John

Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to be with you in this way. I am excited for the fifth part in our series called Things You Should Know, where we're looking through things in Scripture or that come up in church or in Christendom that we are familiar with, we've heard of before, but maybe we don't know how to explain or maybe it hasn't been discussed or maybe we're just too far down the rabbit hole of faith to raise our hand and ask about these things to get some clarity. And so what we wanted to do, so that you didn't have to ask those embarrassing questions in small groups, is take five weeks here at the beginning of the year and talk through some of these topics that we may have questions about, because we don't really discuss them all the time. This morning, I wanted us to look at grace and mercy. Grace and mercy are two things that we see come up in Scripture a lot. We're going to look at Scripture in a little bit to see how replete it is with references to God's grace and God's mercy. And we sing songs about them. We certainly know about them. We've heard about them. The name of the church is Grace, for crying out loud. But I wonder how many of us would be confident in whatever your working definition of grace is. I wonder how many of us would be confident understanding mercy or explaining it to our kids if they heard those words and said, hey, what does that mean? How many of you would feel comfortable going, I got this, I'm going to knock this out of the park? If I asked those of us listening and watching, hey, could you explain grace and mercy to the church? Could I get you to come in one Sunday morning, I'm just going to bring you up on stage, and you tell the good people of grace what the name of the church really means. Now, I have no doubt in our church, we would do a good job. There would be, I think, a myriad answers across a wide range of definitions using a lot of unnecessary words that would be mostly right. But I think it's worth it as a church to take some time and define these words in a simple way and understand what grace and mercy really are. Because when we understand God's grace and God's mercy towards us, I think that we can't help but want to respond in exuberant praise. I think when we really understand what's going on with grace and mercy, when we really properly understand those two characteristics of God, that it inspires within us a response of gratitude, and that gratitude manifests joy, and it ought to make us want to leap out of our skin and praise our good God. Which is why we've positioned the sermon at the beginning of the service this week, and we're going to transition right into worship as I wrap up the sermon. Because I wanted to give you guys a chance to respond to the reality of God's grace and mercy. So with that in mind, and I would also say, for those of you who are listening to this or me, not on Sunday morning, if you're catching up later in the day, if you're listening on a podcast in the car or on a walk or something like that, as you listen to my voice right now, I would encourage you, plan to listen to some praise and worship music on your own at the end of this sermon. Just go ahead and budget some time in your head to listen to two or three songs or just have it playing in the car and allow yourself to respond to what's shared here this morning. But with that preamble, I wanted to jump right in to defining these words for us so we have a working definition here at Grace. So mercy, the way I understand it, is simply when we do not get what we deserve. Mercy is when we do not get something that we deserve. When our actions or our attitude or our behavior warrants punishment, something punitive, or just some natural consequences, and we don't receive those consequences, we don't receive the punishment that we deserve, when we've earned some trouble and we don't get into that trouble, that's mercy. So mercy is simply when we don't get something that we do deserve. Think of it this way. Pretend you've got a 16-year-old son. He's just got a new car. He's got the keys. And part of the deal with having the freedom to drive is that there's a curfew. And his very first time out, he goes out with his buddies and he breaks a curfew. And he understands that you guys have set up these rules that if you go and you break curfew, when you come back, we're going to take your car keys for a week. That's the deal. All right? So he gets back, he's broken curfew, and what he deserves is for you to take his car keys. And instead you say, you know what? I hope that you remember this. I want to forgive you. I'm not going to hold this against you. Go into bed. I'm not going to take your car keys. Right? That's mercy. He does not get a punishment that he does deserve. He doesn't get the consequences that his behaviors warrant. You just showed your son mercy. That's what that is. So mercy is when we do not get something that we do deserve. Grace, conversely, is when we do get something that we don't deserve. Grace is when we get a special favor or a blessing that we did not earn, that our behavior does not warrant. So we go back to the 16-year-old kid. You've forgiven him and you've sent him to his room, go to bed. I'm not going to take your keys. You can continue to have that freedom. You deserve that punishment, but I'm not going to give it to you. But grace is this. Maybe part of the agreement with your son is if he's going to have the freedom of driving, then he has to be responsible and earn his own gas money, which is a pretty fair driving arrangement across, I think, all families. That's a pretty typical arrangement. You're going to have a car, you've got to pay for your gas money. And because you love him, and because you want him to be blessed, and because it seems like he felt particularly bad about breaking curfew, not only do you send him to bed without taking his keys, but then after he's gone, you take his car and you sneak over to the gas station and you fill that thing all the way up for him. And you leave it there as a surprise the next morning. That's grace. Grace is the full gas tank that he doesn't deserve. He just broke the rules, man. He doesn't deserve that at all. He doesn't deserve any special favors. But because you love him, because you're a good parent, you fill up his gas tank. That's grace, right? And it's important that we understand these concepts because they are all over Scripture. Scripture shows us over and over again that God shows us mercy and that God shows us grace. I went through this week and just kind of looked at some of the passages, and I wanted you to see a few of them. So I'm going to read them kind of machine gun style real quick here. There's going to be three in a row for mercy, and then we're going to talk about these. But just look what Scripture has to say about mercy. I love this one in James. This is just a snippet of the verse, but it's a simple phrase. James writes that mercy triumphs over judgment. And then on in Lamentations, back in the Old Testament, the scriptures say, And then finally, Paul writes in Ephesians, What we see in those verses very clearly is that God's mercy is the forgiveness of our sins. God's mercy to us is forgiving our sins, is not giving us the just punishment that we deserve for our sins. I don't know if you've ever thought about it this way, but when we sin, it is offensive to Creator God. When we sin, we take up arms in a violent insurrection against God's domain in the universe. Last week, we talked about Satan, and we talked about his fundamental sin that is all of our fundamental sins, which is to look at God and to say, you're supposed to be up there. You're supposed to be the authority figure, but I don't want that to be true in my life, so I'm going to be my own authority figure. When we sin, when we choose something that is outside of God's will, what we're saying to God is, I don't accept your authority in my life. You're not the boss of me. I'm the boss of me. You don't make my decisions. I make my decisions. You see, when we sin, it is an active rebellion against the way that God created us. God is the creator. We are the created. I'm firmly convinced, and I've said it before, that that's why Genesis starts the way it does. The very first words in the Bible are, in the beginning, God created. It establishes that relationship, creator, creation. In charge, subservient. And when we sin, we go, I don't like that you're in charge. I want to be in charge. And we rebel against God. And God sent his son in light of that rebellion to make a path back to him so that we could spend eternity with him. And God says, when we sin, listen, you can't spend eternity with me anymore. You can't do it. You're imperfect. You've offended me. You violated the terms of the agreement. I am taking your keys. And then God sends his son to make a way for us to go to heaven anyways, for us to spend eternity with him anyways. And what do we do? We trample on that. We sin again. We demand forgiveness again. And I'm not sure that we stop and realize the miracle of God's mercy, the miracle of his forgiveness. When we do, that phrase in James, mercy triumphs over judgment, becomes really amazing. We deserve judgment. We broke the rules. He should take our keys. But he doesn't because our God chooses mercy and mercy triumphs over judgment. Jesus tells Peter, when Peter says, how many times should you forgive someone when they wrong you? Jesus says, 70 times seven. As many times as they wrong you, show them mercy. It's in his very nature to do this. Even though we are involved in a rebellious insurrection against Creator God, He looks at us in all of our offense. And for many of us, we're not talking about ignorant sin here. We're not talking about this thing that we did and now we realize, oh my gosh, I shouldn't be doing that. Now that I'm acquainted with Scripture, I know better. I'm talking about the willful sin that you and I commit every week, every day. Who am I kidding? That's offensive to Creator God. And yet he shows us mercy because lamentation says his mercies are new every morning. Every day requires more of God's forgiveness. Every day we break curfew and every day he gives us mercy for that. He withholds the punishment from us that we do deserve. He withholds the separation from us that we do deserve, the damnation from us that we do deserve. That's God's mercy. But it gets better because I think God's grace adds another layer on top of that that's even more remarkable. Look at what Scripture says about God's grace, just two verses really quickly. In Ephesians, Paul writes, for by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God. And then on in Romans he writes, and we are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. So mercy forgives us. God's mercy forgives us, but God's grace restores us. You see? God's mercy says, you're forgiven. I know you messed up. I know you broke curfew. You're forgiven. But then God's grace says, and I've made a way for you to be in my family. He fills up the tank. God's mercy says, I no longer hold your sins against you. God's grace says, because of that, I sent my son to die for you, and now you have a seat at my table etern, Do you understand? God's mercy says we messed up, we've offended Creator God, we've willfully sinned, and we've offended Him, and we deserve punishment, and He says, I'm not going to punish you. And He could stop there. He could say, I'm not going to punish you, I'm not going to punish you this one time for breaking curfew, but don't mess up anymore. And then if we mess up again, then we're done. We're toast. That's it. But in his grace and in his goodness, he doesn't stop at forgiveness. He stops at restoration. Not only are you forgiven, but now here, have a seat at my table. Not only are you forgiven, but now you are an adopted son or daughter of the king. You are an heir to the universal throne. Not only am I not going to hold it against you, not only am I going to clothe you in the righteousness ofal son. For those of you who are not familiar with it, I'm about to give you the quickest, worst rendition of it ever. All right. I've preached about this before. I can do a better job than this, but for the sake of time, we're going to look at some essential details. The parable of the prodigal son goes like this. There's a father who's wealthy and he has two sons. And one of those sons, the younger one, looks at the dad and he says, you know what? I really just want your stuff. I don't want you. Can you just go ahead and give me my inheritance? I'd rather you be dead anyway. Just give me my money so that I can live how I want. And that father, in his goodness, for reasons I don't understand, says, okay, fine, and gives him the money. And the son goes off into the city and he spends it on living in ways that just feed his appetites and his lusts. And he runs out of money. He spends it in totally dishonorable ways. He comes to the end of it. Everybody leaves him. He can't find a job. He ends up eating slop on a pig farm. And one day the Bible says he comes to his senses in this really poignant moment and he decides, I'm going to go back to my dad's house. But he works out this speech in his head where he's going to go back and he's going to say, I'm going to go back and I'm going to tell him, can you just please forgive me and let me be your servant? I don't deserve to be your son anymore. What I've done is too offensive. Will you please just let me be your servant? Because they live better than I do right now. And so he heads home with this speech in mind, which, by the way, it's a pretty fair speech, right? Dude took his dad's money, went off and spent it however he wanted to, wasted it on debaucherous things, and then comes back with his hat in his hand. Yeah, you're darn right he doesn't deserve to be a son anymore. He should live as a servant, at least for a few years, right? But he goes back, and the father sees him from a long way off and runs out to greet him. And the son starts in with his speech, dad, I'm so sorry, I don't deserve, yada, yada, yada. And the dad shuts him up right away, flings his arms around him and hugs him. And in that moment, the son knows that he's forgiven, that his father's not going to hold those things against him. That's mercy. But he doesn't stop there. He takes the ring, the signet of the family, and he puts it on his son's finger. And he takes the robe and he takes the slippers and he puts those on the son. And then he goes and he kills the fattened calf, the really good stuff. And he throws a big, huge party. And he says, my son is back, and he welcomes him right back into the family, which he didn't have to do, and his behavior didn't warrant. It's the perfect picture of the mercy and the grace that God offers us. We're the prodigals. We run away and make willful decisions to offend our God, to throw off his authority in our life and be our own authority. And then at some point or another, we come back, hat in hand, apologetic, I'm so sorry. And he forgives us. But he doesn't just forgive us. He restores us. He doesn't just say, hey, I'm not mad at you. Come here. You would expect that he would say, you're forgiven. Get away from me. I need a minute. That's not what he does. He says, you're forgiven. And then he hugs us. And then he sends his son, his only son, whom he loves, who was perfect, who never offended him, to die for you and for me. He gave us that gift. Do you understand? We don't deserve the grace of Jesus. We don't deserve that. We didn't earn it. Our behavior doesn't warrant it. Nowhere in the scripture is there a contract that says when we break the law and offend Almighty God that he owes us the death of his son? That's not the deal. But he does it anyways. That's grace. And in light of that, the mercy of forgiveness and the grace of restoration, we should want to exuberantly praise our God. But I'm also aware of the fact that many of us, as we listen to this, if you look at the ends of the spectrum of, Nick, you better shut up so I can start praising God right now. I'm about to jump out of my skin. And then, oh, okay, that's cool. I think I understand grace and mercy a little bit better now. A lot of us are closer to this end. A lot of us have responded in our heads and in our hearts to what I just said in that way. Oh, okay, yeah, I get it. I understand that better. That's good. Thank you. And it makes me wonder, me included, why we're on that end of the spectrum. And as I thought about that this week, I could only include that it's probably because we're all entitled brats. We're probably on that end of the spectrum because there's a very good chance that the two to three hundred adults I'm talking to right now are really just entitled brats. Here's what I mean. I just want to give you a picture of my daughter's life. I have a daughter named Lily. She just recently turned five. This is her last six weeks. Before you get offended at me calling you an entitled brat, which I did just do, just hear me out. Lily's last six weeks have been unbelievable. She is, through no fault of her own, incredibly entitled now. I ran this by Jen. She's not happy I'm saying this, but we've accepted that it's true. Here's what's happened with her. In December, we as a family spent basically the month down in Athens, Georgia with Jen's family as her dad transitioned into eternity. And in doing that, with Christmas coming up, there are people here in Raleigh who love us and who love Lily and wanted to make sure that Lily got a gift. So a couple times I would come back to Raleigh to take care of some church stuff, and there would be packages waiting on me at the house. I had, I literally, the first time I came back, this is embarrassing, we had some neighbors collecting our mail for us. I had to get a wheelbarrow and go down to their house and fill it up with all the stuff that was waiting on us. And then they pulled a wagon and we unloaded it at my house. That was Christmas arriving at the Rector's. That's us. And other people had like dropped things off at the door. So now I go home, I'm getting these gifts. I take them back to Lily, who is now opening these gifts like, hey, all these people got you these things. Okay, great, thank you. So she's opening them. We're trying to do the video with excitement. She's trying to fan excitement, but she's four at the time. She's not really good at this yet. She doesn't know that's part of the deal when you get gifts. So she's already getting gifts in early December. I made another trip back. There's more stuff waiting. I bring that back. I go ahead and give that to her because we know that there's Christmas coming. We don't want to mute those things. Then at Jen's house, because of things going on, we did early Christmas with her dad. So all the grandkids go in and she's now opening three or four other gifts from her grandparents. Thank you for these and these and these. Then Christmas Eve, we have real Christmas with Jen's family and she gets more gifts. Then the next day we go to my family's house and she gets more gifts, right, on Christmas. And so now the situation in a state that we don't even live in is at my parents' house, there's a pile of gifts that's too big to carry back to Jen's parents' house. So we just have to leave it there for a second. At Jen's parents' house, she has gifts strewn across three stories of a home, including inside a princess room that her grandfather made for her while he still could that she gets to sleep in, complete with lit teepee, okay? This is her life. There's a mess of toys there. There's some on the main floor. There's a basement that she's adopted as a playroom. And then there's toys in the playroom that my parents have for her. And then she comes back. We don't get back until early January, right? When we get back, there's more gifts waiting on her because people at the church love her and are so good to us. And then her birthday's on January 15th. So on January 15th, prior to that, more gifts are showing up at the house. She's opening them up. She lives in a, in a, like a dang gift parade. It's a totally normal thing for her to come home and open up to like, hey, these two things came for you today. And she just opens it up like they're nothing. Then on her birthday, the neighborhood kids come over and give her stuff she doesn't need in exchange for cake that they don't need. And then the next day we have church drive by where the families come through and they hand her more stuff that she doesn't need. And we wave at them in the freezing cold, and we just have so much junk all over our house. And to this child, it's totally normal. She has no idea that she lives inside of a gift parade. They just show up every day. And what Jen and I have realized is she's entitled. Now, I will say this. She is not a brat. She's not that. That word was for dramatic effect only. She's sweet and kind and loving, but she has no capacity to show the proper gratitude for all the gifts that she's been getting because to her it's a totally normal thing. It's embarrassing to me how much people love us and love her. And I don't know what I'm going to do as a dad. I've literally tried to talk Jen into when somebody gives us a gift, let's put it in a room somewhere. And then as she is good, if she has a good week, then we'll give her one of the gifts from the gift room, right? To try to help her earn it. I don't know exactly how to solve this. I would imagine that we're not on an island with this issue. But the reality of my daughter's life is she's entitled. And she doesn't know it. We're going to try to correct it. But what I understand is that that entitlement blinds her to what generosity really is. That entitlement works to mute her joy because she sees everything through the lens of this is normal. I deserve this. If I ask for a thing, I get the thing. This is how life goes. And she has no reason to believe that that's not how life goes. She's only barely five, and she's loved. See, here's the thing. I think it's great. I'm happy for her. I'm floored by the love that our family experiences. I'm grateful that she gets to live a life like that. But she has no perspective on how grateful she should really be. Because again, her entitlement blinds her to the generosity around her and serves to mute her joy that she should have when she receives a gift. I bring that up because I believe that you and I live in a stinking gift parade and we just don't know it. We live in parades of God's goodness and we don't see it. All of our life, if we grew up in church, as soon as you're involved in church, at some point or another, you're going to hear, you've sinned and you've offended Almighty God. And then as soon as that is said to help us feel better, as a capstone to it, you've sinned and offended Almighty God, but God offers us mercy, so you're good. Jesus died on the cross for your sins, so you're fine. You've sinned, you don't get to spend eternity with heaven, but God offers us mercy and sends his son to die for us, so you're forgiven. So we never have to sit in the reality of what our sin really warrants. We never have to sit under the weight of, I have sinned, I have chosen my authority over God's authority, and that has earned me eternal separation from him. We don't have to sit in that for more than 30 seconds before the pastor comes back and says, but God died for you, so we have mercy. We never stop to think that we don't deserve mercy. We never stop to consider that these gifts don't have to keep showing up at my house. We've never done the math to understand that God doesn't owe you forgiveness. Do you understand? He doesn't owe it to you. He created you. He set you on the planet. He said, these are the rules. This is how you can please me. And we've all at different points in our life said, you know, I'm not really that interested in pleasing you. He doesn't owe us forgiveness for that. We walk around like we're entitled to it. We walk around like we deserve it. We walk around like, listen, the deal should be, God, I'm going to mess up a couple times. If you could let some people kill your son, that seems pretty fair. Grace, we are not owed mercy. That's nowhere in the contract. You say, yeah, but God is love. God forgives. He is love. He does forgive. He's also just. And what we deserve is separation from the God that we've offended. But because mercy triumphs over judgment, and because His mercies are new every morning, he withholds that judgment from us and he offers us forgiveness. He offers us a mercy that we are not owed and that we do not deserve. Yet we are so familiar with it and we sing songs about it so often and we count on it and take it for granted so regularly that sometimes we treat mercy like another doll that someone handed us out the window that, yeah, of course I get this. It's my birthday. This is what we do. And our entitlement blinds us to the grandeur and the majesty of God's mercy. Not to mention the graces that we don't see. Grace is a goodness that we get that we have not earned. Grace is God's favor on our life that doesn't warrant it. We just walked through the really, and we're in the middle of the really difficult season of losing Jen's dad. His name was John. Towards the end of John's life, we found out we were pregnant with a boy that we're going to name John. What grace from God. What grace from God that he says, listen, everybody has to go. As appointed to man wants to die. Everyone's going to have to walk this path. And now it's John's turn to walk this path. But because I love you and because you're good and because you're my child, you're good because I made you good. Here's another John for you to love. That's grace. We don't deserve that. We didn't warrant that. Do you understand that the goodness in your life is grace? It's God's goodness in your life that when you get the new car and you drive it down the road and it smells nice and it looks nice and you're real proud of yourself and it makes us feel like we arrived, that happiness, that moment, that's God's grace. When we sit in our living room and our kids are back from college and we watch our grandkids scurry around or we see their joy and a gift that we were able to buy them, like that's God's grace. When we sit around with our friends and we laugh and we have a good night and we go home and we feel warm, that's God's grace. Your gifts and talents that got you where you are, those are gifts from God that are his grace. His grace is all over our lives. And if we would just stop and look around and acknowledge that we're in a dang gift parade, I think we would be blown away by God's goodness. It reminds me of one of my favorite verses in John, where he simply writes, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From God's fullness, out of the goodness of his heart, we have all received grace upon grace. He just lavishes them upon us because he's a good father and he likes to see you happy. He likes it when you cry tears of joy. He likes the moments that you share with your husband or your wife or your friend or your parents or your kids. He likes those sweet moments. He designs those for you. He doesn't just forgive you. He doesn't just say, hey, I'm not going to hold your sins against you, but he fills up your tank with gas every day over and over from his fullness. We have all received grace upon grace. He doesn't just forgive you. He sends his son to die for you and he restores you and he welcomes you into his house to sit at his table. And these little snippets of grace are just glimpses into eternity where it's nothing but grace and nothing but goodness and nothing but joy that's waiting for us, that he won for us, that he gifts to us that we didn't earn. And so I just wonder what God's grace and mercy will look like when we no longer see them through the lens of entitlement. I wonder what God's grace and mercy will look like when we no longer see those things through the lens of entitlement. When we can just stop for a second and acknowledge, yeah, I don't deserve mercy. That's not part of the deal. God chooses to show me mercy because he loves me. What will it look like if we take for a second? In a few minutes we're going to sing that song that has the line, I see the evidence of your goodness all around me. What would happen if we would look around at all the goodness in our life that's a gift from God and acknowledge that, man, we live inside of a gift parade. God has given us countless goodness and countless grace. He lavishes it upon us. His mercies are new every morning because we require them every morning. Let's this morning be grateful for God's grace and for God's mercy. Let's see them fresh and new, not through the lens of entitlement that blinds us to the grandeur of his generosity, but through the lens of humility that helps us see his grace and mercy for what they are. And let's be humbly blown away by those things. So sing along as we sing or sit and listen as we sing. But in light of God's grace and mercy, let's praise him together this morning.

Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to be with you in this way. I am excited for the fifth part in our series called Things You Should Know, where we're looking through things in Scripture or that come up in church or in Christendom that we are familiar with, we've heard of before, but maybe we don't know how to explain or maybe it hasn't been discussed or maybe we're just too far down the rabbit hole of faith to raise our hand and ask about these things to get some clarity. And so what we wanted to do, so that you didn't have to ask those embarrassing questions in small groups, is take five weeks here at the beginning of the year and talk through some of these topics that we may have questions about, because we don't really discuss them all the time. This morning, I wanted us to look at grace and mercy. Grace and mercy are two things that we see come up in Scripture a lot. We're going to look at Scripture in a little bit to see how replete it is with references to God's grace and God's mercy. And we sing songs about them. We certainly know about them. We've heard about them. The name of the church is Grace, for crying out loud. But I wonder how many of us would be confident in whatever your working definition of grace is. I wonder how many of us would be confident understanding mercy or explaining it to our kids if they heard those words and said, hey, what does that mean? How many of you would feel comfortable going, I got this, I'm going to knock this out of the park? If I asked those of us listening and watching, hey, could you explain grace and mercy to the church? Could I get you to come in one Sunday morning, I'm just going to bring you up on stage, and you tell the good people of grace what the name of the church really means. Now, I have no doubt in our church, we would do a good job. There would be, I think, a myriad answers across a wide range of definitions using a lot of unnecessary words that would be mostly right. But I think it's worth it as a church to take some time and define these words in a simple way and understand what grace and mercy really are. Because when we understand God's grace and God's mercy towards us, I think that we can't help but want to respond in exuberant praise. I think when we really understand what's going on with grace and mercy, when we really properly understand those two characteristics of God, that it inspires within us a response of gratitude, and that gratitude manifests joy, and it ought to make us want to leap out of our skin and praise our good God. Which is why we've positioned the sermon at the beginning of the service this week, and we're going to transition right into worship as I wrap up the sermon. Because I wanted to give you guys a chance to respond to the reality of God's grace and mercy. So with that in mind, and I would also say, for those of you who are listening to this or me, not on Sunday morning, if you're catching up later in the day, if you're listening on a podcast in the car or on a walk or something like that, as you listen to my voice right now, I would encourage you, plan to listen to some praise and worship music on your own at the end of this sermon. Just go ahead and budget some time in your head to listen to two or three songs or just have it playing in the car and allow yourself to respond to what's shared here this morning. But with that preamble, I wanted to jump right in to defining these words for us so we have a working definition here at Grace. So mercy, the way I understand it, is simply when we do not get what we deserve. Mercy is when we do not get something that we deserve. When our actions or our attitude or our behavior warrants punishment, something punitive, or just some natural consequences, and we don't receive those consequences, we don't receive the punishment that we deserve, when we've earned some trouble and we don't get into that trouble, that's mercy. So mercy is simply when we don't get something that we do deserve. Think of it this way. Pretend you've got a 16-year-old son. He's just got a new car. He's got the keys. And part of the deal with having the freedom to drive is that there's a curfew. And his very first time out, he goes out with his buddies and he breaks a curfew. And he understands that you guys have set up these rules that if you go and you break curfew, when you come back, we're going to take your car keys for a week. That's the deal. All right? So he gets back, he's broken curfew, and what he deserves is for you to take his car keys. And instead you say, you know what? I hope that you remember this. I want to forgive you. I'm not going to hold this against you. Go into bed. I'm not going to take your car keys. Right? That's mercy. He does not get a punishment that he does deserve. He doesn't get the consequences that his behaviors warrant. You just showed your son mercy. That's what that is. So mercy is when we do not get something that we do deserve. Grace, conversely, is when we do get something that we don't deserve. Grace is when we get a special favor or a blessing that we did not earn, that our behavior does not warrant. So we go back to the 16-year-old kid. You've forgiven him and you've sent him to his room, go to bed. I'm not going to take your keys. You can continue to have that freedom. You deserve that punishment, but I'm not going to give it to you. But grace is this. Maybe part of the agreement with your son is if he's going to have the freedom of driving, then he has to be responsible and earn his own gas money, which is a pretty fair driving arrangement across, I think, all families. That's a pretty typical arrangement. You're going to have a car, you've got to pay for your gas money. And because you love him, and because you want him to be blessed, and because it seems like he felt particularly bad about breaking curfew, not only do you send him to bed without taking his keys, but then after he's gone, you take his car and you sneak over to the gas station and you fill that thing all the way up for him. And you leave it there as a surprise the next morning. That's grace. Grace is the full gas tank that he doesn't deserve. He just broke the rules, man. He doesn't deserve that at all. He doesn't deserve any special favors. But because you love him, because you're a good parent, you fill up his gas tank. That's grace, right? And it's important that we understand these concepts because they are all over Scripture. Scripture shows us over and over again that God shows us mercy and that God shows us grace. I went through this week and just kind of looked at some of the passages, and I wanted you to see a few of them. So I'm going to read them kind of machine gun style real quick here. There's going to be three in a row for mercy, and then we're going to talk about these. But just look what Scripture has to say about mercy. I love this one in James. This is just a snippet of the verse, but it's a simple phrase. James writes that mercy triumphs over judgment. And then on in Lamentations, back in the Old Testament, the scriptures say, And then finally, Paul writes in Ephesians, What we see in those verses very clearly is that God's mercy is the forgiveness of our sins. God's mercy to us is forgiving our sins, is not giving us the just punishment that we deserve for our sins. I don't know if you've ever thought about it this way, but when we sin, it is offensive to Creator God. When we sin, we take up arms in a violent insurrection against God's domain in the universe. Last week, we talked about Satan, and we talked about his fundamental sin that is all of our fundamental sins, which is to look at God and to say, you're supposed to be up there. You're supposed to be the authority figure, but I don't want that to be true in my life, so I'm going to be my own authority figure. When we sin, when we choose something that is outside of God's will, what we're saying to God is, I don't accept your authority in my life. You're not the boss of me. I'm the boss of me. You don't make my decisions. I make my decisions. You see, when we sin, it is an active rebellion against the way that God created us. God is the creator. We are the created. I'm firmly convinced, and I've said it before, that that's why Genesis starts the way it does. The very first words in the Bible are, in the beginning, God created. It establishes that relationship, creator, creation. In charge, subservient. And when we sin, we go, I don't like that you're in charge. I want to be in charge. And we rebel against God. And God sent his son in light of that rebellion to make a path back to him so that we could spend eternity with him. And God says, when we sin, listen, you can't spend eternity with me anymore. You can't do it. You're imperfect. You've offended me. You violated the terms of the agreement. I am taking your keys. And then God sends his son to make a way for us to go to heaven anyways, for us to spend eternity with him anyways. And what do we do? We trample on that. We sin again. We demand forgiveness again. And I'm not sure that we stop and realize the miracle of God's mercy, the miracle of his forgiveness. When we do, that phrase in James, mercy triumphs over judgment, becomes really amazing. We deserve judgment. We broke the rules. He should take our keys. But he doesn't because our God chooses mercy and mercy triumphs over judgment. Jesus tells Peter, when Peter says, how many times should you forgive someone when they wrong you? Jesus says, 70 times seven. As many times as they wrong you, show them mercy. It's in his very nature to do this. Even though we are involved in a rebellious insurrection against Creator God, He looks at us in all of our offense. And for many of us, we're not talking about ignorant sin here. We're not talking about this thing that we did and now we realize, oh my gosh, I shouldn't be doing that. Now that I'm acquainted with Scripture, I know better. I'm talking about the willful sin that you and I commit every week, every day. Who am I kidding? That's offensive to Creator God. And yet he shows us mercy because lamentation says his mercies are new every morning. Every day requires more of God's forgiveness. Every day we break curfew and every day he gives us mercy for that. He withholds the punishment from us that we do deserve. He withholds the separation from us that we do deserve, the damnation from us that we do deserve. That's God's mercy. But it gets better because I think God's grace adds another layer on top of that that's even more remarkable. Look at what Scripture says about God's grace, just two verses really quickly. In Ephesians, Paul writes, for by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God. And then on in Romans he writes, and we are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. So mercy forgives us. God's mercy forgives us, but God's grace restores us. You see? God's mercy says, you're forgiven. I know you messed up. I know you broke curfew. You're forgiven. But then God's grace says, and I've made a way for you to be in my family. He fills up the tank. God's mercy says, I no longer hold your sins against you. God's grace says, because of that, I sent my son to die for you, and now you have a seat at my table etern, Do you understand? God's mercy says we messed up, we've offended Creator God, we've willfully sinned, and we've offended Him, and we deserve punishment, and He says, I'm not going to punish you. And He could stop there. He could say, I'm not going to punish you, I'm not going to punish you this one time for breaking curfew, but don't mess up anymore. And then if we mess up again, then we're done. We're toast. That's it. But in his grace and in his goodness, he doesn't stop at forgiveness. He stops at restoration. Not only are you forgiven, but now here, have a seat at my table. Not only are you forgiven, but now you are an adopted son or daughter of the king. You are an heir to the universal throne. Not only am I not going to hold it against you, not only am I going to clothe you in the righteousness ofal son. For those of you who are not familiar with it, I'm about to give you the quickest, worst rendition of it ever. All right. I've preached about this before. I can do a better job than this, but for the sake of time, we're going to look at some essential details. The parable of the prodigal son goes like this. There's a father who's wealthy and he has two sons. And one of those sons, the younger one, looks at the dad and he says, you know what? I really just want your stuff. I don't want you. Can you just go ahead and give me my inheritance? I'd rather you be dead anyway. Just give me my money so that I can live how I want. And that father, in his goodness, for reasons I don't understand, says, okay, fine, and gives him the money. And the son goes off into the city and he spends it on living in ways that just feed his appetites and his lusts. And he runs out of money. He spends it in totally dishonorable ways. He comes to the end of it. Everybody leaves him. He can't find a job. He ends up eating slop on a pig farm. And one day the Bible says he comes to his senses in this really poignant moment and he decides, I'm going to go back to my dad's house. But he works out this speech in his head where he's going to go back and he's going to say, I'm going to go back and I'm going to tell him, can you just please forgive me and let me be your servant? I don't deserve to be your son anymore. What I've done is too offensive. Will you please just let me be your servant? Because they live better than I do right now. And so he heads home with this speech in mind, which, by the way, it's a pretty fair speech, right? Dude took his dad's money, went off and spent it however he wanted to, wasted it on debaucherous things, and then comes back with his hat in his hand. Yeah, you're darn right he doesn't deserve to be a son anymore. He should live as a servant, at least for a few years, right? But he goes back, and the father sees him from a long way off and runs out to greet him. And the son starts in with his speech, dad, I'm so sorry, I don't deserve, yada, yada, yada. And the dad shuts him up right away, flings his arms around him and hugs him. And in that moment, the son knows that he's forgiven, that his father's not going to hold those things against him. That's mercy. But he doesn't stop there. He takes the ring, the signet of the family, and he puts it on his son's finger. And he takes the robe and he takes the slippers and he puts those on the son. And then he goes and he kills the fattened calf, the really good stuff. And he throws a big, huge party. And he says, my son is back, and he welcomes him right back into the family, which he didn't have to do, and his behavior didn't warrant. It's the perfect picture of the mercy and the grace that God offers us. We're the prodigals. We run away and make willful decisions to offend our God, to throw off his authority in our life and be our own authority. And then at some point or another, we come back, hat in hand, apologetic, I'm so sorry. And he forgives us. But he doesn't just forgive us. He restores us. He doesn't just say, hey, I'm not mad at you. Come here. You would expect that he would say, you're forgiven. Get away from me. I need a minute. That's not what he does. He says, you're forgiven. And then he hugs us. And then he sends his son, his only son, whom he loves, who was perfect, who never offended him, to die for you and for me. He gave us that gift. Do you understand? We don't deserve the grace of Jesus. We don't deserve that. We didn't earn it. Our behavior doesn't warrant it. Nowhere in the scripture is there a contract that says when we break the law and offend Almighty God that he owes us the death of his son? That's not the deal. But he does it anyways. That's grace. And in light of that, the mercy of forgiveness and the grace of restoration, we should want to exuberantly praise our God. But I'm also aware of the fact that many of us, as we listen to this, if you look at the ends of the spectrum of, Nick, you better shut up so I can start praising God right now. I'm about to jump out of my skin. And then, oh, okay, that's cool. I think I understand grace and mercy a little bit better now. A lot of us are closer to this end. A lot of us have responded in our heads and in our hearts to what I just said in that way. Oh, okay, yeah, I get it. I understand that better. That's good. Thank you. And it makes me wonder, me included, why we're on that end of the spectrum. And as I thought about that this week, I could only include that it's probably because we're all entitled brats. We're probably on that end of the spectrum because there's a very good chance that the two to three hundred adults I'm talking to right now are really just entitled brats. Here's what I mean. I just want to give you a picture of my daughter's life. I have a daughter named Lily. She just recently turned five. This is her last six weeks. Before you get offended at me calling you an entitled brat, which I did just do, just hear me out. Lily's last six weeks have been unbelievable. She is, through no fault of her own, incredibly entitled now. I ran this by Jen. She's not happy I'm saying this, but we've accepted that it's true. Here's what's happened with her. In December, we as a family spent basically the month down in Athens, Georgia with Jen's family as her dad transitioned into eternity. And in doing that, with Christmas coming up, there are people here in Raleigh who love us and who love Lily and wanted to make sure that Lily got a gift. So a couple times I would come back to Raleigh to take care of some church stuff, and there would be packages waiting on me at the house. I had, I literally, the first time I came back, this is embarrassing, we had some neighbors collecting our mail for us. I had to get a wheelbarrow and go down to their house and fill it up with all the stuff that was waiting on us. And then they pulled a wagon and we unloaded it at my house. That was Christmas arriving at the Rector's. That's us. And other people had like dropped things off at the door. So now I go home, I'm getting these gifts. I take them back to Lily, who is now opening these gifts like, hey, all these people got you these things. Okay, great, thank you. So she's opening them. We're trying to do the video with excitement. She's trying to fan excitement, but she's four at the time. She's not really good at this yet. She doesn't know that's part of the deal when you get gifts. So she's already getting gifts in early December. I made another trip back. There's more stuff waiting. I bring that back. I go ahead and give that to her because we know that there's Christmas coming. We don't want to mute those things. Then at Jen's house, because of things going on, we did early Christmas with her dad. So all the grandkids go in and she's now opening three or four other gifts from her grandparents. Thank you for these and these and these. Then Christmas Eve, we have real Christmas with Jen's family and she gets more gifts. Then the next day we go to my family's house and she gets more gifts, right, on Christmas. And so now the situation in a state that we don't even live in is at my parents' house, there's a pile of gifts that's too big to carry back to Jen's parents' house. So we just have to leave it there for a second. At Jen's parents' house, she has gifts strewn across three stories of a home, including inside a princess room that her grandfather made for her while he still could that she gets to sleep in, complete with lit teepee, okay? This is her life. There's a mess of toys there. There's some on the main floor. There's a basement that she's adopted as a playroom. And then there's toys in the playroom that my parents have for her. And then she comes back. We don't get back until early January, right? When we get back, there's more gifts waiting on her because people at the church love her and are so good to us. And then her birthday's on January 15th. So on January 15th, prior to that, more gifts are showing up at the house. She's opening them up. She lives in a, in a, like a dang gift parade. It's a totally normal thing for her to come home and open up to like, hey, these two things came for you today. And she just opens it up like they're nothing. Then on her birthday, the neighborhood kids come over and give her stuff she doesn't need in exchange for cake that they don't need. And then the next day we have church drive by where the families come through and they hand her more stuff that she doesn't need. And we wave at them in the freezing cold, and we just have so much junk all over our house. And to this child, it's totally normal. She has no idea that she lives inside of a gift parade. They just show up every day. And what Jen and I have realized is she's entitled. Now, I will say this. She is not a brat. She's not that. That word was for dramatic effect only. She's sweet and kind and loving, but she has no capacity to show the proper gratitude for all the gifts that she's been getting because to her it's a totally normal thing. It's embarrassing to me how much people love us and love her. And I don't know what I'm going to do as a dad. I've literally tried to talk Jen into when somebody gives us a gift, let's put it in a room somewhere. And then as she is good, if she has a good week, then we'll give her one of the gifts from the gift room, right? To try to help her earn it. I don't know exactly how to solve this. I would imagine that we're not on an island with this issue. But the reality of my daughter's life is she's entitled. And she doesn't know it. We're going to try to correct it. But what I understand is that that entitlement blinds her to what generosity really is. That entitlement works to mute her joy because she sees everything through the lens of this is normal. I deserve this. If I ask for a thing, I get the thing. This is how life goes. And she has no reason to believe that that's not how life goes. She's only barely five, and she's loved. See, here's the thing. I think it's great. I'm happy for her. I'm floored by the love that our family experiences. I'm grateful that she gets to live a life like that. But she has no perspective on how grateful she should really be. Because again, her entitlement blinds her to the generosity around her and serves to mute her joy that she should have when she receives a gift. I bring that up because I believe that you and I live in a stinking gift parade and we just don't know it. We live in parades of God's goodness and we don't see it. All of our life, if we grew up in church, as soon as you're involved in church, at some point or another, you're going to hear, you've sinned and you've offended Almighty God. And then as soon as that is said to help us feel better, as a capstone to it, you've sinned and offended Almighty God, but God offers us mercy, so you're good. Jesus died on the cross for your sins, so you're fine. You've sinned, you don't get to spend eternity with heaven, but God offers us mercy and sends his son to die for us, so you're forgiven. So we never have to sit in the reality of what our sin really warrants. We never have to sit under the weight of, I have sinned, I have chosen my authority over God's authority, and that has earned me eternal separation from him. We don't have to sit in that for more than 30 seconds before the pastor comes back and says, but God died for you, so we have mercy. We never stop to think that we don't deserve mercy. We never stop to consider that these gifts don't have to keep showing up at my house. We've never done the math to understand that God doesn't owe you forgiveness. Do you understand? He doesn't owe it to you. He created you. He set you on the planet. He said, these are the rules. This is how you can please me. And we've all at different points in our life said, you know, I'm not really that interested in pleasing you. He doesn't owe us forgiveness for that. We walk around like we're entitled to it. We walk around like we deserve it. We walk around like, listen, the deal should be, God, I'm going to mess up a couple times. If you could let some people kill your son, that seems pretty fair. Grace, we are not owed mercy. That's nowhere in the contract. You say, yeah, but God is love. God forgives. He is love. He does forgive. He's also just. And what we deserve is separation from the God that we've offended. But because mercy triumphs over judgment, and because His mercies are new every morning, he withholds that judgment from us and he offers us forgiveness. He offers us a mercy that we are not owed and that we do not deserve. Yet we are so familiar with it and we sing songs about it so often and we count on it and take it for granted so regularly that sometimes we treat mercy like another doll that someone handed us out the window that, yeah, of course I get this. It's my birthday. This is what we do. And our entitlement blinds us to the grandeur and the majesty of God's mercy. Not to mention the graces that we don't see. Grace is a goodness that we get that we have not earned. Grace is God's favor on our life that doesn't warrant it. We just walked through the really, and we're in the middle of the really difficult season of losing Jen's dad. His name was John. Towards the end of John's life, we found out we were pregnant with a boy that we're going to name John. What grace from God. What grace from God that he says, listen, everybody has to go. As appointed to man wants to die. Everyone's going to have to walk this path. And now it's John's turn to walk this path. But because I love you and because you're good and because you're my child, you're good because I made you good. Here's another John for you to love. That's grace. We don't deserve that. We didn't warrant that. Do you understand that the goodness in your life is grace? It's God's goodness in your life that when you get the new car and you drive it down the road and it smells nice and it looks nice and you're real proud of yourself and it makes us feel like we arrived, that happiness, that moment, that's God's grace. When we sit in our living room and our kids are back from college and we watch our grandkids scurry around or we see their joy and a gift that we were able to buy them, like that's God's grace. When we sit around with our friends and we laugh and we have a good night and we go home and we feel warm, that's God's grace. Your gifts and talents that got you where you are, those are gifts from God that are his grace. His grace is all over our lives. And if we would just stop and look around and acknowledge that we're in a dang gift parade, I think we would be blown away by God's goodness. It reminds me of one of my favorite verses in John, where he simply writes, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From God's fullness, out of the goodness of his heart, we have all received grace upon grace. He just lavishes them upon us because he's a good father and he likes to see you happy. He likes it when you cry tears of joy. He likes the moments that you share with your husband or your wife or your friend or your parents or your kids. He likes those sweet moments. He designs those for you. He doesn't just forgive you. He doesn't just say, hey, I'm not going to hold your sins against you, but he fills up your tank with gas every day over and over from his fullness. We have all received grace upon grace. He doesn't just forgive you. He sends his son to die for you and he restores you and he welcomes you into his house to sit at his table. And these little snippets of grace are just glimpses into eternity where it's nothing but grace and nothing but goodness and nothing but joy that's waiting for us, that he won for us, that he gifts to us that we didn't earn. And so I just wonder what God's grace and mercy will look like when we no longer see them through the lens of entitlement. I wonder what God's grace and mercy will look like when we no longer see those things through the lens of entitlement. When we can just stop for a second and acknowledge, yeah, I don't deserve mercy. That's not part of the deal. God chooses to show me mercy because he loves me. What will it look like if we take for a second? In a few minutes we're going to sing that song that has the line, I see the evidence of your goodness all around me. What would happen if we would look around at all the goodness in our life that's a gift from God and acknowledge that, man, we live inside of a gift parade. God has given us countless goodness and countless grace. He lavishes it upon us. His mercies are new every morning because we require them every morning. Let's this morning be grateful for God's grace and for God's mercy. Let's see them fresh and new, not through the lens of entitlement that blinds us to the grandeur of his generosity, but through the lens of humility that helps us see his grace and mercy for what they are. And let's be humbly blown away by those things. So sing along as we sing or sit and listen as we sing. But in light of God's grace and mercy, let's praise him together this morning.

Thank you. Hi, good morning, friends. My name is Yasmeen Reese, and I'm a partner here at Grace Raleigh, along with my sweet husband, Brandon Reese. Had to give a shout-out. Today's reading comes from Matthew 28, 18 to 20. I can confirm Brandon is lovely. We do miss him this week. We remember Brandon's with our team down in Mexico right now, so we remember them and keep them in our prayers and hope that the Lord speaks to them as they go and encourages our partners in Mexico while they're there through Grace Raleigh. This is the fifth part of our series called Traits of Grace. The genesis of this series was last fall, when as a staff, we began talking about what makes grace, grace. And as we want to define what it means to be a partner of grace, which we don't have partners we have, or we don't have members, we have partners. When we talk about what it means to be a partner of grace, a person who calls grace home, what do we expect of grace people? What do we want to be as a church? And so we kind of threw a bunch of stuff on the whiteboard, and we ended up with these five traits that we've gone through these last five weeks. And I would tell you that we want you, I know that this is a lofty goal, but we want you to know all of these. We want you, if you call grace home over time, to be able to say all of these, to understand what these are, to be able to explain them to people. If they say, hey, what's your church all about? We can tell them this. Our mission statement is to connect people to people and connect people to Jesus. But the ways that we do that are in these five traits. So in the first week, we'll see if I can remember them. In the first week, we talked about the fact that we are kingdom builders, right? We're all building a kingdom somewhere. We're either building God's kingdom or our own kingdom. So we asked, whose kingdom are you building? At Grace, we want to build God's kingdom. And then in the second week, we talked about being conduits of grace. This is where we get our authenticity. This is where we're kind of real. This is how we can be accepting of others and loving of others who come in here because we receive God's grace. We know that we're messed up. You're messed up too. We love you too. We are conduits of God's grace as we receive it, we offer it. And then we talked about how we're people of devotion, that the single most important habit anyone can have in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And so we are people who believe in that devotional habit and pursuing God on our own and allowing the Sunday morning experience to simply be supplemental to what God is doing in our life every day as we pursue him. And then, which one have I forgotten? Did we do last week? You're nodding your head at me. You're like, yeah, you got the first one. Now you're not there on the fourth one. Okay, last week, partners. We talked about being partners, right? We're not just partners at the church, but we're partners in ministry and what we do at Grace. We're partners in life. At Grace, no one should walk alone through any season of life. And then we're partners in faith. We hold up one another. We help each other cling to faith as we move through life. And so this week, our last trait, we are step-takers at grace. We are step-takers. And I'll tell you what that means. This is really a Sunday morning focused on our discipleship model at grace. When we talk about discipleship at grace, this is how we talk about it. We talk about it in terms of being step-takers. And as I was preparing this sermon, it occurred to me that this is really more of a seminar than a sermon. This is really more informative where I teach you than it is about being a sermon. A sermon kind of changes us and inspires us and teaching informs us. And so this morning I'm teaching you and I want to teach you about what discipleship is because I don't know if you've realized this or not, but discipleship is the goal of every church. Every church ever, discipleship is the goal because of the verse that Yasmeen read to us just a few minutes ago. Because when Jesus is leaving the disciples, going back up to heaven, he gives them his final instructions. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is the job of the disciples of the church that Jesus left behind. He says, my work here is done. I'm going to go to heaven. I'm going to sit at the right hand of the Father. I'm going to intercede for you. I've done what I came to accomplish here on earth. And now I am going to, I'm going to heaven and I'm leaving you with your instructions. I'm leaving you with the keys to the kingdom. I'm leaving you in charge. The church is my kingdom here on earth and you are going to be in charge of it. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to go make disciples in every nation. And so those instructions are not just for the disciples, but for every church and every body that would follow the disciples, every body of believers that would follow the disciples. So that commission is called the Great Commission, and it is our commission. And so every church ever has the goal of making disciples. They say it in different ways. We want to produce multiplying disciples. We want to produce disciple-making disciples. We're a discipleship-focused church. We want to produce disciples. Like, whatever it is, this is the goal of every church, and it's the goal of every church that I've ever been a part of, except, and here's the thing, this is a well-kept church secret that you probably only know intuitively, but you've probably never heard a pastor admit it, we're not very good at it. No church is really super great at making disciples. And I learned that this was true at my last job. My last job, I was at this church outside of Atlanta. It became this big three-campus church where when you preach, you're simulcast out to all the people and whatever, whatever. And because I was a part of a big growing church like that, I got to go to church conferences. So for seven years, I would go to church conferences, and I was the discipleship pastor, right? Now, it was small groups, but my job was to think about the process by which Greystone Church made disciples. And so we're getting into the weeds a little bit in here, but if you've been a part of church for any number of years, you've heard language like this before. You know churches are trying to make disciples. You know what small groups are all about. So this is what we were doing, and it's what I was tasked with. I was in charge of thinking through and implementing the discipleship process at Greystone Church. So I would go to these conferences where other big churches with big staffs would go as well, and there would be breakout sessions. I don't know what happens in your different industries, but in my industry, there's breakout sessions where you choose different things and you go to what's most applicable to your particular position. And so I would always find myself in rooms about this size with round tables, sitting around with other small group pastors or adult education pastors or discipleship pastors or associate pastors that were in charge of these things. And we'd sit around the table and we'd listen to the guru up in front who had small groups and discipleship all figured out and he would tell us exactly how he did it or she did it. And then we'd sit around our table and we'd have some time to talk to each other. And I'm telling you, without fail at these tables, somebody every time, every conference would say, what are you guys doing for discipleship? Because we're rethinking our model. It's not working, right? I don't know in corporate terms what it means when you rethink a model, but in church terms, it means we are totally messing this up. So we're rethinking our model. What do you guys do for discipleship? What we've been doing is not working. We're not really producing disciples. And the answers, I listened to them for seven years. I offered some of them when I thought I was smart. I'll help you guys, you ministry veterans. Let me tell you how we're doing it at Greystone. But the answers were always the same. Well, we're trying this for these reasons. We hope it works. If it doesn't, we might pivot to this, which means nothing. Nobody said, we've been doing this program for years and it's working. Because what churches are looking for is a funnel to put people in. When we put you into this funnel, small groups, volunteering, men's Bible study, women's Bible studies, whatever it is, when we put you into this funnel, you're going to go through these systems and you're going to bounce through these walls and you're going to come out the end of the funnel, a disciple, a mature believer in Jesus. That's the goal. We're giggling about it now, but that's the goal. And that was my job is to design the funnel. What do we put people in so that when they go around, when they come out, they're mature believers in Jesus who are now producing other disciples in their life? And there's all kinds of ideas for this. Some of you have been, I want to ask you to raise your hand. I don't want to delineate good Christians and bad Christians, but some of you have been in discipleship programs. You've been in discipleship groups. You're serious. Some of you have had people disciple you. Some of you have even, and you're the big dogs. Some people have come to you and said, will you disciple me? And here's the thing. I would bet my next paycheck that when someone asks you, if you've ever had someone come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? That your very first thought was, how? I don't know how to do that. But you don't want to let them down. Clearly they think you're somebody. You got stuff figured out. You're like, yes, I will. I will do that. I will disciple you. Great. How do you want to disciple me? Let's meet for breakfast. I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to meet for breakfast once a month, and I'm going to find a book, and we're going to read it. And we'll probably miss a month or two. So in a year, we'll meet like 10 times, finish that book up, and chip, chop, chip, you're going to be a mature believer. This is going to be great. Let's do it. You're giggling because you've done it, man. And here's what you know. Here's what you know is that it didn't work. It didn't work. I've asked poor men over the years to disciple me. I remember, I'm just gonna say his name publicly. There was a facilities guy at Toccoa Falls College that I worked for when I kept the grounds named George Champion, who was just a phenomenally good man. And I worked for him and I asked him, will you disciple me? And he said, sure, let's have breakfast. I thought we had, in Toccoa, we had the huddle house. We weren't even big enough for a waffle house. We had the huddle house with literal bullet holes in the hood vent. There was three of them, but I only went during safe hours. It was fine. And Mr. Champion said, let's meet at hud House, but I got to meet there early, so we'll meet at five. I said, okay. Old college Nate made about two of those. And then I slept through the next two, and I couldn't look George in the eye anymore, so I bailed out on discipleship. There's been others through the years. Maybe you've tried that too. And we're taught about this thing when you try to figure out how do you make disciples? I could ask you to raise your hand. Who's heard of life-on-life discipleship? Don't raise your hand. But there's that phrase because in the Bible, that's how Jesus makes his disciples. They live together. I used to listen to the teachings of this guy named Ray Vanderlei, who's great, and I would highly endorse his teachings. But his teachings is called the dust of the rabbi, or his website's like the dust of the rabbi, because there's this phrase, may you be walking so closely behind your rabbi that as he kicks up the dust from the trail that is getting on you, that you're around him all the time. And in the first century, that's great, man. In the 21st century, that's not super practical. I had people at student ministry conferences tell me, when you're discipling high school guys, you just invite them into your life. Invite them over to dinner. Let them see how a godly man talks to his wife. Let them see how a godly man buys milk. Take them to the grocery store. Just let them see how you do your life. Like I've heard that phrase before. Like let them see how a godly man grocery shops. I'm like, I don't know, probably the same as a nice atheist, I would assume. I don't know how that's helpful. And so if you've been in church world, what you understand is that all the discipleship models that we work with haven't really worked. And you know how I really know that's true? Because of this question. Those of you who've been in church a while, those of you who have grown in your faith and consider yourselves to have a mature faith, who discipled you to get there? Who is it that's been meeting with you regularly, speaking into your life? What book studies have you gone through that produced you into maturity? Now, some of you lucky ones, you have a girl, you have a guy, and they've been guiding you well. And God's been using that relationship in your life in remarkable ways, and that does happen. But for a vast majority of us, like me, who's discipled me, it's just a hodgepodge of people that move in and out of my life as God directs. There's no single program that I went through to grow in my faith. There's no single relationship that I would say that man discipled me. Besides maybe my dad. But that's what dads are for. So those programs, they don't really work. And we're still left with this task, this holy task from Jesus to make disciples. The question becomes, how do we do it? It's this question that I had in my head when I went to another conference. I'm talking a lot about conferences today. I'm painting this picture like all I do is go to conferences. I'm going to a conference this week. So maybe that's what I do. Maybe I just go to a bunch of conferences. I don't know. I have no idea. But I went to a conference back in, I think, 2019, 18 or 19, in the fall. And it was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. You guys paid for it. Thank you so much. And when I went out there, I went to see this pastor named Larry Osborne, who's written a couple of books, who thinks about church in this really practical way that resonates with me and that seems in line with grace. And we've gone through some of his books and stuff at the elder level and the staff level. And I was tired of just big, huge conferences. This one was 25 senior pastors in a room with this guy, and he just taught us for two days. And it was really, really great. It was so good. I took copious notes. And then our elder meetings are structured as such that we have a business meeting on the first Tuesday of the month where we just make decisions for the church. And then on the third Tuesday of the month, we get together, we fellowship, we have fun, we enjoy each other. Sometimes we'll do communion, we'll pray together. And we have something that we're kind of going through just to edify one another and learn more about church in general. And so for seven weeks, we walked through the notes that I took in this conference. It was really valuable. But the most valuable thing I took out of there was the way that Larry thinks about discipleship, and it shaped the way that we as a church at Grace think about discipleship, because we're all called to be disciples, and we're all called to make disciples. So how do we do it? And if it doesn't work to get in the programs, and if it doesn't work to read the books, and if it doesn't work to do life on life, all those things are good and can supplement, but what is it that we need? Well, the way that Larry explained it was that if we really look at Jesus and his life, what we see is that Jesus is always equating our spiritual maturity with the degree to which we are obedient. Jesus is always telling us over and over again in scripture, over and over again in the gospels, we can see Jesus point to this idea that if you love me, you will obey me. And so when Jesus offers us discipleship, when he says he wants to make disciples of us, really he's beckoning us into obedience. Look at just a couple statements from Jesus. We see this, John 14, 15. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, if you want to walk with me, if I'm really the Lord of your life, then you will obey me. He says it more pointedly in Luke. Listen to this. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you? Gosh, that one cuts, doesn't it? This is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside, how many times could Jesus whisper that in our ear and it bring conviction? Why are you singing this song if you don't obey me? Why are you acting holy in small group if you're acting unholy everywhere else? Why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do what I tell you? Why do you call me Lord and yet not let me be the Lord of your life? And so what we see all throughout the gospels is Jesus teaching us, if you're mature, if you're walking with me, if you're abiding in me, you know what you'll do? You'll obey me. You'll do what I say. You'll follow my commands. And this made such an indelible impression that 30 to 60 years later, one of his best disciples, the apostle John, who may have been as young as 10 when he was following Jesus, is writing letters to the churches, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. They're called general epistles or general letters, which means they were for all of the churches in Asia Minor around the Mediterranean at the time. They were written to be circulated amongst the churches. And so at the end of his life, when John has now made disciples in Erasmus and Polycarp, the early church fathers who carried on after the disciples had all left, John was the last living disciple. So he had successfully made disciples. He had handed the keys to the kingdom to other mature believers. And at the end of his life, writing on the topic of spiritual maturity, because I'm not sure they would have called it discipleship. They would have called it growing in faith. But at the end of his life, when he's writing about this to tell people, how do we know if someone has a genuine faith? John says this in 1 John 2. And by this, we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments. Listen, whoever says I know him but does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him. Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. So John, discipled by Jesus, having produced disciples in his own life, says, if you know Jesus, you'll obey him. Whoever says they know Jesus, whoever says they love Jesus and isn't increasing in their obedience is lying. The truth is not in them. That's pretty stark. But what we see is that Jesus and then his disciple John equate spiritual maturity not with theological acumen, not with acts of great service, not with piety and prayers, not even with effective ministry or charismatically drawing other people. What we see is that Jesus and John equate spiritual maturity with increasing levels of obedience in someone's life. So here's what we understand, that we are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. So if we know that we're called to be disciples, we're called to grow and mature in our faith, and we've been in discipleship groups, and we've read the books, and maybe we've asked somebody to disciple us, maybe we've met with somebody, maybe we have a mentor. Here's how we are disciples. We grow in our obedience. As we grow in our obedience to God, we grow in our maturity with Him and are being formed into more godly disciples. And so the way we think about it at Grace is to be step-takers, to simply know what our next step of obedience is and be working towards taking that step or being in the process of taking that step. So to define it, when you say, what is a disciple? Here's what it means at grace. At grace, being a disciple means we are someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. At grace, how do we define what a disciple is? When Jesus says, go and make disciples. If you're a small group leader and you're trying to figure out, do I have disciples in my group? Am I a disciple of Christ? The easiest way I know to think about it is, is your obedience to Jesus increasing or decreasing? If you're gradually giving Jesus more and more bits of your life, more and more of your submission, more and more of his lordship, and taking steps of obedience whenever he puts them in front of you, then you are growing as a disciple. If there is a step of obedience in front of us and we have not taken it, as a matter of fact, we step back from it, then we are probably fading as disciples. And it's interesting to me that this is really the process that Jesus took his disciples through. If you think about it, yeah, he taught them all along the way, but if you read through the gospels, what you'll see is that Jesus simply put steps of obedience in front of them. He says, here you go, here's the next thing I want you to do, do it or don't. If you do it, we'll grow. If you don't, you'll stay. If you flip through Luke, and I put these references in your notes there just parenthetically so you can make sure I'm not making stuff up. Luke chapter 5, he goes to Peter. Peter's just got done with the day of fishing. He's not Jesus' disciple yet, but he says, hey, he goes to Peter and he says, hey, go back in the water and cast your nets in the deep part. Now, that's a hassle. And Jesus knows it's a hassle. Jesus grew up around Galilee. He knows fishermen. He knows they just got done. They've been out there all day. They've been casting the nets. They've been reeling them back in. They've been casting the nets. They've been waiting. They've been mooring. They've been doing all the stuff they're supposed to do. And now it's the end of the day. They've worked a long shift. They haven't caught anything. They're discouraged. They're looking forward to whatever the rest of their night holds. Maybe some falafel. I don't know if they had it back then, but I've had falafel over there. And if I were there, I would be looking forward to more falafel. So I don't know what they're looking forward to, but they're on with their day, right? And then Jesus sees them at the dock, and he's like, no, I want you to go get back in the boat. I want you to go back out, and I want you to cast in the deep waters. That's the step of obedience. They do it. They have the greatest catch they've ever had. Jesus rewards their obedience with faith. He meets them where they are, and they become his disciples. A few verses later, Jesus calls Levi, or Matthew, the tax collector. And his step of obedience is different. He says, I want you to pick up and follow me. I want you to follow me. And Levi gets up from whatever he's doing, gets up from his desk, leaves his office behind, and he goes and he follows Jesus. He leaves his old life behind, and he goes and follows Jesus. Now, the first step that Peter had to take, get back in the boat, go back out, cast the net, that's annoying. That's not what Levi had to do. Levi's first step of obedience was leave that life behind, follow me. Jesus is always beckoning us with steps of obedience. Down the road, he's trained the disciples a little bit. They've seen him teach. They've seen him cast out demons. They've seen him heal people. And he looks at them and he says, all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me. I want you to break off two by two. I want you to go into the surrounding towns and I want you to cast out demons and I want you to heal people. Go. That's your next step of obedience. That's your thing to do now. Go. The great restoration of Peter. Oh, that's Jen's ring. Did you comb it? The great restoration of Peter. Peter, at the end of Jesus' life, fails him, denies him three times as Jesus is being tried. It's a great failure of Peter. I love this passage, and I love the sermon that you get to preach out of it, and I need to revisit it sometime soon. But this restoration of Peter, he goes to him. Jesus has died. He's resurrected. The last time he saw Peter, Peter rejected him three times and then ran off, brokenhearted at what he had done. Jesus raises from the dead. He shows back up. Peter's on the coast. He's getting ready to fish again because he's disqualified from ministry. He can't do what Jesus asked him to do. And Jesus goes to him and he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've told you to do. Go take the next step. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then obey me. Then go do what I've told you to do. Feed my sheep. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Obey me. There's three times you denied me. There's three times I've restored you. Now go and do what I've asked you to do. Go walk in obedience, Peter. Go feed my sheep. Go be a pastor, what he says. And then the last one, the last step of obedience. Yasmeen read to us, go and make disciples. Do it. Go. What we see in the life of Jesus, when we ask, looking at Jesus' life, how do we make disciples? How do we become disciples? That what we need to pull out of him, out of his life, is not this impractical, clumsy, mysterious, life-on-life discipleship that we need to basically live in a commune with each other and learn from one another. It's we need to take our next steps of obedience. And here's the thing about these next steps of obedience. I don't know what yours might be, but I do know that we all have one. And some of yours are pretty scary. Some of you, if you're thinking about it, if I were to ask you, what do you think is your next step of obedience? Some of it, it's, hey, go back in the deep and cast again. For a lot of us, it's become a person of devotion. Get up every day, spend time in God's word, time in prayer. Just do it. I say it a lot. You hear it a lot. Just do it, man. That's your next step of obedience. Quit worrying about the other stuff and take that one. That's an easy step. That's go back and cast in the deep. I know you're tired. I know it's a hassle. Get up, do it, okay? Maybe that's your step. Maybe it's forgive my mom. Maybe it's confess the sin. Maybe it's seek to restore a relationship that's been broken. Maybe your next step is to get help. Those are hard next steps. Those are the kinds of next steps that we don't know what's on the other side of them. But what we know is that if Jesus is asking us to take it, he will be there to meet us when we do. Which is why we know that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The bigger the step in front of you that God's asking you to take, the greater your faith will grow when you're met there. And this is how we become disciples. Not because we become obedient robots to Jesus, but because with every step we take, our faith is deepened, our trust in him is deepened, and we are less hesitant to take steps in the future. Because all we have to do is look at our past and see every time Jesus met us when we took that step. To know that if he's beckoning me to this again, I can take it. So that's how we become disciples at grace. How do we disciple others? If that's how we become disciples, we just increase in our obedience. We take our next step of faith. That's what discipleship looks like. God, what would you have me do? What's the step of obedience you would have me take in my life? And then faithfully take it. And then once you do it, do it again. And once you do it, do it again. If that's how we are disciples, then how do we make disciples at grace? Here's how. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. That's it. That's it. Maybe their next step is to read a book. For some of you, it's been a few years. You should just try it on. Just read a chapter of something. Maybe the next step is to read a book. Maybe the next step is to start listening to sermons. I don't know. Maybe the next step is to get into a discipleship group, but that's not how we make disciples. We make disciples by helping other people identify their next step and then encouraging them to take it. Small group leaders, you ought to know the next step of everyone in your small group. Or at least know that someone knows what their next step is and that they're being encouraged to take it. This also opens up the doors of clumsy one-on-one discipleship to be discipled in segments or areas of our life, right? Instead of one person just telling us all the things we need to know about everything, we can identify a woman who has a good marriage and ladies, you can go to her and you can say, you seem to have a great marriage. You seem to love your husband well. You seem to honor Jesus in your house. Can you teach me how to do that? Here's some struggles we're having in my house. How would you deal with that? You're more seasoned than me. Your kids are older. You've managed to produce children that like you and that love Jesus and that you like too. How'd you do that? That person, you have that conversation enough times, that person is discipling you in motherhood. You're a young entrepreneur. You're starting something out. You see somebody, you see a guy who's been running his own business for a while. His employees like him. He seems to run it in a godly way. And you go to him, you go, hey, I'm starting a business. Will you help me run this according to the standards of Christ? Can I ask you questions about how to do my business? That man is now discipling you and how to be a godly employer and how to have a Jesus-centered career. You're struggling with an addiction. You're struggling with a particular sin. You're struggling with knowing the Bible. You can go to someone and you say, hey, listen, I've heard you talk. You lace it into conversations. You seem to know the Bible really well. Can you just help me learn it better? Can you tell me what you do? A person's discipling you in your knowledge of Scripture. This allows for communal discipleship, discipleship by a body instead of an individual that we all need to find. This allows people, and this is what's in line with our life experiences, to come in and out of our life and push us towards Jesus in different ways and in different avenues and in different areas of our life without being the person who's discipling us. And I think that this is how Jesus has been shaping his church all along, is by different people being placed in our life that show us our next step of obedience, and then it's up to us to have the willingness to take it. So here's the commission at Grace. Here's what we would ask of Grace partners as we understand what it means to be step-takers. We should all have someone in our life who isn't our spouse, who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. We should all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Now, this is important. Now, here's why it can't be your spouse. I'm not anti-marriage, okay? I just know I'm married, and I know that if you added that layer to what Jen and I manage already, and now, in addition to, hey, did you remember to take out the trash and lock up the door? Also, did you have your quiet time this morning? That's not good. That's not helpful, right? That's probably not going to go great. So we find someone outside of our marriage, if we're married, who knows our next step of obedience. We've confessed to them, this is where I think God is pushing me, this is what I need to do. And that's a good step. But the next step is probably even more important. And has permission to encourage us to take it. Someone who's invited into your life to say, hey man, have you done that yet? Have you had that conversation? How is your relationship with so-and-so? How are those safeguards that you put in place? Have you messed up? Is it going okay? How can I encourage you there? That's how we are step-takers at grace. That's how we think about discipleship, not as a program, not as a funnel, not as something that you enter into and then you get spit out as a mature believer, not even necessarily this life-on-life idea that someone would mentor you through all the stages and phases of your life as you work towards maturity, but this communal idea of discipleship, that it's simply framed up exactly as Jesus framed it up, that the more mature we grow in our faith, the more we will grow in the consistency of our obedience. And so to be a disciple means to be someone who is constantly aware of and taking their next step of obedience. And to disciple, to make disciples means to know what someone's next step is, to help them identify it, and then consistently and lovingly encourage them to take it. So at Grace, we are step-takers. And what that means is we understand to grow in maturity, we grow in obedience. So we all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Let's pray. Father, I pray that grace would be a church that's full of disciples. That it would be a church that's full of disciple-making disciples who are passionate about you, who are grateful for your son, who want nothing more than to know you better and to know you deeper. I pray that there would be fewer and fewer times that Jesus would need to whisper to us, why do you call me Lord, Lord, if you don't do what I say? Jesus, simply help us to do what you say. Help us to be disciples who take steps of obedience towards you and let us experience the goodness that we're met with as we take steps of faith. God, give us the courage to invite people into our life who know our next step. Give us the humility to invite them to encourage us to take it. If someone entrusts us with that for them, God, make us good stewards of your disciple for that season. Be with us as we go through our week. Be with our team in Mexico as they do your work down there. May they minister as they are ministered to. In Jesus' name, amen. If you guys would stand with me as we depart. I thought it appropriate to end this series, the five traits of grace, with this little stanza that I wrote for the sermon on conduits of grace that kind of captures who we are and what we believe. So I would bless you with this as you go into your week. At grace, we understand. We are yet forgiven. We are broken yet restored. We are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Go, have a great week. We'll see you next week.

Thank you. Hi, good morning, friends. My name is Yasmeen Reese, and I'm a partner here at Grace Raleigh, along with my sweet husband, Brandon Reese. Had to give a shout-out. Today's reading comes from Matthew 28, 18 to 20. I can confirm Brandon is lovely. We do miss him this week. We remember Brandon's with our team down in Mexico right now, so we remember them and keep them in our prayers and hope that the Lord speaks to them as they go and encourages our partners in Mexico while they're there through Grace Raleigh. This is the fifth part of our series called Traits of Grace. The genesis of this series was last fall, when as a staff, we began talking about what makes grace, grace. And as we want to define what it means to be a partner of grace, which we don't have partners we have, or we don't have members, we have partners. When we talk about what it means to be a partner of grace, a person who calls grace home, what do we expect of grace people? What do we want to be as a church? And so we kind of threw a bunch of stuff on the whiteboard, and we ended up with these five traits that we've gone through these last five weeks. And I would tell you that we want you, I know that this is a lofty goal, but we want you to know all of these. We want you, if you call grace home over time, to be able to say all of these, to understand what these are, to be able to explain them to people. If they say, hey, what's your church all about? We can tell them this. Our mission statement is to connect people to people and connect people to Jesus. But the ways that we do that are in these five traits. So in the first week, we'll see if I can remember them. In the first week, we talked about the fact that we are kingdom builders, right? We're all building a kingdom somewhere. We're either building God's kingdom or our own kingdom. So we asked, whose kingdom are you building? At Grace, we want to build God's kingdom. And then in the second week, we talked about being conduits of grace. This is where we get our authenticity. This is where we're kind of real. This is how we can be accepting of others and loving of others who come in here because we receive God's grace. We know that we're messed up. You're messed up too. We love you too. We are conduits of God's grace as we receive it, we offer it. And then we talked about how we're people of devotion, that the single most important habit anyone can have in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And so we are people who believe in that devotional habit and pursuing God on our own and allowing the Sunday morning experience to simply be supplemental to what God is doing in our life every day as we pursue him. And then, which one have I forgotten? Did we do last week? You're nodding your head at me. You're like, yeah, you got the first one. Now you're not there on the fourth one. Okay, last week, partners. We talked about being partners, right? We're not just partners at the church, but we're partners in ministry and what we do at Grace. We're partners in life. At Grace, no one should walk alone through any season of life. And then we're partners in faith. We hold up one another. We help each other cling to faith as we move through life. And so this week, our last trait, we are step-takers at grace. We are step-takers. And I'll tell you what that means. This is really a Sunday morning focused on our discipleship model at grace. When we talk about discipleship at grace, this is how we talk about it. We talk about it in terms of being step-takers. And as I was preparing this sermon, it occurred to me that this is really more of a seminar than a sermon. This is really more informative where I teach you than it is about being a sermon. A sermon kind of changes us and inspires us and teaching informs us. And so this morning I'm teaching you and I want to teach you about what discipleship is because I don't know if you've realized this or not, but discipleship is the goal of every church. Every church ever, discipleship is the goal because of the verse that Yasmeen read to us just a few minutes ago. Because when Jesus is leaving the disciples, going back up to heaven, he gives them his final instructions. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is the job of the disciples of the church that Jesus left behind. He says, my work here is done. I'm going to go to heaven. I'm going to sit at the right hand of the Father. I'm going to intercede for you. I've done what I came to accomplish here on earth. And now I am going to, I'm going to heaven and I'm leaving you with your instructions. I'm leaving you with the keys to the kingdom. I'm leaving you in charge. The church is my kingdom here on earth and you are going to be in charge of it. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to go make disciples in every nation. And so those instructions are not just for the disciples, but for every church and every body that would follow the disciples, every body of believers that would follow the disciples. So that commission is called the Great Commission, and it is our commission. And so every church ever has the goal of making disciples. They say it in different ways. We want to produce multiplying disciples. We want to produce disciple-making disciples. We're a discipleship-focused church. We want to produce disciples. Like, whatever it is, this is the goal of every church, and it's the goal of every church that I've ever been a part of, except, and here's the thing, this is a well-kept church secret that you probably only know intuitively, but you've probably never heard a pastor admit it, we're not very good at it. No church is really super great at making disciples. And I learned that this was true at my last job. My last job, I was at this church outside of Atlanta. It became this big three-campus church where when you preach, you're simulcast out to all the people and whatever, whatever. And because I was a part of a big growing church like that, I got to go to church conferences. So for seven years, I would go to church conferences, and I was the discipleship pastor, right? Now, it was small groups, but my job was to think about the process by which Greystone Church made disciples. And so we're getting into the weeds a little bit in here, but if you've been a part of church for any number of years, you've heard language like this before. You know churches are trying to make disciples. You know what small groups are all about. So this is what we were doing, and it's what I was tasked with. I was in charge of thinking through and implementing the discipleship process at Greystone Church. So I would go to these conferences where other big churches with big staffs would go as well, and there would be breakout sessions. I don't know what happens in your different industries, but in my industry, there's breakout sessions where you choose different things and you go to what's most applicable to your particular position. And so I would always find myself in rooms about this size with round tables, sitting around with other small group pastors or adult education pastors or discipleship pastors or associate pastors that were in charge of these things. And we'd sit around the table and we'd listen to the guru up in front who had small groups and discipleship all figured out and he would tell us exactly how he did it or she did it. And then we'd sit around our table and we'd have some time to talk to each other. And I'm telling you, without fail at these tables, somebody every time, every conference would say, what are you guys doing for discipleship? Because we're rethinking our model. It's not working, right? I don't know in corporate terms what it means when you rethink a model, but in church terms, it means we are totally messing this up. So we're rethinking our model. What do you guys do for discipleship? What we've been doing is not working. We're not really producing disciples. And the answers, I listened to them for seven years. I offered some of them when I thought I was smart. I'll help you guys, you ministry veterans. Let me tell you how we're doing it at Greystone. But the answers were always the same. Well, we're trying this for these reasons. We hope it works. If it doesn't, we might pivot to this, which means nothing. Nobody said, we've been doing this program for years and it's working. Because what churches are looking for is a funnel to put people in. When we put you into this funnel, small groups, volunteering, men's Bible study, women's Bible studies, whatever it is, when we put you into this funnel, you're going to go through these systems and you're going to bounce through these walls and you're going to come out the end of the funnel, a disciple, a mature believer in Jesus. That's the goal. We're giggling about it now, but that's the goal. And that was my job is to design the funnel. What do we put people in so that when they go around, when they come out, they're mature believers in Jesus who are now producing other disciples in their life? And there's all kinds of ideas for this. Some of you have been, I want to ask you to raise your hand. I don't want to delineate good Christians and bad Christians, but some of you have been in discipleship programs. You've been in discipleship groups. You're serious. Some of you have had people disciple you. Some of you have even, and you're the big dogs. Some people have come to you and said, will you disciple me? And here's the thing. I would bet my next paycheck that when someone asks you, if you've ever had someone come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? That your very first thought was, how? I don't know how to do that. But you don't want to let them down. Clearly they think you're somebody. You got stuff figured out. You're like, yes, I will. I will do that. I will disciple you. Great. How do you want to disciple me? Let's meet for breakfast. I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to meet for breakfast once a month, and I'm going to find a book, and we're going to read it. And we'll probably miss a month or two. So in a year, we'll meet like 10 times, finish that book up, and chip, chop, chip, you're going to be a mature believer. This is going to be great. Let's do it. You're giggling because you've done it, man. And here's what you know. Here's what you know is that it didn't work. It didn't work. I've asked poor men over the years to disciple me. I remember, I'm just gonna say his name publicly. There was a facilities guy at Toccoa Falls College that I worked for when I kept the grounds named George Champion, who was just a phenomenally good man. And I worked for him and I asked him, will you disciple me? And he said, sure, let's have breakfast. I thought we had, in Toccoa, we had the huddle house. We weren't even big enough for a waffle house. We had the huddle house with literal bullet holes in the hood vent. There was three of them, but I only went during safe hours. It was fine. And Mr. Champion said, let's meet at hud House, but I got to meet there early, so we'll meet at five. I said, okay. Old college Nate made about two of those. And then I slept through the next two, and I couldn't look George in the eye anymore, so I bailed out on discipleship. There's been others through the years. Maybe you've tried that too. And we're taught about this thing when you try to figure out how do you make disciples? I could ask you to raise your hand. Who's heard of life-on-life discipleship? Don't raise your hand. But there's that phrase because in the Bible, that's how Jesus makes his disciples. They live together. I used to listen to the teachings of this guy named Ray Vanderlei, who's great, and I would highly endorse his teachings. But his teachings is called the dust of the rabbi, or his website's like the dust of the rabbi, because there's this phrase, may you be walking so closely behind your rabbi that as he kicks up the dust from the trail that is getting on you, that you're around him all the time. And in the first century, that's great, man. In the 21st century, that's not super practical. I had people at student ministry conferences tell me, when you're discipling high school guys, you just invite them into your life. Invite them over to dinner. Let them see how a godly man talks to his wife. Let them see how a godly man buys milk. Take them to the grocery store. Just let them see how you do your life. Like I've heard that phrase before. Like let them see how a godly man grocery shops. I'm like, I don't know, probably the same as a nice atheist, I would assume. I don't know how that's helpful. And so if you've been in church world, what you understand is that all the discipleship models that we work with haven't really worked. And you know how I really know that's true? Because of this question. Those of you who've been in church a while, those of you who have grown in your faith and consider yourselves to have a mature faith, who discipled you to get there? Who is it that's been meeting with you regularly, speaking into your life? What book studies have you gone through that produced you into maturity? Now, some of you lucky ones, you have a girl, you have a guy, and they've been guiding you well. And God's been using that relationship in your life in remarkable ways, and that does happen. But for a vast majority of us, like me, who's discipled me, it's just a hodgepodge of people that move in and out of my life as God directs. There's no single program that I went through to grow in my faith. There's no single relationship that I would say that man discipled me. Besides maybe my dad. But that's what dads are for. So those programs, they don't really work. And we're still left with this task, this holy task from Jesus to make disciples. The question becomes, how do we do it? It's this question that I had in my head when I went to another conference. I'm talking a lot about conferences today. I'm painting this picture like all I do is go to conferences. I'm going to a conference this week. So maybe that's what I do. Maybe I just go to a bunch of conferences. I don't know. I have no idea. But I went to a conference back in, I think, 2019, 18 or 19, in the fall. And it was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. You guys paid for it. Thank you so much. And when I went out there, I went to see this pastor named Larry Osborne, who's written a couple of books, who thinks about church in this really practical way that resonates with me and that seems in line with grace. And we've gone through some of his books and stuff at the elder level and the staff level. And I was tired of just big, huge conferences. This one was 25 senior pastors in a room with this guy, and he just taught us for two days. And it was really, really great. It was so good. I took copious notes. And then our elder meetings are structured as such that we have a business meeting on the first Tuesday of the month where we just make decisions for the church. And then on the third Tuesday of the month, we get together, we fellowship, we have fun, we enjoy each other. Sometimes we'll do communion, we'll pray together. And we have something that we're kind of going through just to edify one another and learn more about church in general. And so for seven weeks, we walked through the notes that I took in this conference. It was really valuable. But the most valuable thing I took out of there was the way that Larry thinks about discipleship, and it shaped the way that we as a church at Grace think about discipleship, because we're all called to be disciples, and we're all called to make disciples. So how do we do it? And if it doesn't work to get in the programs, and if it doesn't work to read the books, and if it doesn't work to do life on life, all those things are good and can supplement, but what is it that we need? Well, the way that Larry explained it was that if we really look at Jesus and his life, what we see is that Jesus is always equating our spiritual maturity with the degree to which we are obedient. Jesus is always telling us over and over again in scripture, over and over again in the gospels, we can see Jesus point to this idea that if you love me, you will obey me. And so when Jesus offers us discipleship, when he says he wants to make disciples of us, really he's beckoning us into obedience. Look at just a couple statements from Jesus. We see this, John 14, 15. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, if you want to walk with me, if I'm really the Lord of your life, then you will obey me. He says it more pointedly in Luke. Listen to this. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you? Gosh, that one cuts, doesn't it? This is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside, how many times could Jesus whisper that in our ear and it bring conviction? Why are you singing this song if you don't obey me? Why are you acting holy in small group if you're acting unholy everywhere else? Why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do what I tell you? Why do you call me Lord and yet not let me be the Lord of your life? And so what we see all throughout the gospels is Jesus teaching us, if you're mature, if you're walking with me, if you're abiding in me, you know what you'll do? You'll obey me. You'll do what I say. You'll follow my commands. And this made such an indelible impression that 30 to 60 years later, one of his best disciples, the apostle John, who may have been as young as 10 when he was following Jesus, is writing letters to the churches, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. They're called general epistles or general letters, which means they were for all of the churches in Asia Minor around the Mediterranean at the time. They were written to be circulated amongst the churches. And so at the end of his life, when John has now made disciples in Erasmus and Polycarp, the early church fathers who carried on after the disciples had all left, John was the last living disciple. So he had successfully made disciples. He had handed the keys to the kingdom to other mature believers. And at the end of his life, writing on the topic of spiritual maturity, because I'm not sure they would have called it discipleship. They would have called it growing in faith. But at the end of his life, when he's writing about this to tell people, how do we know if someone has a genuine faith? John says this in 1 John 2. And by this, we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments. Listen, whoever says I know him but does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him. Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. So John, discipled by Jesus, having produced disciples in his own life, says, if you know Jesus, you'll obey him. Whoever says they know Jesus, whoever says they love Jesus and isn't increasing in their obedience is lying. The truth is not in them. That's pretty stark. But what we see is that Jesus and then his disciple John equate spiritual maturity not with theological acumen, not with acts of great service, not with piety and prayers, not even with effective ministry or charismatically drawing other people. What we see is that Jesus and John equate spiritual maturity with increasing levels of obedience in someone's life. So here's what we understand, that we are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. So if we know that we're called to be disciples, we're called to grow and mature in our faith, and we've been in discipleship groups, and we've read the books, and maybe we've asked somebody to disciple us, maybe we've met with somebody, maybe we have a mentor. Here's how we are disciples. We grow in our obedience. As we grow in our obedience to God, we grow in our maturity with Him and are being formed into more godly disciples. And so the way we think about it at Grace is to be step-takers, to simply know what our next step of obedience is and be working towards taking that step or being in the process of taking that step. So to define it, when you say, what is a disciple? Here's what it means at grace. At grace, being a disciple means we are someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. At grace, how do we define what a disciple is? When Jesus says, go and make disciples. If you're a small group leader and you're trying to figure out, do I have disciples in my group? Am I a disciple of Christ? The easiest way I know to think about it is, is your obedience to Jesus increasing or decreasing? If you're gradually giving Jesus more and more bits of your life, more and more of your submission, more and more of his lordship, and taking steps of obedience whenever he puts them in front of you, then you are growing as a disciple. If there is a step of obedience in front of us and we have not taken it, as a matter of fact, we step back from it, then we are probably fading as disciples. And it's interesting to me that this is really the process that Jesus took his disciples through. If you think about it, yeah, he taught them all along the way, but if you read through the gospels, what you'll see is that Jesus simply put steps of obedience in front of them. He says, here you go, here's the next thing I want you to do, do it or don't. If you do it, we'll grow. If you don't, you'll stay. If you flip through Luke, and I put these references in your notes there just parenthetically so you can make sure I'm not making stuff up. Luke chapter 5, he goes to Peter. Peter's just got done with the day of fishing. He's not Jesus' disciple yet, but he says, hey, he goes to Peter and he says, hey, go back in the water and cast your nets in the deep part. Now, that's a hassle. And Jesus knows it's a hassle. Jesus grew up around Galilee. He knows fishermen. He knows they just got done. They've been out there all day. They've been casting the nets. They've been reeling them back in. They've been casting the nets. They've been waiting. They've been mooring. They've been doing all the stuff they're supposed to do. And now it's the end of the day. They've worked a long shift. They haven't caught anything. They're discouraged. They're looking forward to whatever the rest of their night holds. Maybe some falafel. I don't know if they had it back then, but I've had falafel over there. And if I were there, I would be looking forward to more falafel. So I don't know what they're looking forward to, but they're on with their day, right? And then Jesus sees them at the dock, and he's like, no, I want you to go get back in the boat. I want you to go back out, and I want you to cast in the deep waters. That's the step of obedience. They do it. They have the greatest catch they've ever had. Jesus rewards their obedience with faith. He meets them where they are, and they become his disciples. A few verses later, Jesus calls Levi, or Matthew, the tax collector. And his step of obedience is different. He says, I want you to pick up and follow me. I want you to follow me. And Levi gets up from whatever he's doing, gets up from his desk, leaves his office behind, and he goes and he follows Jesus. He leaves his old life behind, and he goes and follows Jesus. Now, the first step that Peter had to take, get back in the boat, go back out, cast the net, that's annoying. That's not what Levi had to do. Levi's first step of obedience was leave that life behind, follow me. Jesus is always beckoning us with steps of obedience. Down the road, he's trained the disciples a little bit. They've seen him teach. They've seen him cast out demons. They've seen him heal people. And he looks at them and he says, all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me. I want you to break off two by two. I want you to go into the surrounding towns and I want you to cast out demons and I want you to heal people. Go. That's your next step of obedience. That's your thing to do now. Go. The great restoration of Peter. Oh, that's Jen's ring. Did you comb it? The great restoration of Peter. Peter, at the end of Jesus' life, fails him, denies him three times as Jesus is being tried. It's a great failure of Peter. I love this passage, and I love the sermon that you get to preach out of it, and I need to revisit it sometime soon. But this restoration of Peter, he goes to him. Jesus has died. He's resurrected. The last time he saw Peter, Peter rejected him three times and then ran off, brokenhearted at what he had done. Jesus raises from the dead. He shows back up. Peter's on the coast. He's getting ready to fish again because he's disqualified from ministry. He can't do what Jesus asked him to do. And Jesus goes to him and he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've told you to do. Go take the next step. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then obey me. Then go do what I've told you to do. Feed my sheep. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Obey me. There's three times you denied me. There's three times I've restored you. Now go and do what I've asked you to do. Go walk in obedience, Peter. Go feed my sheep. Go be a pastor, what he says. And then the last one, the last step of obedience. Yasmeen read to us, go and make disciples. Do it. Go. What we see in the life of Jesus, when we ask, looking at Jesus' life, how do we make disciples? How do we become disciples? That what we need to pull out of him, out of his life, is not this impractical, clumsy, mysterious, life-on-life discipleship that we need to basically live in a commune with each other and learn from one another. It's we need to take our next steps of obedience. And here's the thing about these next steps of obedience. I don't know what yours might be, but I do know that we all have one. And some of yours are pretty scary. Some of you, if you're thinking about it, if I were to ask you, what do you think is your next step of obedience? Some of it, it's, hey, go back in the deep and cast again. For a lot of us, it's become a person of devotion. Get up every day, spend time in God's word, time in prayer. Just do it. I say it a lot. You hear it a lot. Just do it, man. That's your next step of obedience. Quit worrying about the other stuff and take that one. That's an easy step. That's go back and cast in the deep. I know you're tired. I know it's a hassle. Get up, do it, okay? Maybe that's your step. Maybe it's forgive my mom. Maybe it's confess the sin. Maybe it's seek to restore a relationship that's been broken. Maybe your next step is to get help. Those are hard next steps. Those are the kinds of next steps that we don't know what's on the other side of them. But what we know is that if Jesus is asking us to take it, he will be there to meet us when we do. Which is why we know that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The bigger the step in front of you that God's asking you to take, the greater your faith will grow when you're met there. And this is how we become disciples. Not because we become obedient robots to Jesus, but because with every step we take, our faith is deepened, our trust in him is deepened, and we are less hesitant to take steps in the future. Because all we have to do is look at our past and see every time Jesus met us when we took that step. To know that if he's beckoning me to this again, I can take it. So that's how we become disciples at grace. How do we disciple others? If that's how we become disciples, we just increase in our obedience. We take our next step of faith. That's what discipleship looks like. God, what would you have me do? What's the step of obedience you would have me take in my life? And then faithfully take it. And then once you do it, do it again. And once you do it, do it again. If that's how we are disciples, then how do we make disciples at grace? Here's how. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. That's it. That's it. Maybe their next step is to read a book. For some of you, it's been a few years. You should just try it on. Just read a chapter of something. Maybe the next step is to read a book. Maybe the next step is to start listening to sermons. I don't know. Maybe the next step is to get into a discipleship group, but that's not how we make disciples. We make disciples by helping other people identify their next step and then encouraging them to take it. Small group leaders, you ought to know the next step of everyone in your small group. Or at least know that someone knows what their next step is and that they're being encouraged to take it. This also opens up the doors of clumsy one-on-one discipleship to be discipled in segments or areas of our life, right? Instead of one person just telling us all the things we need to know about everything, we can identify a woman who has a good marriage and ladies, you can go to her and you can say, you seem to have a great marriage. You seem to love your husband well. You seem to honor Jesus in your house. Can you teach me how to do that? Here's some struggles we're having in my house. How would you deal with that? You're more seasoned than me. Your kids are older. You've managed to produce children that like you and that love Jesus and that you like too. How'd you do that? That person, you have that conversation enough times, that person is discipling you in motherhood. You're a young entrepreneur. You're starting something out. You see somebody, you see a guy who's been running his own business for a while. His employees like him. He seems to run it in a godly way. And you go to him, you go, hey, I'm starting a business. Will you help me run this according to the standards of Christ? Can I ask you questions about how to do my business? That man is now discipling you and how to be a godly employer and how to have a Jesus-centered career. You're struggling with an addiction. You're struggling with a particular sin. You're struggling with knowing the Bible. You can go to someone and you say, hey, listen, I've heard you talk. You lace it into conversations. You seem to know the Bible really well. Can you just help me learn it better? Can you tell me what you do? A person's discipling you in your knowledge of Scripture. This allows for communal discipleship, discipleship by a body instead of an individual that we all need to find. This allows people, and this is what's in line with our life experiences, to come in and out of our life and push us towards Jesus in different ways and in different avenues and in different areas of our life without being the person who's discipling us. And I think that this is how Jesus has been shaping his church all along, is by different people being placed in our life that show us our next step of obedience, and then it's up to us to have the willingness to take it. So here's the commission at Grace. Here's what we would ask of Grace partners as we understand what it means to be step-takers. We should all have someone in our life who isn't our spouse, who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. We should all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Now, this is important. Now, here's why it can't be your spouse. I'm not anti-marriage, okay? I just know I'm married, and I know that if you added that layer to what Jen and I manage already, and now, in addition to, hey, did you remember to take out the trash and lock up the door? Also, did you have your quiet time this morning? That's not good. That's not helpful, right? That's probably not going to go great. So we find someone outside of our marriage, if we're married, who knows our next step of obedience. We've confessed to them, this is where I think God is pushing me, this is what I need to do. And that's a good step. But the next step is probably even more important. And has permission to encourage us to take it. Someone who's invited into your life to say, hey man, have you done that yet? Have you had that conversation? How is your relationship with so-and-so? How are those safeguards that you put in place? Have you messed up? Is it going okay? How can I encourage you there? That's how we are step-takers at grace. That's how we think about discipleship, not as a program, not as a funnel, not as something that you enter into and then you get spit out as a mature believer, not even necessarily this life-on-life idea that someone would mentor you through all the stages and phases of your life as you work towards maturity, but this communal idea of discipleship, that it's simply framed up exactly as Jesus framed it up, that the more mature we grow in our faith, the more we will grow in the consistency of our obedience. And so to be a disciple means to be someone who is constantly aware of and taking their next step of obedience. And to disciple, to make disciples means to know what someone's next step is, to help them identify it, and then consistently and lovingly encourage them to take it. So at Grace, we are step-takers. And what that means is we understand to grow in maturity, we grow in obedience. So we all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Let's pray. Father, I pray that grace would be a church that's full of disciples. That it would be a church that's full of disciple-making disciples who are passionate about you, who are grateful for your son, who want nothing more than to know you better and to know you deeper. I pray that there would be fewer and fewer times that Jesus would need to whisper to us, why do you call me Lord, Lord, if you don't do what I say? Jesus, simply help us to do what you say. Help us to be disciples who take steps of obedience towards you and let us experience the goodness that we're met with as we take steps of faith. God, give us the courage to invite people into our life who know our next step. Give us the humility to invite them to encourage us to take it. If someone entrusts us with that for them, God, make us good stewards of your disciple for that season. Be with us as we go through our week. Be with our team in Mexico as they do your work down there. May they minister as they are ministered to. In Jesus' name, amen. If you guys would stand with me as we depart. I thought it appropriate to end this series, the five traits of grace, with this little stanza that I wrote for the sermon on conduits of grace that kind of captures who we are and what we believe. So I would bless you with this as you go into your week. At grace, we understand. We are yet forgiven. We are broken yet restored. We are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Go, have a great week. We'll see you next week.

Thank you. Hi, good morning, friends. My name is Yasmeen Reese, and I'm a partner here at Grace Raleigh, along with my sweet husband, Brandon Reese. Had to give a shout-out. Today's reading comes from Matthew 28, 18 to 20. I can confirm Brandon is lovely. We do miss him this week. We remember Brandon's with our team down in Mexico right now, so we remember them and keep them in our prayers and hope that the Lord speaks to them as they go and encourages our partners in Mexico while they're there through Grace Raleigh. This is the fifth part of our series called Traits of Grace. The genesis of this series was last fall, when as a staff, we began talking about what makes grace, grace. And as we want to define what it means to be a partner of grace, which we don't have partners we have, or we don't have members, we have partners. When we talk about what it means to be a partner of grace, a person who calls grace home, what do we expect of grace people? What do we want to be as a church? And so we kind of threw a bunch of stuff on the whiteboard, and we ended up with these five traits that we've gone through these last five weeks. And I would tell you that we want you, I know that this is a lofty goal, but we want you to know all of these. We want you, if you call grace home over time, to be able to say all of these, to understand what these are, to be able to explain them to people. If they say, hey, what's your church all about? We can tell them this. Our mission statement is to connect people to people and connect people to Jesus. But the ways that we do that are in these five traits. So in the first week, we'll see if I can remember them. In the first week, we talked about the fact that we are kingdom builders, right? We're all building a kingdom somewhere. We're either building God's kingdom or our own kingdom. So we asked, whose kingdom are you building? At Grace, we want to build God's kingdom. And then in the second week, we talked about being conduits of grace. This is where we get our authenticity. This is where we're kind of real. This is how we can be accepting of others and loving of others who come in here because we receive God's grace. We know that we're messed up. You're messed up too. We love you too. We are conduits of God's grace as we receive it, we offer it. And then we talked about how we're people of devotion, that the single most important habit anyone can have in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And so we are people who believe in that devotional habit and pursuing God on our own and allowing the Sunday morning experience to simply be supplemental to what God is doing in our life every day as we pursue him. And then, which one have I forgotten? Did we do last week? You're nodding your head at me. You're like, yeah, you got the first one. Now you're not there on the fourth one. Okay, last week, partners. We talked about being partners, right? We're not just partners at the church, but we're partners in ministry and what we do at Grace. We're partners in life. At Grace, no one should walk alone through any season of life. And then we're partners in faith. We hold up one another. We help each other cling to faith as we move through life. And so this week, our last trait, we are step-takers at grace. We are step-takers. And I'll tell you what that means. This is really a Sunday morning focused on our discipleship model at grace. When we talk about discipleship at grace, this is how we talk about it. We talk about it in terms of being step-takers. And as I was preparing this sermon, it occurred to me that this is really more of a seminar than a sermon. This is really more informative where I teach you than it is about being a sermon. A sermon kind of changes us and inspires us and teaching informs us. And so this morning I'm teaching you and I want to teach you about what discipleship is because I don't know if you've realized this or not, but discipleship is the goal of every church. Every church ever, discipleship is the goal because of the verse that Yasmeen read to us just a few minutes ago. Because when Jesus is leaving the disciples, going back up to heaven, he gives them his final instructions. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is the job of the disciples of the church that Jesus left behind. He says, my work here is done. I'm going to go to heaven. I'm going to sit at the right hand of the Father. I'm going to intercede for you. I've done what I came to accomplish here on earth. And now I am going to, I'm going to heaven and I'm leaving you with your instructions. I'm leaving you with the keys to the kingdom. I'm leaving you in charge. The church is my kingdom here on earth and you are going to be in charge of it. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to go make disciples in every nation. And so those instructions are not just for the disciples, but for every church and every body that would follow the disciples, every body of believers that would follow the disciples. So that commission is called the Great Commission, and it is our commission. And so every church ever has the goal of making disciples. They say it in different ways. We want to produce multiplying disciples. We want to produce disciple-making disciples. We're a discipleship-focused church. We want to produce disciples. Like, whatever it is, this is the goal of every church, and it's the goal of every church that I've ever been a part of, except, and here's the thing, this is a well-kept church secret that you probably only know intuitively, but you've probably never heard a pastor admit it, we're not very good at it. No church is really super great at making disciples. And I learned that this was true at my last job. My last job, I was at this church outside of Atlanta. It became this big three-campus church where when you preach, you're simulcast out to all the people and whatever, whatever. And because I was a part of a big growing church like that, I got to go to church conferences. So for seven years, I would go to church conferences, and I was the discipleship pastor, right? Now, it was small groups, but my job was to think about the process by which Greystone Church made disciples. And so we're getting into the weeds a little bit in here, but if you've been a part of church for any number of years, you've heard language like this before. You know churches are trying to make disciples. You know what small groups are all about. So this is what we were doing, and it's what I was tasked with. I was in charge of thinking through and implementing the discipleship process at Greystone Church. So I would go to these conferences where other big churches with big staffs would go as well, and there would be breakout sessions. I don't know what happens in your different industries, but in my industry, there's breakout sessions where you choose different things and you go to what's most applicable to your particular position. And so I would always find myself in rooms about this size with round tables, sitting around with other small group pastors or adult education pastors or discipleship pastors or associate pastors that were in charge of these things. And we'd sit around the table and we'd listen to the guru up in front who had small groups and discipleship all figured out and he would tell us exactly how he did it or she did it. And then we'd sit around our table and we'd have some time to talk to each other. And I'm telling you, without fail at these tables, somebody every time, every conference would say, what are you guys doing for discipleship? Because we're rethinking our model. It's not working, right? I don't know in corporate terms what it means when you rethink a model, but in church terms, it means we are totally messing this up. So we're rethinking our model. What do you guys do for discipleship? What we've been doing is not working. We're not really producing disciples. And the answers, I listened to them for seven years. I offered some of them when I thought I was smart. I'll help you guys, you ministry veterans. Let me tell you how we're doing it at Greystone. But the answers were always the same. Well, we're trying this for these reasons. We hope it works. If it doesn't, we might pivot to this, which means nothing. Nobody said, we've been doing this program for years and it's working. Because what churches are looking for is a funnel to put people in. When we put you into this funnel, small groups, volunteering, men's Bible study, women's Bible studies, whatever it is, when we put you into this funnel, you're going to go through these systems and you're going to bounce through these walls and you're going to come out the end of the funnel, a disciple, a mature believer in Jesus. That's the goal. We're giggling about it now, but that's the goal. And that was my job is to design the funnel. What do we put people in so that when they go around, when they come out, they're mature believers in Jesus who are now producing other disciples in their life? And there's all kinds of ideas for this. Some of you have been, I want to ask you to raise your hand. I don't want to delineate good Christians and bad Christians, but some of you have been in discipleship programs. You've been in discipleship groups. You're serious. Some of you have had people disciple you. Some of you have even, and you're the big dogs. Some people have come to you and said, will you disciple me? And here's the thing. I would bet my next paycheck that when someone asks you, if you've ever had someone come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? That your very first thought was, how? I don't know how to do that. But you don't want to let them down. Clearly they think you're somebody. You got stuff figured out. You're like, yes, I will. I will do that. I will disciple you. Great. How do you want to disciple me? Let's meet for breakfast. I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to meet for breakfast once a month, and I'm going to find a book, and we're going to read it. And we'll probably miss a month or two. So in a year, we'll meet like 10 times, finish that book up, and chip, chop, chip, you're going to be a mature believer. This is going to be great. Let's do it. You're giggling because you've done it, man. And here's what you know. Here's what you know is that it didn't work. It didn't work. I've asked poor men over the years to disciple me. I remember, I'm just gonna say his name publicly. There was a facilities guy at Toccoa Falls College that I worked for when I kept the grounds named George Champion, who was just a phenomenally good man. And I worked for him and I asked him, will you disciple me? And he said, sure, let's have breakfast. I thought we had, in Toccoa, we had the huddle house. We weren't even big enough for a waffle house. We had the huddle house with literal bullet holes in the hood vent. There was three of them, but I only went during safe hours. It was fine. And Mr. Champion said, let's meet at hud House, but I got to meet there early, so we'll meet at five. I said, okay. Old college Nate made about two of those. And then I slept through the next two, and I couldn't look George in the eye anymore, so I bailed out on discipleship. There's been others through the years. Maybe you've tried that too. And we're taught about this thing when you try to figure out how do you make disciples? I could ask you to raise your hand. Who's heard of life-on-life discipleship? Don't raise your hand. But there's that phrase because in the Bible, that's how Jesus makes his disciples. They live together. I used to listen to the teachings of this guy named Ray Vanderlei, who's great, and I would highly endorse his teachings. But his teachings is called the dust of the rabbi, or his website's like the dust of the rabbi, because there's this phrase, may you be walking so closely behind your rabbi that as he kicks up the dust from the trail that is getting on you, that you're around him all the time. And in the first century, that's great, man. In the 21st century, that's not super practical. I had people at student ministry conferences tell me, when you're discipling high school guys, you just invite them into your life. Invite them over to dinner. Let them see how a godly man talks to his wife. Let them see how a godly man buys milk. Take them to the grocery store. Just let them see how you do your life. Like I've heard that phrase before. Like let them see how a godly man grocery shops. I'm like, I don't know, probably the same as a nice atheist, I would assume. I don't know how that's helpful. And so if you've been in church world, what you understand is that all the discipleship models that we work with haven't really worked. And you know how I really know that's true? Because of this question. Those of you who've been in church a while, those of you who have grown in your faith and consider yourselves to have a mature faith, who discipled you to get there? Who is it that's been meeting with you regularly, speaking into your life? What book studies have you gone through that produced you into maturity? Now, some of you lucky ones, you have a girl, you have a guy, and they've been guiding you well. And God's been using that relationship in your life in remarkable ways, and that does happen. But for a vast majority of us, like me, who's discipled me, it's just a hodgepodge of people that move in and out of my life as God directs. There's no single program that I went through to grow in my faith. There's no single relationship that I would say that man discipled me. Besides maybe my dad. But that's what dads are for. So those programs, they don't really work. And we're still left with this task, this holy task from Jesus to make disciples. The question becomes, how do we do it? It's this question that I had in my head when I went to another conference. I'm talking a lot about conferences today. I'm painting this picture like all I do is go to conferences. I'm going to a conference this week. So maybe that's what I do. Maybe I just go to a bunch of conferences. I don't know. I have no idea. But I went to a conference back in, I think, 2019, 18 or 19, in the fall. And it was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. You guys paid for it. Thank you so much. And when I went out there, I went to see this pastor named Larry Osborne, who's written a couple of books, who thinks about church in this really practical way that resonates with me and that seems in line with grace. And we've gone through some of his books and stuff at the elder level and the staff level. And I was tired of just big, huge conferences. This one was 25 senior pastors in a room with this guy, and he just taught us for two days. And it was really, really great. It was so good. I took copious notes. And then our elder meetings are structured as such that we have a business meeting on the first Tuesday of the month where we just make decisions for the church. And then on the third Tuesday of the month, we get together, we fellowship, we have fun, we enjoy each other. Sometimes we'll do communion, we'll pray together. And we have something that we're kind of going through just to edify one another and learn more about church in general. And so for seven weeks, we walked through the notes that I took in this conference. It was really valuable. But the most valuable thing I took out of there was the way that Larry thinks about discipleship, and it shaped the way that we as a church at Grace think about discipleship, because we're all called to be disciples, and we're all called to make disciples. So how do we do it? And if it doesn't work to get in the programs, and if it doesn't work to read the books, and if it doesn't work to do life on life, all those things are good and can supplement, but what is it that we need? Well, the way that Larry explained it was that if we really look at Jesus and his life, what we see is that Jesus is always equating our spiritual maturity with the degree to which we are obedient. Jesus is always telling us over and over again in scripture, over and over again in the gospels, we can see Jesus point to this idea that if you love me, you will obey me. And so when Jesus offers us discipleship, when he says he wants to make disciples of us, really he's beckoning us into obedience. Look at just a couple statements from Jesus. We see this, John 14, 15. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, if you want to walk with me, if I'm really the Lord of your life, then you will obey me. He says it more pointedly in Luke. Listen to this. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you? Gosh, that one cuts, doesn't it? This is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside, how many times could Jesus whisper that in our ear and it bring conviction? Why are you singing this song if you don't obey me? Why are you acting holy in small group if you're acting unholy everywhere else? Why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do what I tell you? Why do you call me Lord and yet not let me be the Lord of your life? And so what we see all throughout the gospels is Jesus teaching us, if you're mature, if you're walking with me, if you're abiding in me, you know what you'll do? You'll obey me. You'll do what I say. You'll follow my commands. And this made such an indelible impression that 30 to 60 years later, one of his best disciples, the apostle John, who may have been as young as 10 when he was following Jesus, is writing letters to the churches, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. They're called general epistles or general letters, which means they were for all of the churches in Asia Minor around the Mediterranean at the time. They were written to be circulated amongst the churches. And so at the end of his life, when John has now made disciples in Erasmus and Polycarp, the early church fathers who carried on after the disciples had all left, John was the last living disciple. So he had successfully made disciples. He had handed the keys to the kingdom to other mature believers. And at the end of his life, writing on the topic of spiritual maturity, because I'm not sure they would have called it discipleship. They would have called it growing in faith. But at the end of his life, when he's writing about this to tell people, how do we know if someone has a genuine faith? John says this in 1 John 2. And by this, we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments. Listen, whoever says I know him but does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him. Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. So John, discipled by Jesus, having produced disciples in his own life, says, if you know Jesus, you'll obey him. Whoever says they know Jesus, whoever says they love Jesus and isn't increasing in their obedience is lying. The truth is not in them. That's pretty stark. But what we see is that Jesus and then his disciple John equate spiritual maturity not with theological acumen, not with acts of great service, not with piety and prayers, not even with effective ministry or charismatically drawing other people. What we see is that Jesus and John equate spiritual maturity with increasing levels of obedience in someone's life. So here's what we understand, that we are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. So if we know that we're called to be disciples, we're called to grow and mature in our faith, and we've been in discipleship groups, and we've read the books, and maybe we've asked somebody to disciple us, maybe we've met with somebody, maybe we have a mentor. Here's how we are disciples. We grow in our obedience. As we grow in our obedience to God, we grow in our maturity with Him and are being formed into more godly disciples. And so the way we think about it at Grace is to be step-takers, to simply know what our next step of obedience is and be working towards taking that step or being in the process of taking that step. So to define it, when you say, what is a disciple? Here's what it means at grace. At grace, being a disciple means we are someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. At grace, how do we define what a disciple is? When Jesus says, go and make disciples. If you're a small group leader and you're trying to figure out, do I have disciples in my group? Am I a disciple of Christ? The easiest way I know to think about it is, is your obedience to Jesus increasing or decreasing? If you're gradually giving Jesus more and more bits of your life, more and more of your submission, more and more of his lordship, and taking steps of obedience whenever he puts them in front of you, then you are growing as a disciple. If there is a step of obedience in front of us and we have not taken it, as a matter of fact, we step back from it, then we are probably fading as disciples. And it's interesting to me that this is really the process that Jesus took his disciples through. If you think about it, yeah, he taught them all along the way, but if you read through the gospels, what you'll see is that Jesus simply put steps of obedience in front of them. He says, here you go, here's the next thing I want you to do, do it or don't. If you do it, we'll grow. If you don't, you'll stay. If you flip through Luke, and I put these references in your notes there just parenthetically so you can make sure I'm not making stuff up. Luke chapter 5, he goes to Peter. Peter's just got done with the day of fishing. He's not Jesus' disciple yet, but he says, hey, he goes to Peter and he says, hey, go back in the water and cast your nets in the deep part. Now, that's a hassle. And Jesus knows it's a hassle. Jesus grew up around Galilee. He knows fishermen. He knows they just got done. They've been out there all day. They've been casting the nets. They've been reeling them back in. They've been casting the nets. They've been waiting. They've been mooring. They've been doing all the stuff they're supposed to do. And now it's the end of the day. They've worked a long shift. They haven't caught anything. They're discouraged. They're looking forward to whatever the rest of their night holds. Maybe some falafel. I don't know if they had it back then, but I've had falafel over there. And if I were there, I would be looking forward to more falafel. So I don't know what they're looking forward to, but they're on with their day, right? And then Jesus sees them at the dock, and he's like, no, I want you to go get back in the boat. I want you to go back out, and I want you to cast in the deep waters. That's the step of obedience. They do it. They have the greatest catch they've ever had. Jesus rewards their obedience with faith. He meets them where they are, and they become his disciples. A few verses later, Jesus calls Levi, or Matthew, the tax collector. And his step of obedience is different. He says, I want you to pick up and follow me. I want you to follow me. And Levi gets up from whatever he's doing, gets up from his desk, leaves his office behind, and he goes and he follows Jesus. He leaves his old life behind, and he goes and follows Jesus. Now, the first step that Peter had to take, get back in the boat, go back out, cast the net, that's annoying. That's not what Levi had to do. Levi's first step of obedience was leave that life behind, follow me. Jesus is always beckoning us with steps of obedience. Down the road, he's trained the disciples a little bit. They've seen him teach. They've seen him cast out demons. They've seen him heal people. And he looks at them and he says, all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me. I want you to break off two by two. I want you to go into the surrounding towns and I want you to cast out demons and I want you to heal people. Go. That's your next step of obedience. That's your thing to do now. Go. The great restoration of Peter. Oh, that's Jen's ring. Did you comb it? The great restoration of Peter. Peter, at the end of Jesus' life, fails him, denies him three times as Jesus is being tried. It's a great failure of Peter. I love this passage, and I love the sermon that you get to preach out of it, and I need to revisit it sometime soon. But this restoration of Peter, he goes to him. Jesus has died. He's resurrected. The last time he saw Peter, Peter rejected him three times and then ran off, brokenhearted at what he had done. Jesus raises from the dead. He shows back up. Peter's on the coast. He's getting ready to fish again because he's disqualified from ministry. He can't do what Jesus asked him to do. And Jesus goes to him and he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've told you to do. Go take the next step. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then obey me. Then go do what I've told you to do. Feed my sheep. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Obey me. There's three times you denied me. There's three times I've restored you. Now go and do what I've asked you to do. Go walk in obedience, Peter. Go feed my sheep. Go be a pastor, what he says. And then the last one, the last step of obedience. Yasmeen read to us, go and make disciples. Do it. Go. What we see in the life of Jesus, when we ask, looking at Jesus' life, how do we make disciples? How do we become disciples? That what we need to pull out of him, out of his life, is not this impractical, clumsy, mysterious, life-on-life discipleship that we need to basically live in a commune with each other and learn from one another. It's we need to take our next steps of obedience. And here's the thing about these next steps of obedience. I don't know what yours might be, but I do know that we all have one. And some of yours are pretty scary. Some of you, if you're thinking about it, if I were to ask you, what do you think is your next step of obedience? Some of it, it's, hey, go back in the deep and cast again. For a lot of us, it's become a person of devotion. Get up every day, spend time in God's word, time in prayer. Just do it. I say it a lot. You hear it a lot. Just do it, man. That's your next step of obedience. Quit worrying about the other stuff and take that one. That's an easy step. That's go back and cast in the deep. I know you're tired. I know it's a hassle. Get up, do it, okay? Maybe that's your step. Maybe it's forgive my mom. Maybe it's confess the sin. Maybe it's seek to restore a relationship that's been broken. Maybe your next step is to get help. Those are hard next steps. Those are the kinds of next steps that we don't know what's on the other side of them. But what we know is that if Jesus is asking us to take it, he will be there to meet us when we do. Which is why we know that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The bigger the step in front of you that God's asking you to take, the greater your faith will grow when you're met there. And this is how we become disciples. Not because we become obedient robots to Jesus, but because with every step we take, our faith is deepened, our trust in him is deepened, and we are less hesitant to take steps in the future. Because all we have to do is look at our past and see every time Jesus met us when we took that step. To know that if he's beckoning me to this again, I can take it. So that's how we become disciples at grace. How do we disciple others? If that's how we become disciples, we just increase in our obedience. We take our next step of faith. That's what discipleship looks like. God, what would you have me do? What's the step of obedience you would have me take in my life? And then faithfully take it. And then once you do it, do it again. And once you do it, do it again. If that's how we are disciples, then how do we make disciples at grace? Here's how. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. That's it. That's it. Maybe their next step is to read a book. For some of you, it's been a few years. You should just try it on. Just read a chapter of something. Maybe the next step is to read a book. Maybe the next step is to start listening to sermons. I don't know. Maybe the next step is to get into a discipleship group, but that's not how we make disciples. We make disciples by helping other people identify their next step and then encouraging them to take it. Small group leaders, you ought to know the next step of everyone in your small group. Or at least know that someone knows what their next step is and that they're being encouraged to take it. This also opens up the doors of clumsy one-on-one discipleship to be discipled in segments or areas of our life, right? Instead of one person just telling us all the things we need to know about everything, we can identify a woman who has a good marriage and ladies, you can go to her and you can say, you seem to have a great marriage. You seem to love your husband well. You seem to honor Jesus in your house. Can you teach me how to do that? Here's some struggles we're having in my house. How would you deal with that? You're more seasoned than me. Your kids are older. You've managed to produce children that like you and that love Jesus and that you like too. How'd you do that? That person, you have that conversation enough times, that person is discipling you in motherhood. You're a young entrepreneur. You're starting something out. You see somebody, you see a guy who's been running his own business for a while. His employees like him. He seems to run it in a godly way. And you go to him, you go, hey, I'm starting a business. Will you help me run this according to the standards of Christ? Can I ask you questions about how to do my business? That man is now discipling you and how to be a godly employer and how to have a Jesus-centered career. You're struggling with an addiction. You're struggling with a particular sin. You're struggling with knowing the Bible. You can go to someone and you say, hey, listen, I've heard you talk. You lace it into conversations. You seem to know the Bible really well. Can you just help me learn it better? Can you tell me what you do? A person's discipling you in your knowledge of Scripture. This allows for communal discipleship, discipleship by a body instead of an individual that we all need to find. This allows people, and this is what's in line with our life experiences, to come in and out of our life and push us towards Jesus in different ways and in different avenues and in different areas of our life without being the person who's discipling us. And I think that this is how Jesus has been shaping his church all along, is by different people being placed in our life that show us our next step of obedience, and then it's up to us to have the willingness to take it. So here's the commission at Grace. Here's what we would ask of Grace partners as we understand what it means to be step-takers. We should all have someone in our life who isn't our spouse, who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. We should all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Now, this is important. Now, here's why it can't be your spouse. I'm not anti-marriage, okay? I just know I'm married, and I know that if you added that layer to what Jen and I manage already, and now, in addition to, hey, did you remember to take out the trash and lock up the door? Also, did you have your quiet time this morning? That's not good. That's not helpful, right? That's probably not going to go great. So we find someone outside of our marriage, if we're married, who knows our next step of obedience. We've confessed to them, this is where I think God is pushing me, this is what I need to do. And that's a good step. But the next step is probably even more important. And has permission to encourage us to take it. Someone who's invited into your life to say, hey man, have you done that yet? Have you had that conversation? How is your relationship with so-and-so? How are those safeguards that you put in place? Have you messed up? Is it going okay? How can I encourage you there? That's how we are step-takers at grace. That's how we think about discipleship, not as a program, not as a funnel, not as something that you enter into and then you get spit out as a mature believer, not even necessarily this life-on-life idea that someone would mentor you through all the stages and phases of your life as you work towards maturity, but this communal idea of discipleship, that it's simply framed up exactly as Jesus framed it up, that the more mature we grow in our faith, the more we will grow in the consistency of our obedience. And so to be a disciple means to be someone who is constantly aware of and taking their next step of obedience. And to disciple, to make disciples means to know what someone's next step is, to help them identify it, and then consistently and lovingly encourage them to take it. So at Grace, we are step-takers. And what that means is we understand to grow in maturity, we grow in obedience. So we all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Let's pray. Father, I pray that grace would be a church that's full of disciples. That it would be a church that's full of disciple-making disciples who are passionate about you, who are grateful for your son, who want nothing more than to know you better and to know you deeper. I pray that there would be fewer and fewer times that Jesus would need to whisper to us, why do you call me Lord, Lord, if you don't do what I say? Jesus, simply help us to do what you say. Help us to be disciples who take steps of obedience towards you and let us experience the goodness that we're met with as we take steps of faith. God, give us the courage to invite people into our life who know our next step. Give us the humility to invite them to encourage us to take it. If someone entrusts us with that for them, God, make us good stewards of your disciple for that season. Be with us as we go through our week. Be with our team in Mexico as they do your work down there. May they minister as they are ministered to. In Jesus' name, amen. If you guys would stand with me as we depart. I thought it appropriate to end this series, the five traits of grace, with this little stanza that I wrote for the sermon on conduits of grace that kind of captures who we are and what we believe. So I would bless you with this as you go into your week. At grace, we understand. We are yet forgiven. We are broken yet restored. We are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Go, have a great week. We'll see you next week.

Thank you. Hi, good morning, friends. My name is Yasmeen Reese, and I'm a partner here at Grace Raleigh, along with my sweet husband, Brandon Reese. Had to give a shout-out. Today's reading comes from Matthew 28, 18 to 20. I can confirm Brandon is lovely. We do miss him this week. We remember Brandon's with our team down in Mexico right now, so we remember them and keep them in our prayers and hope that the Lord speaks to them as they go and encourages our partners in Mexico while they're there through Grace Raleigh. This is the fifth part of our series called Traits of Grace. The genesis of this series was last fall, when as a staff, we began talking about what makes grace, grace. And as we want to define what it means to be a partner of grace, which we don't have partners we have, or we don't have members, we have partners. When we talk about what it means to be a partner of grace, a person who calls grace home, what do we expect of grace people? What do we want to be as a church? And so we kind of threw a bunch of stuff on the whiteboard, and we ended up with these five traits that we've gone through these last five weeks. And I would tell you that we want you, I know that this is a lofty goal, but we want you to know all of these. We want you, if you call grace home over time, to be able to say all of these, to understand what these are, to be able to explain them to people. If they say, hey, what's your church all about? We can tell them this. Our mission statement is to connect people to people and connect people to Jesus. But the ways that we do that are in these five traits. So in the first week, we'll see if I can remember them. In the first week, we talked about the fact that we are kingdom builders, right? We're all building a kingdom somewhere. We're either building God's kingdom or our own kingdom. So we asked, whose kingdom are you building? At Grace, we want to build God's kingdom. And then in the second week, we talked about being conduits of grace. This is where we get our authenticity. This is where we're kind of real. This is how we can be accepting of others and loving of others who come in here because we receive God's grace. We know that we're messed up. You're messed up too. We love you too. We are conduits of God's grace as we receive it, we offer it. And then we talked about how we're people of devotion, that the single most important habit anyone can have in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and time in prayer. And so we are people who believe in that devotional habit and pursuing God on our own and allowing the Sunday morning experience to simply be supplemental to what God is doing in our life every day as we pursue him. And then, which one have I forgotten? Did we do last week? You're nodding your head at me. You're like, yeah, you got the first one. Now you're not there on the fourth one. Okay, last week, partners. We talked about being partners, right? We're not just partners at the church, but we're partners in ministry and what we do at Grace. We're partners in life. At Grace, no one should walk alone through any season of life. And then we're partners in faith. We hold up one another. We help each other cling to faith as we move through life. And so this week, our last trait, we are step-takers at grace. We are step-takers. And I'll tell you what that means. This is really a Sunday morning focused on our discipleship model at grace. When we talk about discipleship at grace, this is how we talk about it. We talk about it in terms of being step-takers. And as I was preparing this sermon, it occurred to me that this is really more of a seminar than a sermon. This is really more informative where I teach you than it is about being a sermon. A sermon kind of changes us and inspires us and teaching informs us. And so this morning I'm teaching you and I want to teach you about what discipleship is because I don't know if you've realized this or not, but discipleship is the goal of every church. Every church ever, discipleship is the goal because of the verse that Yasmeen read to us just a few minutes ago. Because when Jesus is leaving the disciples, going back up to heaven, he gives them his final instructions. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is the job of the disciples of the church that Jesus left behind. He says, my work here is done. I'm going to go to heaven. I'm going to sit at the right hand of the Father. I'm going to intercede for you. I've done what I came to accomplish here on earth. And now I am going to, I'm going to heaven and I'm leaving you with your instructions. I'm leaving you with the keys to the kingdom. I'm leaving you in charge. The church is my kingdom here on earth and you are going to be in charge of it. And here's what I want you to do. I want you to go make disciples in every nation. And so those instructions are not just for the disciples, but for every church and every body that would follow the disciples, every body of believers that would follow the disciples. So that commission is called the Great Commission, and it is our commission. And so every church ever has the goal of making disciples. They say it in different ways. We want to produce multiplying disciples. We want to produce disciple-making disciples. We're a discipleship-focused church. We want to produce disciples. Like, whatever it is, this is the goal of every church, and it's the goal of every church that I've ever been a part of, except, and here's the thing, this is a well-kept church secret that you probably only know intuitively, but you've probably never heard a pastor admit it, we're not very good at it. No church is really super great at making disciples. And I learned that this was true at my last job. My last job, I was at this church outside of Atlanta. It became this big three-campus church where when you preach, you're simulcast out to all the people and whatever, whatever. And because I was a part of a big growing church like that, I got to go to church conferences. So for seven years, I would go to church conferences, and I was the discipleship pastor, right? Now, it was small groups, but my job was to think about the process by which Greystone Church made disciples. And so we're getting into the weeds a little bit in here, but if you've been a part of church for any number of years, you've heard language like this before. You know churches are trying to make disciples. You know what small groups are all about. So this is what we were doing, and it's what I was tasked with. I was in charge of thinking through and implementing the discipleship process at Greystone Church. So I would go to these conferences where other big churches with big staffs would go as well, and there would be breakout sessions. I don't know what happens in your different industries, but in my industry, there's breakout sessions where you choose different things and you go to what's most applicable to your particular position. And so I would always find myself in rooms about this size with round tables, sitting around with other small group pastors or adult education pastors or discipleship pastors or associate pastors that were in charge of these things. And we'd sit around the table and we'd listen to the guru up in front who had small groups and discipleship all figured out and he would tell us exactly how he did it or she did it. And then we'd sit around our table and we'd have some time to talk to each other. And I'm telling you, without fail at these tables, somebody every time, every conference would say, what are you guys doing for discipleship? Because we're rethinking our model. It's not working, right? I don't know in corporate terms what it means when you rethink a model, but in church terms, it means we are totally messing this up. So we're rethinking our model. What do you guys do for discipleship? What we've been doing is not working. We're not really producing disciples. And the answers, I listened to them for seven years. I offered some of them when I thought I was smart. I'll help you guys, you ministry veterans. Let me tell you how we're doing it at Greystone. But the answers were always the same. Well, we're trying this for these reasons. We hope it works. If it doesn't, we might pivot to this, which means nothing. Nobody said, we've been doing this program for years and it's working. Because what churches are looking for is a funnel to put people in. When we put you into this funnel, small groups, volunteering, men's Bible study, women's Bible studies, whatever it is, when we put you into this funnel, you're going to go through these systems and you're going to bounce through these walls and you're going to come out the end of the funnel, a disciple, a mature believer in Jesus. That's the goal. We're giggling about it now, but that's the goal. And that was my job is to design the funnel. What do we put people in so that when they go around, when they come out, they're mature believers in Jesus who are now producing other disciples in their life? And there's all kinds of ideas for this. Some of you have been, I want to ask you to raise your hand. I don't want to delineate good Christians and bad Christians, but some of you have been in discipleship programs. You've been in discipleship groups. You're serious. Some of you have had people disciple you. Some of you have even, and you're the big dogs. Some people have come to you and said, will you disciple me? And here's the thing. I would bet my next paycheck that when someone asks you, if you've ever had someone come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? That your very first thought was, how? I don't know how to do that. But you don't want to let them down. Clearly they think you're somebody. You got stuff figured out. You're like, yes, I will. I will do that. I will disciple you. Great. How do you want to disciple me? Let's meet for breakfast. I'll tell you what we're going to do. We're going to meet for breakfast once a month, and I'm going to find a book, and we're going to read it. And we'll probably miss a month or two. So in a year, we'll meet like 10 times, finish that book up, and chip, chop, chip, you're going to be a mature believer. This is going to be great. Let's do it. You're giggling because you've done it, man. And here's what you know. Here's what you know is that it didn't work. It didn't work. I've asked poor men over the years to disciple me. I remember, I'm just gonna say his name publicly. There was a facilities guy at Toccoa Falls College that I worked for when I kept the grounds named George Champion, who was just a phenomenally good man. And I worked for him and I asked him, will you disciple me? And he said, sure, let's have breakfast. I thought we had, in Toccoa, we had the huddle house. We weren't even big enough for a waffle house. We had the huddle house with literal bullet holes in the hood vent. There was three of them, but I only went during safe hours. It was fine. And Mr. Champion said, let's meet at hud House, but I got to meet there early, so we'll meet at five. I said, okay. Old college Nate made about two of those. And then I slept through the next two, and I couldn't look George in the eye anymore, so I bailed out on discipleship. There's been others through the years. Maybe you've tried that too. And we're taught about this thing when you try to figure out how do you make disciples? I could ask you to raise your hand. Who's heard of life-on-life discipleship? Don't raise your hand. But there's that phrase because in the Bible, that's how Jesus makes his disciples. They live together. I used to listen to the teachings of this guy named Ray Vanderlei, who's great, and I would highly endorse his teachings. But his teachings is called the dust of the rabbi, or his website's like the dust of the rabbi, because there's this phrase, may you be walking so closely behind your rabbi that as he kicks up the dust from the trail that is getting on you, that you're around him all the time. And in the first century, that's great, man. In the 21st century, that's not super practical. I had people at student ministry conferences tell me, when you're discipling high school guys, you just invite them into your life. Invite them over to dinner. Let them see how a godly man talks to his wife. Let them see how a godly man buys milk. Take them to the grocery store. Just let them see how you do your life. Like I've heard that phrase before. Like let them see how a godly man grocery shops. I'm like, I don't know, probably the same as a nice atheist, I would assume. I don't know how that's helpful. And so if you've been in church world, what you understand is that all the discipleship models that we work with haven't really worked. And you know how I really know that's true? Because of this question. Those of you who've been in church a while, those of you who have grown in your faith and consider yourselves to have a mature faith, who discipled you to get there? Who is it that's been meeting with you regularly, speaking into your life? What book studies have you gone through that produced you into maturity? Now, some of you lucky ones, you have a girl, you have a guy, and they've been guiding you well. And God's been using that relationship in your life in remarkable ways, and that does happen. But for a vast majority of us, like me, who's discipled me, it's just a hodgepodge of people that move in and out of my life as God directs. There's no single program that I went through to grow in my faith. There's no single relationship that I would say that man discipled me. Besides maybe my dad. But that's what dads are for. So those programs, they don't really work. And we're still left with this task, this holy task from Jesus to make disciples. The question becomes, how do we do it? It's this question that I had in my head when I went to another conference. I'm talking a lot about conferences today. I'm painting this picture like all I do is go to conferences. I'm going to a conference this week. So maybe that's what I do. Maybe I just go to a bunch of conferences. I don't know. I have no idea. But I went to a conference back in, I think, 2019, 18 or 19, in the fall. And it was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. You guys paid for it. Thank you so much. And when I went out there, I went to see this pastor named Larry Osborne, who's written a couple of books, who thinks about church in this really practical way that resonates with me and that seems in line with grace. And we've gone through some of his books and stuff at the elder level and the staff level. And I was tired of just big, huge conferences. This one was 25 senior pastors in a room with this guy, and he just taught us for two days. And it was really, really great. It was so good. I took copious notes. And then our elder meetings are structured as such that we have a business meeting on the first Tuesday of the month where we just make decisions for the church. And then on the third Tuesday of the month, we get together, we fellowship, we have fun, we enjoy each other. Sometimes we'll do communion, we'll pray together. And we have something that we're kind of going through just to edify one another and learn more about church in general. And so for seven weeks, we walked through the notes that I took in this conference. It was really valuable. But the most valuable thing I took out of there was the way that Larry thinks about discipleship, and it shaped the way that we as a church at Grace think about discipleship, because we're all called to be disciples, and we're all called to make disciples. So how do we do it? And if it doesn't work to get in the programs, and if it doesn't work to read the books, and if it doesn't work to do life on life, all those things are good and can supplement, but what is it that we need? Well, the way that Larry explained it was that if we really look at Jesus and his life, what we see is that Jesus is always equating our spiritual maturity with the degree to which we are obedient. Jesus is always telling us over and over again in scripture, over and over again in the gospels, we can see Jesus point to this idea that if you love me, you will obey me. And so when Jesus offers us discipleship, when he says he wants to make disciples of us, really he's beckoning us into obedience. Look at just a couple statements from Jesus. We see this, John 14, 15. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. If you love me, if you want to walk with me, if I'm really the Lord of your life, then you will obey me. He says it more pointedly in Luke. Listen to this. Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do what I tell you? Gosh, that one cuts, doesn't it? This is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside, how many times could Jesus whisper that in our ear and it bring conviction? Why are you singing this song if you don't obey me? Why are you acting holy in small group if you're acting unholy everywhere else? Why do you call me Lord, Lord and not do what I tell you? Why do you call me Lord and yet not let me be the Lord of your life? And so what we see all throughout the gospels is Jesus teaching us, if you're mature, if you're walking with me, if you're abiding in me, you know what you'll do? You'll obey me. You'll do what I say. You'll follow my commands. And this made such an indelible impression that 30 to 60 years later, one of his best disciples, the apostle John, who may have been as young as 10 when he was following Jesus, is writing letters to the churches, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. They're called general epistles or general letters, which means they were for all of the churches in Asia Minor around the Mediterranean at the time. They were written to be circulated amongst the churches. And so at the end of his life, when John has now made disciples in Erasmus and Polycarp, the early church fathers who carried on after the disciples had all left, John was the last living disciple. So he had successfully made disciples. He had handed the keys to the kingdom to other mature believers. And at the end of his life, writing on the topic of spiritual maturity, because I'm not sure they would have called it discipleship. They would have called it growing in faith. But at the end of his life, when he's writing about this to tell people, how do we know if someone has a genuine faith? John says this in 1 John 2. And by this, we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments. Listen, whoever says I know him but does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word in him, truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in him. Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked. So John, discipled by Jesus, having produced disciples in his own life, says, if you know Jesus, you'll obey him. Whoever says they know Jesus, whoever says they love Jesus and isn't increasing in their obedience is lying. The truth is not in them. That's pretty stark. But what we see is that Jesus and then his disciple John equate spiritual maturity not with theological acumen, not with acts of great service, not with piety and prayers, not even with effective ministry or charismatically drawing other people. What we see is that Jesus and John equate spiritual maturity with increasing levels of obedience in someone's life. So here's what we understand, that we are growing as a disciple when we are growing in our obedience. So if we know that we're called to be disciples, we're called to grow and mature in our faith, and we've been in discipleship groups, and we've read the books, and maybe we've asked somebody to disciple us, maybe we've met with somebody, maybe we have a mentor. Here's how we are disciples. We grow in our obedience. As we grow in our obedience to God, we grow in our maturity with Him and are being formed into more godly disciples. And so the way we think about it at Grace is to be step-takers, to simply know what our next step of obedience is and be working towards taking that step or being in the process of taking that step. So to define it, when you say, what is a disciple? Here's what it means at grace. At grace, being a disciple means we are someone who is seeking out and taking our next steps of obedience. At grace, how do we define what a disciple is? When Jesus says, go and make disciples. If you're a small group leader and you're trying to figure out, do I have disciples in my group? Am I a disciple of Christ? The easiest way I know to think about it is, is your obedience to Jesus increasing or decreasing? If you're gradually giving Jesus more and more bits of your life, more and more of your submission, more and more of his lordship, and taking steps of obedience whenever he puts them in front of you, then you are growing as a disciple. If there is a step of obedience in front of us and we have not taken it, as a matter of fact, we step back from it, then we are probably fading as disciples. And it's interesting to me that this is really the process that Jesus took his disciples through. If you think about it, yeah, he taught them all along the way, but if you read through the gospels, what you'll see is that Jesus simply put steps of obedience in front of them. He says, here you go, here's the next thing I want you to do, do it or don't. If you do it, we'll grow. If you don't, you'll stay. If you flip through Luke, and I put these references in your notes there just parenthetically so you can make sure I'm not making stuff up. Luke chapter 5, he goes to Peter. Peter's just got done with the day of fishing. He's not Jesus' disciple yet, but he says, hey, he goes to Peter and he says, hey, go back in the water and cast your nets in the deep part. Now, that's a hassle. And Jesus knows it's a hassle. Jesus grew up around Galilee. He knows fishermen. He knows they just got done. They've been out there all day. They've been casting the nets. They've been reeling them back in. They've been casting the nets. They've been waiting. They've been mooring. They've been doing all the stuff they're supposed to do. And now it's the end of the day. They've worked a long shift. They haven't caught anything. They're discouraged. They're looking forward to whatever the rest of their night holds. Maybe some falafel. I don't know if they had it back then, but I've had falafel over there. And if I were there, I would be looking forward to more falafel. So I don't know what they're looking forward to, but they're on with their day, right? And then Jesus sees them at the dock, and he's like, no, I want you to go get back in the boat. I want you to go back out, and I want you to cast in the deep waters. That's the step of obedience. They do it. They have the greatest catch they've ever had. Jesus rewards their obedience with faith. He meets them where they are, and they become his disciples. A few verses later, Jesus calls Levi, or Matthew, the tax collector. And his step of obedience is different. He says, I want you to pick up and follow me. I want you to follow me. And Levi gets up from whatever he's doing, gets up from his desk, leaves his office behind, and he goes and he follows Jesus. He leaves his old life behind, and he goes and follows Jesus. Now, the first step that Peter had to take, get back in the boat, go back out, cast the net, that's annoying. That's not what Levi had to do. Levi's first step of obedience was leave that life behind, follow me. Jesus is always beckoning us with steps of obedience. Down the road, he's trained the disciples a little bit. They've seen him teach. They've seen him cast out demons. They've seen him heal people. And he looks at them and he says, all authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me. I want you to break off two by two. I want you to go into the surrounding towns and I want you to cast out demons and I want you to heal people. Go. That's your next step of obedience. That's your thing to do now. Go. The great restoration of Peter. Oh, that's Jen's ring. Did you comb it? The great restoration of Peter. Peter, at the end of Jesus' life, fails him, denies him three times as Jesus is being tried. It's a great failure of Peter. I love this passage, and I love the sermon that you get to preach out of it, and I need to revisit it sometime soon. But this restoration of Peter, he goes to him. Jesus has died. He's resurrected. The last time he saw Peter, Peter rejected him three times and then ran off, brokenhearted at what he had done. Jesus raises from the dead. He shows back up. Peter's on the coast. He's getting ready to fish again because he's disqualified from ministry. He can't do what Jesus asked him to do. And Jesus goes to him and he says, Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then feed my sheep. Obey me. Do what I've told you to do. Go take the next step. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Then obey me. Then go do what I've told you to do. Feed my sheep. Peter, do you love me? Yes, Lord, you know I love you. Why do you keep asking me? Obey me. There's three times you denied me. There's three times I've restored you. Now go and do what I've asked you to do. Go walk in obedience, Peter. Go feed my sheep. Go be a pastor, what he says. And then the last one, the last step of obedience. Yasmeen read to us, go and make disciples. Do it. Go. What we see in the life of Jesus, when we ask, looking at Jesus' life, how do we make disciples? How do we become disciples? That what we need to pull out of him, out of his life, is not this impractical, clumsy, mysterious, life-on-life discipleship that we need to basically live in a commune with each other and learn from one another. It's we need to take our next steps of obedience. And here's the thing about these next steps of obedience. I don't know what yours might be, but I do know that we all have one. And some of yours are pretty scary. Some of you, if you're thinking about it, if I were to ask you, what do you think is your next step of obedience? Some of it, it's, hey, go back in the deep and cast again. For a lot of us, it's become a person of devotion. Get up every day, spend time in God's word, time in prayer. Just do it. I say it a lot. You hear it a lot. Just do it, man. That's your next step of obedience. Quit worrying about the other stuff and take that one. That's an easy step. That's go back and cast in the deep. I know you're tired. I know it's a hassle. Get up, do it, okay? Maybe that's your step. Maybe it's forgive my mom. Maybe it's confess the sin. Maybe it's seek to restore a relationship that's been broken. Maybe your next step is to get help. Those are hard next steps. Those are the kinds of next steps that we don't know what's on the other side of them. But what we know is that if Jesus is asking us to take it, he will be there to meet us when we do. Which is why we know that the scarier the step, the deeper the faith. The bigger the step in front of you that God's asking you to take, the greater your faith will grow when you're met there. And this is how we become disciples. Not because we become obedient robots to Jesus, but because with every step we take, our faith is deepened, our trust in him is deepened, and we are less hesitant to take steps in the future. Because all we have to do is look at our past and see every time Jesus met us when we took that step. To know that if he's beckoning me to this again, I can take it. So that's how we become disciples at grace. How do we disciple others? If that's how we become disciples, we just increase in our obedience. We take our next step of faith. That's what discipleship looks like. God, what would you have me do? What's the step of obedience you would have me take in my life? And then faithfully take it. And then once you do it, do it again. And once you do it, do it again. If that's how we are disciples, then how do we make disciples at grace? Here's how. We disciple someone by helping them identify and take their next step. That's it. That's it. Maybe their next step is to read a book. For some of you, it's been a few years. You should just try it on. Just read a chapter of something. Maybe the next step is to read a book. Maybe the next step is to start listening to sermons. I don't know. Maybe the next step is to get into a discipleship group, but that's not how we make disciples. We make disciples by helping other people identify their next step and then encouraging them to take it. Small group leaders, you ought to know the next step of everyone in your small group. Or at least know that someone knows what their next step is and that they're being encouraged to take it. This also opens up the doors of clumsy one-on-one discipleship to be discipled in segments or areas of our life, right? Instead of one person just telling us all the things we need to know about everything, we can identify a woman who has a good marriage and ladies, you can go to her and you can say, you seem to have a great marriage. You seem to love your husband well. You seem to honor Jesus in your house. Can you teach me how to do that? Here's some struggles we're having in my house. How would you deal with that? You're more seasoned than me. Your kids are older. You've managed to produce children that like you and that love Jesus and that you like too. How'd you do that? That person, you have that conversation enough times, that person is discipling you in motherhood. You're a young entrepreneur. You're starting something out. You see somebody, you see a guy who's been running his own business for a while. His employees like him. He seems to run it in a godly way. And you go to him, you go, hey, I'm starting a business. Will you help me run this according to the standards of Christ? Can I ask you questions about how to do my business? That man is now discipling you and how to be a godly employer and how to have a Jesus-centered career. You're struggling with an addiction. You're struggling with a particular sin. You're struggling with knowing the Bible. You can go to someone and you say, hey, listen, I've heard you talk. You lace it into conversations. You seem to know the Bible really well. Can you just help me learn it better? Can you tell me what you do? A person's discipling you in your knowledge of Scripture. This allows for communal discipleship, discipleship by a body instead of an individual that we all need to find. This allows people, and this is what's in line with our life experiences, to come in and out of our life and push us towards Jesus in different ways and in different avenues and in different areas of our life without being the person who's discipling us. And I think that this is how Jesus has been shaping his church all along, is by different people being placed in our life that show us our next step of obedience, and then it's up to us to have the willingness to take it. So here's the commission at Grace. Here's what we would ask of Grace partners as we understand what it means to be step-takers. We should all have someone in our life who isn't our spouse, who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. We should all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Now, this is important. Now, here's why it can't be your spouse. I'm not anti-marriage, okay? I just know I'm married, and I know that if you added that layer to what Jen and I manage already, and now, in addition to, hey, did you remember to take out the trash and lock up the door? Also, did you have your quiet time this morning? That's not good. That's not helpful, right? That's probably not going to go great. So we find someone outside of our marriage, if we're married, who knows our next step of obedience. We've confessed to them, this is where I think God is pushing me, this is what I need to do. And that's a good step. But the next step is probably even more important. And has permission to encourage us to take it. Someone who's invited into your life to say, hey man, have you done that yet? Have you had that conversation? How is your relationship with so-and-so? How are those safeguards that you put in place? Have you messed up? Is it going okay? How can I encourage you there? That's how we are step-takers at grace. That's how we think about discipleship, not as a program, not as a funnel, not as something that you enter into and then you get spit out as a mature believer, not even necessarily this life-on-life idea that someone would mentor you through all the stages and phases of your life as you work towards maturity, but this communal idea of discipleship, that it's simply framed up exactly as Jesus framed it up, that the more mature we grow in our faith, the more we will grow in the consistency of our obedience. And so to be a disciple means to be someone who is constantly aware of and taking their next step of obedience. And to disciple, to make disciples means to know what someone's next step is, to help them identify it, and then consistently and lovingly encourage them to take it. So at Grace, we are step-takers. And what that means is we understand to grow in maturity, we grow in obedience. So we all have someone in our life who knows what our next step is and has permission to encourage us to take it. Let's pray. Father, I pray that grace would be a church that's full of disciples. That it would be a church that's full of disciple-making disciples who are passionate about you, who are grateful for your son, who want nothing more than to know you better and to know you deeper. I pray that there would be fewer and fewer times that Jesus would need to whisper to us, why do you call me Lord, Lord, if you don't do what I say? Jesus, simply help us to do what you say. Help us to be disciples who take steps of obedience towards you and let us experience the goodness that we're met with as we take steps of faith. God, give us the courage to invite people into our life who know our next step. Give us the humility to invite them to encourage us to take it. If someone entrusts us with that for them, God, make us good stewards of your disciple for that season. Be with us as we go through our week. Be with our team in Mexico as they do your work down there. May they minister as they are ministered to. In Jesus' name, amen. If you guys would stand with me as we depart. I thought it appropriate to end this series, the five traits of grace, with this little stanza that I wrote for the sermon on conduits of grace that kind of captures who we are and what we believe. So I would bless you with this as you go into your week. At grace, we understand. We are yet forgiven. We are broken yet restored. We are deeply flawed and yet deeply loved. We are only good because of the Father. We are only righteous because of the Son. And we are only wise because of the Spirit. And all of this is grace. Go, have a great week. We'll see you next week.

Well, good morning, everybody. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Just right up front, I've been getting a lot of flack this morning for going halfsies on my Christmas spirit. I understand that. But listen, I tried on everything last night, and I am doing you a public service by not wearing those bottoms. All right? This is for you. It's not for me. I'd be more comfortable in those, but I made a decision for the betterment of the church, and I would appreciate if you could respect that choice. Now, we are in part two of our series called Twas the Night, where we're looking at the story of Christmas, largely based in Luke chapter two, and we're looking at it from different perspectives within that story to see what we can learn from them and their experience within the Christmas story. And so last week, we looked at Simeon's reaction to Jesus and the innkeeper's reaction to Jesus. We juxtaposed those and kind of learned a bit from those two perspectives. Next week, we're going to look at Joseph and his humble, quiet, consistent obedience and what we can learn from that. And then Christmas Eve, we're going to look at Mary. There's this verse tucked away at the end of the Christmas narrative, towards the end of chapter 2, that I really, really love where there's this joy that's almost, words would cheapen it, this joy that Mary experiences. So we're going to look at that verse for Christmas Eve, and I'm very excited for the Christmas Eve service and message that we get to share with you that day. Today, we're going to look at the Christmas story from the perspective of the wise men. Now, I'll give credit where it's due. Aaron Gibson and I went on a little retreat in September to go ahead and plan out the Christmas series and figure out what we were going to do. The idea for this morning and what we're talking about this morning comes from him. So if it's good, tell him so. If it's not, let's just assume that there was an issue with the delivery and he needs to choose a better messenger or just hold his good ideas and preach them himself. But this morning I want to look at the perspective of the wise men. Now we don't read about the wise men in Luke chapter 2. We see them in Matthew chapter 2. And I'm actually not going to turn to either of those today. I'm going to be in John chapter 6. So if you brought your Bible like I've been asking you to do, you can go ahead and turn to John 6. If you don't have one with you, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Please excuse me. I've been, I got a sinus infection that turned into a cough. I've been fighting it off for a week. I'm not contagious, but I am on about four different cough suppressants. So if I say something crazy, that's why. We see the wise men in Matthew chapter 2. And I like to point out, I don't know why I like to point out, I just do, that the wise men were more than likely not actually at the manger scene. The nativity scene that we have that we put in our houses and everything. We went to a live nativity at another church last night. Did a phenomenal job. The wise men were more than likely not there. Okay? Their story is they saw a star and they were told by God to go follow that star. And I think this is worth pointing out and amazing. It's not the point, but it's something that I didn't want to just blow past. That the wise men are even involved in the story of Christmas. Because I'll get into why later, but they're from very far away. They are not from Israel. They are not Hebrew people. They are not descendants of Abraham. It is very, very unlikely that the Jewish tradition had made its way to wherever they called home. And yet, without any religious infrastructure at all, without any holy texts at all, they somehow recognize the voice of God, the God that we worship, the God that Mary and Joseph worship. They heard that voice, identified that voice, and were obedient to that voice. When we read the Bible, the narrative focuses way down on Abraham's family and then on Israel and what happens in Israel, as if God's scope of evangelism and love and care and speaking isn't worldwide all the time. And we get these little glimpses throughout scripture like Melchizedek in the Old Testament that it's actually true that God is speaking outside of Israel to those who will listen. It reminds me of Romans 1 where it says that God reveals himself to all men in nature so that no man is without excuse. Somehow, some way, these wise men with no no religious structure at all, heard the voice of God, identified it, obeyed it. They go to Jerusalem. They're following the star. The star leads them to Jerusalem. They get to Jerusalem, and this is all in Matthew 2. You can check me if you need to. I would always encourage that. But they get to Jerusalem where Jesus is not there. He's either in Bethlehem or he's in Nazareth. He's not in Jerusalem. And they go to Herod, the king, because they don't know where else to go. And they say, hey, we're here to worship. The Savior's been born. We're here to worship him. Do you know where he is? And Herod is threatened by this because he knows somewhere in the annals of his brain that when this Messiah comes, he's going to be the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. And Herod erroneously thinks he's going to try to sit on my throne, to which Jesus is like, I'm not interested in your throne. That's very small potatoes. Don't care. But Herod thinks he's going to try to take his stuff. And so Herod responds with an edict to kill all the boys in Israel aged two and younger, which is one of the more horrific evil edicts that we see in the whole Bible. Herod was evil. And I have a two and a half year old son. I can't imagine what it would be to be one of the soldiers that had to carry out those directives. Awful, awful stuff. But he says this, Herod does, to kill all the baby boys, age two or younger, we're told in Matthew 2, because of the timing of the journey of the wise men. What this means is, more than likely, the wise men were following that star for two years. Could be more, could be less. Could be a year, could be nine months. We don't know when the star appeared. And the star could have appeared two years in advance of Jesus' birth. And then they showed up at the time. We don't know that for sure, except for when they appear, when they go in to see Joseph and Mary, it says that they entered into the house. Not the manger, but the house. So they're probably in Nazareth, meaning Jesus is probably a toddler by this point. At which point they give him gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And Johnny, my two-year-old, has just been beating me up for myrrh this Christmas. So they were on point with those gifts. But it took two years to get where they were going. I want you to imagine that. They're from very far east. We do not know where. India is possible. China is possible. Iran, Iraq, one of the stands. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan. One of the stands could be. And they journeyed for two years. Based on a voice of God that they heard that said, follow this star. Maybe they were nomadic people and so journeying wasn't a huge deal, but they're still rearranging their whole life. A lot of scholars believe they were just wealthy individuals and they brought their caravan with them. We don't know how many wise men there were. We just know that there was more than one. We usually say three because of the three gifts, but that's really not indicative of the total number. And so they load up, presumably on camels, and they travel for maybe as long as two years. And this was the point that Gibson made that I thought was a really interesting insight. What if you could talk to the wise men on that journey? What if you could ask them, hey, guys, where are you going? You know what their answer would be? We don't really know. Where are you going? We're not sure. Well, how do you even know where to go? God, do you see that star? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, God told us to follow that one. Are you getting any closer to it? Not really. No, it just stays right there. We just kind of walk during the day and hope at night, still in front of us. When are you going to get there? Like, how long is this journey? Yeah, I couldn't tell you. I don't know. We're just walking. I think that's amazing. To go to the wise men during that journey and say, where are you going? Not sure. How do you know where to go? God told us to follow that star. When are you going to get there? We don't know. I don't want to be too critical, but I'd be willing to bet that very few people in this room have that kind of faith. And yet, when we look at the journey of the wise men, I believe all of us have that faith because that faith is the Christian faith. I believe that the wise men personify this statement. The Christian journey is following God in the midst of uncertainty. The Christian journey itself is to follow God in the midst of uncertainty. It's to not be able to see the whole path and yet take the steps that are illuminated in front of us. Isn't this what we were taught when we were young? If you grew up in church, you heard the Psalm. I think in either 109 or, you heard the psalm, thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. And I was taught at ages, you know, three, four, five, six years old, when you're in the woods and it's dark, you're outside and it's dark, and you have a lantern or a lamp next to you, how many steps can you see? Just a couple. You can't see the whole path. You can't see the whole trail. And so I carry, you carry with you, if you grow up in church, you carry with you this understanding, this intellectual, this mental consent that yes, God is never going to illuminate the whole path for me. It's always going to be just a couple of steps. He's never going to give me all the clarity I want. He's just going to give me the clarity I need to take the next step or two of obedience. And this is what the wise men personify. Could they see the whole path? No. Did they know where they were going? No. Had they heard of the nation of Israel before? No, nobody knows. Maybe, maybe not. They didn't know who they were going to find or what they were going to do. They were just going in obedience, taking the next step. Today, we can see the star, so today we're going to follow it. Are we going to get there tomorrow? Maybe, don't know. The Christian journey is to follow God in the midst of uncertainty. It's to not understand everything and yet choose to follow him anyways. I think maybe the best depiction of this in the whole Bible is in John chapter 6. In this discourse, this dialogue that Jesus has with Peter. I think it's a remarkable dialogue. We're going to pick it up in verse 66. And the verse is preceding. Jesus is teaching the people in the synagogue at Capernaum. And he's telling them. And he tells them in about three or four different ways. But he's telling them, if you want to follow me, you have to eat of my flesh and drink of my blood. If you do not eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, then you have no place with me and you cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven. That's what Jesus teaches. It is a weird, cultish, cannibalistic teaching. It's weird. And he gives them no context. See, we know, we know that what Jesus is talking about is communion. We understand that. If you don't know what communion is, it's the tradition where we break bread and we dip it in the grape juice or the wine or you sip it or however your church or your tradition does it. So we know that Jesus is, that's an allusion to communion. But they don't know that because they've never experienced communion. And Jesus says, unless you cannibalize me, you cannot be a part of me or enter into the kingdom. And then people started to leave and go, yo, dude, that's really weird. And we pick the story up. John chapter 6, verse 66. Now I'd pause there because that could be confusing. When we think of disciples, we immediately think of the 12 disciples. But what we know is that there was probably as many as 120 people that were constantly following Jesus everywhere. And we know this in part because in Acts, when they go to replace Judas as a disciple, they ultimately named Matthias to be the 12th disciple, the replacement disciple for Judas. And one of the requirements to be eligible to be that disciple is to have been with them from the beginning. So Jesus has disciples outside of the 12. The 12 is like his inner circle. The three, Peter, James, and John are like his inner, inner circle. But then there's other disciples on the perimeter that are following too. And when he says this, the disciples on the perimeter begin to leave. We'll pick it up in verse 68. Do you want to go as well? Verse 68, Simon Peter answered him. And listen, I love these words. I don't have a tattoo. If I get one, it'll be these words. Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and I have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. I love that answer. I love it so much because it's so very human. It's so very honest. Jesus says this incredibly hard teaching that does not make sense to anyone. And people who have been following him for months and years leave. And he looks at his inner circle. And he says, are you guys going to leave too? And Peter responds, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. Now this is just my interpretation of the subtext here, of what's laying under these statements of Peter. There seems to be an implicit agreement of Peter with the ones who left. You can see the tension in Peter. Listen, Jesus says, are you going to go too? And I paraphrase this response as going, listen, what you just said is weird. It's weird. I do not want to cannibalize you. I don't want to drink your blood. That's weird. That's cultish. It doesn't make any sense. I hope I don't have to do that. Jesus, you make absolutely no sense to me right now. And frankly, it's weird. But here's what I know. I know that you are who you say you are. I know that you're Jesus. I know that you have the words of eternal life. You have claimed to be the Holy One, and I believe you. And because I believe you, and because I trust you are who you are, where else am I going to go? I'm in. Jesus, this doesn't make sense to me. I don't follow it. That's not how I would have done it. I think this is weird, but you're Jesus. I know that you are. I believe you. I trust you. I'm in. I love that sentiment from Peter. Because frankly, if you haven't gotten to that point in your faith where you've had to choose to to follow Jesus even when he doesn't make sense, then I would tell you gently and humbly that I believe your faith still has some maturing to do. Because everyone of faith, everyone of faith comes to that moment where Jesus doesn't make any sense to them. That shouldn't have happened. That man is a good man. Why did that happen to him? My father was a good man. He shouldn't have died, and he did. That child never did anything, and God allowed them to get leukemia and wither away. Why did he do that? If Jesus is who he says he is, then why are these things true in my life? I've been living my life according to the standards of God, and I want the blessings that other people have who don't live like I do. I'm a good person. Why can't I have what I want? Jesus, this doesn't make any sense. Jesus, you could have healed this person that I love. I know you could have. And they love you? It doesn't make any sense. I told you guys a few weeks back, a friend of mine, 40 years old, two kids, died. Jesus, you could have prevented that death. You didn't. And so at some point, we find ourselves in the position of Peter saying, Jesus, you don't make any sense to me. And I don't see the whole path here. But I'm going to choose to trust you because I know who you are. Because I'm a Christian. And being a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. He did what he said he did. He lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death, and he raised on the third day. And he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's going to come back one day to claim his people and to make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. To be a Christian is to believe that. And so Peter says, you don't make any sense to me right now, but I'm a Christian, so I'm in. I was thinking about this this morning as I was going through things. Can you imagine the light bulb moment that communion was for Peter? Can you imagine him sitting around that table as long as one to two years after this exchange with Jesus? Because this is towards the beginning of his ministry. So as many as two years later, Jesus is sitting around the communion table, or Peter's sitting around the Passover table about to observe the first communion. He doesn't know what communion is. Jesus breaks the bread and tells them to eat it. And he pours the wine and he tells them to drink it. And Peter goes, oh, and he still doesn't know what it is because the next day Jesus actually dies for him. And he's like, well, this stinks. Everything's over. And he wanders back and he goes to fish. And then the resurrected Jesus shows up and makes him breakfast. And he's like, hey, do you love me? Yes. Do you love me? Yes. Do you love me? Yes. Okay, go feed my sheep. You're reinstated. Go do it, Peter. What a light bulb moment for Peter in this moment with no context. Because Jesus doesn't explain it. He does not explain the cannibalism. He just drops it on them. You still going to follow me? You still trust me? Great. And then he goes. And for two years, he doesn't come back to it and address it. And then one day he's at a table and he breaks the bread and Peter goes, oh. God never gives us the clarity we want in the moment. But he always gives us what we need. And if we stick in there, we get light bulb moments too. And both of these stories, the story of the wise men just following the star, okay, that's what I'm going to do. The story of the disenfranchised disciple. You make no sense to me, but I'm in because I know who you are. Highlight what I believe is God's fundamental ask of all humanity. God's fundamental ask is simply that we would trust him. God's fundamental ask of people from the beginning of time is that we would trust him. Just listen to me. Just trust me. Just hear my voice and respond in obedience like the wise men do who don't need a religious apparatus to discern the voice of God and be obedient to it. Just follow me like that. Isn't that what he asked of Adam and Eve? Hey, there's a tree. Don't eat it. Just trust me on this one. And they didn't trust him. Isn't that what he asked of Abraham? The father of his children is in Ur, the land of the Chaldeans, probably the Sumerian dynasty. And God appears to him. God speaks to him. I don't know if he appeared to him, but he speaks to him. And he says, I want you to pack up your stuff and quote, go to the place where I will show you. To this place called Israel that Abraham's never heard of, the land of Canaan at the time that no one's ever heard of. And he meets someone there named Melchizedek, who is the high priest and the king of a city called Salem that would later become Jerusalem, who has heard the voice of God and is obeying him outside of any religious apparatus, outside of the focus of the narrative scripture, of the narrative text of the gospel, just out there obeying God. And Abraham goes to him, not knowing where he's going, arrives, and God's just illuminating one step by one step. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Then he gives him a son. He says, I want you to go sacrifice this son. Three days journey away on a random hill. And he gets up the next day and he goes. And he's at the bottom of the hill, and a lot of scholars believe that Abraham did not know how he was going to walk back down that mountain with his living son, but he believed that he would. And so he went. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Moses, wandering the desert for 40 years, stumbles upon, as a shepherd, stumbles upon the burning bush. This is in Exodus chapters 2 and 3, two of the greatest chapters in the Bible. And God appears to him in the burning bush, and he says, I want you to go to the most powerful man in the world, and I want you to tell him to let my people go based on zero authority whatsoever. And Moses is like, okay, I've got questions. And he asks him five clarifying questions. What's your name? Why are they going to believe me? I have a stutter that seems like an issue. No one's going to listen to me. Five different questions. Five times, God says, don't worry about that, trust me. Don't worry about that, trust me. What's your name? Don't worry about that, trust me. I have a stutter, don't worry about that, trust me. Just trust me, just trust me. How's it going to work out, God? I'm not going to tell you. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. All through scripture. David, anointed king. You're going to be the next king. You're the chosen one. Man after God's own heart. As probably an adolescent kid. He waits 20 years before he ascends to the throne. God, when's it going to happen? The current king's trying to kill me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Why did God wait so long to give the Ten Commandments? He could have, he could have, once Adam and Eve broke the rules, he could have said, okay, here's the new rules. He waits generation after generation after generation, a couple thousand years before he says, fine, here's the rules. What I'd really like for you to do is trust me and obey me without the rules, but since you need rules, here are the rules. And then Jesus shows up and he says, we don't need those rules anymore. Love God, trust him. Love God, trust him, be obedient by loving others. Just trust me, just trust me, just trust me. Have you ever thought about the fact that Jesus could have sat down with the disciples and we, especially those of us who are business and strategy minded, would, those of us, like I'm business and strategy minded, those of you, we would think that the best possible thing for Jesus to do would be to recruit the disciples, test them for a few months to make sure they're all the way in, and then bring them into a meeting and sit them down and say, all right, boys, listen, here's the deal. And for Jesus to lay out every step of the strategy, doesn't that make so much sense? Hey, I'm going to be here for about three more years. The whole time, I'm going to show you how to do ministry. I'm going to show you how to love on people. I'm going to teach you this new rule of loving others the way that I've loved you. I'm going to show you what it is to love people. And then you guys think I'm going to be a physical king. I'm not. I'm going to be an eternal king. I don't care about that throne. It's small potatoes. I don't need it. So quit trying to make me be king. This is the kind of king I'm going to be. I'm going to be an eternal king. And at the end of the three years, after I've shown you how to live and love perfectly, I'm going to have given you all the tools to build what I'm going to call the church. What's the church, Jesus? Well, let me explain to you what the church is going to be. He could have explained all this. And he could have said, at the end of three years, I'm going to be arrested and it's going to be an unfair trial and I'm going to die. You should watch me die. And honestly, you should celebrate it because it's ushering in the next part of the plan. That's how I'm paying for you guys to get to heaven. It's an okay thing when I die. And don't worry about it because I'm going to be buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea and I'm going to be raised on the third day. You guys can come hang out with me if you want. And then I'm going to stick around for about 40 days and I'm going to go into heaven because my job's done and I'm going to hand you the keys to the kingdom. So the next three years of your life, pay attention, write down notes, ask me all the questions you need because I'm going to give you this thing. Tell me that doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't he do that? It makes so much sense. It makes sense to us because we're stupid. That was not the way that Jesus did it. He didn't tell them the plan. He didn't explain to them the death. He let them believe he was going to be an earthly king. He illuminated one step at a time. Go into this city and perform these miracles. Go over there and tell them about me. Follow me here and listen to my teaching. Now you can answer, now you can ask me questions. Take this bread and eat it. He never illuminates the whole path. He never explains everything to them. He just beckons them to trust him. And God has the same ask of you. Trust him. Hang in there. Believe him. Be like Peter. And those moments when your faith doesn't make any sense, where something happens in your life that doesn't have a nice, neat, satisfying box to put it in and categorize it and explain it to others and justify it, when that happens, when something outside of your boxes and your theology and your understanding, when that happens and tears it down, and we sit in the midst of confusion and uncertainty, Jesus, why'd you let that happen? Why did it turn out this way? Why am I struggling with this? Why won't you rescue me from that? When we sit in that uncertainty, no, God designed and intended that uncertainty. He's never, ever given anyone the full path. He's never, ever illuminated more than a couple steps for anyone in their life. He simply beckons us to trust him. And I love that word and that concept of trust because it has so many tendrils, doesn't it? Don't just trust me with your faith. Trust me with your family. Do for your family what I think is best for them. Not, not what you think is best for them. See, when we trust somebody, what we do is we choose their judgment over our own. When I trust the finance committee, I trust their expertise over my expertise, which is none in that area. When we trust someone, we choose them over ourselves. So God says in every way, choose my expertise over your own, and I promise you it will work out. Simply trust me. Trust me with your morals and with your values. Trust me with your money. I've asked you to give a bottom line of 10%. Be generous people and give. Trust me with that. It's going to be best for you. Trust me with your children. Trust me with your marriage. Trust me with your career. Trust me with your priorities. Trust me with your calendar. Trust me. Just believe me. Trust me. Take the steps I'm illuminating for you. And I promise, I promise, I promise it will be better for you. The more we can trust God in the midst of uncertainty, the more light bulb moments we get like Peter sitting at communion going, this is why God, okay. And tell me that doesn't strengthen faith when you have those moments. And here's what happens when we choose to trust God in the midst of uncertainty. We make that a pattern in our life. God rewards our trust with a full life and perfect eternity. God rewards that trust with a full life and a perfect eternity. I chose that phrase full life there on purpose because one of my favorite verses I've said to you before, John 10, 10, the thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come, Jesus is speaking. I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus says he came to give us the most full life possible. Not the wealthiest life. Not the healthiest life. Not the most comfortable life. I'm reminded of that quote from, I believe it's Chronicles of Narnia, where they're talking about the Jesus figure, Aslam, I think. And they say, is he safe? And the response is, oh, no, he is not safe. But he is good. Jesus invites us into that goodness. Do you trust me? Do you trust me? Do you trust me? Because if you do, if you choose my judgment over yours, he will give us in this life the most full life possible, the best life we can imagine if we'll simply trust him. The problem is we hold back parts of our life because we think in our judgment, with our values, with our morals, and with what we do, that we can make little pockets of our life better and more comfortable and more enjoyable than what Jesus can do. No, no, no, I'm not going to trust you with that because I like what I'm doing right here. And Jesus says, if you'll just trust me and hand me that too, I promise there will be a more full life around the corner. I promise you there will be a deeper peace, a deeper happiness, a deeper joy if you'll simply hand that to me too. So here's my question for you this morning. Where can you trust God more? Where are you holding back from him? What are you keeping to yourself and not choosing to be like the wise men and humble, faithful, consistent obedience? Where are you going? I don't know. When are you going to get there? I'm not sure. How do you know where to go? I'm just following God. Where can we choose to trust God more and trust his judgment over our own? And I would also encourage you, if you're one who's sitting in the midst of uncertainty, Jesus, this is happening in my life and I don't understand it. You could fix it and you're not. And honestly, Jesus, it kind of makes me frustrated with you. Okay. Be like Peter. Are you going to leave Jesus because of it? No. You're the son of God. You have the words of eternal life and I believe you. Where else am I going to go? And I promise you, you'll have your aha moment if you trust him. And you'll usher in a full life and a perfect eternity. So this morning, let's trust God like the wise men did and just take the step of obedience that's in front of us. Let's pray. Father, we love you this morning. We love you always. We trust you. Help us to trust you more. God, I'm reminded of the simple prayer, I believe, help my unbelief. Lord, if there are those who are sitting in the midst of uncertainty, who feel disillusioned like the disciples that thought cannibalism was a part of the deal, God, would you give them the faith of Peter to hang in there, to trust you, even when they're not certain and don't understand everything they feel like they need to understand. God, for those of us who are holding back parts of our lives, who are choosing our judgment in places over yours, would you give us the strength and the faith to trust you, to believe you? That things are only going to be better when we hand them to you? Would you give us the remarkable faith of the wise men who journeyed to an unknown place for two years simply trusting? And as we do that, as we take those steps and as we trust you, would you help us to see you? Would you show up in those places and reassure us? In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Just right up front, I've been getting a lot of flack this morning for going halfsies on my Christmas spirit. I understand that. But listen, I tried on everything last night, and I am doing you a public service by not wearing those bottoms. All right? This is for you. It's not for me. I'd be more comfortable in those, but I made a decision for the betterment of the church, and I would appreciate if you could respect that choice. Now, we are in part two of our series called Twas the Night, where we're looking at the story of Christmas, largely based in Luke chapter two, and we're looking at it from different perspectives within that story to see what we can learn from them and their experience within the Christmas story. And so last week, we looked at Simeon's reaction to Jesus and the innkeeper's reaction to Jesus. We juxtaposed those and kind of learned a bit from those two perspectives. Next week, we're going to look at Joseph and his humble, quiet, consistent obedience and what we can learn from that. And then Christmas Eve, we're going to look at Mary. There's this verse tucked away at the end of the Christmas narrative, towards the end of chapter 2, that I really, really love where there's this joy that's almost, words would cheapen it, this joy that Mary experiences. So we're going to look at that verse for Christmas Eve, and I'm very excited for the Christmas Eve service and message that we get to share with you that day. Today, we're going to look at the Christmas story from the perspective of the wise men. Now, I'll give credit where it's due. Aaron Gibson and I went on a little retreat in September to go ahead and plan out the Christmas series and figure out what we were going to do. The idea for this morning and what we're talking about this morning comes from him. So if it's good, tell him so. If it's not, let's just assume that there was an issue with the delivery and he needs to choose a better messenger or just hold his good ideas and preach them himself. But this morning I want to look at the perspective of the wise men. Now we don't read about the wise men in Luke chapter 2. We see them in Matthew chapter 2. And I'm actually not going to turn to either of those today. I'm going to be in John chapter 6. So if you brought your Bible like I've been asking you to do, you can go ahead and turn to John 6. If you don't have one with you, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Please excuse me. I've been, I got a sinus infection that turned into a cough. I've been fighting it off for a week. I'm not contagious, but I am on about four different cough suppressants. So if I say something crazy, that's why. We see the wise men in Matthew chapter 2. And I like to point out, I don't know why I like to point out, I just do, that the wise men were more than likely not actually at the manger scene. The nativity scene that we have that we put in our houses and everything. We went to a live nativity at another church last night. Did a phenomenal job. The wise men were more than likely not there. Okay? Their story is they saw a star and they were told by God to go follow that star. And I think this is worth pointing out and amazing. It's not the point, but it's something that I didn't want to just blow past. That the wise men are even involved in the story of Christmas. Because I'll get into why later, but they're from very far away. They are not from Israel. They are not Hebrew people. They are not descendants of Abraham. It is very, very unlikely that the Jewish tradition had made its way to wherever they called home. And yet, without any religious infrastructure at all, without any holy texts at all, they somehow recognize the voice of God, the God that we worship, the God that Mary and Joseph worship. They heard that voice, identified that voice, and were obedient to that voice. When we read the Bible, the narrative focuses way down on Abraham's family and then on Israel and what happens in Israel, as if God's scope of evangelism and love and care and speaking isn't worldwide all the time. And we get these little glimpses throughout scripture like Melchizedek in the Old Testament that it's actually true that God is speaking outside of Israel to those who will listen. It reminds me of Romans 1 where it says that God reveals himself to all men in nature so that no man is without excuse. Somehow, some way, these wise men with no no religious structure at all, heard the voice of God, identified it, obeyed it. They go to Jerusalem. They're following the star. The star leads them to Jerusalem. They get to Jerusalem, and this is all in Matthew 2. You can check me if you need to. I would always encourage that. But they get to Jerusalem where Jesus is not there. He's either in Bethlehem or he's in Nazareth. He's not in Jerusalem. And they go to Herod, the king, because they don't know where else to go. And they say, hey, we're here to worship. The Savior's been born. We're here to worship him. Do you know where he is? And Herod is threatened by this because he knows somewhere in the annals of his brain that when this Messiah comes, he's going to be the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. And Herod erroneously thinks he's going to try to sit on my throne, to which Jesus is like, I'm not interested in your throne. That's very small potatoes. Don't care. But Herod thinks he's going to try to take his stuff. And so Herod responds with an edict to kill all the boys in Israel aged two and younger, which is one of the more horrific evil edicts that we see in the whole Bible. Herod was evil. And I have a two and a half year old son. I can't imagine what it would be to be one of the soldiers that had to carry out those directives. Awful, awful stuff. But he says this, Herod does, to kill all the baby boys, age two or younger, we're told in Matthew 2, because of the timing of the journey of the wise men. What this means is, more than likely, the wise men were following that star for two years. Could be more, could be less. Could be a year, could be nine months. We don't know when the star appeared. And the star could have appeared two years in advance of Jesus' birth. And then they showed up at the time. We don't know that for sure, except for when they appear, when they go in to see Joseph and Mary, it says that they entered into the house. Not the manger, but the house. So they're probably in Nazareth, meaning Jesus is probably a toddler by this point. At which point they give him gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And Johnny, my two-year-old, has just been beating me up for myrrh this Christmas. So they were on point with those gifts. But it took two years to get where they were going. I want you to imagine that. They're from very far east. We do not know where. India is possible. China is possible. Iran, Iraq, one of the stands. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan. One of the stands could be. And they journeyed for two years. Based on a voice of God that they heard that said, follow this star. Maybe they were nomadic people and so journeying wasn't a huge deal, but they're still rearranging their whole life. A lot of scholars believe they were just wealthy individuals and they brought their caravan with them. We don't know how many wise men there were. We just know that there was more than one. We usually say three because of the three gifts, but that's really not indicative of the total number. And so they load up, presumably on camels, and they travel for maybe as long as two years. And this was the point that Gibson made that I thought was a really interesting insight. What if you could talk to the wise men on that journey? What if you could ask them, hey, guys, where are you going? You know what their answer would be? We don't really know. Where are you going? We're not sure. Well, how do you even know where to go? God, do you see that star? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, God told us to follow that one. Are you getting any closer to it? Not really. No, it just stays right there. We just kind of walk during the day and hope at night, still in front of us. When are you going to get there? Like, how long is this journey? Yeah, I couldn't tell you. I don't know. We're just walking. I think that's amazing. To go to the wise men during that journey and say, where are you going? Not sure. How do you know where to go? God told us to follow that star. When are you going to get there? We don't know. I don't want to be too critical, but I'd be willing to bet that very few people in this room have that kind of faith. And yet, when we look at the journey of the wise men, I believe all of us have that faith because that faith is the Christian faith. I believe that the wise men personify this statement. The Christian journey is following God in the midst of uncertainty. The Christian journey itself is to follow God in the midst of uncertainty. It's to not be able to see the whole path and yet take the steps that are illuminated in front of us. Isn't this what we were taught when we were young? If you grew up in church, you heard the Psalm. I think in either 109 or, you heard the psalm, thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. And I was taught at ages, you know, three, four, five, six years old, when you're in the woods and it's dark, you're outside and it's dark, and you have a lantern or a lamp next to you, how many steps can you see? Just a couple. You can't see the whole path. You can't see the whole trail. And so I carry, you carry with you, if you grow up in church, you carry with you this understanding, this intellectual, this mental consent that yes, God is never going to illuminate the whole path for me. It's always going to be just a couple of steps. He's never going to give me all the clarity I want. He's just going to give me the clarity I need to take the next step or two of obedience. And this is what the wise men personify. Could they see the whole path? No. Did they know where they were going? No. Had they heard of the nation of Israel before? No, nobody knows. Maybe, maybe not. They didn't know who they were going to find or what they were going to do. They were just going in obedience, taking the next step. Today, we can see the star, so today we're going to follow it. Are we going to get there tomorrow? Maybe, don't know. The Christian journey is to follow God in the midst of uncertainty. It's to not understand everything and yet choose to follow him anyways. I think maybe the best depiction of this in the whole Bible is in John chapter 6. In this discourse, this dialogue that Jesus has with Peter. I think it's a remarkable dialogue. We're going to pick it up in verse 66. And the verse is preceding. Jesus is teaching the people in the synagogue at Capernaum. And he's telling them. And he tells them in about three or four different ways. But he's telling them, if you want to follow me, you have to eat of my flesh and drink of my blood. If you do not eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, then you have no place with me and you cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven. That's what Jesus teaches. It is a weird, cultish, cannibalistic teaching. It's weird. And he gives them no context. See, we know, we know that what Jesus is talking about is communion. We understand that. If you don't know what communion is, it's the tradition where we break bread and we dip it in the grape juice or the wine or you sip it or however your church or your tradition does it. So we know that Jesus is, that's an allusion to communion. But they don't know that because they've never experienced communion. And Jesus says, unless you cannibalize me, you cannot be a part of me or enter into the kingdom. And then people started to leave and go, yo, dude, that's really weird. And we pick the story up. John chapter 6, verse 66. Now I'd pause there because that could be confusing. When we think of disciples, we immediately think of the 12 disciples. But what we know is that there was probably as many as 120 people that were constantly following Jesus everywhere. And we know this in part because in Acts, when they go to replace Judas as a disciple, they ultimately named Matthias to be the 12th disciple, the replacement disciple for Judas. And one of the requirements to be eligible to be that disciple is to have been with them from the beginning. So Jesus has disciples outside of the 12. The 12 is like his inner circle. The three, Peter, James, and John are like his inner, inner circle. But then there's other disciples on the perimeter that are following too. And when he says this, the disciples on the perimeter begin to leave. We'll pick it up in verse 68. Do you want to go as well? Verse 68, Simon Peter answered him. And listen, I love these words. I don't have a tattoo. If I get one, it'll be these words. Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and I have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. I love that answer. I love it so much because it's so very human. It's so very honest. Jesus says this incredibly hard teaching that does not make sense to anyone. And people who have been following him for months and years leave. And he looks at his inner circle. And he says, are you guys going to leave too? And Peter responds, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. Now this is just my interpretation of the subtext here, of what's laying under these statements of Peter. There seems to be an implicit agreement of Peter with the ones who left. You can see the tension in Peter. Listen, Jesus says, are you going to go too? And I paraphrase this response as going, listen, what you just said is weird. It's weird. I do not want to cannibalize you. I don't want to drink your blood. That's weird. That's cultish. It doesn't make any sense. I hope I don't have to do that. Jesus, you make absolutely no sense to me right now. And frankly, it's weird. But here's what I know. I know that you are who you say you are. I know that you're Jesus. I know that you have the words of eternal life. You have claimed to be the Holy One, and I believe you. And because I believe you, and because I trust you are who you are, where else am I going to go? I'm in. Jesus, this doesn't make sense to me. I don't follow it. That's not how I would have done it. I think this is weird, but you're Jesus. I know that you are. I believe you. I trust you. I'm in. I love that sentiment from Peter. Because frankly, if you haven't gotten to that point in your faith where you've had to choose to to follow Jesus even when he doesn't make sense, then I would tell you gently and humbly that I believe your faith still has some maturing to do. Because everyone of faith, everyone of faith comes to that moment where Jesus doesn't make any sense to them. That shouldn't have happened. That man is a good man. Why did that happen to him? My father was a good man. He shouldn't have died, and he did. That child never did anything, and God allowed them to get leukemia and wither away. Why did he do that? If Jesus is who he says he is, then why are these things true in my life? I've been living my life according to the standards of God, and I want the blessings that other people have who don't live like I do. I'm a good person. Why can't I have what I want? Jesus, this doesn't make any sense. Jesus, you could have healed this person that I love. I know you could have. And they love you? It doesn't make any sense. I told you guys a few weeks back, a friend of mine, 40 years old, two kids, died. Jesus, you could have prevented that death. You didn't. And so at some point, we find ourselves in the position of Peter saying, Jesus, you don't make any sense to me. And I don't see the whole path here. But I'm going to choose to trust you because I know who you are. Because I'm a Christian. And being a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. He did what he said he did. He lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death, and he raised on the third day. And he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's going to come back one day to claim his people and to make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. To be a Christian is to believe that. And so Peter says, you don't make any sense to me right now, but I'm a Christian, so I'm in. I was thinking about this this morning as I was going through things. Can you imagine the light bulb moment that communion was for Peter? Can you imagine him sitting around that table as long as one to two years after this exchange with Jesus? Because this is towards the beginning of his ministry. So as many as two years later, Jesus is sitting around the communion table, or Peter's sitting around the Passover table about to observe the first communion. He doesn't know what communion is. Jesus breaks the bread and tells them to eat it. And he pours the wine and he tells them to drink it. And Peter goes, oh, and he still doesn't know what it is because the next day Jesus actually dies for him. And he's like, well, this stinks. Everything's over. And he wanders back and he goes to fish. And then the resurrected Jesus shows up and makes him breakfast. And he's like, hey, do you love me? Yes. Do you love me? Yes. Do you love me? Yes. Okay, go feed my sheep. You're reinstated. Go do it, Peter. What a light bulb moment for Peter in this moment with no context. Because Jesus doesn't explain it. He does not explain the cannibalism. He just drops it on them. You still going to follow me? You still trust me? Great. And then he goes. And for two years, he doesn't come back to it and address it. And then one day he's at a table and he breaks the bread and Peter goes, oh. God never gives us the clarity we want in the moment. But he always gives us what we need. And if we stick in there, we get light bulb moments too. And both of these stories, the story of the wise men just following the star, okay, that's what I'm going to do. The story of the disenfranchised disciple. You make no sense to me, but I'm in because I know who you are. Highlight what I believe is God's fundamental ask of all humanity. God's fundamental ask is simply that we would trust him. God's fundamental ask of people from the beginning of time is that we would trust him. Just listen to me. Just trust me. Just hear my voice and respond in obedience like the wise men do who don't need a religious apparatus to discern the voice of God and be obedient to it. Just follow me like that. Isn't that what he asked of Adam and Eve? Hey, there's a tree. Don't eat it. Just trust me on this one. And they didn't trust him. Isn't that what he asked of Abraham? The father of his children is in Ur, the land of the Chaldeans, probably the Sumerian dynasty. And God appears to him. God speaks to him. I don't know if he appeared to him, but he speaks to him. And he says, I want you to pack up your stuff and quote, go to the place where I will show you. To this place called Israel that Abraham's never heard of, the land of Canaan at the time that no one's ever heard of. And he meets someone there named Melchizedek, who is the high priest and the king of a city called Salem that would later become Jerusalem, who has heard the voice of God and is obeying him outside of any religious apparatus, outside of the focus of the narrative scripture, of the narrative text of the gospel, just out there obeying God. And Abraham goes to him, not knowing where he's going, arrives, and God's just illuminating one step by one step. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Then he gives him a son. He says, I want you to go sacrifice this son. Three days journey away on a random hill. And he gets up the next day and he goes. And he's at the bottom of the hill, and a lot of scholars believe that Abraham did not know how he was going to walk back down that mountain with his living son, but he believed that he would. And so he went. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Moses, wandering the desert for 40 years, stumbles upon, as a shepherd, stumbles upon the burning bush. This is in Exodus chapters 2 and 3, two of the greatest chapters in the Bible. And God appears to him in the burning bush, and he says, I want you to go to the most powerful man in the world, and I want you to tell him to let my people go based on zero authority whatsoever. And Moses is like, okay, I've got questions. And he asks him five clarifying questions. What's your name? Why are they going to believe me? I have a stutter that seems like an issue. No one's going to listen to me. Five different questions. Five times, God says, don't worry about that, trust me. Don't worry about that, trust me. What's your name? Don't worry about that, trust me. I have a stutter, don't worry about that, trust me. Just trust me, just trust me. How's it going to work out, God? I'm not going to tell you. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. All through scripture. David, anointed king. You're going to be the next king. You're the chosen one. Man after God's own heart. As probably an adolescent kid. He waits 20 years before he ascends to the throne. God, when's it going to happen? The current king's trying to kill me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Why did God wait so long to give the Ten Commandments? He could have, he could have, once Adam and Eve broke the rules, he could have said, okay, here's the new rules. He waits generation after generation after generation, a couple thousand years before he says, fine, here's the rules. What I'd really like for you to do is trust me and obey me without the rules, but since you need rules, here are the rules. And then Jesus shows up and he says, we don't need those rules anymore. Love God, trust him. Love God, trust him, be obedient by loving others. Just trust me, just trust me, just trust me. Have you ever thought about the fact that Jesus could have sat down with the disciples and we, especially those of us who are business and strategy minded, would, those of us, like I'm business and strategy minded, those of you, we would think that the best possible thing for Jesus to do would be to recruit the disciples, test them for a few months to make sure they're all the way in, and then bring them into a meeting and sit them down and say, all right, boys, listen, here's the deal. And for Jesus to lay out every step of the strategy, doesn't that make so much sense? Hey, I'm going to be here for about three more years. The whole time, I'm going to show you how to do ministry. I'm going to show you how to love on people. I'm going to teach you this new rule of loving others the way that I've loved you. I'm going to show you what it is to love people. And then you guys think I'm going to be a physical king. I'm not. I'm going to be an eternal king. I don't care about that throne. It's small potatoes. I don't need it. So quit trying to make me be king. This is the kind of king I'm going to be. I'm going to be an eternal king. And at the end of the three years, after I've shown you how to live and love perfectly, I'm going to have given you all the tools to build what I'm going to call the church. What's the church, Jesus? Well, let me explain to you what the church is going to be. He could have explained all this. And he could have said, at the end of three years, I'm going to be arrested and it's going to be an unfair trial and I'm going to die. You should watch me die. And honestly, you should celebrate it because it's ushering in the next part of the plan. That's how I'm paying for you guys to get to heaven. It's an okay thing when I die. And don't worry about it because I'm going to be buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea and I'm going to be raised on the third day. You guys can come hang out with me if you want. And then I'm going to stick around for about 40 days and I'm going to go into heaven because my job's done and I'm going to hand you the keys to the kingdom. So the next three years of your life, pay attention, write down notes, ask me all the questions you need because I'm going to give you this thing. Tell me that doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't he do that? It makes so much sense. It makes sense to us because we're stupid. That was not the way that Jesus did it. He didn't tell them the plan. He didn't explain to them the death. He let them believe he was going to be an earthly king. He illuminated one step at a time. Go into this city and perform these miracles. Go over there and tell them about me. Follow me here and listen to my teaching. Now you can answer, now you can ask me questions. Take this bread and eat it. He never illuminates the whole path. He never explains everything to them. He just beckons them to trust him. And God has the same ask of you. Trust him. Hang in there. Believe him. Be like Peter. And those moments when your faith doesn't make any sense, where something happens in your life that doesn't have a nice, neat, satisfying box to put it in and categorize it and explain it to others and justify it, when that happens, when something outside of your boxes and your theology and your understanding, when that happens and tears it down, and we sit in the midst of confusion and uncertainty, Jesus, why'd you let that happen? Why did it turn out this way? Why am I struggling with this? Why won't you rescue me from that? When we sit in that uncertainty, no, God designed and intended that uncertainty. He's never, ever given anyone the full path. He's never, ever illuminated more than a couple steps for anyone in their life. He simply beckons us to trust him. And I love that word and that concept of trust because it has so many tendrils, doesn't it? Don't just trust me with your faith. Trust me with your family. Do for your family what I think is best for them. Not, not what you think is best for them. See, when we trust somebody, what we do is we choose their judgment over our own. When I trust the finance committee, I trust their expertise over my expertise, which is none in that area. When we trust someone, we choose them over ourselves. So God says in every way, choose my expertise over your own, and I promise you it will work out. Simply trust me. Trust me with your morals and with your values. Trust me with your money. I've asked you to give a bottom line of 10%. Be generous people and give. Trust me with that. It's going to be best for you. Trust me with your children. Trust me with your marriage. Trust me with your career. Trust me with your priorities. Trust me with your calendar. Trust me. Just believe me. Trust me. Take the steps I'm illuminating for you. And I promise, I promise, I promise it will be better for you. The more we can trust God in the midst of uncertainty, the more light bulb moments we get like Peter sitting at communion going, this is why God, okay. And tell me that doesn't strengthen faith when you have those moments. And here's what happens when we choose to trust God in the midst of uncertainty. We make that a pattern in our life. God rewards our trust with a full life and perfect eternity. God rewards that trust with a full life and a perfect eternity. I chose that phrase full life there on purpose because one of my favorite verses I've said to you before, John 10, 10, the thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come, Jesus is speaking. I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus says he came to give us the most full life possible. Not the wealthiest life. Not the healthiest life. Not the most comfortable life. I'm reminded of that quote from, I believe it's Chronicles of Narnia, where they're talking about the Jesus figure, Aslam, I think. And they say, is he safe? And the response is, oh, no, he is not safe. But he is good. Jesus invites us into that goodness. Do you trust me? Do you trust me? Do you trust me? Because if you do, if you choose my judgment over yours, he will give us in this life the most full life possible, the best life we can imagine if we'll simply trust him. The problem is we hold back parts of our life because we think in our judgment, with our values, with our morals, and with what we do, that we can make little pockets of our life better and more comfortable and more enjoyable than what Jesus can do. No, no, no, I'm not going to trust you with that because I like what I'm doing right here. And Jesus says, if you'll just trust me and hand me that too, I promise there will be a more full life around the corner. I promise you there will be a deeper peace, a deeper happiness, a deeper joy if you'll simply hand that to me too. So here's my question for you this morning. Where can you trust God more? Where are you holding back from him? What are you keeping to yourself and not choosing to be like the wise men and humble, faithful, consistent obedience? Where are you going? I don't know. When are you going to get there? I'm not sure. How do you know where to go? I'm just following God. Where can we choose to trust God more and trust his judgment over our own? And I would also encourage you, if you're one who's sitting in the midst of uncertainty, Jesus, this is happening in my life and I don't understand it. You could fix it and you're not. And honestly, Jesus, it kind of makes me frustrated with you. Okay. Be like Peter. Are you going to leave Jesus because of it? No. You're the son of God. You have the words of eternal life and I believe you. Where else am I going to go? And I promise you, you'll have your aha moment if you trust him. And you'll usher in a full life and a perfect eternity. So this morning, let's trust God like the wise men did and just take the step of obedience that's in front of us. Let's pray. Father, we love you this morning. We love you always. We trust you. Help us to trust you more. God, I'm reminded of the simple prayer, I believe, help my unbelief. Lord, if there are those who are sitting in the midst of uncertainty, who feel disillusioned like the disciples that thought cannibalism was a part of the deal, God, would you give them the faith of Peter to hang in there, to trust you, even when they're not certain and don't understand everything they feel like they need to understand. God, for those of us who are holding back parts of our lives, who are choosing our judgment in places over yours, would you give us the strength and the faith to trust you, to believe you? That things are only going to be better when we hand them to you? Would you give us the remarkable faith of the wise men who journeyed to an unknown place for two years simply trusting? And as we do that, as we take those steps and as we trust you, would you help us to see you? Would you show up in those places and reassure us? In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Just right up front, I've been getting a lot of flack this morning for going halfsies on my Christmas spirit. I understand that. But listen, I tried on everything last night, and I am doing you a public service by not wearing those bottoms. All right? This is for you. It's not for me. I'd be more comfortable in those, but I made a decision for the betterment of the church, and I would appreciate if you could respect that choice. Now, we are in part two of our series called Twas the Night, where we're looking at the story of Christmas, largely based in Luke chapter two, and we're looking at it from different perspectives within that story to see what we can learn from them and their experience within the Christmas story. And so last week, we looked at Simeon's reaction to Jesus and the innkeeper's reaction to Jesus. We juxtaposed those and kind of learned a bit from those two perspectives. Next week, we're going to look at Joseph and his humble, quiet, consistent obedience and what we can learn from that. And then Christmas Eve, we're going to look at Mary. There's this verse tucked away at the end of the Christmas narrative, towards the end of chapter 2, that I really, really love where there's this joy that's almost, words would cheapen it, this joy that Mary experiences. So we're going to look at that verse for Christmas Eve, and I'm very excited for the Christmas Eve service and message that we get to share with you that day. Today, we're going to look at the Christmas story from the perspective of the wise men. Now, I'll give credit where it's due. Aaron Gibson and I went on a little retreat in September to go ahead and plan out the Christmas series and figure out what we were going to do. The idea for this morning and what we're talking about this morning comes from him. So if it's good, tell him so. If it's not, let's just assume that there was an issue with the delivery and he needs to choose a better messenger or just hold his good ideas and preach them himself. But this morning I want to look at the perspective of the wise men. Now we don't read about the wise men in Luke chapter 2. We see them in Matthew chapter 2. And I'm actually not going to turn to either of those today. I'm going to be in John chapter 6. So if you brought your Bible like I've been asking you to do, you can go ahead and turn to John 6. If you don't have one with you, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Please excuse me. I've been, I got a sinus infection that turned into a cough. I've been fighting it off for a week. I'm not contagious, but I am on about four different cough suppressants. So if I say something crazy, that's why. We see the wise men in Matthew chapter 2. And I like to point out, I don't know why I like to point out, I just do, that the wise men were more than likely not actually at the manger scene. The nativity scene that we have that we put in our houses and everything. We went to a live nativity at another church last night. Did a phenomenal job. The wise men were more than likely not there. Okay? Their story is they saw a star and they were told by God to go follow that star. And I think this is worth pointing out and amazing. It's not the point, but it's something that I didn't want to just blow past. That the wise men are even involved in the story of Christmas. Because I'll get into why later, but they're from very far away. They are not from Israel. They are not Hebrew people. They are not descendants of Abraham. It is very, very unlikely that the Jewish tradition had made its way to wherever they called home. And yet, without any religious infrastructure at all, without any holy texts at all, they somehow recognize the voice of God, the God that we worship, the God that Mary and Joseph worship. They heard that voice, identified that voice, and were obedient to that voice. When we read the Bible, the narrative focuses way down on Abraham's family and then on Israel and what happens in Israel, as if God's scope of evangelism and love and care and speaking isn't worldwide all the time. And we get these little glimpses throughout scripture like Melchizedek in the Old Testament that it's actually true that God is speaking outside of Israel to those who will listen. It reminds me of Romans 1 where it says that God reveals himself to all men in nature so that no man is without excuse. Somehow, some way, these wise men with no no religious structure at all, heard the voice of God, identified it, obeyed it. They go to Jerusalem. They're following the star. The star leads them to Jerusalem. They get to Jerusalem, and this is all in Matthew 2. You can check me if you need to. I would always encourage that. But they get to Jerusalem where Jesus is not there. He's either in Bethlehem or he's in Nazareth. He's not in Jerusalem. And they go to Herod, the king, because they don't know where else to go. And they say, hey, we're here to worship. The Savior's been born. We're here to worship him. Do you know where he is? And Herod is threatened by this because he knows somewhere in the annals of his brain that when this Messiah comes, he's going to be the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. And Herod erroneously thinks he's going to try to sit on my throne, to which Jesus is like, I'm not interested in your throne. That's very small potatoes. Don't care. But Herod thinks he's going to try to take his stuff. And so Herod responds with an edict to kill all the boys in Israel aged two and younger, which is one of the more horrific evil edicts that we see in the whole Bible. Herod was evil. And I have a two and a half year old son. I can't imagine what it would be to be one of the soldiers that had to carry out those directives. Awful, awful stuff. But he says this, Herod does, to kill all the baby boys, age two or younger, we're told in Matthew 2, because of the timing of the journey of the wise men. What this means is, more than likely, the wise men were following that star for two years. Could be more, could be less. Could be a year, could be nine months. We don't know when the star appeared. And the star could have appeared two years in advance of Jesus' birth. And then they showed up at the time. We don't know that for sure, except for when they appear, when they go in to see Joseph and Mary, it says that they entered into the house. Not the manger, but the house. So they're probably in Nazareth, meaning Jesus is probably a toddler by this point. At which point they give him gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And Johnny, my two-year-old, has just been beating me up for myrrh this Christmas. So they were on point with those gifts. But it took two years to get where they were going. I want you to imagine that. They're from very far east. We do not know where. India is possible. China is possible. Iran, Iraq, one of the stands. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan. One of the stands could be. And they journeyed for two years. Based on a voice of God that they heard that said, follow this star. Maybe they were nomadic people and so journeying wasn't a huge deal, but they're still rearranging their whole life. A lot of scholars believe they were just wealthy individuals and they brought their caravan with them. We don't know how many wise men there were. We just know that there was more than one. We usually say three because of the three gifts, but that's really not indicative of the total number. And so they load up, presumably on camels, and they travel for maybe as long as two years. And this was the point that Gibson made that I thought was a really interesting insight. What if you could talk to the wise men on that journey? What if you could ask them, hey, guys, where are you going? You know what their answer would be? We don't really know. Where are you going? We're not sure. Well, how do you even know where to go? God, do you see that star? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, God told us to follow that one. Are you getting any closer to it? Not really. No, it just stays right there. We just kind of walk during the day and hope at night, still in front of us. When are you going to get there? Like, how long is this journey? Yeah, I couldn't tell you. I don't know. We're just walking. I think that's amazing. To go to the wise men during that journey and say, where are you going? Not sure. How do you know where to go? God told us to follow that star. When are you going to get there? We don't know. I don't want to be too critical, but I'd be willing to bet that very few people in this room have that kind of faith. And yet, when we look at the journey of the wise men, I believe all of us have that faith because that faith is the Christian faith. I believe that the wise men personify this statement. The Christian journey is following God in the midst of uncertainty. The Christian journey itself is to follow God in the midst of uncertainty. It's to not be able to see the whole path and yet take the steps that are illuminated in front of us. Isn't this what we were taught when we were young? If you grew up in church, you heard the Psalm. I think in either 109 or, you heard the psalm, thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. And I was taught at ages, you know, three, four, five, six years old, when you're in the woods and it's dark, you're outside and it's dark, and you have a lantern or a lamp next to you, how many steps can you see? Just a couple. You can't see the whole path. You can't see the whole trail. And so I carry, you carry with you, if you grow up in church, you carry with you this understanding, this intellectual, this mental consent that yes, God is never going to illuminate the whole path for me. It's always going to be just a couple of steps. He's never going to give me all the clarity I want. He's just going to give me the clarity I need to take the next step or two of obedience. And this is what the wise men personify. Could they see the whole path? No. Did they know where they were going? No. Had they heard of the nation of Israel before? No, nobody knows. Maybe, maybe not. They didn't know who they were going to find or what they were going to do. They were just going in obedience, taking the next step. Today, we can see the star, so today we're going to follow it. Are we going to get there tomorrow? Maybe, don't know. The Christian journey is to follow God in the midst of uncertainty. It's to not understand everything and yet choose to follow him anyways. I think maybe the best depiction of this in the whole Bible is in John chapter 6. In this discourse, this dialogue that Jesus has with Peter. I think it's a remarkable dialogue. We're going to pick it up in verse 66. And the verse is preceding. Jesus is teaching the people in the synagogue at Capernaum. And he's telling them. And he tells them in about three or four different ways. But he's telling them, if you want to follow me, you have to eat of my flesh and drink of my blood. If you do not eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, then you have no place with me and you cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven. That's what Jesus teaches. It is a weird, cultish, cannibalistic teaching. It's weird. And he gives them no context. See, we know, we know that what Jesus is talking about is communion. We understand that. If you don't know what communion is, it's the tradition where we break bread and we dip it in the grape juice or the wine or you sip it or however your church or your tradition does it. So we know that Jesus is, that's an allusion to communion. But they don't know that because they've never experienced communion. And Jesus says, unless you cannibalize me, you cannot be a part of me or enter into the kingdom. And then people started to leave and go, yo, dude, that's really weird. And we pick the story up. John chapter 6, verse 66. Now I'd pause there because that could be confusing. When we think of disciples, we immediately think of the 12 disciples. But what we know is that there was probably as many as 120 people that were constantly following Jesus everywhere. And we know this in part because in Acts, when they go to replace Judas as a disciple, they ultimately named Matthias to be the 12th disciple, the replacement disciple for Judas. And one of the requirements to be eligible to be that disciple is to have been with them from the beginning. So Jesus has disciples outside of the 12. The 12 is like his inner circle. The three, Peter, James, and John are like his inner, inner circle. But then there's other disciples on the perimeter that are following too. And when he says this, the disciples on the perimeter begin to leave. We'll pick it up in verse 68. Do you want to go as well? Verse 68, Simon Peter answered him. And listen, I love these words. I don't have a tattoo. If I get one, it'll be these words. Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and I have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. I love that answer. I love it so much because it's so very human. It's so very honest. Jesus says this incredibly hard teaching that does not make sense to anyone. And people who have been following him for months and years leave. And he looks at his inner circle. And he says, are you guys going to leave too? And Peter responds, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. Now this is just my interpretation of the subtext here, of what's laying under these statements of Peter. There seems to be an implicit agreement of Peter with the ones who left. You can see the tension in Peter. Listen, Jesus says, are you going to go too? And I paraphrase this response as going, listen, what you just said is weird. It's weird. I do not want to cannibalize you. I don't want to drink your blood. That's weird. That's cultish. It doesn't make any sense. I hope I don't have to do that. Jesus, you make absolutely no sense to me right now. And frankly, it's weird. But here's what I know. I know that you are who you say you are. I know that you're Jesus. I know that you have the words of eternal life. You have claimed to be the Holy One, and I believe you. And because I believe you, and because I trust you are who you are, where else am I going to go? I'm in. Jesus, this doesn't make sense to me. I don't follow it. That's not how I would have done it. I think this is weird, but you're Jesus. I know that you are. I believe you. I trust you. I'm in. I love that sentiment from Peter. Because frankly, if you haven't gotten to that point in your faith where you've had to choose to to follow Jesus even when he doesn't make sense, then I would tell you gently and humbly that I believe your faith still has some maturing to do. Because everyone of faith, everyone of faith comes to that moment where Jesus doesn't make any sense to them. That shouldn't have happened. That man is a good man. Why did that happen to him? My father was a good man. He shouldn't have died, and he did. That child never did anything, and God allowed them to get leukemia and wither away. Why did he do that? If Jesus is who he says he is, then why are these things true in my life? I've been living my life according to the standards of God, and I want the blessings that other people have who don't live like I do. I'm a good person. Why can't I have what I want? Jesus, this doesn't make any sense. Jesus, you could have healed this person that I love. I know you could have. And they love you? It doesn't make any sense. I told you guys a few weeks back, a friend of mine, 40 years old, two kids, died. Jesus, you could have prevented that death. You didn't. And so at some point, we find ourselves in the position of Peter saying, Jesus, you don't make any sense to me. And I don't see the whole path here. But I'm going to choose to trust you because I know who you are. Because I'm a Christian. And being a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. He did what he said he did. He lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death, and he raised on the third day. And he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's going to come back one day to claim his people and to make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. To be a Christian is to believe that. And so Peter says, you don't make any sense to me right now, but I'm a Christian, so I'm in. I was thinking about this this morning as I was going through things. Can you imagine the light bulb moment that communion was for Peter? Can you imagine him sitting around that table as long as one to two years after this exchange with Jesus? Because this is towards the beginning of his ministry. So as many as two years later, Jesus is sitting around the communion table, or Peter's sitting around the Passover table about to observe the first communion. He doesn't know what communion is. Jesus breaks the bread and tells them to eat it. And he pours the wine and he tells them to drink it. And Peter goes, oh, and he still doesn't know what it is because the next day Jesus actually dies for him. And he's like, well, this stinks. Everything's over. And he wanders back and he goes to fish. And then the resurrected Jesus shows up and makes him breakfast. And he's like, hey, do you love me? Yes. Do you love me? Yes. Do you love me? Yes. Okay, go feed my sheep. You're reinstated. Go do it, Peter. What a light bulb moment for Peter in this moment with no context. Because Jesus doesn't explain it. He does not explain the cannibalism. He just drops it on them. You still going to follow me? You still trust me? Great. And then he goes. And for two years, he doesn't come back to it and address it. And then one day he's at a table and he breaks the bread and Peter goes, oh. God never gives us the clarity we want in the moment. But he always gives us what we need. And if we stick in there, we get light bulb moments too. And both of these stories, the story of the wise men just following the star, okay, that's what I'm going to do. The story of the disenfranchised disciple. You make no sense to me, but I'm in because I know who you are. Highlight what I believe is God's fundamental ask of all humanity. God's fundamental ask is simply that we would trust him. God's fundamental ask of people from the beginning of time is that we would trust him. Just listen to me. Just trust me. Just hear my voice and respond in obedience like the wise men do who don't need a religious apparatus to discern the voice of God and be obedient to it. Just follow me like that. Isn't that what he asked of Adam and Eve? Hey, there's a tree. Don't eat it. Just trust me on this one. And they didn't trust him. Isn't that what he asked of Abraham? The father of his children is in Ur, the land of the Chaldeans, probably the Sumerian dynasty. And God appears to him. God speaks to him. I don't know if he appeared to him, but he speaks to him. And he says, I want you to pack up your stuff and quote, go to the place where I will show you. To this place called Israel that Abraham's never heard of, the land of Canaan at the time that no one's ever heard of. And he meets someone there named Melchizedek, who is the high priest and the king of a city called Salem that would later become Jerusalem, who has heard the voice of God and is obeying him outside of any religious apparatus, outside of the focus of the narrative scripture, of the narrative text of the gospel, just out there obeying God. And Abraham goes to him, not knowing where he's going, arrives, and God's just illuminating one step by one step. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Then he gives him a son. He says, I want you to go sacrifice this son. Three days journey away on a random hill. And he gets up the next day and he goes. And he's at the bottom of the hill, and a lot of scholars believe that Abraham did not know how he was going to walk back down that mountain with his living son, but he believed that he would. And so he went. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Moses, wandering the desert for 40 years, stumbles upon, as a shepherd, stumbles upon the burning bush. This is in Exodus chapters 2 and 3, two of the greatest chapters in the Bible. And God appears to him in the burning bush, and he says, I want you to go to the most powerful man in the world, and I want you to tell him to let my people go based on zero authority whatsoever. And Moses is like, okay, I've got questions. And he asks him five clarifying questions. What's your name? Why are they going to believe me? I have a stutter that seems like an issue. No one's going to listen to me. Five different questions. Five times, God says, don't worry about that, trust me. Don't worry about that, trust me. What's your name? Don't worry about that, trust me. I have a stutter, don't worry about that, trust me. Just trust me, just trust me. How's it going to work out, God? I'm not going to tell you. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. All through scripture. David, anointed king. You're going to be the next king. You're the chosen one. Man after God's own heart. As probably an adolescent kid. He waits 20 years before he ascends to the throne. God, when's it going to happen? The current king's trying to kill me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Why did God wait so long to give the Ten Commandments? He could have, he could have, once Adam and Eve broke the rules, he could have said, okay, here's the new rules. He waits generation after generation after generation, a couple thousand years before he says, fine, here's the rules. What I'd really like for you to do is trust me and obey me without the rules, but since you need rules, here are the rules. And then Jesus shows up and he says, we don't need those rules anymore. Love God, trust him. Love God, trust him, be obedient by loving others. Just trust me, just trust me, just trust me. Have you ever thought about the fact that Jesus could have sat down with the disciples and we, especially those of us who are business and strategy minded, would, those of us, like I'm business and strategy minded, those of you, we would think that the best possible thing for Jesus to do would be to recruit the disciples, test them for a few months to make sure they're all the way in, and then bring them into a meeting and sit them down and say, all right, boys, listen, here's the deal. And for Jesus to lay out every step of the strategy, doesn't that make so much sense? Hey, I'm going to be here for about three more years. The whole time, I'm going to show you how to do ministry. I'm going to show you how to love on people. I'm going to teach you this new rule of loving others the way that I've loved you. I'm going to show you what it is to love people. And then you guys think I'm going to be a physical king. I'm not. I'm going to be an eternal king. I don't care about that throne. It's small potatoes. I don't need it. So quit trying to make me be king. This is the kind of king I'm going to be. I'm going to be an eternal king. And at the end of the three years, after I've shown you how to live and love perfectly, I'm going to have given you all the tools to build what I'm going to call the church. What's the church, Jesus? Well, let me explain to you what the church is going to be. He could have explained all this. And he could have said, at the end of three years, I'm going to be arrested and it's going to be an unfair trial and I'm going to die. You should watch me die. And honestly, you should celebrate it because it's ushering in the next part of the plan. That's how I'm paying for you guys to get to heaven. It's an okay thing when I die. And don't worry about it because I'm going to be buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea and I'm going to be raised on the third day. You guys can come hang out with me if you want. And then I'm going to stick around for about 40 days and I'm going to go into heaven because my job's done and I'm going to hand you the keys to the kingdom. So the next three years of your life, pay attention, write down notes, ask me all the questions you need because I'm going to give you this thing. Tell me that doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't he do that? It makes so much sense. It makes sense to us because we're stupid. That was not the way that Jesus did it. He didn't tell them the plan. He didn't explain to them the death. He let them believe he was going to be an earthly king. He illuminated one step at a time. Go into this city and perform these miracles. Go over there and tell them about me. Follow me here and listen to my teaching. Now you can answer, now you can ask me questions. Take this bread and eat it. He never illuminates the whole path. He never explains everything to them. He just beckons them to trust him. And God has the same ask of you. Trust him. Hang in there. Believe him. Be like Peter. And those moments when your faith doesn't make any sense, where something happens in your life that doesn't have a nice, neat, satisfying box to put it in and categorize it and explain it to others and justify it, when that happens, when something outside of your boxes and your theology and your understanding, when that happens and tears it down, and we sit in the midst of confusion and uncertainty, Jesus, why'd you let that happen? Why did it turn out this way? Why am I struggling with this? Why won't you rescue me from that? When we sit in that uncertainty, no, God designed and intended that uncertainty. He's never, ever given anyone the full path. He's never, ever illuminated more than a couple steps for anyone in their life. He simply beckons us to trust him. And I love that word and that concept of trust because it has so many tendrils, doesn't it? Don't just trust me with your faith. Trust me with your family. Do for your family what I think is best for them. Not, not what you think is best for them. See, when we trust somebody, what we do is we choose their judgment over our own. When I trust the finance committee, I trust their expertise over my expertise, which is none in that area. When we trust someone, we choose them over ourselves. So God says in every way, choose my expertise over your own, and I promise you it will work out. Simply trust me. Trust me with your morals and with your values. Trust me with your money. I've asked you to give a bottom line of 10%. Be generous people and give. Trust me with that. It's going to be best for you. Trust me with your children. Trust me with your marriage. Trust me with your career. Trust me with your priorities. Trust me with your calendar. Trust me. Just believe me. Trust me. Take the steps I'm illuminating for you. And I promise, I promise, I promise it will be better for you. The more we can trust God in the midst of uncertainty, the more light bulb moments we get like Peter sitting at communion going, this is why God, okay. And tell me that doesn't strengthen faith when you have those moments. And here's what happens when we choose to trust God in the midst of uncertainty. We make that a pattern in our life. God rewards our trust with a full life and perfect eternity. God rewards that trust with a full life and a perfect eternity. I chose that phrase full life there on purpose because one of my favorite verses I've said to you before, John 10, 10, the thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come, Jesus is speaking. I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus says he came to give us the most full life possible. Not the wealthiest life. Not the healthiest life. Not the most comfortable life. I'm reminded of that quote from, I believe it's Chronicles of Narnia, where they're talking about the Jesus figure, Aslam, I think. And they say, is he safe? And the response is, oh, no, he is not safe. But he is good. Jesus invites us into that goodness. Do you trust me? Do you trust me? Do you trust me? Because if you do, if you choose my judgment over yours, he will give us in this life the most full life possible, the best life we can imagine if we'll simply trust him. The problem is we hold back parts of our life because we think in our judgment, with our values, with our morals, and with what we do, that we can make little pockets of our life better and more comfortable and more enjoyable than what Jesus can do. No, no, no, I'm not going to trust you with that because I like what I'm doing right here. And Jesus says, if you'll just trust me and hand me that too, I promise there will be a more full life around the corner. I promise you there will be a deeper peace, a deeper happiness, a deeper joy if you'll simply hand that to me too. So here's my question for you this morning. Where can you trust God more? Where are you holding back from him? What are you keeping to yourself and not choosing to be like the wise men and humble, faithful, consistent obedience? Where are you going? I don't know. When are you going to get there? I'm not sure. How do you know where to go? I'm just following God. Where can we choose to trust God more and trust his judgment over our own? And I would also encourage you, if you're one who's sitting in the midst of uncertainty, Jesus, this is happening in my life and I don't understand it. You could fix it and you're not. And honestly, Jesus, it kind of makes me frustrated with you. Okay. Be like Peter. Are you going to leave Jesus because of it? No. You're the son of God. You have the words of eternal life and I believe you. Where else am I going to go? And I promise you, you'll have your aha moment if you trust him. And you'll usher in a full life and a perfect eternity. So this morning, let's trust God like the wise men did and just take the step of obedience that's in front of us. Let's pray. Father, we love you this morning. We love you always. We trust you. Help us to trust you more. God, I'm reminded of the simple prayer, I believe, help my unbelief. Lord, if there are those who are sitting in the midst of uncertainty, who feel disillusioned like the disciples that thought cannibalism was a part of the deal, God, would you give them the faith of Peter to hang in there, to trust you, even when they're not certain and don't understand everything they feel like they need to understand. God, for those of us who are holding back parts of our lives, who are choosing our judgment in places over yours, would you give us the strength and the faith to trust you, to believe you? That things are only going to be better when we hand them to you? Would you give us the remarkable faith of the wise men who journeyed to an unknown place for two years simply trusting? And as we do that, as we take those steps and as we trust you, would you help us to see you? Would you show up in those places and reassure us? In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Just right up front, I've been getting a lot of flack this morning for going halfsies on my Christmas spirit. I understand that. But listen, I tried on everything last night, and I am doing you a public service by not wearing those bottoms. All right? This is for you. It's not for me. I'd be more comfortable in those, but I made a decision for the betterment of the church, and I would appreciate if you could respect that choice. Now, we are in part two of our series called Twas the Night, where we're looking at the story of Christmas, largely based in Luke chapter two, and we're looking at it from different perspectives within that story to see what we can learn from them and their experience within the Christmas story. And so last week, we looked at Simeon's reaction to Jesus and the innkeeper's reaction to Jesus. We juxtaposed those and kind of learned a bit from those two perspectives. Next week, we're going to look at Joseph and his humble, quiet, consistent obedience and what we can learn from that. And then Christmas Eve, we're going to look at Mary. There's this verse tucked away at the end of the Christmas narrative, towards the end of chapter 2, that I really, really love where there's this joy that's almost, words would cheapen it, this joy that Mary experiences. So we're going to look at that verse for Christmas Eve, and I'm very excited for the Christmas Eve service and message that we get to share with you that day. Today, we're going to look at the Christmas story from the perspective of the wise men. Now, I'll give credit where it's due. Aaron Gibson and I went on a little retreat in September to go ahead and plan out the Christmas series and figure out what we were going to do. The idea for this morning and what we're talking about this morning comes from him. So if it's good, tell him so. If it's not, let's just assume that there was an issue with the delivery and he needs to choose a better messenger or just hold his good ideas and preach them himself. But this morning I want to look at the perspective of the wise men. Now we don't read about the wise men in Luke chapter 2. We see them in Matthew chapter 2. And I'm actually not going to turn to either of those today. I'm going to be in John chapter 6. So if you brought your Bible like I've been asking you to do, you can go ahead and turn to John 6. If you don't have one with you, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Please excuse me. I've been, I got a sinus infection that turned into a cough. I've been fighting it off for a week. I'm not contagious, but I am on about four different cough suppressants. So if I say something crazy, that's why. We see the wise men in Matthew chapter 2. And I like to point out, I don't know why I like to point out, I just do, that the wise men were more than likely not actually at the manger scene. The nativity scene that we have that we put in our houses and everything. We went to a live nativity at another church last night. Did a phenomenal job. The wise men were more than likely not there. Okay? Their story is they saw a star and they were told by God to go follow that star. And I think this is worth pointing out and amazing. It's not the point, but it's something that I didn't want to just blow past. That the wise men are even involved in the story of Christmas. Because I'll get into why later, but they're from very far away. They are not from Israel. They are not Hebrew people. They are not descendants of Abraham. It is very, very unlikely that the Jewish tradition had made its way to wherever they called home. And yet, without any religious infrastructure at all, without any holy texts at all, they somehow recognize the voice of God, the God that we worship, the God that Mary and Joseph worship. They heard that voice, identified that voice, and were obedient to that voice. When we read the Bible, the narrative focuses way down on Abraham's family and then on Israel and what happens in Israel, as if God's scope of evangelism and love and care and speaking isn't worldwide all the time. And we get these little glimpses throughout scripture like Melchizedek in the Old Testament that it's actually true that God is speaking outside of Israel to those who will listen. It reminds me of Romans 1 where it says that God reveals himself to all men in nature so that no man is without excuse. Somehow, some way, these wise men with no no religious structure at all, heard the voice of God, identified it, obeyed it. They go to Jerusalem. They're following the star. The star leads them to Jerusalem. They get to Jerusalem, and this is all in Matthew 2. You can check me if you need to. I would always encourage that. But they get to Jerusalem where Jesus is not there. He's either in Bethlehem or he's in Nazareth. He's not in Jerusalem. And they go to Herod, the king, because they don't know where else to go. And they say, hey, we're here to worship. The Savior's been born. We're here to worship him. Do you know where he is? And Herod is threatened by this because he knows somewhere in the annals of his brain that when this Messiah comes, he's going to be the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. And Herod erroneously thinks he's going to try to sit on my throne, to which Jesus is like, I'm not interested in your throne. That's very small potatoes. Don't care. But Herod thinks he's going to try to take his stuff. And so Herod responds with an edict to kill all the boys in Israel aged two and younger, which is one of the more horrific evil edicts that we see in the whole Bible. Herod was evil. And I have a two and a half year old son. I can't imagine what it would be to be one of the soldiers that had to carry out those directives. Awful, awful stuff. But he says this, Herod does, to kill all the baby boys, age two or younger, we're told in Matthew 2, because of the timing of the journey of the wise men. What this means is, more than likely, the wise men were following that star for two years. Could be more, could be less. Could be a year, could be nine months. We don't know when the star appeared. And the star could have appeared two years in advance of Jesus' birth. And then they showed up at the time. We don't know that for sure, except for when they appear, when they go in to see Joseph and Mary, it says that they entered into the house. Not the manger, but the house. So they're probably in Nazareth, meaning Jesus is probably a toddler by this point. At which point they give him gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And Johnny, my two-year-old, has just been beating me up for myrrh this Christmas. So they were on point with those gifts. But it took two years to get where they were going. I want you to imagine that. They're from very far east. We do not know where. India is possible. China is possible. Iran, Iraq, one of the stands. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan. One of the stands could be. And they journeyed for two years. Based on a voice of God that they heard that said, follow this star. Maybe they were nomadic people and so journeying wasn't a huge deal, but they're still rearranging their whole life. A lot of scholars believe they were just wealthy individuals and they brought their caravan with them. We don't know how many wise men there were. We just know that there was more than one. We usually say three because of the three gifts, but that's really not indicative of the total number. And so they load up, presumably on camels, and they travel for maybe as long as two years. And this was the point that Gibson made that I thought was a really interesting insight. What if you could talk to the wise men on that journey? What if you could ask them, hey, guys, where are you going? You know what their answer would be? We don't really know. Where are you going? We're not sure. Well, how do you even know where to go? God, do you see that star? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, God told us to follow that one. Are you getting any closer to it? Not really. No, it just stays right there. We just kind of walk during the day and hope at night, still in front of us. When are you going to get there? Like, how long is this journey? Yeah, I couldn't tell you. I don't know. We're just walking. I think that's amazing. To go to the wise men during that journey and say, where are you going? Not sure. How do you know where to go? God told us to follow that star. When are you going to get there? We don't know. I don't want to be too critical, but I'd be willing to bet that very few people in this room have that kind of faith. And yet, when we look at the journey of the wise men, I believe all of us have that faith because that faith is the Christian faith. I believe that the wise men personify this statement. The Christian journey is following God in the midst of uncertainty. The Christian journey itself is to follow God in the midst of uncertainty. It's to not be able to see the whole path and yet take the steps that are illuminated in front of us. Isn't this what we were taught when we were young? If you grew up in church, you heard the Psalm. I think in either 109 or, you heard the psalm, thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. And I was taught at ages, you know, three, four, five, six years old, when you're in the woods and it's dark, you're outside and it's dark, and you have a lantern or a lamp next to you, how many steps can you see? Just a couple. You can't see the whole path. You can't see the whole trail. And so I carry, you carry with you, if you grow up in church, you carry with you this understanding, this intellectual, this mental consent that yes, God is never going to illuminate the whole path for me. It's always going to be just a couple of steps. He's never going to give me all the clarity I want. He's just going to give me the clarity I need to take the next step or two of obedience. And this is what the wise men personify. Could they see the whole path? No. Did they know where they were going? No. Had they heard of the nation of Israel before? No, nobody knows. Maybe, maybe not. They didn't know who they were going to find or what they were going to do. They were just going in obedience, taking the next step. Today, we can see the star, so today we're going to follow it. Are we going to get there tomorrow? Maybe, don't know. The Christian journey is to follow God in the midst of uncertainty. It's to not understand everything and yet choose to follow him anyways. I think maybe the best depiction of this in the whole Bible is in John chapter 6. In this discourse, this dialogue that Jesus has with Peter. I think it's a remarkable dialogue. We're going to pick it up in verse 66. And the verse is preceding. Jesus is teaching the people in the synagogue at Capernaum. And he's telling them. And he tells them in about three or four different ways. But he's telling them, if you want to follow me, you have to eat of my flesh and drink of my blood. If you do not eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, then you have no place with me and you cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven. That's what Jesus teaches. It is a weird, cultish, cannibalistic teaching. It's weird. And he gives them no context. See, we know, we know that what Jesus is talking about is communion. We understand that. If you don't know what communion is, it's the tradition where we break bread and we dip it in the grape juice or the wine or you sip it or however your church or your tradition does it. So we know that Jesus is, that's an allusion to communion. But they don't know that because they've never experienced communion. And Jesus says, unless you cannibalize me, you cannot be a part of me or enter into the kingdom. And then people started to leave and go, yo, dude, that's really weird. And we pick the story up. John chapter 6, verse 66. Now I'd pause there because that could be confusing. When we think of disciples, we immediately think of the 12 disciples. But what we know is that there was probably as many as 120 people that were constantly following Jesus everywhere. And we know this in part because in Acts, when they go to replace Judas as a disciple, they ultimately named Matthias to be the 12th disciple, the replacement disciple for Judas. And one of the requirements to be eligible to be that disciple is to have been with them from the beginning. So Jesus has disciples outside of the 12. The 12 is like his inner circle. The three, Peter, James, and John are like his inner, inner circle. But then there's other disciples on the perimeter that are following too. And when he says this, the disciples on the perimeter begin to leave. We'll pick it up in verse 68. Do you want to go as well? Verse 68, Simon Peter answered him. And listen, I love these words. I don't have a tattoo. If I get one, it'll be these words. Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and I have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. I love that answer. I love it so much because it's so very human. It's so very honest. Jesus says this incredibly hard teaching that does not make sense to anyone. And people who have been following him for months and years leave. And he looks at his inner circle. And he says, are you guys going to leave too? And Peter responds, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. Now this is just my interpretation of the subtext here, of what's laying under these statements of Peter. There seems to be an implicit agreement of Peter with the ones who left. You can see the tension in Peter. Listen, Jesus says, are you going to go too? And I paraphrase this response as going, listen, what you just said is weird. It's weird. I do not want to cannibalize you. I don't want to drink your blood. That's weird. That's cultish. It doesn't make any sense. I hope I don't have to do that. Jesus, you make absolutely no sense to me right now. And frankly, it's weird. But here's what I know. I know that you are who you say you are. I know that you're Jesus. I know that you have the words of eternal life. You have claimed to be the Holy One, and I believe you. And because I believe you, and because I trust you are who you are, where else am I going to go? I'm in. Jesus, this doesn't make sense to me. I don't follow it. That's not how I would have done it. I think this is weird, but you're Jesus. I know that you are. I believe you. I trust you. I'm in. I love that sentiment from Peter. Because frankly, if you haven't gotten to that point in your faith where you've had to choose to to follow Jesus even when he doesn't make sense, then I would tell you gently and humbly that I believe your faith still has some maturing to do. Because everyone of faith, everyone of faith comes to that moment where Jesus doesn't make any sense to them. That shouldn't have happened. That man is a good man. Why did that happen to him? My father was a good man. He shouldn't have died, and he did. That child never did anything, and God allowed them to get leukemia and wither away. Why did he do that? If Jesus is who he says he is, then why are these things true in my life? I've been living my life according to the standards of God, and I want the blessings that other people have who don't live like I do. I'm a good person. Why can't I have what I want? Jesus, this doesn't make any sense. Jesus, you could have healed this person that I love. I know you could have. And they love you? It doesn't make any sense. I told you guys a few weeks back, a friend of mine, 40 years old, two kids, died. Jesus, you could have prevented that death. You didn't. And so at some point, we find ourselves in the position of Peter saying, Jesus, you don't make any sense to me. And I don't see the whole path here. But I'm going to choose to trust you because I know who you are. Because I'm a Christian. And being a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. He did what he said he did. He lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death, and he raised on the third day. And he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's going to come back one day to claim his people and to make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. To be a Christian is to believe that. And so Peter says, you don't make any sense to me right now, but I'm a Christian, so I'm in. I was thinking about this this morning as I was going through things. Can you imagine the light bulb moment that communion was for Peter? Can you imagine him sitting around that table as long as one to two years after this exchange with Jesus? Because this is towards the beginning of his ministry. So as many as two years later, Jesus is sitting around the communion table, or Peter's sitting around the Passover table about to observe the first communion. He doesn't know what communion is. Jesus breaks the bread and tells them to eat it. And he pours the wine and he tells them to drink it. And Peter goes, oh, and he still doesn't know what it is because the next day Jesus actually dies for him. And he's like, well, this stinks. Everything's over. And he wanders back and he goes to fish. And then the resurrected Jesus shows up and makes him breakfast. And he's like, hey, do you love me? Yes. Do you love me? Yes. Do you love me? Yes. Okay, go feed my sheep. You're reinstated. Go do it, Peter. What a light bulb moment for Peter in this moment with no context. Because Jesus doesn't explain it. He does not explain the cannibalism. He just drops it on them. You still going to follow me? You still trust me? Great. And then he goes. And for two years, he doesn't come back to it and address it. And then one day he's at a table and he breaks the bread and Peter goes, oh. God never gives us the clarity we want in the moment. But he always gives us what we need. And if we stick in there, we get light bulb moments too. And both of these stories, the story of the wise men just following the star, okay, that's what I'm going to do. The story of the disenfranchised disciple. You make no sense to me, but I'm in because I know who you are. Highlight what I believe is God's fundamental ask of all humanity. God's fundamental ask is simply that we would trust him. God's fundamental ask of people from the beginning of time is that we would trust him. Just listen to me. Just trust me. Just hear my voice and respond in obedience like the wise men do who don't need a religious apparatus to discern the voice of God and be obedient to it. Just follow me like that. Isn't that what he asked of Adam and Eve? Hey, there's a tree. Don't eat it. Just trust me on this one. And they didn't trust him. Isn't that what he asked of Abraham? The father of his children is in Ur, the land of the Chaldeans, probably the Sumerian dynasty. And God appears to him. God speaks to him. I don't know if he appeared to him, but he speaks to him. And he says, I want you to pack up your stuff and quote, go to the place where I will show you. To this place called Israel that Abraham's never heard of, the land of Canaan at the time that no one's ever heard of. And he meets someone there named Melchizedek, who is the high priest and the king of a city called Salem that would later become Jerusalem, who has heard the voice of God and is obeying him outside of any religious apparatus, outside of the focus of the narrative scripture, of the narrative text of the gospel, just out there obeying God. And Abraham goes to him, not knowing where he's going, arrives, and God's just illuminating one step by one step. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Then he gives him a son. He says, I want you to go sacrifice this son. Three days journey away on a random hill. And he gets up the next day and he goes. And he's at the bottom of the hill, and a lot of scholars believe that Abraham did not know how he was going to walk back down that mountain with his living son, but he believed that he would. And so he went. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Moses, wandering the desert for 40 years, stumbles upon, as a shepherd, stumbles upon the burning bush. This is in Exodus chapters 2 and 3, two of the greatest chapters in the Bible. And God appears to him in the burning bush, and he says, I want you to go to the most powerful man in the world, and I want you to tell him to let my people go based on zero authority whatsoever. And Moses is like, okay, I've got questions. And he asks him five clarifying questions. What's your name? Why are they going to believe me? I have a stutter that seems like an issue. No one's going to listen to me. Five different questions. Five times, God says, don't worry about that, trust me. Don't worry about that, trust me. What's your name? Don't worry about that, trust me. I have a stutter, don't worry about that, trust me. Just trust me, just trust me. How's it going to work out, God? I'm not going to tell you. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. All through scripture. David, anointed king. You're going to be the next king. You're the chosen one. Man after God's own heart. As probably an adolescent kid. He waits 20 years before he ascends to the throne. God, when's it going to happen? The current king's trying to kill me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Just trust me. Why did God wait so long to give the Ten Commandments? He could have, he could have, once Adam and Eve broke the rules, he could have said, okay, here's the new rules. He waits generation after generation after generation, a couple thousand years before he says, fine, here's the rules. What I'd really like for you to do is trust me and obey me without the rules, but since you need rules, here are the rules. And then Jesus shows up and he says, we don't need those rules anymore. Love God, trust him. Love God, trust him, be obedient by loving others. Just trust me, just trust me, just trust me. Have you ever thought about the fact that Jesus could have sat down with the disciples and we, especially those of us who are business and strategy minded, would, those of us, like I'm business and strategy minded, those of you, we would think that the best possible thing for Jesus to do would be to recruit the disciples, test them for a few months to make sure they're all the way in, and then bring them into a meeting and sit them down and say, all right, boys, listen, here's the deal. And for Jesus to lay out every step of the strategy, doesn't that make so much sense? Hey, I'm going to be here for about three more years. The whole time, I'm going to show you how to do ministry. I'm going to show you how to love on people. I'm going to teach you this new rule of loving others the way that I've loved you. I'm going to show you what it is to love people. And then you guys think I'm going to be a physical king. I'm not. I'm going to be an eternal king. I don't care about that throne. It's small potatoes. I don't need it. So quit trying to make me be king. This is the kind of king I'm going to be. I'm going to be an eternal king. And at the end of the three years, after I've shown you how to live and love perfectly, I'm going to have given you all the tools to build what I'm going to call the church. What's the church, Jesus? Well, let me explain to you what the church is going to be. He could have explained all this. And he could have said, at the end of three years, I'm going to be arrested and it's going to be an unfair trial and I'm going to die. You should watch me die. And honestly, you should celebrate it because it's ushering in the next part of the plan. That's how I'm paying for you guys to get to heaven. It's an okay thing when I die. And don't worry about it because I'm going to be buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea and I'm going to be raised on the third day. You guys can come hang out with me if you want. And then I'm going to stick around for about 40 days and I'm going to go into heaven because my job's done and I'm going to hand you the keys to the kingdom. So the next three years of your life, pay attention, write down notes, ask me all the questions you need because I'm going to give you this thing. Tell me that doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't he do that? It makes so much sense. It makes sense to us because we're stupid. That was not the way that Jesus did it. He didn't tell them the plan. He didn't explain to them the death. He let them believe he was going to be an earthly king. He illuminated one step at a time. Go into this city and perform these miracles. Go over there and tell them about me. Follow me here and listen to my teaching. Now you can answer, now you can ask me questions. Take this bread and eat it. He never illuminates the whole path. He never explains everything to them. He just beckons them to trust him. And God has the same ask of you. Trust him. Hang in there. Believe him. Be like Peter. And those moments when your faith doesn't make any sense, where something happens in your life that doesn't have a nice, neat, satisfying box to put it in and categorize it and explain it to others and justify it, when that happens, when something outside of your boxes and your theology and your understanding, when that happens and tears it down, and we sit in the midst of confusion and uncertainty, Jesus, why'd you let that happen? Why did it turn out this way? Why am I struggling with this? Why won't you rescue me from that? When we sit in that uncertainty, no, God designed and intended that uncertainty. He's never, ever given anyone the full path. He's never, ever illuminated more than a couple steps for anyone in their life. He simply beckons us to trust him. And I love that word and that concept of trust because it has so many tendrils, doesn't it? Don't just trust me with your faith. Trust me with your family. Do for your family what I think is best for them. Not, not what you think is best for them. See, when we trust somebody, what we do is we choose their judgment over our own. When I trust the finance committee, I trust their expertise over my expertise, which is none in that area. When we trust someone, we choose them over ourselves. So God says in every way, choose my expertise over your own, and I promise you it will work out. Simply trust me. Trust me with your morals and with your values. Trust me with your money. I've asked you to give a bottom line of 10%. Be generous people and give. Trust me with that. It's going to be best for you. Trust me with your children. Trust me with your marriage. Trust me with your career. Trust me with your priorities. Trust me with your calendar. Trust me. Just believe me. Trust me. Take the steps I'm illuminating for you. And I promise, I promise, I promise it will be better for you. The more we can trust God in the midst of uncertainty, the more light bulb moments we get like Peter sitting at communion going, this is why God, okay. And tell me that doesn't strengthen faith when you have those moments. And here's what happens when we choose to trust God in the midst of uncertainty. We make that a pattern in our life. God rewards our trust with a full life and perfect eternity. God rewards that trust with a full life and a perfect eternity. I chose that phrase full life there on purpose because one of my favorite verses I've said to you before, John 10, 10, the thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come, Jesus is speaking. I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Jesus says he came to give us the most full life possible. Not the wealthiest life. Not the healthiest life. Not the most comfortable life. I'm reminded of that quote from, I believe it's Chronicles of Narnia, where they're talking about the Jesus figure, Aslam, I think. And they say, is he safe? And the response is, oh, no, he is not safe. But he is good. Jesus invites us into that goodness. Do you trust me? Do you trust me? Do you trust me? Because if you do, if you choose my judgment over yours, he will give us in this life the most full life possible, the best life we can imagine if we'll simply trust him. The problem is we hold back parts of our life because we think in our judgment, with our values, with our morals, and with what we do, that we can make little pockets of our life better and more comfortable and more enjoyable than what Jesus can do. No, no, no, I'm not going to trust you with that because I like what I'm doing right here. And Jesus says, if you'll just trust me and hand me that too, I promise there will be a more full life around the corner. I promise you there will be a deeper peace, a deeper happiness, a deeper joy if you'll simply hand that to me too. So here's my question for you this morning. Where can you trust God more? Where are you holding back from him? What are you keeping to yourself and not choosing to be like the wise men and humble, faithful, consistent obedience? Where are you going? I don't know. When are you going to get there? I'm not sure. How do you know where to go? I'm just following God. Where can we choose to trust God more and trust his judgment over our own? And I would also encourage you, if you're one who's sitting in the midst of uncertainty, Jesus, this is happening in my life and I don't understand it. You could fix it and you're not. And honestly, Jesus, it kind of makes me frustrated with you. Okay. Be like Peter. Are you going to leave Jesus because of it? No. You're the son of God. You have the words of eternal life and I believe you. Where else am I going to go? And I promise you, you'll have your aha moment if you trust him. And you'll usher in a full life and a perfect eternity. So this morning, let's trust God like the wise men did and just take the step of obedience that's in front of us. Let's pray. Father, we love you this morning. We love you always. We trust you. Help us to trust you more. God, I'm reminded of the simple prayer, I believe, help my unbelief. Lord, if there are those who are sitting in the midst of uncertainty, who feel disillusioned like the disciples that thought cannibalism was a part of the deal, God, would you give them the faith of Peter to hang in there, to trust you, even when they're not certain and don't understand everything they feel like they need to understand. God, for those of us who are holding back parts of our lives, who are choosing our judgment in places over yours, would you give us the strength and the faith to trust you, to believe you? That things are only going to be better when we hand them to you? Would you give us the remarkable faith of the wise men who journeyed to an unknown place for two years simply trusting? And as we do that, as we take those steps and as we trust you, would you help us to see you? Would you show up in those places and reassure us? In Jesus' name, amen.