaise Pascal that said, all of man's problems can be summed up in his inability to sit in a quiet room alone. Some of us hate the silence. Some of us can't go more than 10 seconds without pulling out our phone to distract ourselves from the things that we don't want to think about. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to bring back and restore that sense of security and worth. And when we think about healthy coping mechanisms, I think this is a good place to insert the spiritual into the conversation as we think about what are some healthy coping mechanisms with a lack of stability or a lack of value that can bring me back to a place of true health. And as I had this conversation with my therapist, I suggested these two things. I said, I think God provides for us these senses in these two ways. And he said, yeah, that's not everything. And I just want to say very clearly, I'm not covering everything that we do and how we handle mental health this morning, but this is a very good start, I think. As we think about healthy coping mechanisms and what it means to be truly healthy, I want to suggest these two things to you, that there's really two pillars of true health. There's security in God's sovereignty and worthiness in God's love. If we want to be healthy people, truly healthy the way that we were designed, we have to walk in a sense of security anchored in God's sovereignty and a sense of worthiness brought about by God's deep and compassionate love for us. That's what true health is. And so a healthy coping mechanism is to acknowledge that God is sovereign, to acknowledge that God is in control, to acknowledge that nothing happens outside of his purview and outside of his will and feel the relief of that. A good coping mechanism is to look around at the people in your life that God has placed in your life who love you and who value you and who are telling you that you are enough and to allow that to be the truth that you hear and not the truth from the detractors. I actually think that these two pillars are some of the greatest things that Christianity has to offer. I think we undervalue the sovereignty of God. One of my favorite verses, group of verses, is Philippians 4, 6, and 7. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, through prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your requests to God, and the God of peace who transcends all understanding will, listen, guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Are you anxious? Are the things keeping you up at night? Does worry characterize you? Pray those things to God. Release them to God. And he says that his peace that passes all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. And what that means is God is saying, I've got it. I'm in control. I'm God. It's going to be okay. Rest easy in my sovereignty. He does this again in Romans 8, where it says, we know that for those who love him and are called according to his purpose, that all things work together for the good of those who love him. Everything works together for the good of those who love him are called according to his purpose. Romans 8.28 tells us everything's going to work out. Even if it doesn't work out now, it will work out eventually. It's a beautiful promise from God. I saw a clip of a pastor doing the funeral for his mother that he lost far too early. And he said some amazing things. He said, you know, with God, all of our prayers are answered. I was praying so much for my mom to live, and then she died. He said it disillusioned him for a little bit. But what he realized was he was thinking about it wrong. And it dawned on him that in God, all his prayers are answered because she knew Jesus. So as he prayed for his mom to live, the truth of it is either she's going to live or she was gonna live. She was gonna be okay or she was gonna be okay. She was gonna be with family or she was gonna go be with family. God is good or God is good. This is the sovereignty that he offers us. And one of my favorite passages that I mentioned often, Revelation 21, paints this beautiful picture where it says the end of days that we will be with God and he will be with his people and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. There is a sovereignty and a peace that God promises throughout scripture. Scripture is replete with these promises. And if we want to be healthy and cling onto a sense of stability and know that everything is okay, even when we don't see how it's going to be okay, then we cling to the sovereignty of God that is laced throughout Scripture, and we know that it's going to be okay, even if it doesn't make sense to me. And I believe that a healthy person reminds themselves of the sovereignty of God and rests easy in that and not in their own control. The next thing we do is we rest in God's love. We know the Bible tells us God loves us. We know John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life. God tells us that not even a sparrow falls to the ground without his knowledge, so how much more does he care about you that the numbers of hairs on your head are numbered? He knows you that well and that intimately. He tells us that if your earthly father knows how to give you a good gift, how much better are my gifts? He tells us that we know that we are loved because while we were still sinners, he died for us. He tells us that we are able to love him because he first loved us. From God, if you listen, is a constant, pervasive, never fatiguing voice that says, you are enough. I love you. You do not have to perform for me. You don't have to be good for me. You don't have to sell for me. You don't have to execute for me. You don't have to impress me. I love you as much as I'm ever going to love you. And to be healthy is to walk in an acknowledgement of that love and not need the accolades of others and not be so desperate for the approval of this group because I'm walking with the approval of my God. And if you give me it too, that's great, but I don't need it because God gives it to me. That's what health looks like. Have you ever met somebody who is so comfortable in their own skin that you just marvel at it? To me, that's a person who walks knowing that God loves me and I'm good. That's what health is. So if we want to be a healthy person, we need to quiet the voices that are telling us we're not enough and listen to the pervasive and persistent voice of God that tells us that we are. As we think about ourselves pursuing mental and emotional health, I think the best, most practical way to do that is to pursue health. We need to identify poor coping mechanisms in our life and pursue healthy ones. If we're going to be mentally healthy, if we're in a state this morning where we feel given towards depression, if we feel given towards anxiety, if we feel given towards just unhealth, I think a good exercise is to identify the unhealthy coping mechanisms that exist in our life. And listen, we all have them. One of the things I'm more certain of than ever, especially in being in counseling, is that we are all a bundle and an alchemy of insecurities and coping mechanisms to present ourselves as enough, all of us. So the best thing we can do is try to identify where these coping mechanisms are and pursue them and pursue healthy ones. But I don't just want to talk about us, how we pursue health. I think one of the big questions the church faces and some of us in our life faces, if I have people in my life who are not healthy, how do I love them towards health? What can we do to love other people towards emotional and mental health? I think two things I would suggest to you this morning. The first would be to offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. To offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. Hebrews tells us that Christ took on flesh, that he bore our infirmities, that he was tempted in the ways that we are tempted, so that he understood our plight, so that when we pray to our Savior, we're not praying to someone who is altogether unfamiliar with the human condition. We're praying to someone who is empathetic with us and therefore compassionate towards us. Do you realize that empathy is the birthplace of compassion? That empathy begats compassion. That the thing that happened with me and that guy that called the church that day, I had zero empathy for him. Therefore, I had zero compassion. It made no sense to me how he was that broken up about that. I could not put myself in his shoes of caring that much that I would doubt the existence of God because a girl dumped me. And so I had no compassion for him. But when I had that conversation with the counselor, and I realized the nuances of what was going on in the conversation that I had with that guy, the thought occurred to me, you know what? If I didn't grow up the way that I grew up in the house that I grew up in, it's entirely possible that I would handle that situation just like he does. And that I'm not tough. I didn't just learn to suck it up. I'm just the benefit of a good environment with good coping mechanisms. And the truth of it is, if you think about me as a little kid, I said I learned to suck it up early. No, I didn't. No, I didn't. I didn't decide as a 12-year-old to get tough. No one gets tough at 12. I was in an environment where I was loved by family and by people at church. And that reminded me of my worthiness. My parents breathed scripture into me and that reminded me of God's sovereignty. And I begun to cling to those things. And I wouldn't have articulated it like this at the time, but all that happened is I had to simply develop healthy coping mechanisms for feeling unsafe and unworthy. And the guy that I was talking to on the phone that day had never had the opportunity to develop those. So the first thing we do with people who are experiencing unhealth is we offer empathy. And we acknowledge and admit that even if we don't understand, even if we've never felt that way before, if you change the alchemy of my life and you make the circumstances the same and you run me through the ringer that they went through, there's a very good chance I would come out the other side feeling and thinking and acting the same way that they do. So don't think that we're for a second better than them or more stable than them or tougher than them or stronger than them. We have a different background than they do. And when we can acknowledge that we would be the same person they are, that produces in us empathy. And out of that empathy comes compassion, where we realize some of the worst possible advice would be to suck it up or to pray it away, that we need to first be empathetic with them and understand. And empathy is also the acknowledgement that sometimes when people are dealing with a mental health issue, it's a chemical imbalance. They are sick. Looking at someone who is depressed and telling them to suck it up is like looking at someone with the flu and telling them to run a couple miles. It's useless advice. All it does is make you look dumb and then feel bad. We've got to offer empathy, which produces in us a Christ-like compassion. To help us offer empathy, I wanted to share with you some statistics that I found in the research that I've been doing. These are from the National Mental Health Institute, Institute of Mental Health. What I learned is that a quarter or 20% of U.S. citizens exhibit some symptoms of mental illness. Now, that's a wide brush. That's mild depression all the way to extreme schizophrenia, okay? But 20%, one in five of you, look down the row within two people and one of them is crazy, right? That's a lot. It affects a lot of us. Now, here's what I think is really interesting. It says that there's 22% of women and 15% of men deal with mental health issues. Now, here's what that doesn't mean, that men have it together more than women do. What it means is they're more honest than us and you're a stubborn jerk. That's what that means. You just can't admit that you're struggling. You just fold your arms and pretend like everything's okay. And it only gets worse because 26% of millennials of 18 to 25 say that they experienced some sort of mental illness or exhibit signs of that. Only 14% of ages 50 and older. Now listen, I don't think for a second that you people who are 50 and older in this room have just have life so figured out and all your coping skills so nailed that you're the healthiest bunch in the room. Listen, if you're a dude over 50 and you're like, I don't struggle with depression. Yes, you do. You're just stubborn. Listen, all of us at some point have experienced a season of melancholy. We all have. If you haven't, you're a psychopath or you're not paying attention. All of us experience anxiety in excessive ways. Everybody in this room has had a suicidal thought. Everybody. The difference with healthy and unhealthy is how we cope with those things. I also thought it was really interesting that 50% of adolescents show sign of a mental disorder. And if we understand that health is to walk in a sense of stability and worth, is it any wonder that half of our high school students have no idea how to cling on to stability and worth? We are all of us broken. We are all of us at times weak and in need of help. There is none of us in here who is singularly and individually strong and healthy. And we need to acknowledge that as we seek to offer empathy to others. The next thing we can do to love people towards health is to celebrate courageous choices. We need to start celebrating courageous choices. When somebody makes a decision to get help, when somebody makes a decision to be vulnerable and confess, we need to praise those things. We need to celebrate those things. We don't need to deride those things. I've talked a lot about counseling in this sermon. One of the things that breaks my heart is that counseling gets such a stigma that people, when you start talking about going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that we automatically think, man, only broken people do that. What's going on in your life? What can you not get together yourself? Why do you need help that you need to go talk to a professional to do that? Are you crazy? What's wrong with you? What have you failed at? How did you ruin your marriage? When did you get fired? We just assume that when people are going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that there's something broken in them. But here's the thing, there's something broken in all of us, so we need to stop it. Sometimes, most of the time, the unhealthy coping mechanisms that we have are so deeply embedded and ingrained in us that we can't see them. We don't know how to find them ourselves. And we need a trained professional to talk with us and help us see those and then help us see a way through them. We need trained professionals who are more than pastors. I'm very quick to go, listen, I wanna try to help you as best I can. I'm gonna pray for you. You need to talk to a therapist, not because you're crazy, but because they're good at it. The other thing I've learned is when you talk to somebody who will say, I should really go speak to a counselor about this. A lot of times they won't. And at first they won't because it's a pride thing. I don't want to do that. I don't want people to see me parking at that office. I don't want people to think that there's something wrong with me. I don't want people to think that I can't handle it or that I'm weak somehow. I don't want all the stuff that goes with seeing a counselor. So I'm not gonna go do that. And it seems like pride. But when you start to peel back the layers, what you find is that it's really fear. I'm convinced that the reason, if you're thinking about seeing a counselor, getting help, working through some unhealth in your life, I'm convinced that one of the big reasons we don't do that is because we know good and well what we're going to have to walk through when we get there. We don't want to have to look at ourselves in the mirror. It is easier to cope. It is easier to demur. It is easier to distract than it is to confront. And so we keep walking away from our unhealthy selves instead of turning and allowing someone to hold up a mirror and show us and work through it and walk through it and emerge on the other side more healthy. It's often fear that keeps us from getting help, not pride. And so I want you to know this morning that I think it takes bravery to go get help. And I actually think, and I would love for our church to start thinking about it this way, that counseling is not for the broken. It's for the brave. Counseling is not for broken people. It's for brave people. If it were for broken people, then we'd all be in it because we're all broken. But at some point or another, you have to take a step and make a decision that I want some help. I want to be healthy. I want somebody else's voice in this conversation helping me identify the unhealthy pockets in my life to restoring me to my God-given sense of security and value and love. And since I can't find my way out of this mess myself, I want to get someone else to speak into it for me. And that takes bravery and courage. The counseling is not the broken. It's for the brave. My prayer is that 2020 will be the healthiest year for you in a long, long time. For those of you who are brave enough to pursue health, I think it begins with acknowledging and identifying the unhealthy ways we bring ourselves a sense of security and worth. And doing the work to replace that coping mechanism with one that pushes us towards God's sovereignty and pushes us towards God's love. If we have people in our lives this year that we're trying to love towards mental health, we need to do it with empathy and compassion. And we need to, as a church and as a Christian subculture, destigmatize what it is to get help and admit that we all need it. And it's not for the broken, it's for the brave. I hope that some of you will make courageous choices, even this week. If you do want to talk to a counselor, email me and I'll work to find you a good one. I'm not going to send you to mine, but somebody. If there's someone in your life who is struggling, please, please offer them empathy. Please offer them compassion. Please offer them understanding. Try the best you can to put yourself in their shoes and love them from that perspective. And let's make this year a healthy year. Let's pray. Father, we do love you. We thank you so much for loving us. God, if there is anybody here who feels unworthy, who feels unvaluable, who feels unloved, God, may they just feel a pervasive sense of your love and your compassion wrapping around them today. Help them to hear the voices in their life that speak for you and tell them that they are enough. God, if we feel unsafe or insecure, I pray that you would restore that sense of security with your sovereignty. God, for those here who are struggling, who are sad, or who are anxious, or dealing with a multitude of other things, help them feel your peace today. Help them feel your hope today. Remind them that that hope, your word says, will not be put to shame. God, I pray that we would be healthy, that we would walk in a sense of security in you, of value in you, and that that would enable us to love other people well on your behalf. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

Hi, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Before I dive into the sermon, a couple things about worship. First of all, Carly B. killed it on that last song. That was great. Yeah, I don't know where she is, but good job, Carly. Her last name is Buchanan, so we call her Carly B. around here. And then the second thing, I just want to let you in on something. And I feel like this is an important matter to bring to the church. Aaron's back there. He knows what I'm about to talk about. I don't know if you noticed during the second song that Carly and Aaron were smiling and looking at me, and I was laughing. Here's why, and I feel like we should all weigh in on this as partners. If you're not from the South, I don't care what you think about this. One of my favorite things about hymns, I'm just totally, this has nothing to do with anything. I'm just telling you a story. One of my favorite things about hymns is how liberal the writers are with apostrophes. In hymns, they'll apostrophe anything, right? And one of my favorite ones is victory. Not victory like an obnoxious carpetbagger. Victory like a southerner. You know what I'm saying? Like victory. It's best in Victory in Jesus, that old hymn. So anyways, last week we're singing that song that we sang, the second one. What's that called, Aaron? I'm not telling. And there's victory in there. There's the word victory in there, but you sing it victory. You know, you sing it like that, but it's not apostrophe. Now it's bummed out. And then like two slides down, we apostrophed flowers, the E in flowers. How do you even, flowers, how do you even say that? That's not a thing. How are we going to apostrophe flowers and not victory? So it just made me mad. And I told Aaron and Carly last week, and I didn't know we were singing it this week. So it comes up and they're both giggling at me and I'm grinning at them. Anyways, now you know too, and we can together peer pressure him to fix the lyrics. So there is an apostrophe and victory as the Lord intended. Okay, let's get started. Actually, these words don't mean anything to you because I know that I'm the boy that cries excited. I know that. I'm excited about everything that I get to preach. I know that I say that to you. I'm really excited about this. This is a sermon that I knew I was going to preach as soon as we planned the series. I knew that we would arrive at this passage, and I've been very much looking forward to diving into it with you. So if you have a Bible with you, and I hope you do, go ahead and turn it to John chapter 13. This is the beginning of the Upper Room Discourse. You'll remember that this is a series called Final Thoughts. These are the final things that Jesus shared with the disciples before he was arrested and tried and crucified. And so it's just Jesus and the disciples in the upper room, and he has some final thoughts for them, and they're in John chapters 13 through 17. So the back half of John chapter 13, after washing their feet, Jesus starts to share with them. And if you look at verses 34 and 35, I'm not sure that you could definitively say what the most important and profound words of Christ are in his whole life. I don't know that there would be an agreement among scholars or pastors or believers as to what are the most important, most profound words Jesus ever spoke. But I know that you couldn't have that conversation without talking about what we find in those verses. I believe that what Jesus says here is so profound and powerful that hyperbole is lost on the import of these verses. So I want to look at them and read them with you. If you're a believer, I hope these are well-trodden verses for you. I hope you already almost know them before I even say them. And I hope, if you have your Bible with you, that you'll grab a pen and that you'll underline these verses. And that you'll highlight some of the phrases. We're going to spend the whole morning in these two verses, and we're going to look at three profound statements that Jesus makes in this compact section of text. And I hope that you'll take a pen and you'll underline and you'll mark. I hope that you'll make notes for yourself in your Bible. I've learned from a young age that if you show me a Bible that's falling apart, then I'll show you a person who isn't. So let's beat up our Bibles. Let's mark in them. Let's scratch in them. And let's note this passage together. John chapter 13, verses 34 and 35. This is Jesus speaking. A new command I give you. Love one another as I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another. That's a well-worn passage. This is a passage we ought to be familiar with. This is a passage of which the profundity cannot be overstated. It's so profound and stuck with the disciples so much in their memory that 30 years later, when two people who were in the room, Peter and John, when they write their epistles, when they write their letters to the church to be spread throughout the church and read throughout the church, they both included this maxim in their instructions, in their brief instructions to the church. In 1 Peter 4, 8, Peter says, above all else, love one another dearly. After everything's said and done, love one another dearly. John, in his three letters, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, over and over and over again, if you say you believe in God and you do not love your brother, then you are a liar and the truth is not in you. He brings it back to love, back to love, back to love. Even Paul, who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament, was not in this room, did not hear this teaching personally, but heard it proclaimed by the disciples after him. When Paul writes his letter to Corinth, he ends it with that famous love passage. And he says, now after everything is said and done, in eternity, these three things remain, faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these? Love. We cannot overstate the importance, the efficacy, and the power of love. And this is what Jesus commands us here. It's how he opens his closing remarks. And so if it's so powerful and effective that everyone who's ever followed Jesus has reminded the people that they lead of this command, then we ought to look at the command and examine it and pick it apart and seek to understand it. And, I think, let the power of it wash over us. So the first portion of the text I want to point you to, a profound statement, is when he says this, a new command I give you. A new command I give you. Underline that in your Bible. Here's why this is profound. We know, because we have the benefit of hindsight, that Jesus is God. We understand the deity of Christ. They did not. They did not yet understand the deity of Christ. Certainly not the way that we do. You remember that when they're on the Sea of Galilee and Jesus is sleeping in the hull of the ship and the wind and the waves are crashing, that they go down and they wake Jesus up. And he says, peace be still. And the storm calms. And he goes back to sleep, a little bit annoyed that his nap got interrupted. And the disciples looked at each other. And they said, it's in the text. And they said, who is this that even the wind and the waves would obey him? They still do not understand the deity of Christ. In this moment, they understand loosely the deity of Christ, but not like we do. And so when Jesus says this new command I give you, he is placing himself solidly in the Trinity. He is placing himself as God because a new command has not been given for 4,000 years. 4,000 years ago, Moses walked down the mountain with two tablets of stone with a lot more than 10 commandments written on them. If you read the text, you find it was the 10, but then they were covered front and back. There's 630 some odd laws in the Old Testament based on Mosaic law. Nobody in Israel since then had given a new commandment because nobody had the authority to do it. Moses gave the commandments from God himself. God himself wrote on those tablets and gave them to Moses, and no one had questioned it since then. No one gives new commandments. That's not a thing that you can do unless you're God. So when Jesus says this, he's claiming that he is God. And I don't know how to help us understand how radical what he's doing is, but the only thing I can equate it to is our Bill of Rights, our Constitution. No citizen can just decide, I'm going to add an amendment. I hereby declare, and then add an amendment. As a matter of fact, we'll test this out. I'd like to add one right now. I hereby declare as an amendment to the United States Constitution that daylight savings time is stupid and abolished. I woke up an hour and a half late this morning. I should have only been a half hour late. But daylight savings time. It's stupid. And likes it. And nobody needs it. We're long since agrarian. All right. Nebraska can keep it if they want it. We're squared away. Thanks. But that doesn't do anything. I don't just get to add amendments willy-nilly. There's a whole process. If we can't add amendments to a document that some guys wrote 200 years ago, you definitely can't start adding commandments that God wrote 4,000 years ago. But Jesus does. And he says it's a new one. And this commandment, one of the things that makes it so radical, is that this commandment serves as a summary for all the commandments. This commandment serves as a summary for all the commandments. It's not that Jesus is saying, you don't have to worry about any of the stuff that you've been commanded previously. Go be adulterers. Go murder people. Knock yourselves out as long as you're loving people on the way. You're good. That's not the idea. We get a glimpse of the idea earlier in Christ's life when someone says, what's the greatest commandment? And the response is, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. These are the greatest commandments with promise. On these hang the law and the prophets, meaning the entire Old Testament. And so what Jesus says in that statement is, basically, if you'll focus on loving God and loving others, the commandments will take care of themselves. It's not that you won't be walking in obedience or you'll be walking in disobedience to them. It's that you will automatically obey them by default. And so Jesus is being even more succinct here with this new commandment to love others as I have loved you and saying, as a matter of fact, just love others as I have loved you. Because if you're doing that, if you are loving the people in your life as Jesus loves us, you will by default be loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Because you cannot love as Jesus loved if you're not fueled by Jesus. You will by default. you're not going to have an affair. You're not going to go around murdering. You're not going to steal. You're not going to say unkind words. You're going to outdo one another in hospitality. You're going to be generous. You're going to be humble. You're not going to be greedy if we simply love other people as Christ loved us. It's the command that summarizes all the other commands, which makes it such an impactful command. And here's why it takes walking with Jesus to love like Jesus. Because Jesus loved in superhuman ways. That's the second big one I want you to underline. Let me just say it real quick. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. That's the new command. Now here's why this is so radical. Have you ever been betrayed? Have you ever let someone into your life? Made yourself vulnerable to them? Given them the power to hurt you? And they have? Which, by the way, I think is vitally important to live vulnerable lives and have people invited into our life who do have the power and the capacity to hurt us because they know us that well and we love them that much. That's okay. That's a good thing. But have you ever done that with somebody who then betrayed you? Who used that exposure to hurt you? I know I've not experienced terrible betrayal, but I've tasted it. I've let people in, shared things, been vulnerable with them, and then that ended up getting used against me. That ended up getting turned towards me. That ended up with them judging me and not loving me. And that's hard. I shared years ago about when I did a sermon on forgiveness about a dear friend of mine whose husband had been having multiple affairs and it all blew up in their face one day. She had five kids under the age of 10. That's betrayal. I've never experienced betrayal like that. But I've tasted what it is to let someone in and then watch them hurt me. And if you've experienced betrayal too, let me ask you a question. If you could go back to when that person who hurt you entered into your life, and there was some sort of divine whisper that came to you and said, hey, just so you know, if you let this person in, they will hurt you. They are going to betray you. They're going to let you down and betray your confidence. If you somehow knew that at the very beginning of the relationship where they entered your life, if you knew it, how differently would you treat them? How much would you let them in? Would you let them in at all? When I think of the people who've hurt me, I go back to those places. If you were to ask me that question, hey, if you knew at the beginning that they were going to hurt you if you let them in, what would you do? I wouldn't be their friend. I wouldn't let them in. If my life forced me to be around them, I would be very guarded. I would have treated them completely differently. How would you treat the people in your life who have hurt you if you knew at the onset that they were going to do that? Would you have loved them differently? Would you have not let them in? Would that relationship have looked different? Something occurred to me as I was thinking through this passage. Immediately before Jesus starts this teaching, do you know what happened? He washed the feet of the disciples. And then he said, one of you is going to betray me. And then it comes that it was Judas. And he looked at Judas and he says one of the coolest lines in the Bible, what you're about to do, go and do it quickly. And Judas goes to betray him. Don't miss this. Jesus knew. He knew when he invited him in. When he called Judas to be his disciple. He knew. He knew he was going to get betrayed for 30 pieces of silver. He knew that. He knew who Jesus was when he walked up to him and he tapped his shoulder and he said, I want to invite you into my life for three years. I want you to spend every day with me. And I know what you're going to do at the end of those three years and you don't even know it yet. Jesus knew, man. And here's what's amazing. Nobody else did. We have no indication whatsoever from the text that Jesus treated Judas any differently than any of the other disciples. When they're sitting around the table, and Jesus says, one of you is going to betray me, nobody went, it's Judas, isn't it? I knew. I could tell. Nobody did that. Because Jesus treated them all the same. You understand that? He loved them all the same. For three years, he loved Judas with the same consistency and compassion and tenderness that he loved John. Polar opposite of a disciple. Is that not remarkable? How could you do that? How could you walk every day with someone who was going to betray you to be killed? Not just hurt your feelings like a little sissy, but betray you to be killed. Was gonna be the one who kissed you on the cheek to identify you to the guard of the high priest so that they could arrest you and beat you and kill you. And you love them the exact same as all their peers. Right before Jesus was betrayed, he washed Judas' feet. His grimy, sandaled, third world feet. So that he could go collect his betrayal money with clean toes. He had the freshly minted, humble love of Christ on his feet when he went to cash his check. And that's how Jesus loves Judas. Now here's what's important. You are Judas. I am Judas. We have, all of us, betrayed Christ in word and thought and deed. All of us have trampled on the grace of Christ. All of us have presumed upon his mercy. All of us have cheapened the blood of his sacrifice with our actions and our attitudes and our words. All of us. We are Judas. And yet, knowing the betrayal that you would bring, Jesus loves you anyways. That's the reckless nature of the love that we just sang about a few minutes ago. He continues to pursue us. He continues to come after us. He knows you're going to betray him in word and deed. He knows that you're going to trample on his death. He knows that you're going to cheapen his blood. He knows that and he loves you anyways. And you push him away and you betray him and you act in a way during the week that you won't act on a Sunday morning or you won't act on small group or you'll watch things that you're not supposed to watch. You'll take in things that you're not supposed to take in. You'll foster attitudes that you know he doesn't love and that he doesn't approve of. But he died for those anyways. He knew that you were going to betray him over and over and over again and he died for you anyways. He went anyways. He washed your feet anyways. He loved you anyways. That's how Jesus loves. So when Jesus says, go and love as I have loved you, that's what he means. Go love other people like I love Judas. It's not fair. They're going to hurt you. Okay, that's how I loved. They're not going to reciprocate. You're going to feel foolish. Okay. That's how I loved. It's going to cost something from me that I'm not going to get back. Okay. That's how I loved. That love is so powerful and profound that loving like Jesus is only made possible by walking with Jesus. Loving like Jesus is only made possible by walking with Jesus. We just spent two weeks on abiding in Christ. Two weeks on what it means to abide in him. If we are not abiding in Christ, there is no possible way we can love like Jesus loved. And what's interesting is the promise of abiding is abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. What's the fruit of abiding in Christ? This kind of love. Sacrificial, reckless love that overcomes betrayal and humanity and hardship. This is the fruit of abiding in Christ. And here's what's remarkable about this fruit. Here's, not only does loving others as Christ loved us keep us in line with all the commandments, not only does it keep us attached to him and abiding in him because it's the only possible way to love like that, but it also becomes our defining marker. This is the third remarkable statement that we find in these verses. The third one, underline this. By this, everyone will know you are my disciples. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples. Love, we are told, church, is to be our defining marker to the world. And it's interesting to me how off the mark we can get. I remember one time when I missed the mark really, really badly. I was 15 years old, and we were hosting at our house Thanksgiving or Christmas for my mom's family that year. And we were a teetotaling house. No alcohol at all, ever. It was demon's liquor. And my aunt came over with, at the time, her roommate, Molly. And they brought with them a bottle of wine. And we didn't have a corkscrew in the house. We didn't have a wine opener. And so my mom said, son, will you go next door and borrow a corkscrew from our neighbor? And I, in my misguided 15-year-old piety, said, absolutely not. We don't drink alcohol in this house. And we're not starting today. Not doing it. God help my parents. I must have been impossible. Don't worry. Have you met Lily? I've got it coming. I'm going to walk the path. I refused to go. And my mom, I think probably a little misguidedly proud of me then, and now she's as ashamed of this as I am, didn't make me. I just said, well, looks like we're not doing it today, Indiana. And they put their bottle of wine back in the car. Now, Deanna and Molly had walked away from the church at that point. And as I reflect back on my actions that day, I'm so ashamed that I thought that the defining marker for my faith that day needed to be my piety and my holiness and the rules that I followed and the things that I did and didn't do. And we get really misguided at church that the best Christians are the ones who have the best grasp on their behavior, who do the things they're supposed to do and don't do the things they're not supposed to do, and the best knowledge of Scripture. We tend to judge someone's faith not by how well they love, which is what Jesus says the defining marker should be, but we judge the faith of others by how well they've reined in their behavior and how much they've learned about scripture. And don't get me wrong, those things are important. God is a God of holiness. He does want us to press towards piety, but the press towards piety, the press towards holiness, the press towards righteousness, the press towards having a guilt-free conscience should be in a desire to love as Jesus loved, not in a desire to prove ourselves and our holiness to others. And what kind of damage, what message did it send to my aunt that day? Rejection? Judgment? Holier than thou? It was a singularly unloving act to not just go get the stupid corkscrew. And instead, they felt judged. There's no way my actions turned them on to the church. There's no possible way I did that and they're like, you know what? I see Jesus in that boy. I want to know that Jesus because I want to start telling other people where they're screwing up. But isn't that historically what we look to to define spirituality. When Jesus says, the defining marker of your faith, how I want the world to know you, is by your love for other people. It ought to be our defining characteristic. And I'm not going to wade too deeply into these waters this morning because I don't have time and it's messy. But I would simply ask you, as you think about where church sits in the culture of America, is that our defining characteristic? Is that what the outside world would say that we are known for? It is, however, one of the things I am proud of grace for. Because I do think there are spots and moments where we do this really, really well. And what we see when we love really well is that love is actually the greatest apologetic. Love is the most compelling argument for Christ, especially in a culture saturated with church. If there's somebody in your neighborhood, if there's somebody you work with, if there's a friend that you have on your tennis team or wherever you go, and they don't go to church, let me tell you something. It's not because they haven't heard about it. It's not because they don't know. It's not because they haven't heard the name of Jesus and they're just waiting to be told. They know. And let me tell you something. The people that you know who don't go to church, can I just tell you, they have a reason. And can I tell you this? It's probably a good one. So the greatest apologetic to a culture of people who have on purpose turned away from the church is to love them well. It's more convincing than any book. It's more convincing than A Case for Faith by Lee Strobel, although that's a great one. It's more convincing than any argument or TV show. Showing them the love of Christ compels them towards Christ. I think this is the way I put it. Loving someone in the name of Jesus compels them towards Jesus. Loving someone in the name of Christ like Christ loves compels them towards Christ. And here's why I think it can be so effective and so contagious. I heard this story a couple of weeks ago, and I was so proud when I heard it. In the fall, we had the Addis Jamari, one of our great ministry partners doing great work with the orphans in Ethiopia, had an event last fall. And whenever there's an AJ event, Addis Jamari, it's like 75% grace people, at least, right? And so one of our partners invited some friends that they used to work with to come to the event and see what AJ does. And the friends that they invited are a part of a church in the kind of way that there's a church where you're on their membership role, which is, and you have to remove your letter and stuff like that, which is, I don't understand. I don't understand it. I got a, germane to nothing, I got a letter early on in my tenure here that someone who I had never met was requesting removal of their letter from this church to this other church down the road. And I just wrote them back and I was like, consider all letters moved, ever. You don't have to ever ask me this again. I don't know what this means. So some churches had their letter for like 20 years, but they don't really go. I haven't been since their kids went around. They're kind of cold to church. But they came to this AJ event. And after spending an evening around grace people, they pulled my friend aside and they said, there's something different here. You guys actually like, you like each other. You guys see, everyone knows everyone's name. You seem to get along. This is not like churches we've been around. We want to find out more about your church. So they did. They went to dinner. They told them a little bit more. And I've gotten to spend some time around them. And they say that they're wanting to start coming. They may be watching online. Hey. But it wasn't an argument. It wasn't an invitation. It wasn't a book. It wasn't a moment of conviction. It was an exposure to a group of people who want to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. It was an exposure to the love and the community shared in the church. And they said, I want to be a part of that. That is a compelling love. The challenge, church, is not simply to love each other that way, but to love everyone that way and to be obedient to this new command. Can you imagine with me the power and efficacy of a church that is zealous about loving as Christ loves. Can you imagine how contagious that faith would be? Can you imagine how exuberant our worship would be every Sunday? Can you imagine how much better I'm going to have to step it up to preach to you because you've been preaching to yourself the love of Christ every day and loving everybody in your neighborhood? Can you imagine the power of a group of people who comes together and takes seriously this new command that Jesus gives us and says, you know what? Everything else is fine. It'll take care of itself. I'm going to focus on the loving. And we took steps to abide in Christ, to walk with him, and we let him produce the fruit in our lives, which is this love. And we love everybody the way that Jesus loves Judas and loves us. Can you imagine what God could do with a church of people like that? I asked you earlier, what do you think the Big C Church is known for? What's our defining characteristic? And I don't know where you went and I don't know what you thought, but here's what I do know. We don't have any say over what other churches do, nor should we, by the way. We barely deserve say here, I question it. But we have say over who we are and over what we do. And wouldn't it be amazing if when people heard the name Grace Raleigh in our community, if the first thing they thought was, that church loves well. What if that were our defining characteristic? Let's make it so, Grace. Let's be Christians who love well. Let's be Christians who make that our identifying trait over and above all the other elements of our faith. And let's watch what God can do with a church of people who love like him. Let's pray. Father, we love you because you love us. We can never hope to love like you without you. We thank you for your reckless, sacrificial love. For watching your son suffer and die the way that he did. So that you could claim souls to heaven that would betray you and trample on you over and over again on our way there. God, if nothing else, would we sit humbly and graciously in the reality of your love for us? And as we do that, Father, would it please compel us to go love others in your name? We ask these things in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Hi, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Before I dive into the sermon, a couple things about worship. First of all, Carly B. killed it on that last song. That was great. Yeah, I don't know where she is, but good job, Carly. Her last name is Buchanan, so we call her Carly B. around here. And then the second thing, I just want to let you in on something. And I feel like this is an important matter to bring to the church. Aaron's back there. He knows what I'm about to talk about. I don't know if you noticed during the second song that Carly and Aaron were smiling and looking at me, and I was laughing. Here's why, and I feel like we should all weigh in on this as partners. If you're not from the South, I don't care what you think about this. One of my favorite things about hymns, I'm just totally, this has nothing to do with anything. I'm just telling you a story. One of my favorite things about hymns is how liberal the writers are with apostrophes. In hymns, they'll apostrophe anything, right? And one of my favorite ones is victory. Not victory like an obnoxious carpetbagger. Victory like a southerner. You know what I'm saying? Like victory. It's best in Victory in Jesus, that old hymn. So anyways, last week we're singing that song that we sang, the second one. What's that called, Aaron? I'm not telling. And there's victory in there. There's the word victory in there, but you sing it victory. You know, you sing it like that, but it's not apostrophe. Now it's bummed out. And then like two slides down, we apostrophed flowers, the E in flowers. How do you even, flowers, how do you even say that? That's not a thing. How are we going to apostrophe flowers and not victory? So it just made me mad. And I told Aaron and Carly last week, and I didn't know we were singing it this week. So it comes up and they're both giggling at me and I'm grinning at them. Anyways, now you know too, and we can together peer pressure him to fix the lyrics. So there is an apostrophe and victory as the Lord intended. Okay, let's get started. Actually, these words don't mean anything to you because I know that I'm the boy that cries excited. I know that. I'm excited about everything that I get to preach. I know that I say that to you. I'm really excited about this. This is a sermon that I knew I was going to preach as soon as we planned the series. I knew that we would arrive at this passage, and I've been very much looking forward to diving into it with you. So if you have a Bible with you, and I hope you do, go ahead and turn it to John chapter 13. This is the beginning of the Upper Room Discourse. You'll remember that this is a series called Final Thoughts. These are the final things that Jesus shared with the disciples before he was arrested and tried and crucified. And so it's just Jesus and the disciples in the upper room, and he has some final thoughts for them, and they're in John chapters 13 through 17. So the back half of John chapter 13, after washing their feet, Jesus starts to share with them. And if you look at verses 34 and 35, I'm not sure that you could definitively say what the most important and profound words of Christ are in his whole life. I don't know that there would be an agreement among scholars or pastors or believers as to what are the most important, most profound words Jesus ever spoke. But I know that you couldn't have that conversation without talking about what we find in those verses. I believe that what Jesus says here is so profound and powerful that hyperbole is lost on the import of these verses. So I want to look at them and read them with you. If you're a believer, I hope these are well-trodden verses for you. I hope you already almost know them before I even say them. And I hope, if you have your Bible with you, that you'll grab a pen and that you'll underline these verses. And that you'll highlight some of the phrases. We're going to spend the whole morning in these two verses, and we're going to look at three profound statements that Jesus makes in this compact section of text. And I hope that you'll take a pen and you'll underline and you'll mark. I hope that you'll make notes for yourself in your Bible. I've learned from a young age that if you show me a Bible that's falling apart, then I'll show you a person who isn't. So let's beat up our Bibles. Let's mark in them. Let's scratch in them. And let's note this passage together. John chapter 13, verses 34 and 35. This is Jesus speaking. A new command I give you. Love one another as I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another. That's a well-worn passage. This is a passage we ought to be familiar with. This is a passage of which the profundity cannot be overstated. It's so profound and stuck with the disciples so much in their memory that 30 years later, when two people who were in the room, Peter and John, when they write their epistles, when they write their letters to the church to be spread throughout the church and read throughout the church, they both included this maxim in their instructions, in their brief instructions to the church. In 1 Peter 4, 8, Peter says, above all else, love one another dearly. After everything's said and done, love one another dearly. John, in his three letters, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, over and over and over again, if you say you believe in God and you do not love your brother, then you are a liar and the truth is not in you. He brings it back to love, back to love, back to love. Even Paul, who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament, was not in this room, did not hear this teaching personally, but heard it proclaimed by the disciples after him. When Paul writes his letter to Corinth, he ends it with that famous love passage. And he says, now after everything is said and done, in eternity, these three things remain, faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these? Love. We cannot overstate the importance, the efficacy, and the power of love. And this is what Jesus commands us here. It's how he opens his closing remarks. And so if it's so powerful and effective that everyone who's ever followed Jesus has reminded the people that they lead of this command, then we ought to look at the command and examine it and pick it apart and seek to understand it. And, I think, let the power of it wash over us. So the first portion of the text I want to point you to, a profound statement, is when he says this, a new command I give you. A new command I give you. Underline that in your Bible. Here's why this is profound. We know, because we have the benefit of hindsight, that Jesus is God. We understand the deity of Christ. They did not. They did not yet understand the deity of Christ. Certainly not the way that we do. You remember that when they're on the Sea of Galilee and Jesus is sleeping in the hull of the ship and the wind and the waves are crashing, that they go down and they wake Jesus up. And he says, peace be still. And the storm calms. And he goes back to sleep, a little bit annoyed that his nap got interrupted. And the disciples looked at each other. And they said, it's in the text. And they said, who is this that even the wind and the waves would obey him? They still do not understand the deity of Christ. In this moment, they understand loosely the deity of Christ, but not like we do. And so when Jesus says this new command I give you, he is placing himself solidly in the Trinity. He is placing himself as God because a new command has not been given for 4,000 years. 4,000 years ago, Moses walked down the mountain with two tablets of stone with a lot more than 10 commandments written on them. If you read the text, you find it was the 10, but then they were covered front and back. There's 630 some odd laws in the Old Testament based on Mosaic law. Nobody in Israel since then had given a new commandment because nobody had the authority to do it. Moses gave the commandments from God himself. God himself wrote on those tablets and gave them to Moses, and no one had questioned it since then. No one gives new commandments. That's not a thing that you can do unless you're God. So when Jesus says this, he's claiming that he is God. And I don't know how to help us understand how radical what he's doing is, but the only thing I can equate it to is our Bill of Rights, our Constitution. No citizen can just decide, I'm going to add an amendment. I hereby declare, and then add an amendment. As a matter of fact, we'll test this out. I'd like to add one right now. I hereby declare as an amendment to the United States Constitution that daylight savings time is stupid and abolished. I woke up an hour and a half late this morning. I should have only been a half hour late. But daylight savings time. It's stupid. And likes it. And nobody needs it. We're long since agrarian. All right. Nebraska can keep it if they want it. We're squared away. Thanks. But that doesn't do anything. I don't just get to add amendments willy-nilly. There's a whole process. If we can't add amendments to a document that some guys wrote 200 years ago, you definitely can't start adding commandments that God wrote 4,000 years ago. But Jesus does. And he says it's a new one. And this commandment, one of the things that makes it so radical, is that this commandment serves as a summary for all the commandments. This commandment serves as a summary for all the commandments. It's not that Jesus is saying, you don't have to worry about any of the stuff that you've been commanded previously. Go be adulterers. Go murder people. Knock yourselves out as long as you're loving people on the way. You're good. That's not the idea. We get a glimpse of the idea earlier in Christ's life when someone says, what's the greatest commandment? And the response is, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. These are the greatest commandments with promise. On these hang the law and the prophets, meaning the entire Old Testament. And so what Jesus says in that statement is, basically, if you'll focus on loving God and loving others, the commandments will take care of themselves. It's not that you won't be walking in obedience or you'll be walking in disobedience to them. It's that you will automatically obey them by default. And so Jesus is being even more succinct here with this new commandment to love others as I have loved you and saying, as a matter of fact, just love others as I have loved you. Because if you're doing that, if you are loving the people in your life as Jesus loves us, you will by default be loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Because you cannot love as Jesus loved if you're not fueled by Jesus. You will by default. you're not going to have an affair. You're not going to go around murdering. You're not going to steal. You're not going to say unkind words. You're going to outdo one another in hospitality. You're going to be generous. You're going to be humble. You're not going to be greedy if we simply love other people as Christ loved us. It's the command that summarizes all the other commands, which makes it such an impactful command. And here's why it takes walking with Jesus to love like Jesus. Because Jesus loved in superhuman ways. That's the second big one I want you to underline. Let me just say it real quick. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. That's the new command. Now here's why this is so radical. Have you ever been betrayed? Have you ever let someone into your life? Made yourself vulnerable to them? Given them the power to hurt you? And they have? Which, by the way, I think is vitally important to live vulnerable lives and have people invited into our life who do have the power and the capacity to hurt us because they know us that well and we love them that much. That's okay. That's a good thing. But have you ever done that with somebody who then betrayed you? Who used that exposure to hurt you? I know I've not experienced terrible betrayal, but I've tasted it. I've let people in, shared things, been vulnerable with them, and then that ended up getting used against me. That ended up getting turned towards me. That ended up with them judging me and not loving me. And that's hard. I shared years ago about when I did a sermon on forgiveness about a dear friend of mine whose husband had been having multiple affairs and it all blew up in their face one day. She had five kids under the age of 10. That's betrayal. I've never experienced betrayal like that. But I've tasted what it is to let someone in and then watch them hurt me. And if you've experienced betrayal too, let me ask you a question. If you could go back to when that person who hurt you entered into your life, and there was some sort of divine whisper that came to you and said, hey, just so you know, if you let this person in, they will hurt you. They are going to betray you. They're going to let you down and betray your confidence. If you somehow knew that at the very beginning of the relationship where they entered your life, if you knew it, how differently would you treat them? How much would you let them in? Would you let them in at all? When I think of the people who've hurt me, I go back to those places. If you were to ask me that question, hey, if you knew at the beginning that they were going to hurt you if you let them in, what would you do? I wouldn't be their friend. I wouldn't let them in. If my life forced me to be around them, I would be very guarded. I would have treated them completely differently. How would you treat the people in your life who have hurt you if you knew at the onset that they were going to do that? Would you have loved them differently? Would you have not let them in? Would that relationship have looked different? Something occurred to me as I was thinking through this passage. Immediately before Jesus starts this teaching, do you know what happened? He washed the feet of the disciples. And then he said, one of you is going to betray me. And then it comes that it was Judas. And he looked at Judas and he says one of the coolest lines in the Bible, what you're about to do, go and do it quickly. And Judas goes to betray him. Don't miss this. Jesus knew. He knew when he invited him in. When he called Judas to be his disciple. He knew. He knew he was going to get betrayed for 30 pieces of silver. He knew that. He knew who Jesus was when he walked up to him and he tapped his shoulder and he said, I want to invite you into my life for three years. I want you to spend every day with me. And I know what you're going to do at the end of those three years and you don't even know it yet. Jesus knew, man. And here's what's amazing. Nobody else did. We have no indication whatsoever from the text that Jesus treated Judas any differently than any of the other disciples. When they're sitting around the table, and Jesus says, one of you is going to betray me, nobody went, it's Judas, isn't it? I knew. I could tell. Nobody did that. Because Jesus treated them all the same. You understand that? He loved them all the same. For three years, he loved Judas with the same consistency and compassion and tenderness that he loved John. Polar opposite of a disciple. Is that not remarkable? How could you do that? How could you walk every day with someone who was going to betray you to be killed? Not just hurt your feelings like a little sissy, but betray you to be killed. Was gonna be the one who kissed you on the cheek to identify you to the guard of the high priest so that they could arrest you and beat you and kill you. And you love them the exact same as all their peers. Right before Jesus was betrayed, he washed Judas' feet. His grimy, sandaled, third world feet. So that he could go collect his betrayal money with clean toes. He had the freshly minted, humble love of Christ on his feet when he went to cash his check. And that's how Jesus loves Judas. Now here's what's important. You are Judas. I am Judas. We have, all of us, betrayed Christ in word and thought and deed. All of us have trampled on the grace of Christ. All of us have presumed upon his mercy. All of us have cheapened the blood of his sacrifice with our actions and our attitudes and our words. All of us. We are Judas. And yet, knowing the betrayal that you would bring, Jesus loves you anyways. That's the reckless nature of the love that we just sang about a few minutes ago. He continues to pursue us. He continues to come after us. He knows you're going to betray him in word and deed. He knows that you're going to trample on his death. He knows that you're going to cheapen his blood. He knows that and he loves you anyways. And you push him away and you betray him and you act in a way during the week that you won't act on a Sunday morning or you won't act on small group or you'll watch things that you're not supposed to watch. You'll take in things that you're not supposed to take in. You'll foster attitudes that you know he doesn't love and that he doesn't approve of. But he died for those anyways. He knew that you were going to betray him over and over and over again and he died for you anyways. He went anyways. He washed your feet anyways. He loved you anyways. That's how Jesus loves. So when Jesus says, go and love as I have loved you, that's what he means. Go love other people like I love Judas. It's not fair. They're going to hurt you. Okay, that's how I loved. They're not going to reciprocate. You're going to feel foolish. Okay. That's how I loved. It's going to cost something from me that I'm not going to get back. Okay. That's how I loved. That love is so powerful and profound that loving like Jesus is only made possible by walking with Jesus. Loving like Jesus is only made possible by walking with Jesus. We just spent two weeks on abiding in Christ. Two weeks on what it means to abide in him. If we are not abiding in Christ, there is no possible way we can love like Jesus loved. And what's interesting is the promise of abiding is abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. What's the fruit of abiding in Christ? This kind of love. Sacrificial, reckless love that overcomes betrayal and humanity and hardship. This is the fruit of abiding in Christ. And here's what's remarkable about this fruit. Here's, not only does loving others as Christ loved us keep us in line with all the commandments, not only does it keep us attached to him and abiding in him because it's the only possible way to love like that, but it also becomes our defining marker. This is the third remarkable statement that we find in these verses. The third one, underline this. By this, everyone will know you are my disciples. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples. Love, we are told, church, is to be our defining marker to the world. And it's interesting to me how off the mark we can get. I remember one time when I missed the mark really, really badly. I was 15 years old, and we were hosting at our house Thanksgiving or Christmas for my mom's family that year. And we were a teetotaling house. No alcohol at all, ever. It was demon's liquor. And my aunt came over with, at the time, her roommate, Molly. And they brought with them a bottle of wine. And we didn't have a corkscrew in the house. We didn't have a wine opener. And so my mom said, son, will you go next door and borrow a corkscrew from our neighbor? And I, in my misguided 15-year-old piety, said, absolutely not. We don't drink alcohol in this house. And we're not starting today. Not doing it. God help my parents. I must have been impossible. Don't worry. Have you met Lily? I've got it coming. I'm going to walk the path. I refused to go. And my mom, I think probably a little misguidedly proud of me then, and now she's as ashamed of this as I am, didn't make me. I just said, well, looks like we're not doing it today, Indiana. And they put their bottle of wine back in the car. Now, Deanna and Molly had walked away from the church at that point. And as I reflect back on my actions that day, I'm so ashamed that I thought that the defining marker for my faith that day needed to be my piety and my holiness and the rules that I followed and the things that I did and didn't do. And we get really misguided at church that the best Christians are the ones who have the best grasp on their behavior, who do the things they're supposed to do and don't do the things they're not supposed to do, and the best knowledge of Scripture. We tend to judge someone's faith not by how well they love, which is what Jesus says the defining marker should be, but we judge the faith of others by how well they've reined in their behavior and how much they've learned about scripture. And don't get me wrong, those things are important. God is a God of holiness. He does want us to press towards piety, but the press towards piety, the press towards holiness, the press towards righteousness, the press towards having a guilt-free conscience should be in a desire to love as Jesus loved, not in a desire to prove ourselves and our holiness to others. And what kind of damage, what message did it send to my aunt that day? Rejection? Judgment? Holier than thou? It was a singularly unloving act to not just go get the stupid corkscrew. And instead, they felt judged. There's no way my actions turned them on to the church. There's no possible way I did that and they're like, you know what? I see Jesus in that boy. I want to know that Jesus because I want to start telling other people where they're screwing up. But isn't that historically what we look to to define spirituality. When Jesus says, the defining marker of your faith, how I want the world to know you, is by your love for other people. It ought to be our defining characteristic. And I'm not going to wade too deeply into these waters this morning because I don't have time and it's messy. But I would simply ask you, as you think about where church sits in the culture of America, is that our defining characteristic? Is that what the outside world would say that we are known for? It is, however, one of the things I am proud of grace for. Because I do think there are spots and moments where we do this really, really well. And what we see when we love really well is that love is actually the greatest apologetic. Love is the most compelling argument for Christ, especially in a culture saturated with church. If there's somebody in your neighborhood, if there's somebody you work with, if there's a friend that you have on your tennis team or wherever you go, and they don't go to church, let me tell you something. It's not because they haven't heard about it. It's not because they don't know. It's not because they haven't heard the name of Jesus and they're just waiting to be told. They know. And let me tell you something. The people that you know who don't go to church, can I just tell you, they have a reason. And can I tell you this? It's probably a good one. So the greatest apologetic to a culture of people who have on purpose turned away from the church is to love them well. It's more convincing than any book. It's more convincing than A Case for Faith by Lee Strobel, although that's a great one. It's more convincing than any argument or TV show. Showing them the love of Christ compels them towards Christ. I think this is the way I put it. Loving someone in the name of Jesus compels them towards Jesus. Loving someone in the name of Christ like Christ loves compels them towards Christ. And here's why I think it can be so effective and so contagious. I heard this story a couple of weeks ago, and I was so proud when I heard it. In the fall, we had the Addis Jamari, one of our great ministry partners doing great work with the orphans in Ethiopia, had an event last fall. And whenever there's an AJ event, Addis Jamari, it's like 75% grace people, at least, right? And so one of our partners invited some friends that they used to work with to come to the event and see what AJ does. And the friends that they invited are a part of a church in the kind of way that there's a church where you're on their membership role, which is, and you have to remove your letter and stuff like that, which is, I don't understand. I don't understand it. I got a, germane to nothing, I got a letter early on in my tenure here that someone who I had never met was requesting removal of their letter from this church to this other church down the road. And I just wrote them back and I was like, consider all letters moved, ever. You don't have to ever ask me this again. I don't know what this means. So some churches had their letter for like 20 years, but they don't really go. I haven't been since their kids went around. They're kind of cold to church. But they came to this AJ event. And after spending an evening around grace people, they pulled my friend aside and they said, there's something different here. You guys actually like, you like each other. You guys see, everyone knows everyone's name. You seem to get along. This is not like churches we've been around. We want to find out more about your church. So they did. They went to dinner. They told them a little bit more. And I've gotten to spend some time around them. And they say that they're wanting to start coming. They may be watching online. Hey. But it wasn't an argument. It wasn't an invitation. It wasn't a book. It wasn't a moment of conviction. It was an exposure to a group of people who want to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. It was an exposure to the love and the community shared in the church. And they said, I want to be a part of that. That is a compelling love. The challenge, church, is not simply to love each other that way, but to love everyone that way and to be obedient to this new command. Can you imagine with me the power and efficacy of a church that is zealous about loving as Christ loves. Can you imagine how contagious that faith would be? Can you imagine how exuberant our worship would be every Sunday? Can you imagine how much better I'm going to have to step it up to preach to you because you've been preaching to yourself the love of Christ every day and loving everybody in your neighborhood? Can you imagine the power of a group of people who comes together and takes seriously this new command that Jesus gives us and says, you know what? Everything else is fine. It'll take care of itself. I'm going to focus on the loving. And we took steps to abide in Christ, to walk with him, and we let him produce the fruit in our lives, which is this love. And we love everybody the way that Jesus loves Judas and loves us. Can you imagine what God could do with a church of people like that? I asked you earlier, what do you think the Big C Church is known for? What's our defining characteristic? And I don't know where you went and I don't know what you thought, but here's what I do know. We don't have any say over what other churches do, nor should we, by the way. We barely deserve say here, I question it. But we have say over who we are and over what we do. And wouldn't it be amazing if when people heard the name Grace Raleigh in our community, if the first thing they thought was, that church loves well. What if that were our defining characteristic? Let's make it so, Grace. Let's be Christians who love well. Let's be Christians who make that our identifying trait over and above all the other elements of our faith. And let's watch what God can do with a church of people who love like him. Let's pray. Father, we love you because you love us. We can never hope to love like you without you. We thank you for your reckless, sacrificial love. For watching your son suffer and die the way that he did. So that you could claim souls to heaven that would betray you and trample on you over and over again on our way there. God, if nothing else, would we sit humbly and graciously in the reality of your love for us? And as we do that, Father, would it please compel us to go love others in your name? We ask these things in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Hi, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Before I dive into the sermon, a couple things about worship. First of all, Carly B. killed it on that last song. That was great. Yeah, I don't know where she is, but good job, Carly. Her last name is Buchanan, so we call her Carly B. around here. And then the second thing, I just want to let you in on something. And I feel like this is an important matter to bring to the church. Aaron's back there. He knows what I'm about to talk about. I don't know if you noticed during the second song that Carly and Aaron were smiling and looking at me, and I was laughing. Here's why, and I feel like we should all weigh in on this as partners. If you're not from the South, I don't care what you think about this. One of my favorite things about hymns, I'm just totally, this has nothing to do with anything. I'm just telling you a story. One of my favorite things about hymns is how liberal the writers are with apostrophes. In hymns, they'll apostrophe anything, right? And one of my favorite ones is victory. Not victory like an obnoxious carpetbagger. Victory like a southerner. You know what I'm saying? Like victory. It's best in Victory in Jesus, that old hymn. So anyways, last week we're singing that song that we sang, the second one. What's that called, Aaron? I'm not telling. And there's victory in there. There's the word victory in there, but you sing it victory. You know, you sing it like that, but it's not apostrophe. Now it's bummed out. And then like two slides down, we apostrophed flowers, the E in flowers. How do you even, flowers, how do you even say that? That's not a thing. How are we going to apostrophe flowers and not victory? So it just made me mad. And I told Aaron and Carly last week, and I didn't know we were singing it this week. So it comes up and they're both giggling at me and I'm grinning at them. Anyways, now you know too, and we can together peer pressure him to fix the lyrics. So there is an apostrophe and victory as the Lord intended. Okay, let's get started. Actually, these words don't mean anything to you because I know that I'm the boy that cries excited. I know that. I'm excited about everything that I get to preach. I know that I say that to you. I'm really excited about this. This is a sermon that I knew I was going to preach as soon as we planned the series. I knew that we would arrive at this passage, and I've been very much looking forward to diving into it with you. So if you have a Bible with you, and I hope you do, go ahead and turn it to John chapter 13. This is the beginning of the Upper Room Discourse. You'll remember that this is a series called Final Thoughts. These are the final things that Jesus shared with the disciples before he was arrested and tried and crucified. And so it's just Jesus and the disciples in the upper room, and he has some final thoughts for them, and they're in John chapters 13 through 17. So the back half of John chapter 13, after washing their feet, Jesus starts to share with them. And if you look at verses 34 and 35, I'm not sure that you could definitively say what the most important and profound words of Christ are in his whole life. I don't know that there would be an agreement among scholars or pastors or believers as to what are the most important, most profound words Jesus ever spoke. But I know that you couldn't have that conversation without talking about what we find in those verses. I believe that what Jesus says here is so profound and powerful that hyperbole is lost on the import of these verses. So I want to look at them and read them with you. If you're a believer, I hope these are well-trodden verses for you. I hope you already almost know them before I even say them. And I hope, if you have your Bible with you, that you'll grab a pen and that you'll underline these verses. And that you'll highlight some of the phrases. We're going to spend the whole morning in these two verses, and we're going to look at three profound statements that Jesus makes in this compact section of text. And I hope that you'll take a pen and you'll underline and you'll mark. I hope that you'll make notes for yourself in your Bible. I've learned from a young age that if you show me a Bible that's falling apart, then I'll show you a person who isn't. So let's beat up our Bibles. Let's mark in them. Let's scratch in them. And let's note this passage together. John chapter 13, verses 34 and 35. This is Jesus speaking. A new command I give you. Love one another as I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another. That's a well-worn passage. This is a passage we ought to be familiar with. This is a passage of which the profundity cannot be overstated. It's so profound and stuck with the disciples so much in their memory that 30 years later, when two people who were in the room, Peter and John, when they write their epistles, when they write their letters to the church to be spread throughout the church and read throughout the church, they both included this maxim in their instructions, in their brief instructions to the church. In 1 Peter 4, 8, Peter says, above all else, love one another dearly. After everything's said and done, love one another dearly. John, in his three letters, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, over and over and over again, if you say you believe in God and you do not love your brother, then you are a liar and the truth is not in you. He brings it back to love, back to love, back to love. Even Paul, who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament, was not in this room, did not hear this teaching personally, but heard it proclaimed by the disciples after him. When Paul writes his letter to Corinth, he ends it with that famous love passage. And he says, now after everything is said and done, in eternity, these three things remain, faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these? Love. We cannot overstate the importance, the efficacy, and the power of love. And this is what Jesus commands us here. It's how he opens his closing remarks. And so if it's so powerful and effective that everyone who's ever followed Jesus has reminded the people that they lead of this command, then we ought to look at the command and examine it and pick it apart and seek to understand it. And, I think, let the power of it wash over us. So the first portion of the text I want to point you to, a profound statement, is when he says this, a new command I give you. A new command I give you. Underline that in your Bible. Here's why this is profound. We know, because we have the benefit of hindsight, that Jesus is God. We understand the deity of Christ. They did not. They did not yet understand the deity of Christ. Certainly not the way that we do. You remember that when they're on the Sea of Galilee and Jesus is sleeping in the hull of the ship and the wind and the waves are crashing, that they go down and they wake Jesus up. And he says, peace be still. And the storm calms. And he goes back to sleep, a little bit annoyed that his nap got interrupted. And the disciples looked at each other. And they said, it's in the text. And they said, who is this that even the wind and the waves would obey him? They still do not understand the deity of Christ. In this moment, they understand loosely the deity of Christ, but not like we do. And so when Jesus says this new command I give you, he is placing himself solidly in the Trinity. He is placing himself as God because a new command has not been given for 4,000 years. 4,000 years ago, Moses walked down the mountain with two tablets of stone with a lot more than 10 commandments written on them. If you read the text, you find it was the 10, but then they were covered front and back. There's 630 some odd laws in the Old Testament based on Mosaic law. Nobody in Israel since then had given a new commandment because nobody had the authority to do it. Moses gave the commandments from God himself. God himself wrote on those tablets and gave them to Moses, and no one had questioned it since then. No one gives new commandments. That's not a thing that you can do unless you're God. So when Jesus says this, he's claiming that he is God. And I don't know how to help us understand how radical what he's doing is, but the only thing I can equate it to is our Bill of Rights, our Constitution. No citizen can just decide, I'm going to add an amendment. I hereby declare, and then add an amendment. As a matter of fact, we'll test this out. I'd like to add one right now. I hereby declare as an amendment to the United States Constitution that daylight savings time is stupid and abolished. I woke up an hour and a half late this morning. I should have only been a half hour late. But daylight savings time. It's stupid. And likes it. And nobody needs it. We're long since agrarian. All right. Nebraska can keep it if they want it. We're squared away. Thanks. But that doesn't do anything. I don't just get to add amendments willy-nilly. There's a whole process. If we can't add amendments to a document that some guys wrote 200 years ago, you definitely can't start adding commandments that God wrote 4,000 years ago. But Jesus does. And he says it's a new one. And this commandment, one of the things that makes it so radical, is that this commandment serves as a summary for all the commandments. This commandment serves as a summary for all the commandments. It's not that Jesus is saying, you don't have to worry about any of the stuff that you've been commanded previously. Go be adulterers. Go murder people. Knock yourselves out as long as you're loving people on the way. You're good. That's not the idea. We get a glimpse of the idea earlier in Christ's life when someone says, what's the greatest commandment? And the response is, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. These are the greatest commandments with promise. On these hang the law and the prophets, meaning the entire Old Testament. And so what Jesus says in that statement is, basically, if you'll focus on loving God and loving others, the commandments will take care of themselves. It's not that you won't be walking in obedience or you'll be walking in disobedience to them. It's that you will automatically obey them by default. And so Jesus is being even more succinct here with this new commandment to love others as I have loved you and saying, as a matter of fact, just love others as I have loved you. Because if you're doing that, if you are loving the people in your life as Jesus loves us, you will by default be loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Because you cannot love as Jesus loved if you're not fueled by Jesus. You will by default. you're not going to have an affair. You're not going to go around murdering. You're not going to steal. You're not going to say unkind words. You're going to outdo one another in hospitality. You're going to be generous. You're going to be humble. You're not going to be greedy if we simply love other people as Christ loved us. It's the command that summarizes all the other commands, which makes it such an impactful command. And here's why it takes walking with Jesus to love like Jesus. Because Jesus loved in superhuman ways. That's the second big one I want you to underline. Let me just say it real quick. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. That's the new command. Now here's why this is so radical. Have you ever been betrayed? Have you ever let someone into your life? Made yourself vulnerable to them? Given them the power to hurt you? And they have? Which, by the way, I think is vitally important to live vulnerable lives and have people invited into our life who do have the power and the capacity to hurt us because they know us that well and we love them that much. That's okay. That's a good thing. But have you ever done that with somebody who then betrayed you? Who used that exposure to hurt you? I know I've not experienced terrible betrayal, but I've tasted it. I've let people in, shared things, been vulnerable with them, and then that ended up getting used against me. That ended up getting turned towards me. That ended up with them judging me and not loving me. And that's hard. I shared years ago about when I did a sermon on forgiveness about a dear friend of mine whose husband had been having multiple affairs and it all blew up in their face one day. She had five kids under the age of 10. That's betrayal. I've never experienced betrayal like that. But I've tasted what it is to let someone in and then watch them hurt me. And if you've experienced betrayal too, let me ask you a question. If you could go back to when that person who hurt you entered into your life, and there was some sort of divine whisper that came to you and said, hey, just so you know, if you let this person in, they will hurt you. They are going to betray you. They're going to let you down and betray your confidence. If you somehow knew that at the very beginning of the relationship where they entered your life, if you knew it, how differently would you treat them? How much would you let them in? Would you let them in at all? When I think of the people who've hurt me, I go back to those places. If you were to ask me that question, hey, if you knew at the beginning that they were going to hurt you if you let them in, what would you do? I wouldn't be their friend. I wouldn't let them in. If my life forced me to be around them, I would be very guarded. I would have treated them completely differently. How would you treat the people in your life who have hurt you if you knew at the onset that they were going to do that? Would you have loved them differently? Would you have not let them in? Would that relationship have looked different? Something occurred to me as I was thinking through this passage. Immediately before Jesus starts this teaching, do you know what happened? He washed the feet of the disciples. And then he said, one of you is going to betray me. And then it comes that it was Judas. And he looked at Judas and he says one of the coolest lines in the Bible, what you're about to do, go and do it quickly. And Judas goes to betray him. Don't miss this. Jesus knew. He knew when he invited him in. When he called Judas to be his disciple. He knew. He knew he was going to get betrayed for 30 pieces of silver. He knew that. He knew who Jesus was when he walked up to him and he tapped his shoulder and he said, I want to invite you into my life for three years. I want you to spend every day with me. And I know what you're going to do at the end of those three years and you don't even know it yet. Jesus knew, man. And here's what's amazing. Nobody else did. We have no indication whatsoever from the text that Jesus treated Judas any differently than any of the other disciples. When they're sitting around the table, and Jesus says, one of you is going to betray me, nobody went, it's Judas, isn't it? I knew. I could tell. Nobody did that. Because Jesus treated them all the same. You understand that? He loved them all the same. For three years, he loved Judas with the same consistency and compassion and tenderness that he loved John. Polar opposite of a disciple. Is that not remarkable? How could you do that? How could you walk every day with someone who was going to betray you to be killed? Not just hurt your feelings like a little sissy, but betray you to be killed. Was gonna be the one who kissed you on the cheek to identify you to the guard of the high priest so that they could arrest you and beat you and kill you. And you love them the exact same as all their peers. Right before Jesus was betrayed, he washed Judas' feet. His grimy, sandaled, third world feet. So that he could go collect his betrayal money with clean toes. He had the freshly minted, humble love of Christ on his feet when he went to cash his check. And that's how Jesus loves Judas. Now here's what's important. You are Judas. I am Judas. We have, all of us, betrayed Christ in word and thought and deed. All of us have trampled on the grace of Christ. All of us have presumed upon his mercy. All of us have cheapened the blood of his sacrifice with our actions and our attitudes and our words. All of us. We are Judas. And yet, knowing the betrayal that you would bring, Jesus loves you anyways. That's the reckless nature of the love that we just sang about a few minutes ago. He continues to pursue us. He continues to come after us. He knows you're going to betray him in word and deed. He knows that you're going to trample on his death. He knows that you're going to cheapen his blood. He knows that and he loves you anyways. And you push him away and you betray him and you act in a way during the week that you won't act on a Sunday morning or you won't act on small group or you'll watch things that you're not supposed to watch. You'll take in things that you're not supposed to take in. You'll foster attitudes that you know he doesn't love and that he doesn't approve of. But he died for those anyways. He knew that you were going to betray him over and over and over again and he died for you anyways. He went anyways. He washed your feet anyways. He loved you anyways. That's how Jesus loves. So when Jesus says, go and love as I have loved you, that's what he means. Go love other people like I love Judas. It's not fair. They're going to hurt you. Okay, that's how I loved. They're not going to reciprocate. You're going to feel foolish. Okay. That's how I loved. It's going to cost something from me that I'm not going to get back. Okay. That's how I loved. That love is so powerful and profound that loving like Jesus is only made possible by walking with Jesus. Loving like Jesus is only made possible by walking with Jesus. We just spent two weeks on abiding in Christ. Two weeks on what it means to abide in him. If we are not abiding in Christ, there is no possible way we can love like Jesus loved. And what's interesting is the promise of abiding is abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. What's the fruit of abiding in Christ? This kind of love. Sacrificial, reckless love that overcomes betrayal and humanity and hardship. This is the fruit of abiding in Christ. And here's what's remarkable about this fruit. Here's, not only does loving others as Christ loved us keep us in line with all the commandments, not only does it keep us attached to him and abiding in him because it's the only possible way to love like that, but it also becomes our defining marker. This is the third remarkable statement that we find in these verses. The third one, underline this. By this, everyone will know you are my disciples. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples. Love, we are told, church, is to be our defining marker to the world. And it's interesting to me how off the mark we can get. I remember one time when I missed the mark really, really badly. I was 15 years old, and we were hosting at our house Thanksgiving or Christmas for my mom's family that year. And we were a teetotaling house. No alcohol at all, ever. It was demon's liquor. And my aunt came over with, at the time, her roommate, Molly. And they brought with them a bottle of wine. And we didn't have a corkscrew in the house. We didn't have a wine opener. And so my mom said, son, will you go next door and borrow a corkscrew from our neighbor? And I, in my misguided 15-year-old piety, said, absolutely not. We don't drink alcohol in this house. And we're not starting today. Not doing it. God help my parents. I must have been impossible. Don't worry. Have you met Lily? I've got it coming. I'm going to walk the path. I refused to go. And my mom, I think probably a little misguidedly proud of me then, and now she's as ashamed of this as I am, didn't make me. I just said, well, looks like we're not doing it today, Indiana. And they put their bottle of wine back in the car. Now, Deanna and Molly had walked away from the church at that point. And as I reflect back on my actions that day, I'm so ashamed that I thought that the defining marker for my faith that day needed to be my piety and my holiness and the rules that I followed and the things that I did and didn't do. And we get really misguided at church that the best Christians are the ones who have the best grasp on their behavior, who do the things they're supposed to do and don't do the things they're not supposed to do, and the best knowledge of Scripture. We tend to judge someone's faith not by how well they love, which is what Jesus says the defining marker should be, but we judge the faith of others by how well they've reined in their behavior and how much they've learned about scripture. And don't get me wrong, those things are important. God is a God of holiness. He does want us to press towards piety, but the press towards piety, the press towards holiness, the press towards righteousness, the press towards having a guilt-free conscience should be in a desire to love as Jesus loved, not in a desire to prove ourselves and our holiness to others. And what kind of damage, what message did it send to my aunt that day? Rejection? Judgment? Holier than thou? It was a singularly unloving act to not just go get the stupid corkscrew. And instead, they felt judged. There's no way my actions turned them on to the church. There's no possible way I did that and they're like, you know what? I see Jesus in that boy. I want to know that Jesus because I want to start telling other people where they're screwing up. But isn't that historically what we look to to define spirituality. When Jesus says, the defining marker of your faith, how I want the world to know you, is by your love for other people. It ought to be our defining characteristic. And I'm not going to wade too deeply into these waters this morning because I don't have time and it's messy. But I would simply ask you, as you think about where church sits in the culture of America, is that our defining characteristic? Is that what the outside world would say that we are known for? It is, however, one of the things I am proud of grace for. Because I do think there are spots and moments where we do this really, really well. And what we see when we love really well is that love is actually the greatest apologetic. Love is the most compelling argument for Christ, especially in a culture saturated with church. If there's somebody in your neighborhood, if there's somebody you work with, if there's a friend that you have on your tennis team or wherever you go, and they don't go to church, let me tell you something. It's not because they haven't heard about it. It's not because they don't know. It's not because they haven't heard the name of Jesus and they're just waiting to be told. They know. And let me tell you something. The people that you know who don't go to church, can I just tell you, they have a reason. And can I tell you this? It's probably a good one. So the greatest apologetic to a culture of people who have on purpose turned away from the church is to love them well. It's more convincing than any book. It's more convincing than A Case for Faith by Lee Strobel, although that's a great one. It's more convincing than any argument or TV show. Showing them the love of Christ compels them towards Christ. I think this is the way I put it. Loving someone in the name of Jesus compels them towards Jesus. Loving someone in the name of Christ like Christ loves compels them towards Christ. And here's why I think it can be so effective and so contagious. I heard this story a couple of weeks ago, and I was so proud when I heard it. In the fall, we had the Addis Jamari, one of our great ministry partners doing great work with the orphans in Ethiopia, had an event last fall. And whenever there's an AJ event, Addis Jamari, it's like 75% grace people, at least, right? And so one of our partners invited some friends that they used to work with to come to the event and see what AJ does. And the friends that they invited are a part of a church in the kind of way that there's a church where you're on their membership role, which is, and you have to remove your letter and stuff like that, which is, I don't understand. I don't understand it. I got a, germane to nothing, I got a letter early on in my tenure here that someone who I had never met was requesting removal of their letter from this church to this other church down the road. And I just wrote them back and I was like, consider all letters moved, ever. You don't have to ever ask me this again. I don't know what this means. So some churches had their letter for like 20 years, but they don't really go. I haven't been since their kids went around. They're kind of cold to church. But they came to this AJ event. And after spending an evening around grace people, they pulled my friend aside and they said, there's something different here. You guys actually like, you like each other. You guys see, everyone knows everyone's name. You seem to get along. This is not like churches we've been around. We want to find out more about your church. So they did. They went to dinner. They told them a little bit more. And I've gotten to spend some time around them. And they say that they're wanting to start coming. They may be watching online. Hey. But it wasn't an argument. It wasn't an invitation. It wasn't a book. It wasn't a moment of conviction. It was an exposure to a group of people who want to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. It was an exposure to the love and the community shared in the church. And they said, I want to be a part of that. That is a compelling love. The challenge, church, is not simply to love each other that way, but to love everyone that way and to be obedient to this new command. Can you imagine with me the power and efficacy of a church that is zealous about loving as Christ loves. Can you imagine how contagious that faith would be? Can you imagine how exuberant our worship would be every Sunday? Can you imagine how much better I'm going to have to step it up to preach to you because you've been preaching to yourself the love of Christ every day and loving everybody in your neighborhood? Can you imagine the power of a group of people who comes together and takes seriously this new command that Jesus gives us and says, you know what? Everything else is fine. It'll take care of itself. I'm going to focus on the loving. And we took steps to abide in Christ, to walk with him, and we let him produce the fruit in our lives, which is this love. And we love everybody the way that Jesus loves Judas and loves us. Can you imagine what God could do with a church of people like that? I asked you earlier, what do you think the Big C Church is known for? What's our defining characteristic? And I don't know where you went and I don't know what you thought, but here's what I do know. We don't have any say over what other churches do, nor should we, by the way. We barely deserve say here, I question it. But we have say over who we are and over what we do. And wouldn't it be amazing if when people heard the name Grace Raleigh in our community, if the first thing they thought was, that church loves well. What if that were our defining characteristic? Let's make it so, Grace. Let's be Christians who love well. Let's be Christians who make that our identifying trait over and above all the other elements of our faith. And let's watch what God can do with a church of people who love like him. Let's pray. Father, we love you because you love us. We can never hope to love like you without you. We thank you for your reckless, sacrificial love. For watching your son suffer and die the way that he did. So that you could claim souls to heaven that would betray you and trample on you over and over again on our way there. God, if nothing else, would we sit humbly and graciously in the reality of your love for us? And as we do that, Father, would it please compel us to go love others in your name? We ask these things in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Hi, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Before I dive into the sermon, a couple things about worship. First of all, Carly B. killed it on that last song. That was great. Yeah, I don't know where she is, but good job, Carly. Her last name is Buchanan, so we call her Carly B. around here. And then the second thing, I just want to let you in on something. And I feel like this is an important matter to bring to the church. Aaron's back there. He knows what I'm about to talk about. I don't know if you noticed during the second song that Carly and Aaron were smiling and looking at me, and I was laughing. Here's why, and I feel like we should all weigh in on this as partners. If you're not from the South, I don't care what you think about this. One of my favorite things about hymns, I'm just totally, this has nothing to do with anything. I'm just telling you a story. One of my favorite things about hymns is how liberal the writers are with apostrophes. In hymns, they'll apostrophe anything, right? And one of my favorite ones is victory. Not victory like an obnoxious carpetbagger. Victory like a southerner. You know what I'm saying? Like victory. It's best in Victory in Jesus, that old hymn. So anyways, last week we're singing that song that we sang, the second one. What's that called, Aaron? I'm not telling. And there's victory in there. There's the word victory in there, but you sing it victory. You know, you sing it like that, but it's not apostrophe. Now it's bummed out. And then like two slides down, we apostrophed flowers, the E in flowers. How do you even, flowers, how do you even say that? That's not a thing. How are we going to apostrophe flowers and not victory? So it just made me mad. And I told Aaron and Carly last week, and I didn't know we were singing it this week. So it comes up and they're both giggling at me and I'm grinning at them. Anyways, now you know too, and we can together peer pressure him to fix the lyrics. So there is an apostrophe and victory as the Lord intended. Okay, let's get started. Actually, these words don't mean anything to you because I know that I'm the boy that cries excited. I know that. I'm excited about everything that I get to preach. I know that I say that to you. I'm really excited about this. This is a sermon that I knew I was going to preach as soon as we planned the series. I knew that we would arrive at this passage, and I've been very much looking forward to diving into it with you. So if you have a Bible with you, and I hope you do, go ahead and turn it to John chapter 13. This is the beginning of the Upper Room Discourse. You'll remember that this is a series called Final Thoughts. These are the final things that Jesus shared with the disciples before he was arrested and tried and crucified. And so it's just Jesus and the disciples in the upper room, and he has some final thoughts for them, and they're in John chapters 13 through 17. So the back half of John chapter 13, after washing their feet, Jesus starts to share with them. And if you look at verses 34 and 35, I'm not sure that you could definitively say what the most important and profound words of Christ are in his whole life. I don't know that there would be an agreement among scholars or pastors or believers as to what are the most important, most profound words Jesus ever spoke. But I know that you couldn't have that conversation without talking about what we find in those verses. I believe that what Jesus says here is so profound and powerful that hyperbole is lost on the import of these verses. So I want to look at them and read them with you. If you're a believer, I hope these are well-trodden verses for you. I hope you already almost know them before I even say them. And I hope, if you have your Bible with you, that you'll grab a pen and that you'll underline these verses. And that you'll highlight some of the phrases. We're going to spend the whole morning in these two verses, and we're going to look at three profound statements that Jesus makes in this compact section of text. And I hope that you'll take a pen and you'll underline and you'll mark. I hope that you'll make notes for yourself in your Bible. I've learned from a young age that if you show me a Bible that's falling apart, then I'll show you a person who isn't. So let's beat up our Bibles. Let's mark in them. Let's scratch in them. And let's note this passage together. John chapter 13, verses 34 and 35. This is Jesus speaking. A new command I give you. Love one another as I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love one another. That's a well-worn passage. This is a passage we ought to be familiar with. This is a passage of which the profundity cannot be overstated. It's so profound and stuck with the disciples so much in their memory that 30 years later, when two people who were in the room, Peter and John, when they write their epistles, when they write their letters to the church to be spread throughout the church and read throughout the church, they both included this maxim in their instructions, in their brief instructions to the church. In 1 Peter 4, 8, Peter says, above all else, love one another dearly. After everything's said and done, love one another dearly. John, in his three letters, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, over and over and over again, if you say you believe in God and you do not love your brother, then you are a liar and the truth is not in you. He brings it back to love, back to love, back to love. Even Paul, who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament, was not in this room, did not hear this teaching personally, but heard it proclaimed by the disciples after him. When Paul writes his letter to Corinth, he ends it with that famous love passage. And he says, now after everything is said and done, in eternity, these three things remain, faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these? Love. We cannot overstate the importance, the efficacy, and the power of love. And this is what Jesus commands us here. It's how he opens his closing remarks. And so if it's so powerful and effective that everyone who's ever followed Jesus has reminded the people that they lead of this command, then we ought to look at the command and examine it and pick it apart and seek to understand it. And, I think, let the power of it wash over us. So the first portion of the text I want to point you to, a profound statement, is when he says this, a new command I give you. A new command I give you. Underline that in your Bible. Here's why this is profound. We know, because we have the benefit of hindsight, that Jesus is God. We understand the deity of Christ. They did not. They did not yet understand the deity of Christ. Certainly not the way that we do. You remember that when they're on the Sea of Galilee and Jesus is sleeping in the hull of the ship and the wind and the waves are crashing, that they go down and they wake Jesus up. And he says, peace be still. And the storm calms. And he goes back to sleep, a little bit annoyed that his nap got interrupted. And the disciples looked at each other. And they said, it's in the text. And they said, who is this that even the wind and the waves would obey him? They still do not understand the deity of Christ. In this moment, they understand loosely the deity of Christ, but not like we do. And so when Jesus says this new command I give you, he is placing himself solidly in the Trinity. He is placing himself as God because a new command has not been given for 4,000 years. 4,000 years ago, Moses walked down the mountain with two tablets of stone with a lot more than 10 commandments written on them. If you read the text, you find it was the 10, but then they were covered front and back. There's 630 some odd laws in the Old Testament based on Mosaic law. Nobody in Israel since then had given a new commandment because nobody had the authority to do it. Moses gave the commandments from God himself. God himself wrote on those tablets and gave them to Moses, and no one had questioned it since then. No one gives new commandments. That's not a thing that you can do unless you're God. So when Jesus says this, he's claiming that he is God. And I don't know how to help us understand how radical what he's doing is, but the only thing I can equate it to is our Bill of Rights, our Constitution. No citizen can just decide, I'm going to add an amendment. I hereby declare, and then add an amendment. As a matter of fact, we'll test this out. I'd like to add one right now. I hereby declare as an amendment to the United States Constitution that daylight savings time is stupid and abolished. I woke up an hour and a half late this morning. I should have only been a half hour late. But daylight savings time. It's stupid. And likes it. And nobody needs it. We're long since agrarian. All right. Nebraska can keep it if they want it. We're squared away. Thanks. But that doesn't do anything. I don't just get to add amendments willy-nilly. There's a whole process. If we can't add amendments to a document that some guys wrote 200 years ago, you definitely can't start adding commandments that God wrote 4,000 years ago. But Jesus does. And he says it's a new one. And this commandment, one of the things that makes it so radical, is that this commandment serves as a summary for all the commandments. This commandment serves as a summary for all the commandments. It's not that Jesus is saying, you don't have to worry about any of the stuff that you've been commanded previously. Go be adulterers. Go murder people. Knock yourselves out as long as you're loving people on the way. You're good. That's not the idea. We get a glimpse of the idea earlier in Christ's life when someone says, what's the greatest commandment? And the response is, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. These are the greatest commandments with promise. On these hang the law and the prophets, meaning the entire Old Testament. And so what Jesus says in that statement is, basically, if you'll focus on loving God and loving others, the commandments will take care of themselves. It's not that you won't be walking in obedience or you'll be walking in disobedience to them. It's that you will automatically obey them by default. And so Jesus is being even more succinct here with this new commandment to love others as I have loved you and saying, as a matter of fact, just love others as I have loved you. Because if you're doing that, if you are loving the people in your life as Jesus loves us, you will by default be loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Because you cannot love as Jesus loved if you're not fueled by Jesus. You will by default. you're not going to have an affair. You're not going to go around murdering. You're not going to steal. You're not going to say unkind words. You're going to outdo one another in hospitality. You're going to be generous. You're going to be humble. You're not going to be greedy if we simply love other people as Christ loved us. It's the command that summarizes all the other commands, which makes it such an impactful command. And here's why it takes walking with Jesus to love like Jesus. Because Jesus loved in superhuman ways. That's the second big one I want you to underline. Let me just say it real quick. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. That's the new command. Now here's why this is so radical. Have you ever been betrayed? Have you ever let someone into your life? Made yourself vulnerable to them? Given them the power to hurt you? And they have? Which, by the way, I think is vitally important to live vulnerable lives and have people invited into our life who do have the power and the capacity to hurt us because they know us that well and we love them that much. That's okay. That's a good thing. But have you ever done that with somebody who then betrayed you? Who used that exposure to hurt you? I know I've not experienced terrible betrayal, but I've tasted it. I've let people in, shared things, been vulnerable with them, and then that ended up getting used against me. That ended up getting turned towards me. That ended up with them judging me and not loving me. And that's hard. I shared years ago about when I did a sermon on forgiveness about a dear friend of mine whose husband had been having multiple affairs and it all blew up in their face one day. She had five kids under the age of 10. That's betrayal. I've never experienced betrayal like that. But I've tasted what it is to let someone in and then watch them hurt me. And if you've experienced betrayal too, let me ask you a question. If you could go back to when that person who hurt you entered into your life, and there was some sort of divine whisper that came to you and said, hey, just so you know, if you let this person in, they will hurt you. They are going to betray you. They're going to let you down and betray your confidence. If you somehow knew that at the very beginning of the relationship where they entered your life, if you knew it, how differently would you treat them? How much would you let them in? Would you let them in at all? When I think of the people who've hurt me, I go back to those places. If you were to ask me that question, hey, if you knew at the beginning that they were going to hurt you if you let them in, what would you do? I wouldn't be their friend. I wouldn't let them in. If my life forced me to be around them, I would be very guarded. I would have treated them completely differently. How would you treat the people in your life who have hurt you if you knew at the onset that they were going to do that? Would you have loved them differently? Would you have not let them in? Would that relationship have looked different? Something occurred to me as I was thinking through this passage. Immediately before Jesus starts this teaching, do you know what happened? He washed the feet of the disciples. And then he said, one of you is going to betray me. And then it comes that it was Judas. And he looked at Judas and he says one of the coolest lines in the Bible, what you're about to do, go and do it quickly. And Judas goes to betray him. Don't miss this. Jesus knew. He knew when he invited him in. When he called Judas to be his disciple. He knew. He knew he was going to get betrayed for 30 pieces of silver. He knew that. He knew who Jesus was when he walked up to him and he tapped his shoulder and he said, I want to invite you into my life for three years. I want you to spend every day with me. And I know what you're going to do at the end of those three years and you don't even know it yet. Jesus knew, man. And here's what's amazing. Nobody else did. We have no indication whatsoever from the text that Jesus treated Judas any differently than any of the other disciples. When they're sitting around the table, and Jesus says, one of you is going to betray me, nobody went, it's Judas, isn't it? I knew. I could tell. Nobody did that. Because Jesus treated them all the same. You understand that? He loved them all the same. For three years, he loved Judas with the same consistency and compassion and tenderness that he loved John. Polar opposite of a disciple. Is that not remarkable? How could you do that? How could you walk every day with someone who was going to betray you to be killed? Not just hurt your feelings like a little sissy, but betray you to be killed. Was gonna be the one who kissed you on the cheek to identify you to the guard of the high priest so that they could arrest you and beat you and kill you. And you love them the exact same as all their peers. Right before Jesus was betrayed, he washed Judas' feet. His grimy, sandaled, third world feet. So that he could go collect his betrayal money with clean toes. He had the freshly minted, humble love of Christ on his feet when he went to cash his check. And that's how Jesus loves Judas. Now here's what's important. You are Judas. I am Judas. We have, all of us, betrayed Christ in word and thought and deed. All of us have trampled on the grace of Christ. All of us have presumed upon his mercy. All of us have cheapened the blood of his sacrifice with our actions and our attitudes and our words. All of us. We are Judas. And yet, knowing the betrayal that you would bring, Jesus loves you anyways. That's the reckless nature of the love that we just sang about a few minutes ago. He continues to pursue us. He continues to come after us. He knows you're going to betray him in word and deed. He knows that you're going to trample on his death. He knows that you're going to cheapen his blood. He knows that and he loves you anyways. And you push him away and you betray him and you act in a way during the week that you won't act on a Sunday morning or you won't act on small group or you'll watch things that you're not supposed to watch. You'll take in things that you're not supposed to take in. You'll foster attitudes that you know he doesn't love and that he doesn't approve of. But he died for those anyways. He knew that you were going to betray him over and over and over again and he died for you anyways. He went anyways. He washed your feet anyways. He loved you anyways. That's how Jesus loves. So when Jesus says, go and love as I have loved you, that's what he means. Go love other people like I love Judas. It's not fair. They're going to hurt you. Okay, that's how I loved. They're not going to reciprocate. You're going to feel foolish. Okay. That's how I loved. It's going to cost something from me that I'm not going to get back. Okay. That's how I loved. That love is so powerful and profound that loving like Jesus is only made possible by walking with Jesus. Loving like Jesus is only made possible by walking with Jesus. We just spent two weeks on abiding in Christ. Two weeks on what it means to abide in him. If we are not abiding in Christ, there is no possible way we can love like Jesus loved. And what's interesting is the promise of abiding is abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. What's the fruit of abiding in Christ? This kind of love. Sacrificial, reckless love that overcomes betrayal and humanity and hardship. This is the fruit of abiding in Christ. And here's what's remarkable about this fruit. Here's, not only does loving others as Christ loved us keep us in line with all the commandments, not only does it keep us attached to him and abiding in him because it's the only possible way to love like that, but it also becomes our defining marker. This is the third remarkable statement that we find in these verses. The third one, underline this. By this, everyone will know you are my disciples. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples. Love, we are told, church, is to be our defining marker to the world. And it's interesting to me how off the mark we can get. I remember one time when I missed the mark really, really badly. I was 15 years old, and we were hosting at our house Thanksgiving or Christmas for my mom's family that year. And we were a teetotaling house. No alcohol at all, ever. It was demon's liquor. And my aunt came over with, at the time, her roommate, Molly. And they brought with them a bottle of wine. And we didn't have a corkscrew in the house. We didn't have a wine opener. And so my mom said, son, will you go next door and borrow a corkscrew from our neighbor? And I, in my misguided 15-year-old piety, said, absolutely not. We don't drink alcohol in this house. And we're not starting today. Not doing it. God help my parents. I must have been impossible. Don't worry. Have you met Lily? I've got it coming. I'm going to walk the path. I refused to go. And my mom, I think probably a little misguidedly proud of me then, and now she's as ashamed of this as I am, didn't make me. I just said, well, looks like we're not doing it today, Indiana. And they put their bottle of wine back in the car. Now, Deanna and Molly had walked away from the church at that point. And as I reflect back on my actions that day, I'm so ashamed that I thought that the defining marker for my faith that day needed to be my piety and my holiness and the rules that I followed and the things that I did and didn't do. And we get really misguided at church that the best Christians are the ones who have the best grasp on their behavior, who do the things they're supposed to do and don't do the things they're not supposed to do, and the best knowledge of Scripture. We tend to judge someone's faith not by how well they love, which is what Jesus says the defining marker should be, but we judge the faith of others by how well they've reined in their behavior and how much they've learned about scripture. And don't get me wrong, those things are important. God is a God of holiness. He does want us to press towards piety, but the press towards piety, the press towards holiness, the press towards righteousness, the press towards having a guilt-free conscience should be in a desire to love as Jesus loved, not in a desire to prove ourselves and our holiness to others. And what kind of damage, what message did it send to my aunt that day? Rejection? Judgment? Holier than thou? It was a singularly unloving act to not just go get the stupid corkscrew. And instead, they felt judged. There's no way my actions turned them on to the church. There's no possible way I did that and they're like, you know what? I see Jesus in that boy. I want to know that Jesus because I want to start telling other people where they're screwing up. But isn't that historically what we look to to define spirituality. When Jesus says, the defining marker of your faith, how I want the world to know you, is by your love for other people. It ought to be our defining characteristic. And I'm not going to wade too deeply into these waters this morning because I don't have time and it's messy. But I would simply ask you, as you think about where church sits in the culture of America, is that our defining characteristic? Is that what the outside world would say that we are known for? It is, however, one of the things I am proud of grace for. Because I do think there are spots and moments where we do this really, really well. And what we see when we love really well is that love is actually the greatest apologetic. Love is the most compelling argument for Christ, especially in a culture saturated with church. If there's somebody in your neighborhood, if there's somebody you work with, if there's a friend that you have on your tennis team or wherever you go, and they don't go to church, let me tell you something. It's not because they haven't heard about it. It's not because they don't know. It's not because they haven't heard the name of Jesus and they're just waiting to be told. They know. And let me tell you something. The people that you know who don't go to church, can I just tell you, they have a reason. And can I tell you this? It's probably a good one. So the greatest apologetic to a culture of people who have on purpose turned away from the church is to love them well. It's more convincing than any book. It's more convincing than A Case for Faith by Lee Strobel, although that's a great one. It's more convincing than any argument or TV show. Showing them the love of Christ compels them towards Christ. I think this is the way I put it. Loving someone in the name of Jesus compels them towards Jesus. Loving someone in the name of Christ like Christ loves compels them towards Christ. And here's why I think it can be so effective and so contagious. I heard this story a couple of weeks ago, and I was so proud when I heard it. In the fall, we had the Addis Jamari, one of our great ministry partners doing great work with the orphans in Ethiopia, had an event last fall. And whenever there's an AJ event, Addis Jamari, it's like 75% grace people, at least, right? And so one of our partners invited some friends that they used to work with to come to the event and see what AJ does. And the friends that they invited are a part of a church in the kind of way that there's a church where you're on their membership role, which is, and you have to remove your letter and stuff like that, which is, I don't understand. I don't understand it. I got a, germane to nothing, I got a letter early on in my tenure here that someone who I had never met was requesting removal of their letter from this church to this other church down the road. And I just wrote them back and I was like, consider all letters moved, ever. You don't have to ever ask me this again. I don't know what this means. So some churches had their letter for like 20 years, but they don't really go. I haven't been since their kids went around. They're kind of cold to church. But they came to this AJ event. And after spending an evening around grace people, they pulled my friend aside and they said, there's something different here. You guys actually like, you like each other. You guys see, everyone knows everyone's name. You seem to get along. This is not like churches we've been around. We want to find out more about your church. So they did. They went to dinner. They told them a little bit more. And I've gotten to spend some time around them. And they say that they're wanting to start coming. They may be watching online. Hey. But it wasn't an argument. It wasn't an invitation. It wasn't a book. It wasn't a moment of conviction. It was an exposure to a group of people who want to connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. It was an exposure to the love and the community shared in the church. And they said, I want to be a part of that. That is a compelling love. The challenge, church, is not simply to love each other that way, but to love everyone that way and to be obedient to this new command. Can you imagine with me the power and efficacy of a church that is zealous about loving as Christ loves. Can you imagine how contagious that faith would be? Can you imagine how exuberant our worship would be every Sunday? Can you imagine how much better I'm going to have to step it up to preach to you because you've been preaching to yourself the love of Christ every day and loving everybody in your neighborhood? Can you imagine the power of a group of people who comes together and takes seriously this new command that Jesus gives us and says, you know what? Everything else is fine. It'll take care of itself. I'm going to focus on the loving. And we took steps to abide in Christ, to walk with him, and we let him produce the fruit in our lives, which is this love. And we love everybody the way that Jesus loves Judas and loves us. Can you imagine what God could do with a church of people like that? I asked you earlier, what do you think the Big C Church is known for? What's our defining characteristic? And I don't know where you went and I don't know what you thought, but here's what I do know. We don't have any say over what other churches do, nor should we, by the way. We barely deserve say here, I question it. But we have say over who we are and over what we do. And wouldn't it be amazing if when people heard the name Grace Raleigh in our community, if the first thing they thought was, that church loves well. What if that were our defining characteristic? Let's make it so, Grace. Let's be Christians who love well. Let's be Christians who make that our identifying trait over and above all the other elements of our faith. And let's watch what God can do with a church of people who love like him. Let's pray. Father, we love you because you love us. We can never hope to love like you without you. We thank you for your reckless, sacrificial love. For watching your son suffer and die the way that he did. So that you could claim souls to heaven that would betray you and trample on you over and over again on our way there. God, if nothing else, would we sit humbly and graciously in the reality of your love for us? And as we do that, Father, would it please compel us to go love others in your name? We ask these things in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Well, good morning, First Service. My name is Nate. I am the lead pastor here. It's so good to see all of you. Thanks for being here on this May Sunday, on the last Sunday of our regular schedule. Next Sunday for Memorial Day weekend, we're going to go to our summer schedule and have one service that meets at 10 o'clock through the summer, and then we'll kick in two services again after Labor Day when things pick back up in September. So I'm kind of looking forward to the one big family feel that we can afford ourselves over the summer and the things that that's going to provide for us. So I'm excited about that. So again, next Sunday, 10 o'clock, if you get here at the 9.30 time, then we'll just hang out with you until the service starts. And my feelings won't be hurt if you leave 30 minutes early. Like right when the sermon starts, you just bolt because that's been your hour. That's fine. But that's going to be our summer schedule. I'm excited about that. This morning is the second part in our series about the Holy Spirit called The Forgotten God, because we talk a lot about God the Father. We learn a lot about God the Son. But in some church circles, in a lot of church circles, we often forget about the Holy Spirit. And so we wanted to take four weeks and slow down and focus our energy and our effort and our intellect on the Holy Spirit and what he does for us and what his ministry is to us. So last week, we started off by looking at this absurd statement that Jesus makes in John chapter 16, when he tells the disciples, and by extension us, hey, it's better for you that I go, that you don't have my physical presence next to you all the time, because if I don't go, then you will not receive the helper or the comforter that we know as the Holy Spirit. And that feels absurd, because we talked about, man, how much different would life be if we had Jesus right next to us all the time? But then we went through the reasons that that's true. And what we discovered is that it's better to have the Spirit because the Spirit is omnipresent and with us all the time. If I want to be in the presence of the Spirit and the Spirit is at your house, I don't have to convince Him to come to my house. He's in me. We are the temples of the Spirit. So He's with us all the time. And then we realize that the role or the job of the Spirit is to continue the ministry of Jesus, both through us in the form of spiritual gifts that we're going to talk about this morning, and to us as He grows us and sanctifies us. It takes us through the process of becoming more like God in character. That's his ministry to us. That's the roles of the Spirit that we're going to talk about next week. And then the last week, we're going to answer a really difficult question. How do we synthesize what we've learned about the Spirit with what we've experienced of the Spirit? Because sometimes those aren't the same things. But this week, we're looking at the spiritual gifts, how the Holy Spirit continues the ministry of Jesus through us. To do that, I want us to think about the idea of this word privilege, okay? And I don't mean privilege in the politically charged, like CNN, Fox way, where individuals may or may not be more than others. I don't mean that. I mean it in just the good old-fashioned way of, man, what a privilege this is to be doing this thing. When I think about privilege, I thought about a couple of weeks ago, somebody in the church, one of our great grace partners, who is now incidentally my favorite grace partner, emailed me and said, hey man, I've got four tickets to the Champions Club at PNC Arena for the Carolina Hurricanes' last home game. If they win this game, we may go to the playoffs. They're probably going to clinch the playoffs at this game. Would you like to come and bring some staff members? Yes, I would. I would love to. I don't care what sport is playing. When you say Champions Club with free buffet, I'm there. It can be women's field hockey. I'm in. Let's go. Right? So I went. We brought a couple other folks with us. And we get there. And you walk through the arena. Well, first of all, you park like right outside the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks. This is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in. You're walking through the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks, this is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in, you're walking through the arena, and then you get to this part where they have a concierge like behind these booths, and they're very important. And you give them like blood and urine and social security, and then they let you in, right? They let you in. And then once you're in, it's carpeted, and there's fireplaces and mahogany, and it is swanky, man. And then they have these buffets of food, so you don't have to pay $12 for the Cruddy Stadium Burger. Like, you get the buffet right there. And then all the ice cream and cookies that you can eat. They give you little tickets to go to the bar and get you a drink if that's what you want to do. You can, like, float out of there on Coke if you want to. It's amazing, right? And then you sit down. You get your food, and you go, and you sit down. And you're in these plush leather seats as you look at the ice and then the other peasants that don't get to sit where you get to sit. And this really ruined me. I don't think I can ever watch a hockey game with poor people again. But it was just an incredible experience, right? And, like, towards the end of the game, the team that they needed to lose lost, and the Hurricanes were winning, and then they scored another goal to kind of cinch the game, and the whole crowd knows, oh my goodness, we're going to the playoffs. I haven't been to the playoffs in a long time, so the place is going nuts, and it was super fun, and it was a really kind of electric atmosphere to be in. And the whole time, I thought, my goodness, I don't deserve this. This is too nice for me. You know, there's a proverb where Solomon says, if the king invites you to dinner, don't look at the food. Like, don't get used to that. That's going to suck you in. Like, don't get used to that. Keep your eye on what you can afford for yourself. And the whole time, I'm trying to remember this proverb, don't get used to this because you're one of those people, right? You don't deserve to be here. And then I thought, man, there are other people who love the Hurricanes so much that this would be a huge deal for them to be able to be a part of this excitement. And I'm not a Hurricanes fan. I mean, I watched the playoff games. I cheered for them. But I went to the gift shop that night and thought, I should get something And then I looked at like the $26 hat and I thought, I don't want this $26 worth. I want this about $12 worth. So then I left. So like, I'm not even a fan, but I get to be here, part of this electricity. And I realized, man, what a privilege this is. Because a privilege is something that you haven't earned and you don't deserve, but you get to experience anyways. You get invited into this experience anyways. And you guys have had different privileges in your life. We could probably all tell stories about times when we got to do a thing or meet a person or be in a conversation or have an experience that we kind of looked around and thought, gosh, I don't deserve to be here. This is really incredible. So as we think about this idea of privilege, life has some pretty great privileges. I think of parenthood. Parenthood's a phenomenal privilege, isn't it? We have a three-year-old daughter named Lily. And daily I'm reminded of the privilege that it is to be her parent. Like I'm the one that gets to watch her. Like right now we're learning to go to the bathroom the right way. And so she's celebrating and she gets her M&Ms and she's figuring that out on her own. And like we get to celebrate that with her and be happy with her as she does that. We're the ones that when she wakes up in the middle of the night, we get to comfort her. We're the ones that when she's scared, she runs to. When she gets here for the second service, she's going to see me and yell, Dad, and she's going to run to me, and it's going to be really fun. And what a great privilege it is to be the recipient of those hugs. And if you're a parent, then you know that parenthood is one of life's great privileges. Well, I want to submit to you this morning this idea that ministry is one of life's great privileges. Ministry, being involved in the building of the church, is one of life's great privileges. And here's what I mean. Jesus spent three years on this earth. He could have come into adulthood, lived a perfect life, died on the cross for us and go to heaven, but he spent three extra years on this earth, I am convinced, to train the disciples to do ministry, to build the church, to leave to them the keys to the kingdom and say, this is my kingdom on earth. It is your responsibility to grow it and nourish it and grow others and love people towards me. And then the disciples trained the next generation, and then they changed the generation after that. And it got passed on down as this holy responsibility, a holy mantle that we carry until each living generation of Christians, it becomes our responsibility to carry the mantle of ministry. That's why Peter says in his letters at the end of the New Testament that we, Christians, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then Peter tells you that you are a part of a holy priesthood, that you are a chosen nation, that you are cut from the same quarry as Abraham and David and Moses, and that it is your responsibility to carry on the ministry of Jesus. And when I talk about ministry this morning, it's an important thing to understand. I don't mean something that's organized. I don't mean vocational ministry, going pro and getting paid to be a Christian. I don't mean it like that. I don't mean something that's organized where you have to volunteer for something. I don't mean structured ministry. When I think of ministry, I think true ministry is simply loving others towards Jesus. When I say that we get invited into ministry by Jesus, when we get called to holy priesthood, when we get told that we are the torchbearers to carry on the legacy of the church, all I mean is nothing structured. All I mean is simply loving others towards Jesus. That's how we talk about ministry at Grace. That's what that means. And I believe it to be one of the great privileges in life for several reasons. One reason is this is God, the creator of the universe, who created you and knows the number of hairs on your head, who knows everything that's ever happened, and he is chiefly concerned with his kingdom and bringing other people into his kingdom and into a knowledge of him. That's his chief concern. That's what he wants. That's the whole reason you're left on this earth after you become a Christian is to bring as many people to heaven with you as you go, to love as many people towards Jesus with you as you possibly can on your way to spend eternity with God. That's the reason that we are here. And in ministry, Jesus has invited you in to participate in that plan. He's given you a front row seat to the most important thing happening in the universe. And here's the deal. He's going to get it done. The church is going to grow. And I hate to say it this way because I don't want to be overly flippant about it, but the church is going to grow with or without you. The church doesn't need your talent. Church doesn't need your money. Church doesn't need your intelligence. God doesn't need your ability. He's going to grow up with or without you. He's definitely going to grow up with or without me. But he's invited us in to participate in what he's doing. And that, to me, is amazing. He's invited us in to be conduits of the love that he shows us. He shows us a perfect love that is boundless, that is reckless, that knows nothing that can stop it. Nothing can take us away from that love. He offers that love to us and he invites us to be conduits of that love as we show it to other people. And I believe ministry to be one of life's great privileges because one of our biggest fears in life is to live a life that doesn't matter, right? One of our biggest fears in life, what all people do and what I've experienced in my friends and in my parents and in people that I've seen hit the back nine of life. I don't know how you define that. I don't want to throw out a decade and make anybody feel old. So people who begin to think about their legacy once they get through their really productive years, what do they always begin to think about? What's my legacy? What am I going to leave behind? What kind of difference has my life made? We want to know that we matter, and ministry ensures that our life matters. There's this great quote. I heard it from D.L. Moody, but it's attributed to a bunch of different people. But he said, one of the most tragic things in life you'll see is for someone to spend their entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and find that it was propped against the wrong building. Ministry insulates us against that. It makes us matter. It's an offer from God. Here's something that you can invest your life in that will matter for all of eternity. Here's a way to ensure that when you die one day and you look back on your life, you can be sure that you're sure that you're sure that it mattered that you invested your life well because he's invited you into the process of loving other people towards him. And I think that this promise, this insurance that our life will matter is incredibly important and maybe increasingly so in a world that lurches for ways to matter in all kinds of ways and screams out to everyone paying attention, we just want to matter. Jen and I were in New York City this last week, and it was very fun. It was pretty much an eating vacation. I walked about 11 miles a day and gained four pounds, so I don't know how I managed to do that, but it was fun. And one of the things we noticed everywhere we went, and as girls, I don't mean to pick on girls, but it was girls. It was girls posing for Instagram pictures. Everywhere. Like every tourist site that we went to, Central Park, we went to this thing called the Vessel at Hudson Yards, and everywhere we went, there was a couple of girls who were dressed nicer than everybody else there, had on the makeup and the hair and the fake eyelashes and the whole deal, and they're posing. They got their friend taking pictures of them. And they're posing like for all of these candids, you know, like that kind of thing, you know, and they're kind of like doing their hair. And Jen and I just started like, we laugh at it. We find them and we're just sitting over there going in this hilarious. But after a while, it started to break my heart because you know what those girls are saying? I want to matter. I'm going to post this somewhere. Will you please tell me that I'm pretty? This is how I gain my sense of worth. Will you please tell me that I matter? And we all do that in one way or another. We all preen to matter in one way or another. We all lurch for significance in one way or another. And ministry says, here, here's a way to ensure that your life matters and that it matters for all eternity. And I think intuitively we know that ministry is one of life's great privileges. I talked to Jen, who a lot of you guys don't know this, but Jen for her entire adult life has poured into groups of young girls, middle school, high school age girls. And I asked her, what brings you joy? What have been your privileges as you've done ministry? And we talked about one of her close friends, this girl named Elizabeth. When Jen got out of college, she began to teach fifth grade. And when those fifth grade girls graduated from elementary school and moved into middle school, Jen started a Bible study for them, and they would meet in her classroom early one day. And one of those girls was named Elizabeth. And Jen's gotten to watch Elizabeth grow into a young woman who loves the Lord, into a young woman who leads her own Bible studies and her own discipleship groups and pours into young women on her own. And she tells those young girls who have never met Jen some of the things that Jen shared with her. And so now there's multi-generational love and wisdom going on because Jen had the opportunity to pour her life into those girls. And she still gets texts from them and calls from them. And she still gets to celebrate with them. And she still gets to mourn with them. And when you minister to people and when you love on people, you get invited into these situations that feel like such a privilege, like, my goodness, I don't deserve to be here. This is incredible. We know experientially that when we minister, when God uses us in the life of others, we come alive. That's why I think it's one of God's great privileges that he offers us to be in ministry. The deal with ministry, however, once we become Christians and God says, okay, go grow the church, is that we're grossly unqualified to grow the church. We are grossly and radically unqualified to do ministry because ministry requires supernatural power. Someone has to realize that they're a sinner, that they need Jesus, and then come to Jesus and repent. Ministry is hard. Sometimes ministry requires saying the exact right word at the exact right time. Sometimes loving on people requires you to say challenging things to them that are really difficult and awkward and uncomfortable to say. Sometimes it means that you have to apply grace to them and not say the thing that you want to say because they need more time to develop on your own. Sometimes ministry means discerning between spirits so we really know what's going on here. Sometimes it means being able to explain the Bible in ways that are really difficult or difficult concepts that we're not sure what they actually mean. Ministry is difficult. Ministry works kind of like your first job. For most of us, we went to college, and after we went to college, we got our job. And at college, what'd they tell you they were doing? We're preparing you to go into the workforce. We're preparing you for your job. And then you get to your job, which is most of the time outside of your major, and you begin to work, and you realize oh my gosh, they did not prepare me for the workforce. I got to figure this out. And you do on-the-job training, right? Spiritual gifts that the Spirit gives us so that we can do ministry are God's on-the-job training. This is why we have spiritual gifts. God has called each of us to minister. He's invited us into and bestowed upon us the privilege of ministry, and he's acknowledging that we are grossly inept for this ministry, kind of like me finishing that sentence. We don't have what it takes sometimes, right? And so God acknowledges you don't have the expertise you need to do the job I want you to do. So here, through the Spirit, is a gift to make you more effective at ministry. And this is where we get the spiritual gifts. Now, the spiritual gifts we see at different places in the Bible. There's four or five places in the New Testament where they pop up. There's two really definitive lists, kind of more authoritative lists that we see in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12. And in your notes there, I've listed out some of the gifts that I found in those passages. In 1 Corinthians 12, we have a longer list. We have wisdom and knowledge, faith, healing, miraculous power, prophecy, discernment, tongues, interpretation, apostleship, teaching, and administration. And then in Romans 12, we have some of those and then some extras, right? And so those are the lists of the gifts. And I would say this about the spiritual gifts that God gives to us. These are not exhaustive lists. I don't think that Paul's intention when he begins to write the spiritual gifts, who's the guy that wrote these books, I don't think his intention was to make an exhaustive list of the gifts. I don't think he was trying to list all of them for you. I think he's more giving you categories of what they could be. I think it's possible that there's more gifts outside of what's mentioned here. I don't think either list is definitive. I've seen places where guys try or girls try to make one list more authoritative than the other, and I don't think that it's fair to do that. My personal view is that there's no exhaustive list in the New Testament of what the gifts are. But these are what he gives us, and he gives us these gifts, the Spirit does, so that we can continue the ministry of Jesus. And now every time you talk about spiritual gifts, you really have two questions. There's really two questions that come up in the church. If this is your first time hearing about the spiritual gifts, then maybe you're already forming these questions. If not, then you know how to anticipate these questions. What are they? Like, what are the gifts? What do they mean? How do we define them? And which one's mine? Right? That's what we want to know. We want to know how do we define these gifts and which one are mine? Which one's mine? Well, to answer those questions first, how do we define these gifts? How do we explain them? Some of these are pretty self-explanatory, okay? When it says the gift of serving, you are smart adults, most of you. You don't need me to explain to you what that is. It would be patronizing to do it. The gift of hospitality, what's that? You don't need me to explain that to you. You know. And I don't think it would be a very wise investment of our time to go down the list of gifts and tell you how to define them. You're pretty smart. You can figure it out. If you don't, Google's the thing. There are some, however, that are more confusing. Usually people want to know about the gift of tongues. That's one that we've heard. People speak in sometimes known languages, sometimes languages that we don't know that sound like utterances. What's the deal with those? How do we figure those out? And then we also want to know about this gift of prophecy. What's that mean? What are prophets? Do we still have them? How does that work? And so because I don't have time in this sermon to talk about those, and because that's really not the point of this sermon, what I'm going to do this week, sometime this week, is I'm just going to write up my thoughts on what the gift of tongues is and what the gift of prophecy is and how those work. And I would invite you, if you look through these lists or you can think of others that you've always had questions about that you'd like to know more about, write that on your connection card and put that in the offering when it comes by or email me and I'll add those into what I write up. Now, please, you can mention them to me in the lobby afterwards, but I'm just telling you on Sundays I forget everything. So if you mention it to me, I'll go, yeah, that sounds great. And then it will not be written up. Okay, so email me or put it on the connection card and I'll give some more detail to those this week. That's how we're going to address how do we define the gifts. But then the other question is, what's mine, right? What's my gift? And we like this question because it's about us. This kind of feels like the personality test that we like to click on on Facebook, right? This is like, which friend are you? Are you Ross or Rachel or maybe Chandler? Like, what color is your personality? Like, what's your spirit animal? And we don't tell anybody. Like, we take the test and it says, do you want to publish to Facebook? Lord, no, I don't want to publish to Facebook. I don't know why. I don't want anybody to know that I actually spent 15 minutes doing this and learned that I was a horse. Like, that's not what we want to do. And so when we see spiritual gifts, we approach it the same way. Ooh, which one am I? And we actually did this, a church that I used to work at, we did a series on the Holy Spirit. And whenever you do a series on the Holy Spirit, you do a sermon on the spiritual gifts as part of the deal. And we covered it like that. And at the time I was younger in ministry and my job, what was assigned to me was to find a test that everybody could take so that we could send you to a website and you could take a test and then you would know how best to serve at that church. And it all felt just very self-serving and kind of ridiculous. And the truth of it is, when I got online to look for these tests, they were all stupid. There were none of them good. They were all ridiculous. I ended up calling them spiritual preference tests. What do you want to do? Everybody comes out with the gift of teaching, right? It's silly. And it was self-serving because the gifts are not about serving the local church. It's about serving the big C church. That's what they're for. And the more I looked at it and the more I examined the passages, the more I realized Paul's goal here is not to help you figure out which one you are. It's the reason why we spent 20 minutes on the introduction of ministry as an incredible privilege and the last 10 minutes on spiritual gifts when the sermon's supposed to be about spiritual gifts. Because guess what? It's not really about the spiritual gifts. If you look at the passages where he's talking about them, in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12, in both passages, the context around the spiritual gifts is, hey, we are a body. We are the church, and we have a job. Incidentally, it's why at Grace we have partners, not members, because we believe that we are a part of the body and that we are partnering together for ministry, for the purpose of loving other people towards Jesus. And in both chapters where he talks about the gifts, Paul is saying we are part of a body and we have a job and we are to build the kingdom of God through the church. And everybody has a part to play. Everybody's been invited in. Everybody is a part of the royal priesthood. And to some people, he gives the gift of serving and to others, hospitality, and to others, contributing, and to others, teaching, and to others, leading, and to others, mercy, which is my gift, and to others, compassion, which is another one of my strong suits, right? That's what he gives people. And the whole point of it is so that we can build the church together. The point is not which gift do I have? The point is you have the gift of ministry. That's the point. In fact, following this in 1 Corinthians 12, he talks about all the gifts at length. There's two different sections where he mentions them. He says, but those are the gifts and those are great and you should desire those. But then he finishes 1 Corinthians 12 this way. He says, and I will show you a still more excellent way. And then he opens up with the famous love chapter in 1 Corinthians 13. If I speak in tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I'm a noisy gong or a clinging cymbal. And he goes through and he lists the gifts. If I have prophecy, if I can teach, if I can do all these things, but I have not love, then my life doesn't matter. And it is not the point. The gifts are not the point. The point is loving on others. And then he goes into the love passage and defines it. Love is patient and is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It keeps no record of wrongs. And then in the end, it says it believes all things, it hopes all things, it endures all things. Love never fails. The whole point of him going through the gifts is him showing you that you've been invited into the privilege of ministry, gifted to do the ministry of loving on other people, which is the whole point anyways. I feel like we always miss the point when we approach the spiritual gifts because we go, what do they mean and which one's mine? And that's not the point of any of the passages where they're mentioned. The point is that we're called into ministry to go love on other people. I do still think it's important to know what our gift is, but if you really want to know what your gift is, don't go take a test. That's a waste of time. You'd have more fun figuring out which animal you are. If you really want to know what your spiritual gift is, then go love other people. And what you'll find is that your gift is what others affirm in you as you love them. Don't worry about what your gift is. What's my gift? Am I serving? Am I compassionate? Am I hospitality? Am I teaching? Am I leadership? Don't worry about that. Just go love people. The people that are in your life, go love them towards Jesus. That's your ministry. Go love them towards Jesus. And as you love them towards Jesus, they will affirm in you what your gift is. I can only share with you my own path through that realization. As far back as I can remember doing ministry, I was invited to teach in different settings. Nothing big or extravagant. I mean, I've shown up to a lot of 6 a.m. FCA's where there's 20 kids who don't care. I've talked to a lot of youth groups. I've done youth group retreats with like 18 kids in North Georgia woods. Like I've showed up to a lot of places to teach, but I kept getting invited to teach. And people would affirm in me, hey, that was effective. You were good at that. And I began to suspect that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. But honestly, I'm so uncomfortable with that. It took me a long time to maybe kind of admit that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. Now, some of you are sitting in here and you're going, dude, this is super boring. This is not your gift. And you may be right. We may find that out together as we go down in flames of glory here in a couple of years. Who knows? But enough people began to say, hey, that was effective. Hey, you're good at that. Hey, I appreciate that. But at some point or another, I quit fighting against it and just acknowledged, I think maybe my gift is teaching. And that's what I need to do. But you don't need to worry about what your gift is on the front end. Just get busy loving people towards God. And they will affirm in you whatever your gift is. And that's how you'll identify it. And what I want us to see as we think about the spiritual gifts and how often we miss it and go, oh, what's mine? How do I do this? What do they mean? How do we talk about them? We miss the point. When we think about spiritual gifts at Grace, I want us to think about them in this way. Spiritual gifts are an affirmation of and an invitation into the privilege of ministry. If we believe ministry to be one of the great privileges in life, to be invited into the lives of others, to be able to be the person that they call on when they mourn, to be the person that they call when they don't understand something, to be the person that gets to celebrate with them when they get pregnant or when their kid does something great or when they get a promotion. If we want to be invited into people's lives in that way, if we want to love on people in that way, if we want our life to matter, to know for certain that it's going to matter and that what we're going to do will ring for all of eternity, then we believe that ministry is a privilege. And we understand that the gift that the Spirit gives us to be more effective at that ministry is an affirmation of the fact that we are saved, that he calls us his child, and that we are to be used in that ministry, and it is an invitation into one of life's great privileges. So here's what I want you to do this morning in light of the spiritual gifts. I want to ask you, what's your ministry? Not organized, not structured, your ministry is not the coffee bar. Now that's a way to love on people, but let's not reduce your life to that. The people who serve the coffee are lovely, wonderful people. They are far more capable of other things besides brewing coffee. On some Sundays, they're not very capable of brewing coffee. Am I right? Not today. Today it's good. That's right, baby. What is your ministry? Meaning, who has God called you to love? Who is it that God has placed in your life that you are to love towards him? Sometimes it's structured. It's your small group. It's the kids that you volunteer to lead and to watch. It's the students that you pour into. It's the other people on your board or on your committee. Sometimes it's unstructured. It's the people at work. It's your family. It's your friends. It's your tennis team. It's the folks you hang out with. But I think this morning the question is not, what is my gift? But it's a realization of, man, I have been invited into one of the great privileges of life. And as I'm invited into that privilege of loving others, God, who have you assigned to me to love? And in that way, we are all ministers. And if you're not sure who that is, then my encouragement to you this week is to just beg the Spirit to show you. Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? And as you get busy loving other people towards Jesus, they will affirm in you whatever your gifting is, and you can lean into that more and more and experience the joy in being exactly who you were created to be. All right. I'm going to pray, and then we're going to continue with the service. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for your spirit. Thank you for the gift of ministry, for the gift of being conduits of your love to other people. Lord, I pray that we would get to, all of us, experience the incredible privilege that it is to be used by you. To know that you're using us in a way that makes our life matter. To know that you're using us in a way that when we get to the end of our days, we will look back and know and get to say like Paul did, that we were poured out like a drink offering. Father, I pray that you would show us who to love, that you would give us the courage to love them well, that you would gift us exactly how we need to to love them effectively, that we would be comfortable with whatever shape that love takes based on how you've wired and gifted us. God, I pray that Grace Raleigh would be a place where other people feel loved. I pray for those who go on from this place to different areas, God, that they would love people there as well. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning, First Service. My name is Nate. I am the lead pastor here. It's so good to see all of you. Thanks for being here on this May Sunday, on the last Sunday of our regular schedule. Next Sunday for Memorial Day weekend, we're going to go to our summer schedule and have one service that meets at 10 o'clock through the summer, and then we'll kick in two services again after Labor Day when things pick back up in September. So I'm kind of looking forward to the one big family feel that we can afford ourselves over the summer and the things that that's going to provide for us. So I'm excited about that. So again, next Sunday, 10 o'clock, if you get here at the 9.30 time, then we'll just hang out with you until the service starts. And my feelings won't be hurt if you leave 30 minutes early. Like right when the sermon starts, you just bolt because that's been your hour. That's fine. But that's going to be our summer schedule. I'm excited about that. This morning is the second part in our series about the Holy Spirit called The Forgotten God, because we talk a lot about God the Father. We learn a lot about God the Son. But in some church circles, in a lot of church circles, we often forget about the Holy Spirit. And so we wanted to take four weeks and slow down and focus our energy and our effort and our intellect on the Holy Spirit and what he does for us and what his ministry is to us. So last week, we started off by looking at this absurd statement that Jesus makes in John chapter 16, when he tells the disciples, and by extension us, hey, it's better for you that I go, that you don't have my physical presence next to you all the time, because if I don't go, then you will not receive the helper or the comforter that we know as the Holy Spirit. And that feels absurd, because we talked about, man, how much different would life be if we had Jesus right next to us all the time? But then we went through the reasons that that's true. And what we discovered is that it's better to have the Spirit because the Spirit is omnipresent and with us all the time. If I want to be in the presence of the Spirit and the Spirit is at your house, I don't have to convince Him to come to my house. He's in me. We are the temples of the Spirit. So He's with us all the time. And then we realize that the role or the job of the Spirit is to continue the ministry of Jesus, both through us in the form of spiritual gifts that we're going to talk about this morning, and to us as He grows us and sanctifies us. It takes us through the process of becoming more like God in character. That's his ministry to us. That's the roles of the Spirit that we're going to talk about next week. And then the last week, we're going to answer a really difficult question. How do we synthesize what we've learned about the Spirit with what we've experienced of the Spirit? Because sometimes those aren't the same things. But this week, we're looking at the spiritual gifts, how the Holy Spirit continues the ministry of Jesus through us. To do that, I want us to think about the idea of this word privilege, okay? And I don't mean privilege in the politically charged, like CNN, Fox way, where individuals may or may not be more than others. I don't mean that. I mean it in just the good old-fashioned way of, man, what a privilege this is to be doing this thing. When I think about privilege, I thought about a couple of weeks ago, somebody in the church, one of our great grace partners, who is now incidentally my favorite grace partner, emailed me and said, hey man, I've got four tickets to the Champions Club at PNC Arena for the Carolina Hurricanes' last home game. If they win this game, we may go to the playoffs. They're probably going to clinch the playoffs at this game. Would you like to come and bring some staff members? Yes, I would. I would love to. I don't care what sport is playing. When you say Champions Club with free buffet, I'm there. It can be women's field hockey. I'm in. Let's go. Right? So I went. We brought a couple other folks with us. And we get there. And you walk through the arena. Well, first of all, you park like right outside the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks. This is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in. You're walking through the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks, this is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in, you're walking through the arena, and then you get to this part where they have a concierge like behind these booths, and they're very important. And you give them like blood and urine and social security, and then they let you in, right? They let you in. And then once you're in, it's carpeted, and there's fireplaces and mahogany, and it is swanky, man. And then they have these buffets of food, so you don't have to pay $12 for the Cruddy Stadium Burger. Like, you get the buffet right there. And then all the ice cream and cookies that you can eat. They give you little tickets to go to the bar and get you a drink if that's what you want to do. You can, like, float out of there on Coke if you want to. It's amazing, right? And then you sit down. You get your food, and you go, and you sit down. And you're in these plush leather seats as you look at the ice and then the other peasants that don't get to sit where you get to sit. And this really ruined me. I don't think I can ever watch a hockey game with poor people again. But it was just an incredible experience, right? And, like, towards the end of the game, the team that they needed to lose lost, and the Hurricanes were winning, and then they scored another goal to kind of cinch the game, and the whole crowd knows, oh my goodness, we're going to the playoffs. I haven't been to the playoffs in a long time, so the place is going nuts, and it was super fun, and it was a really kind of electric atmosphere to be in. And the whole time, I thought, my goodness, I don't deserve this. This is too nice for me. You know, there's a proverb where Solomon says, if the king invites you to dinner, don't look at the food. Like, don't get used to that. That's going to suck you in. Like, don't get used to that. Keep your eye on what you can afford for yourself. And the whole time, I'm trying to remember this proverb, don't get used to this because you're one of those people, right? You don't deserve to be here. And then I thought, man, there are other people who love the Hurricanes so much that this would be a huge deal for them to be able to be a part of this excitement. And I'm not a Hurricanes fan. I mean, I watched the playoff games. I cheered for them. But I went to the gift shop that night and thought, I should get something And then I looked at like the $26 hat and I thought, I don't want this $26 worth. I want this about $12 worth. So then I left. So like, I'm not even a fan, but I get to be here, part of this electricity. And I realized, man, what a privilege this is. Because a privilege is something that you haven't earned and you don't deserve, but you get to experience anyways. You get invited into this experience anyways. And you guys have had different privileges in your life. We could probably all tell stories about times when we got to do a thing or meet a person or be in a conversation or have an experience that we kind of looked around and thought, gosh, I don't deserve to be here. This is really incredible. So as we think about this idea of privilege, life has some pretty great privileges. I think of parenthood. Parenthood's a phenomenal privilege, isn't it? We have a three-year-old daughter named Lily. And daily I'm reminded of the privilege that it is to be her parent. Like I'm the one that gets to watch her. Like right now we're learning to go to the bathroom the right way. And so she's celebrating and she gets her M&Ms and she's figuring that out on her own. And like we get to celebrate that with her and be happy with her as she does that. We're the ones that when she wakes up in the middle of the night, we get to comfort her. We're the ones that when she's scared, she runs to. When she gets here for the second service, she's going to see me and yell, Dad, and she's going to run to me, and it's going to be really fun. And what a great privilege it is to be the recipient of those hugs. And if you're a parent, then you know that parenthood is one of life's great privileges. Well, I want to submit to you this morning this idea that ministry is one of life's great privileges. Ministry, being involved in the building of the church, is one of life's great privileges. And here's what I mean. Jesus spent three years on this earth. He could have come into adulthood, lived a perfect life, died on the cross for us and go to heaven, but he spent three extra years on this earth, I am convinced, to train the disciples to do ministry, to build the church, to leave to them the keys to the kingdom and say, this is my kingdom on earth. It is your responsibility to grow it and nourish it and grow others and love people towards me. And then the disciples trained the next generation, and then they changed the generation after that. And it got passed on down as this holy responsibility, a holy mantle that we carry until each living generation of Christians, it becomes our responsibility to carry the mantle of ministry. That's why Peter says in his letters at the end of the New Testament that we, Christians, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then Peter tells you that you are a part of a holy priesthood, that you are a chosen nation, that you are cut from the same quarry as Abraham and David and Moses, and that it is your responsibility to carry on the ministry of Jesus. And when I talk about ministry this morning, it's an important thing to understand. I don't mean something that's organized. I don't mean vocational ministry, going pro and getting paid to be a Christian. I don't mean it like that. I don't mean something that's organized where you have to volunteer for something. I don't mean structured ministry. When I think of ministry, I think true ministry is simply loving others towards Jesus. When I say that we get invited into ministry by Jesus, when we get called to holy priesthood, when we get told that we are the torchbearers to carry on the legacy of the church, all I mean is nothing structured. All I mean is simply loving others towards Jesus. That's how we talk about ministry at Grace. That's what that means. And I believe it to be one of the great privileges in life for several reasons. One reason is this is God, the creator of the universe, who created you and knows the number of hairs on your head, who knows everything that's ever happened, and he is chiefly concerned with his kingdom and bringing other people into his kingdom and into a knowledge of him. That's his chief concern. That's what he wants. That's the whole reason you're left on this earth after you become a Christian is to bring as many people to heaven with you as you go, to love as many people towards Jesus with you as you possibly can on your way to spend eternity with God. That's the reason that we are here. And in ministry, Jesus has invited you in to participate in that plan. He's given you a front row seat to the most important thing happening in the universe. And here's the deal. He's going to get it done. The church is going to grow. And I hate to say it this way because I don't want to be overly flippant about it, but the church is going to grow with or without you. The church doesn't need your talent. Church doesn't need your money. Church doesn't need your intelligence. God doesn't need your ability. He's going to grow up with or without you. He's definitely going to grow up with or without me. But he's invited us in to participate in what he's doing. And that, to me, is amazing. He's invited us in to be conduits of the love that he shows us. He shows us a perfect love that is boundless, that is reckless, that knows nothing that can stop it. Nothing can take us away from that love. He offers that love to us and he invites us to be conduits of that love as we show it to other people. And I believe ministry to be one of life's great privileges because one of our biggest fears in life is to live a life that doesn't matter, right? One of our biggest fears in life, what all people do and what I've experienced in my friends and in my parents and in people that I've seen hit the back nine of life. I don't know how you define that. I don't want to throw out a decade and make anybody feel old. So people who begin to think about their legacy once they get through their really productive years, what do they always begin to think about? What's my legacy? What am I going to leave behind? What kind of difference has my life made? We want to know that we matter, and ministry ensures that our life matters. There's this great quote. I heard it from D.L. Moody, but it's attributed to a bunch of different people. But he said, one of the most tragic things in life you'll see is for someone to spend their entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and find that it was propped against the wrong building. Ministry insulates us against that. It makes us matter. It's an offer from God. Here's something that you can invest your life in that will matter for all of eternity. Here's a way to ensure that when you die one day and you look back on your life, you can be sure that you're sure that you're sure that it mattered that you invested your life well because he's invited you into the process of loving other people towards him. And I think that this promise, this insurance that our life will matter is incredibly important and maybe increasingly so in a world that lurches for ways to matter in all kinds of ways and screams out to everyone paying attention, we just want to matter. Jen and I were in New York City this last week, and it was very fun. It was pretty much an eating vacation. I walked about 11 miles a day and gained four pounds, so I don't know how I managed to do that, but it was fun. And one of the things we noticed everywhere we went, and as girls, I don't mean to pick on girls, but it was girls. It was girls posing for Instagram pictures. Everywhere. Like every tourist site that we went to, Central Park, we went to this thing called the Vessel at Hudson Yards, and everywhere we went, there was a couple of girls who were dressed nicer than everybody else there, had on the makeup and the hair and the fake eyelashes and the whole deal, and they're posing. They got their friend taking pictures of them. And they're posing like for all of these candids, you know, like that kind of thing, you know, and they're kind of like doing their hair. And Jen and I just started like, we laugh at it. We find them and we're just sitting over there going in this hilarious. But after a while, it started to break my heart because you know what those girls are saying? I want to matter. I'm going to post this somewhere. Will you please tell me that I'm pretty? This is how I gain my sense of worth. Will you please tell me that I matter? And we all do that in one way or another. We all preen to matter in one way or another. We all lurch for significance in one way or another. And ministry says, here, here's a way to ensure that your life matters and that it matters for all eternity. And I think intuitively we know that ministry is one of life's great privileges. I talked to Jen, who a lot of you guys don't know this, but Jen for her entire adult life has poured into groups of young girls, middle school, high school age girls. And I asked her, what brings you joy? What have been your privileges as you've done ministry? And we talked about one of her close friends, this girl named Elizabeth. When Jen got out of college, she began to teach fifth grade. And when those fifth grade girls graduated from elementary school and moved into middle school, Jen started a Bible study for them, and they would meet in her classroom early one day. And one of those girls was named Elizabeth. And Jen's gotten to watch Elizabeth grow into a young woman who loves the Lord, into a young woman who leads her own Bible studies and her own discipleship groups and pours into young women on her own. And she tells those young girls who have never met Jen some of the things that Jen shared with her. And so now there's multi-generational love and wisdom going on because Jen had the opportunity to pour her life into those girls. And she still gets texts from them and calls from them. And she still gets to celebrate with them. And she still gets to mourn with them. And when you minister to people and when you love on people, you get invited into these situations that feel like such a privilege, like, my goodness, I don't deserve to be here. This is incredible. We know experientially that when we minister, when God uses us in the life of others, we come alive. That's why I think it's one of God's great privileges that he offers us to be in ministry. The deal with ministry, however, once we become Christians and God says, okay, go grow the church, is that we're grossly unqualified to grow the church. We are grossly and radically unqualified to do ministry because ministry requires supernatural power. Someone has to realize that they're a sinner, that they need Jesus, and then come to Jesus and repent. Ministry is hard. Sometimes ministry requires saying the exact right word at the exact right time. Sometimes loving on people requires you to say challenging things to them that are really difficult and awkward and uncomfortable to say. Sometimes it means that you have to apply grace to them and not say the thing that you want to say because they need more time to develop on your own. Sometimes ministry means discerning between spirits so we really know what's going on here. Sometimes it means being able to explain the Bible in ways that are really difficult or difficult concepts that we're not sure what they actually mean. Ministry is difficult. Ministry works kind of like your first job. For most of us, we went to college, and after we went to college, we got our job. And at college, what'd they tell you they were doing? We're preparing you to go into the workforce. We're preparing you for your job. And then you get to your job, which is most of the time outside of your major, and you begin to work, and you realize oh my gosh, they did not prepare me for the workforce. I got to figure this out. And you do on-the-job training, right? Spiritual gifts that the Spirit gives us so that we can do ministry are God's on-the-job training. This is why we have spiritual gifts. God has called each of us to minister. He's invited us into and bestowed upon us the privilege of ministry, and he's acknowledging that we are grossly inept for this ministry, kind of like me finishing that sentence. We don't have what it takes sometimes, right? And so God acknowledges you don't have the expertise you need to do the job I want you to do. So here, through the Spirit, is a gift to make you more effective at ministry. And this is where we get the spiritual gifts. Now, the spiritual gifts we see at different places in the Bible. There's four or five places in the New Testament where they pop up. There's two really definitive lists, kind of more authoritative lists that we see in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12. And in your notes there, I've listed out some of the gifts that I found in those passages. In 1 Corinthians 12, we have a longer list. We have wisdom and knowledge, faith, healing, miraculous power, prophecy, discernment, tongues, interpretation, apostleship, teaching, and administration. And then in Romans 12, we have some of those and then some extras, right? And so those are the lists of the gifts. And I would say this about the spiritual gifts that God gives to us. These are not exhaustive lists. I don't think that Paul's intention when he begins to write the spiritual gifts, who's the guy that wrote these books, I don't think his intention was to make an exhaustive list of the gifts. I don't think he was trying to list all of them for you. I think he's more giving you categories of what they could be. I think it's possible that there's more gifts outside of what's mentioned here. I don't think either list is definitive. I've seen places where guys try or girls try to make one list more authoritative than the other, and I don't think that it's fair to do that. My personal view is that there's no exhaustive list in the New Testament of what the gifts are. But these are what he gives us, and he gives us these gifts, the Spirit does, so that we can continue the ministry of Jesus. And now every time you talk about spiritual gifts, you really have two questions. There's really two questions that come up in the church. If this is your first time hearing about the spiritual gifts, then maybe you're already forming these questions. If not, then you know how to anticipate these questions. What are they? Like, what are the gifts? What do they mean? How do we define them? And which one's mine? Right? That's what we want to know. We want to know how do we define these gifts and which one are mine? Which one's mine? Well, to answer those questions first, how do we define these gifts? How do we explain them? Some of these are pretty self-explanatory, okay? When it says the gift of serving, you are smart adults, most of you. You don't need me to explain to you what that is. It would be patronizing to do it. The gift of hospitality, what's that? You don't need me to explain that to you. You know. And I don't think it would be a very wise investment of our time to go down the list of gifts and tell you how to define them. You're pretty smart. You can figure it out. If you don't, Google's the thing. There are some, however, that are more confusing. Usually people want to know about the gift of tongues. That's one that we've heard. People speak in sometimes known languages, sometimes languages that we don't know that sound like utterances. What's the deal with those? How do we figure those out? And then we also want to know about this gift of prophecy. What's that mean? What are prophets? Do we still have them? How does that work? And so because I don't have time in this sermon to talk about those, and because that's really not the point of this sermon, what I'm going to do this week, sometime this week, is I'm just going to write up my thoughts on what the gift of tongues is and what the gift of prophecy is and how those work. And I would invite you, if you look through these lists or you can think of others that you've always had questions about that you'd like to know more about, write that on your connection card and put that in the offering when it comes by or email me and I'll add those into what I write up. Now, please, you can mention them to me in the lobby afterwards, but I'm just telling you on Sundays I forget everything. So if you mention it to me, I'll go, yeah, that sounds great. And then it will not be written up. Okay, so email me or put it on the connection card and I'll give some more detail to those this week. That's how we're going to address how do we define the gifts. But then the other question is, what's mine, right? What's my gift? And we like this question because it's about us. This kind of feels like the personality test that we like to click on on Facebook, right? This is like, which friend are you? Are you Ross or Rachel or maybe Chandler? Like, what color is your personality? Like, what's your spirit animal? And we don't tell anybody. Like, we take the test and it says, do you want to publish to Facebook? Lord, no, I don't want to publish to Facebook. I don't know why. I don't want anybody to know that I actually spent 15 minutes doing this and learned that I was a horse. Like, that's not what we want to do. And so when we see spiritual gifts, we approach it the same way. Ooh, which one am I? And we actually did this, a church that I used to work at, we did a series on the Holy Spirit. And whenever you do a series on the Holy Spirit, you do a sermon on the spiritual gifts as part of the deal. And we covered it like that. And at the time I was younger in ministry and my job, what was assigned to me was to find a test that everybody could take so that we could send you to a website and you could take a test and then you would know how best to serve at that church. And it all felt just very self-serving and kind of ridiculous. And the truth of it is, when I got online to look for these tests, they were all stupid. There were none of them good. They were all ridiculous. I ended up calling them spiritual preference tests. What do you want to do? Everybody comes out with the gift of teaching, right? It's silly. And it was self-serving because the gifts are not about serving the local church. It's about serving the big C church. That's what they're for. And the more I looked at it and the more I examined the passages, the more I realized Paul's goal here is not to help you figure out which one you are. It's the reason why we spent 20 minutes on the introduction of ministry as an incredible privilege and the last 10 minutes on spiritual gifts when the sermon's supposed to be about spiritual gifts. Because guess what? It's not really about the spiritual gifts. If you look at the passages where he's talking about them, in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12, in both passages, the context around the spiritual gifts is, hey, we are a body. We are the church, and we have a job. Incidentally, it's why at Grace we have partners, not members, because we believe that we are a part of the body and that we are partnering together for ministry, for the purpose of loving other people towards Jesus. And in both chapters where he talks about the gifts, Paul is saying we are part of a body and we have a job and we are to build the kingdom of God through the church. And everybody has a part to play. Everybody's been invited in. Everybody is a part of the royal priesthood. And to some people, he gives the gift of serving and to others, hospitality, and to others, contributing, and to others, teaching, and to others, leading, and to others, mercy, which is my gift, and to others, compassion, which is another one of my strong suits, right? That's what he gives people. And the whole point of it is so that we can build the church together. The point is not which gift do I have? The point is you have the gift of ministry. That's the point. In fact, following this in 1 Corinthians 12, he talks about all the gifts at length. There's two different sections where he mentions them. He says, but those are the gifts and those are great and you should desire those. But then he finishes 1 Corinthians 12 this way. He says, and I will show you a still more excellent way. And then he opens up with the famous love chapter in 1 Corinthians 13. If I speak in tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I'm a noisy gong or a clinging cymbal. And he goes through and he lists the gifts. If I have prophecy, if I can teach, if I can do all these things, but I have not love, then my life doesn't matter. And it is not the point. The gifts are not the point. The point is loving on others. And then he goes into the love passage and defines it. Love is patient and is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It keeps no record of wrongs. And then in the end, it says it believes all things, it hopes all things, it endures all things. Love never fails. The whole point of him going through the gifts is him showing you that you've been invited into the privilege of ministry, gifted to do the ministry of loving on other people, which is the whole point anyways. I feel like we always miss the point when we approach the spiritual gifts because we go, what do they mean and which one's mine? And that's not the point of any of the passages where they're mentioned. The point is that we're called into ministry to go love on other people. I do still think it's important to know what our gift is, but if you really want to know what your gift is, don't go take a test. That's a waste of time. You'd have more fun figuring out which animal you are. If you really want to know what your spiritual gift is, then go love other people. And what you'll find is that your gift is what others affirm in you as you love them. Don't worry about what your gift is. What's my gift? Am I serving? Am I compassionate? Am I hospitality? Am I teaching? Am I leadership? Don't worry about that. Just go love people. The people that are in your life, go love them towards Jesus. That's your ministry. Go love them towards Jesus. And as you love them towards Jesus, they will affirm in you what your gift is. I can only share with you my own path through that realization. As far back as I can remember doing ministry, I was invited to teach in different settings. Nothing big or extravagant. I mean, I've shown up to a lot of 6 a.m. FCA's where there's 20 kids who don't care. I've talked to a lot of youth groups. I've done youth group retreats with like 18 kids in North Georgia woods. Like I've showed up to a lot of places to teach, but I kept getting invited to teach. And people would affirm in me, hey, that was effective. You were good at that. And I began to suspect that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. But honestly, I'm so uncomfortable with that. It took me a long time to maybe kind of admit that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. Now, some of you are sitting in here and you're going, dude, this is super boring. This is not your gift. And you may be right. We may find that out together as we go down in flames of glory here in a couple of years. Who knows? But enough people began to say, hey, that was effective. Hey, you're good at that. Hey, I appreciate that. But at some point or another, I quit fighting against it and just acknowledged, I think maybe my gift is teaching. And that's what I need to do. But you don't need to worry about what your gift is on the front end. Just get busy loving people towards God. And they will affirm in you whatever your gift is. And that's how you'll identify it. And what I want us to see as we think about the spiritual gifts and how often we miss it and go, oh, what's mine? How do I do this? What do they mean? How do we talk about them? We miss the point. When we think about spiritual gifts at Grace, I want us to think about them in this way. Spiritual gifts are an affirmation of and an invitation into the privilege of ministry. If we believe ministry to be one of the great privileges in life, to be invited into the lives of others, to be able to be the person that they call on when they mourn, to be the person that they call when they don't understand something, to be the person that gets to celebrate with them when they get pregnant or when their kid does something great or when they get a promotion. If we want to be invited into people's lives in that way, if we want to love on people in that way, if we want our life to matter, to know for certain that it's going to matter and that what we're going to do will ring for all of eternity, then we believe that ministry is a privilege. And we understand that the gift that the Spirit gives us to be more effective at that ministry is an affirmation of the fact that we are saved, that he calls us his child, and that we are to be used in that ministry, and it is an invitation into one of life's great privileges. So here's what I want you to do this morning in light of the spiritual gifts. I want to ask you, what's your ministry? Not organized, not structured, your ministry is not the coffee bar. Now that's a way to love on people, but let's not reduce your life to that. The people who serve the coffee are lovely, wonderful people. They are far more capable of other things besides brewing coffee. On some Sundays, they're not very capable of brewing coffee. Am I right? Not today. Today it's good. That's right, baby. What is your ministry? Meaning, who has God called you to love? Who is it that God has placed in your life that you are to love towards him? Sometimes it's structured. It's your small group. It's the kids that you volunteer to lead and to watch. It's the students that you pour into. It's the other people on your board or on your committee. Sometimes it's unstructured. It's the people at work. It's your family. It's your friends. It's your tennis team. It's the folks you hang out with. But I think this morning the question is not, what is my gift? But it's a realization of, man, I have been invited into one of the great privileges of life. And as I'm invited into that privilege of loving others, God, who have you assigned to me to love? And in that way, we are all ministers. And if you're not sure who that is, then my encouragement to you this week is to just beg the Spirit to show you. Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? And as you get busy loving other people towards Jesus, they will affirm in you whatever your gifting is, and you can lean into that more and more and experience the joy in being exactly who you were created to be. All right. I'm going to pray, and then we're going to continue with the service. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for your spirit. Thank you for the gift of ministry, for the gift of being conduits of your love to other people. Lord, I pray that we would get to, all of us, experience the incredible privilege that it is to be used by you. To know that you're using us in a way that makes our life matter. To know that you're using us in a way that when we get to the end of our days, we will look back and know and get to say like Paul did, that we were poured out like a drink offering. Father, I pray that you would show us who to love, that you would give us the courage to love them well, that you would gift us exactly how we need to to love them effectively, that we would be comfortable with whatever shape that love takes based on how you've wired and gifted us. God, I pray that Grace Raleigh would be a place where other people feel loved. I pray for those who go on from this place to different areas, God, that they would love people there as well. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Well, good morning, First Service. My name is Nate. I am the lead pastor here. It's so good to see all of you. Thanks for being here on this May Sunday, on the last Sunday of our regular schedule. Next Sunday for Memorial Day weekend, we're going to go to our summer schedule and have one service that meets at 10 o'clock through the summer, and then we'll kick in two services again after Labor Day when things pick back up in September. So I'm kind of looking forward to the one big family feel that we can afford ourselves over the summer and the things that that's going to provide for us. So I'm excited about that. So again, next Sunday, 10 o'clock, if you get here at the 9.30 time, then we'll just hang out with you until the service starts. And my feelings won't be hurt if you leave 30 minutes early. Like right when the sermon starts, you just bolt because that's been your hour. That's fine. But that's going to be our summer schedule. I'm excited about that. This morning is the second part in our series about the Holy Spirit called The Forgotten God, because we talk a lot about God the Father. We learn a lot about God the Son. But in some church circles, in a lot of church circles, we often forget about the Holy Spirit. And so we wanted to take four weeks and slow down and focus our energy and our effort and our intellect on the Holy Spirit and what he does for us and what his ministry is to us. So last week, we started off by looking at this absurd statement that Jesus makes in John chapter 16, when he tells the disciples, and by extension us, hey, it's better for you that I go, that you don't have my physical presence next to you all the time, because if I don't go, then you will not receive the helper or the comforter that we know as the Holy Spirit. And that feels absurd, because we talked about, man, how much different would life be if we had Jesus right next to us all the time? But then we went through the reasons that that's true. And what we discovered is that it's better to have the Spirit because the Spirit is omnipresent and with us all the time. If I want to be in the presence of the Spirit and the Spirit is at your house, I don't have to convince Him to come to my house. He's in me. We are the temples of the Spirit. So He's with us all the time. And then we realize that the role or the job of the Spirit is to continue the ministry of Jesus, both through us in the form of spiritual gifts that we're going to talk about this morning, and to us as He grows us and sanctifies us. It takes us through the process of becoming more like God in character. That's his ministry to us. That's the roles of the Spirit that we're going to talk about next week. And then the last week, we're going to answer a really difficult question. How do we synthesize what we've learned about the Spirit with what we've experienced of the Spirit? Because sometimes those aren't the same things. But this week, we're looking at the spiritual gifts, how the Holy Spirit continues the ministry of Jesus through us. To do that, I want us to think about the idea of this word privilege, okay? And I don't mean privilege in the politically charged, like CNN, Fox way, where individuals may or may not be more than others. I don't mean that. I mean it in just the good old-fashioned way of, man, what a privilege this is to be doing this thing. When I think about privilege, I thought about a couple of weeks ago, somebody in the church, one of our great grace partners, who is now incidentally my favorite grace partner, emailed me and said, hey man, I've got four tickets to the Champions Club at PNC Arena for the Carolina Hurricanes' last home game. If they win this game, we may go to the playoffs. They're probably going to clinch the playoffs at this game. Would you like to come and bring some staff members? Yes, I would. I would love to. I don't care what sport is playing. When you say Champions Club with free buffet, I'm there. It can be women's field hockey. I'm in. Let's go. Right? So I went. We brought a couple other folks with us. And we get there. And you walk through the arena. Well, first of all, you park like right outside the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks. This is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in. You're walking through the arena. Like if they had valet parking, we would say, no thanks, this is better. Like you're right outside. It was unbelievable. And you walk in, you're walking through the arena, and then you get to this part where they have a concierge like behind these booths, and they're very important. And you give them like blood and urine and social security, and then they let you in, right? They let you in. And then once you're in, it's carpeted, and there's fireplaces and mahogany, and it is swanky, man. And then they have these buffets of food, so you don't have to pay $12 for the Cruddy Stadium Burger. Like, you get the buffet right there. And then all the ice cream and cookies that you can eat. They give you little tickets to go to the bar and get you a drink if that's what you want to do. You can, like, float out of there on Coke if you want to. It's amazing, right? And then you sit down. You get your food, and you go, and you sit down. And you're in these plush leather seats as you look at the ice and then the other peasants that don't get to sit where you get to sit. And this really ruined me. I don't think I can ever watch a hockey game with poor people again. But it was just an incredible experience, right? And, like, towards the end of the game, the team that they needed to lose lost, and the Hurricanes were winning, and then they scored another goal to kind of cinch the game, and the whole crowd knows, oh my goodness, we're going to the playoffs. I haven't been to the playoffs in a long time, so the place is going nuts, and it was super fun, and it was a really kind of electric atmosphere to be in. And the whole time, I thought, my goodness, I don't deserve this. This is too nice for me. You know, there's a proverb where Solomon says, if the king invites you to dinner, don't look at the food. Like, don't get used to that. That's going to suck you in. Like, don't get used to that. Keep your eye on what you can afford for yourself. And the whole time, I'm trying to remember this proverb, don't get used to this because you're one of those people, right? You don't deserve to be here. And then I thought, man, there are other people who love the Hurricanes so much that this would be a huge deal for them to be able to be a part of this excitement. And I'm not a Hurricanes fan. I mean, I watched the playoff games. I cheered for them. But I went to the gift shop that night and thought, I should get something And then I looked at like the $26 hat and I thought, I don't want this $26 worth. I want this about $12 worth. So then I left. So like, I'm not even a fan, but I get to be here, part of this electricity. And I realized, man, what a privilege this is. Because a privilege is something that you haven't earned and you don't deserve, but you get to experience anyways. You get invited into this experience anyways. And you guys have had different privileges in your life. We could probably all tell stories about times when we got to do a thing or meet a person or be in a conversation or have an experience that we kind of looked around and thought, gosh, I don't deserve to be here. This is really incredible. So as we think about this idea of privilege, life has some pretty great privileges. I think of parenthood. Parenthood's a phenomenal privilege, isn't it? We have a three-year-old daughter named Lily. And daily I'm reminded of the privilege that it is to be her parent. Like I'm the one that gets to watch her. Like right now we're learning to go to the bathroom the right way. And so she's celebrating and she gets her M&Ms and she's figuring that out on her own. And like we get to celebrate that with her and be happy with her as she does that. We're the ones that when she wakes up in the middle of the night, we get to comfort her. We're the ones that when she's scared, she runs to. When she gets here for the second service, she's going to see me and yell, Dad, and she's going to run to me, and it's going to be really fun. And what a great privilege it is to be the recipient of those hugs. And if you're a parent, then you know that parenthood is one of life's great privileges. Well, I want to submit to you this morning this idea that ministry is one of life's great privileges. Ministry, being involved in the building of the church, is one of life's great privileges. And here's what I mean. Jesus spent three years on this earth. He could have come into adulthood, lived a perfect life, died on the cross for us and go to heaven, but he spent three extra years on this earth, I am convinced, to train the disciples to do ministry, to build the church, to leave to them the keys to the kingdom and say, this is my kingdom on earth. It is your responsibility to grow it and nourish it and grow others and love people towards me. And then the disciples trained the next generation, and then they changed the generation after that. And it got passed on down as this holy responsibility, a holy mantle that we carry until each living generation of Christians, it becomes our responsibility to carry the mantle of ministry. That's why Peter says in his letters at the end of the New Testament that we, Christians, if you call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then Peter tells you that you are a part of a holy priesthood, that you are a chosen nation, that you are cut from the same quarry as Abraham and David and Moses, and that it is your responsibility to carry on the ministry of Jesus. And when I talk about ministry this morning, it's an important thing to understand. I don't mean something that's organized. I don't mean vocational ministry, going pro and getting paid to be a Christian. I don't mean it like that. I don't mean something that's organized where you have to volunteer for something. I don't mean structured ministry. When I think of ministry, I think true ministry is simply loving others towards Jesus. When I say that we get invited into ministry by Jesus, when we get called to holy priesthood, when we get told that we are the torchbearers to carry on the legacy of the church, all I mean is nothing structured. All I mean is simply loving others towards Jesus. That's how we talk about ministry at Grace. That's what that means. And I believe it to be one of the great privileges in life for several reasons. One reason is this is God, the creator of the universe, who created you and knows the number of hairs on your head, who knows everything that's ever happened, and he is chiefly concerned with his kingdom and bringing other people into his kingdom and into a knowledge of him. That's his chief concern. That's what he wants. That's the whole reason you're left on this earth after you become a Christian is to bring as many people to heaven with you as you go, to love as many people towards Jesus with you as you possibly can on your way to spend eternity with God. That's the reason that we are here. And in ministry, Jesus has invited you in to participate in that plan. He's given you a front row seat to the most important thing happening in the universe. And here's the deal. He's going to get it done. The church is going to grow. And I hate to say it this way because I don't want to be overly flippant about it, but the church is going to grow with or without you. The church doesn't need your talent. Church doesn't need your money. Church doesn't need your intelligence. God doesn't need your ability. He's going to grow up with or without you. He's definitely going to grow up with or without me. But he's invited us in to participate in what he's doing. And that, to me, is amazing. He's invited us in to be conduits of the love that he shows us. He shows us a perfect love that is boundless, that is reckless, that knows nothing that can stop it. Nothing can take us away from that love. He offers that love to us and he invites us to be conduits of that love as we show it to other people. And I believe ministry to be one of life's great privileges because one of our biggest fears in life is to live a life that doesn't matter, right? One of our biggest fears in life, what all people do and what I've experienced in my friends and in my parents and in people that I've seen hit the back nine of life. I don't know how you define that. I don't want to throw out a decade and make anybody feel old. So people who begin to think about their legacy once they get through their really productive years, what do they always begin to think about? What's my legacy? What am I going to leave behind? What kind of difference has my life made? We want to know that we matter, and ministry ensures that our life matters. There's this great quote. I heard it from D.L. Moody, but it's attributed to a bunch of different people. But he said, one of the most tragic things in life you'll see is for someone to spend their entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and find that it was propped against the wrong building. Ministry insulates us against that. It makes us matter. It's an offer from God. Here's something that you can invest your life in that will matter for all of eternity. Here's a way to ensure that when you die one day and you look back on your life, you can be sure that you're sure that you're sure that it mattered that you invested your life well because he's invited you into the process of loving other people towards him. And I think that this promise, this insurance that our life will matter is incredibly important and maybe increasingly so in a world that lurches for ways to matter in all kinds of ways and screams out to everyone paying attention, we just want to matter. Jen and I were in New York City this last week, and it was very fun. It was pretty much an eating vacation. I walked about 11 miles a day and gained four pounds, so I don't know how I managed to do that, but it was fun. And one of the things we noticed everywhere we went, and as girls, I don't mean to pick on girls, but it was girls. It was girls posing for Instagram pictures. Everywhere. Like every tourist site that we went to, Central Park, we went to this thing called the Vessel at Hudson Yards, and everywhere we went, there was a couple of girls who were dressed nicer than everybody else there, had on the makeup and the hair and the fake eyelashes and the whole deal, and they're posing. They got their friend taking pictures of them. And they're posing like for all of these candids, you know, like that kind of thing, you know, and they're kind of like doing their hair. And Jen and I just started like, we laugh at it. We find them and we're just sitting over there going in this hilarious. But after a while, it started to break my heart because you know what those girls are saying? I want to matter. I'm going to post this somewhere. Will you please tell me that I'm pretty? This is how I gain my sense of worth. Will you please tell me that I matter? And we all do that in one way or another. We all preen to matter in one way or another. We all lurch for significance in one way or another. And ministry says, here, here's a way to ensure that your life matters and that it matters for all eternity. And I think intuitively we know that ministry is one of life's great privileges. I talked to Jen, who a lot of you guys don't know this, but Jen for her entire adult life has poured into groups of young girls, middle school, high school age girls. And I asked her, what brings you joy? What have been your privileges as you've done ministry? And we talked about one of her close friends, this girl named Elizabeth. When Jen got out of college, she began to teach fifth grade. And when those fifth grade girls graduated from elementary school and moved into middle school, Jen started a Bible study for them, and they would meet in her classroom early one day. And one of those girls was named Elizabeth. And Jen's gotten to watch Elizabeth grow into a young woman who loves the Lord, into a young woman who leads her own Bible studies and her own discipleship groups and pours into young women on her own. And she tells those young girls who have never met Jen some of the things that Jen shared with her. And so now there's multi-generational love and wisdom going on because Jen had the opportunity to pour her life into those girls. And she still gets texts from them and calls from them. And she still gets to celebrate with them. And she still gets to mourn with them. And when you minister to people and when you love on people, you get invited into these situations that feel like such a privilege, like, my goodness, I don't deserve to be here. This is incredible. We know experientially that when we minister, when God uses us in the life of others, we come alive. That's why I think it's one of God's great privileges that he offers us to be in ministry. The deal with ministry, however, once we become Christians and God says, okay, go grow the church, is that we're grossly unqualified to grow the church. We are grossly and radically unqualified to do ministry because ministry requires supernatural power. Someone has to realize that they're a sinner, that they need Jesus, and then come to Jesus and repent. Ministry is hard. Sometimes ministry requires saying the exact right word at the exact right time. Sometimes loving on people requires you to say challenging things to them that are really difficult and awkward and uncomfortable to say. Sometimes it means that you have to apply grace to them and not say the thing that you want to say because they need more time to develop on your own. Sometimes ministry means discerning between spirits so we really know what's going on here. Sometimes it means being able to explain the Bible in ways that are really difficult or difficult concepts that we're not sure what they actually mean. Ministry is difficult. Ministry works kind of like your first job. For most of us, we went to college, and after we went to college, we got our job. And at college, what'd they tell you they were doing? We're preparing you to go into the workforce. We're preparing you for your job. And then you get to your job, which is most of the time outside of your major, and you begin to work, and you realize oh my gosh, they did not prepare me for the workforce. I got to figure this out. And you do on-the-job training, right? Spiritual gifts that the Spirit gives us so that we can do ministry are God's on-the-job training. This is why we have spiritual gifts. God has called each of us to minister. He's invited us into and bestowed upon us the privilege of ministry, and he's acknowledging that we are grossly inept for this ministry, kind of like me finishing that sentence. We don't have what it takes sometimes, right? And so God acknowledges you don't have the expertise you need to do the job I want you to do. So here, through the Spirit, is a gift to make you more effective at ministry. And this is where we get the spiritual gifts. Now, the spiritual gifts we see at different places in the Bible. There's four or five places in the New Testament where they pop up. There's two really definitive lists, kind of more authoritative lists that we see in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12. And in your notes there, I've listed out some of the gifts that I found in those passages. In 1 Corinthians 12, we have a longer list. We have wisdom and knowledge, faith, healing, miraculous power, prophecy, discernment, tongues, interpretation, apostleship, teaching, and administration. And then in Romans 12, we have some of those and then some extras, right? And so those are the lists of the gifts. And I would say this about the spiritual gifts that God gives to us. These are not exhaustive lists. I don't think that Paul's intention when he begins to write the spiritual gifts, who's the guy that wrote these books, I don't think his intention was to make an exhaustive list of the gifts. I don't think he was trying to list all of them for you. I think he's more giving you categories of what they could be. I think it's possible that there's more gifts outside of what's mentioned here. I don't think either list is definitive. I've seen places where guys try or girls try to make one list more authoritative than the other, and I don't think that it's fair to do that. My personal view is that there's no exhaustive list in the New Testament of what the gifts are. But these are what he gives us, and he gives us these gifts, the Spirit does, so that we can continue the ministry of Jesus. And now every time you talk about spiritual gifts, you really have two questions. There's really two questions that come up in the church. If this is your first time hearing about the spiritual gifts, then maybe you're already forming these questions. If not, then you know how to anticipate these questions. What are they? Like, what are the gifts? What do they mean? How do we define them? And which one's mine? Right? That's what we want to know. We want to know how do we define these gifts and which one are mine? Which one's mine? Well, to answer those questions first, how do we define these gifts? How do we explain them? Some of these are pretty self-explanatory, okay? When it says the gift of serving, you are smart adults, most of you. You don't need me to explain to you what that is. It would be patronizing to do it. The gift of hospitality, what's that? You don't need me to explain that to you. You know. And I don't think it would be a very wise investment of our time to go down the list of gifts and tell you how to define them. You're pretty smart. You can figure it out. If you don't, Google's the thing. There are some, however, that are more confusing. Usually people want to know about the gift of tongues. That's one that we've heard. People speak in sometimes known languages, sometimes languages that we don't know that sound like utterances. What's the deal with those? How do we figure those out? And then we also want to know about this gift of prophecy. What's that mean? What are prophets? Do we still have them? How does that work? And so because I don't have time in this sermon to talk about those, and because that's really not the point of this sermon, what I'm going to do this week, sometime this week, is I'm just going to write up my thoughts on what the gift of tongues is and what the gift of prophecy is and how those work. And I would invite you, if you look through these lists or you can think of others that you've always had questions about that you'd like to know more about, write that on your connection card and put that in the offering when it comes by or email me and I'll add those into what I write up. Now, please, you can mention them to me in the lobby afterwards, but I'm just telling you on Sundays I forget everything. So if you mention it to me, I'll go, yeah, that sounds great. And then it will not be written up. Okay, so email me or put it on the connection card and I'll give some more detail to those this week. That's how we're going to address how do we define the gifts. But then the other question is, what's mine, right? What's my gift? And we like this question because it's about us. This kind of feels like the personality test that we like to click on on Facebook, right? This is like, which friend are you? Are you Ross or Rachel or maybe Chandler? Like, what color is your personality? Like, what's your spirit animal? And we don't tell anybody. Like, we take the test and it says, do you want to publish to Facebook? Lord, no, I don't want to publish to Facebook. I don't know why. I don't want anybody to know that I actually spent 15 minutes doing this and learned that I was a horse. Like, that's not what we want to do. And so when we see spiritual gifts, we approach it the same way. Ooh, which one am I? And we actually did this, a church that I used to work at, we did a series on the Holy Spirit. And whenever you do a series on the Holy Spirit, you do a sermon on the spiritual gifts as part of the deal. And we covered it like that. And at the time I was younger in ministry and my job, what was assigned to me was to find a test that everybody could take so that we could send you to a website and you could take a test and then you would know how best to serve at that church. And it all felt just very self-serving and kind of ridiculous. And the truth of it is, when I got online to look for these tests, they were all stupid. There were none of them good. They were all ridiculous. I ended up calling them spiritual preference tests. What do you want to do? Everybody comes out with the gift of teaching, right? It's silly. And it was self-serving because the gifts are not about serving the local church. It's about serving the big C church. That's what they're for. And the more I looked at it and the more I examined the passages, the more I realized Paul's goal here is not to help you figure out which one you are. It's the reason why we spent 20 minutes on the introduction of ministry as an incredible privilege and the last 10 minutes on spiritual gifts when the sermon's supposed to be about spiritual gifts. Because guess what? It's not really about the spiritual gifts. If you look at the passages where he's talking about them, in 1 Corinthians 12 and in Romans 12, in both passages, the context around the spiritual gifts is, hey, we are a body. We are the church, and we have a job. Incidentally, it's why at Grace we have partners, not members, because we believe that we are a part of the body and that we are partnering together for ministry, for the purpose of loving other people towards Jesus. And in both chapters where he talks about the gifts, Paul is saying we are part of a body and we have a job and we are to build the kingdom of God through the church. And everybody has a part to play. Everybody's been invited in. Everybody is a part of the royal priesthood. And to some people, he gives the gift of serving and to others, hospitality, and to others, contributing, and to others, teaching, and to others, leading, and to others, mercy, which is my gift, and to others, compassion, which is another one of my strong suits, right? That's what he gives people. And the whole point of it is so that we can build the church together. The point is not which gift do I have? The point is you have the gift of ministry. That's the point. In fact, following this in 1 Corinthians 12, he talks about all the gifts at length. There's two different sections where he mentions them. He says, but those are the gifts and those are great and you should desire those. But then he finishes 1 Corinthians 12 this way. He says, and I will show you a still more excellent way. And then he opens up with the famous love chapter in 1 Corinthians 13. If I speak in tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I'm a noisy gong or a clinging cymbal. And he goes through and he lists the gifts. If I have prophecy, if I can teach, if I can do all these things, but I have not love, then my life doesn't matter. And it is not the point. The gifts are not the point. The point is loving on others. And then he goes into the love passage and defines it. Love is patient and is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It keeps no record of wrongs. And then in the end, it says it believes all things, it hopes all things, it endures all things. Love never fails. The whole point of him going through the gifts is him showing you that you've been invited into the privilege of ministry, gifted to do the ministry of loving on other people, which is the whole point anyways. I feel like we always miss the point when we approach the spiritual gifts because we go, what do they mean and which one's mine? And that's not the point of any of the passages where they're mentioned. The point is that we're called into ministry to go love on other people. I do still think it's important to know what our gift is, but if you really want to know what your gift is, don't go take a test. That's a waste of time. You'd have more fun figuring out which animal you are. If you really want to know what your spiritual gift is, then go love other people. And what you'll find is that your gift is what others affirm in you as you love them. Don't worry about what your gift is. What's my gift? Am I serving? Am I compassionate? Am I hospitality? Am I teaching? Am I leadership? Don't worry about that. Just go love people. The people that are in your life, go love them towards Jesus. That's your ministry. Go love them towards Jesus. And as you love them towards Jesus, they will affirm in you what your gift is. I can only share with you my own path through that realization. As far back as I can remember doing ministry, I was invited to teach in different settings. Nothing big or extravagant. I mean, I've shown up to a lot of 6 a.m. FCA's where there's 20 kids who don't care. I've talked to a lot of youth groups. I've done youth group retreats with like 18 kids in North Georgia woods. Like I've showed up to a lot of places to teach, but I kept getting invited to teach. And people would affirm in me, hey, that was effective. You were good at that. And I began to suspect that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. But honestly, I'm so uncomfortable with that. It took me a long time to maybe kind of admit that maybe that's how the Spirit has gifted me. Now, some of you are sitting in here and you're going, dude, this is super boring. This is not your gift. And you may be right. We may find that out together as we go down in flames of glory here in a couple of years. Who knows? But enough people began to say, hey, that was effective. Hey, you're good at that. Hey, I appreciate that. But at some point or another, I quit fighting against it and just acknowledged, I think maybe my gift is teaching. And that's what I need to do. But you don't need to worry about what your gift is on the front end. Just get busy loving people towards God. And they will affirm in you whatever your gift is. And that's how you'll identify it. And what I want us to see as we think about the spiritual gifts and how often we miss it and go, oh, what's mine? How do I do this? What do they mean? How do we talk about them? We miss the point. When we think about spiritual gifts at Grace, I want us to think about them in this way. Spiritual gifts are an affirmation of and an invitation into the privilege of ministry. If we believe ministry to be one of the great privileges in life, to be invited into the lives of others, to be able to be the person that they call on when they mourn, to be the person that they call when they don't understand something, to be the person that gets to celebrate with them when they get pregnant or when their kid does something great or when they get a promotion. If we want to be invited into people's lives in that way, if we want to love on people in that way, if we want our life to matter, to know for certain that it's going to matter and that what we're going to do will ring for all of eternity, then we believe that ministry is a privilege. And we understand that the gift that the Spirit gives us to be more effective at that ministry is an affirmation of the fact that we are saved, that he calls us his child, and that we are to be used in that ministry, and it is an invitation into one of life's great privileges. So here's what I want you to do this morning in light of the spiritual gifts. I want to ask you, what's your ministry? Not organized, not structured, your ministry is not the coffee bar. Now that's a way to love on people, but let's not reduce your life to that. The people who serve the coffee are lovely, wonderful people. They are far more capable of other things besides brewing coffee. On some Sundays, they're not very capable of brewing coffee. Am I right? Not today. Today it's good. That's right, baby. What is your ministry? Meaning, who has God called you to love? Who is it that God has placed in your life that you are to love towards him? Sometimes it's structured. It's your small group. It's the kids that you volunteer to lead and to watch. It's the students that you pour into. It's the other people on your board or on your committee. Sometimes it's unstructured. It's the people at work. It's your family. It's your friends. It's your tennis team. It's the folks you hang out with. But I think this morning the question is not, what is my gift? But it's a realization of, man, I have been invited into one of the great privileges of life. And as I'm invited into that privilege of loving others, God, who have you assigned to me to love? And in that way, we are all ministers. And if you're not sure who that is, then my encouragement to you this week is to just beg the Spirit to show you. Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? Who do you want me to love? And as you get busy loving other people towards Jesus, they will affirm in you whatever your gifting is, and you can lean into that more and more and experience the joy in being exactly who you were created to be. All right. I'm going to pray, and then we're going to continue with the service. Father, thank you for loving us. Thank you for your spirit. Thank you for the gift of ministry, for the gift of being conduits of your love to other people. Lord, I pray that we would get to, all of us, experience the incredible privilege that it is to be used by you. To know that you're using us in a way that makes our life matter. To know that you're using us in a way that when we get to the end of our days, we will look back and know and get to say like Paul did, that we were poured out like a drink offering. Father, I pray that you would show us who to love, that you would give us the courage to love them well, that you would gift us exactly how we need to to love them effectively, that we would be comfortable with whatever shape that love takes based on how you've wired and gifted us. God, I pray that Grace Raleigh would be a place where other people feel loved. I pray for those who go on from this place to different areas, God, that they would love people there as well. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.