Joshua

It's good to get to be back with you in the saddle preaching live. I've been excited for this morning and I'm excited for this series. This series, Things You Should Know, I think that's what we're calling it. Yeah, it's right there on the screen next to me. Things You Should Know. I forgot what we named it back in the beginning of December, but I haven't forgotten what it's about. And it's based on this idea that there's things that we should all know as Christians, or that we at least nod along with as Christians, that we pretend that we know, that we may not actually know, right? Like there's a kind of a Christianese and another language that's spoken around churches. And I think sometimes we just kind of nod along with that because we don't want to look or feel dumb. And I know how it goes. I mean, you join a small group for the first time. You haven't really been involved in church in a while or just kind of cursory involvement. And then you show up in a small group and people start talking about stuff. And you might not know what they're talking about, but you don't want to feel dumb or silly or uninformed or make yourself look bad. So you don't say anything. And then you've been there so long that now I have to be one of the people that knows these things too. And so we just kind of nod along when people talk about grace and mercy or throw out Bible words like sanctification, and we just kind of act like we know what they're talking about when sometimes we really don't. And one of the things that I want you to know is that it's okay not to know stuff. It's actually really great to ask questions. One of my favorite things to do is to have my men's Bible study and have people in that study who are not very familiar with the text that we're covering because the questions that they ask are the best, but you have to be brave to ask questions because when you ask a question, you're admitting that I don't know this thing. And there's some stuff in the church that I think we nod along with, that we act like we know, when maybe we don't. And we want to be brave for you this month and ask those questions for you this month. And so this morning, the title of the sermon is simply the Bible. Questions that we might have about the Bible. I'm going to look at three questions that I think everybody has about Scripture that we might not know the answers to, but that I think every Christian should know. And now I'll warn you up front, this is not a normal sermon. This is far more informative. It's informational, this sermon is. The things that I'm going to share with you this morning are things that I wasn't exposed to until I was in Bible college, taking theology classes, or in grad school, in seminary, taking more theology classes. And there's a lot more to it than what we're going to cover this morning, but I wanted to take a morning, one Sunday, and address with you some common questions about the Bible, because again, I think every believer should know the answers to these questions. So I'll say up front, for some of you, you're going to love this. You're going to love it. Your notebook is out. You're ready. You're going to write these things down, and if you're a note taker, there's going to be a lot to write down. So get ready. Get your best possible pen. Some of you might not love this. This might not be your thing. And just to know, just for you to know, when I was praying before the sermon, my final words to God were, Father, make this helpful. And if it's not helpful, make it quick. Okay, so I'm with you. There's a lot of information, but I think you need to know this stuff, and I hope that you'll be interested in it. And actually, I want to know what you learned this morning. If I tell you something that you didn't know before, email me and tell me what you learned and tell me what you enjoyed. If there's other questions that you've always wanted to ask, email me and ask those questions. You can even tell me that I heard my friend ask this, so you don't even have to throw yourself under the bus. But get those questions to me. Get your responses to me. I want us to interact with the things we're talking about in this series. But I said I was going to give you three questions about the Bible that I think we should all be able to answer. And the first one is this. Why is the Bible a big deal? Why is the Bible such a big deal? Why do we make such a fuss about it? And it may seem like I'm going too simple on this, but I think it's an important question. Think about it. Think about where we place the Bible in our lives. I tell you guys all the time that there's no greater habit that anyone in their life could have than to read the Bible every day, than to spend time with God through prayer and in His Word every day. So we make a big deal out of the Bible. We hold the Bible up as the foremost authority in our lives. We believe and we teach at Grace that if you're walking with God, that you won't allow anything into your life until it's filtered through Scripture. That the biggest authority in your life of whether something is right or wrong or good or bad or from God or not is to go to Scripture and see what does it say. The entire church is built around the teachings of the Bible. Wars have been fought over it. People have died to preserve it. So it's worth asking the question, why is the Bible such a big deal? Well, the short answer is this. The Bible is a big deal because it's God's special revelation to us. We make such a fuss out of the Bible. The Bible is a big deal because it is God's special revelation to us. Now, here's what I mean. That word revelation, we're already getting into some technical Christian terms. That's not really a Christian term. That just means something that's revealed. It's the same root word there. It just means to reveal something. And so what we understand about ourselves and what you understand about you, whether you've ever thought about this or not, is that people can only know about you what you choose to reveal to them, right? If you meet somebody at a dinner party, you know you're never going to talk to them again. You can make up a totally false identity. They'll never know. You can tell them that you used to be a professional ball player. They won't know the difference. They'll Google you later. You won't exist, and it's fine. You'll never have that interaction again. But they only know about you what you choose to reveal about yourself. So when you meet someone in passing, it's just a cursory glance. They only know you by the way that you dress, by what you reveal, by how you present yourself to the world. The more someone is around you, the more they see you react and interact and respond, the more they learn about you and what's there. But again, people can only know about you what you choose to reveal to them about yourself, right? Well, the same is true of God. We can only know about God what he chooses to reveal about himself. And with him, it's in particular no more and no less. So with God, if we understand revelation to be what God chooses to reveal to us about himself, that we would get to know God the same way we would get to know anybody in our life, the same way other people would get to know us, then we have to understand that with God, there's two kinds of revelation. There's general revelation and special revelation. The way that I think about those is this. General revelation makes us aware of the presence of God, and special revelation gives us the details of that presence. General revelation is stuff that everybody can see. And Romans 1 actually sums up general revelation like this. This is what Paul says in Romans 1, looking at verse 19. He says, So he says, listen, God wrote himself in nature. Anybody who looks outward at nature, at the trees, at the seasons, at the rhythms of nature, the way the earth rotates around the sun, at how huge the universe is, at how small it can be, at the miracle of birth, at just the essence of life. As you look at nature, it points to a creator God. And as you look inward on what is written in your nature, it points to a creator God. Our moral compass, the fact that every civilization ever has prized bravery and bemoaned cowardice, has said that telling the truth is good and that being deceptive is bad. That moral code was written on our hearts by God. On our hearts, we have a longing for our Creator. So whether we look without or within, when we look at nature, God has written himself in nature. That is his general revelation, making all of us aware of his existence. But his special revelation, where he gives us the details of that existence, that's in the Bible. And here's what's incredible about that. What if we didn't have the Bible? What if we didn't know the details of this God that exists? Then he would just be to us this being that existed distant and cold, who had the authority to punish us, to start our life and to take our life, to manipulate circumstances to make us joyful or to make us miserable. It would be a God that we would hope to try to appease, but we wouldn't really know who he was. It would be a God that would inevitably incur fear and myth. But in God's goodness, he gave us the Bible. And it gives us the details of his existence. It's in his words that we find out, oh goodness, this God that created me loves me. This God that created me actually only created me so that I could spend eternity with him. That's how much he wants to be with me. This God who created me sent his son to die for me. This God who created me is love. He is goodness. He is gracious. He is merciful. This book tells us all we need to know about the God who created us. It is God's special revelation of himself to us. This is why we hold it in such high esteem. Because we believe that in these pages are the very words of God. And that this is, he could have chosen to reveal himself any way he wanted to, but what he chose to do is to reveal himself in the pages of Scripture. And in here we find him and who he is. It's an invitation to know our God better. That's why we make such a big deal out of the Bible. Now, the next question. And this one is important. I hope that some of you guys have asked this. I hope that some of you know some of the answers to this. But I think it's an important question. How did we even get the Bible? How did we get the Bible? How is it that I can go to the store and buy this, and these are the books that God wants in here, and these are the words that God wants in here, and these are the things that were written down however many years ago. How do we even get this? Because I don't know if you know this about the Bible, but the Bible is composed of an Old Testament and a New Testament. It totals 66 books. There's 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament. And you may or may not know, I mean, you probably know that there's been a lot of people who have contributed to writing the Bible, but there's actually over 40 authors that contribute to the Bible. Did you know that the Bible was written over the span of about 1,400 years across three different continents, Africa and Asia and Europe? And that it was written actually in three different languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. And through all of that time, through the span of 1,400 years, through the minds of over 40 authors on three continents and however many different cultures that was, and in three different languages, God inspired this written word. So how did it get to us? It's a fair question. When we talk about how it got to us, we can really talk about it in the Old and the New Testament. The Old Testament is pretty easy. In ancient Israel, there was a ruling body called the Sanhedrin. That was a lot like our Senate. It was made up of different parties. The two most famous parties in the Sanhedrin were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. We've probably heard of those before, at least the Pharisees, I would think. And then there was other little parties that weren't as influential, but were there, the Essenes and the Zealots. You can think of those as like the modern day libertarians. I know that my friend Tom Sartorius will appreciate that very much. But the Sanhedrin was made up of different parties, and those parties ruled Israel. It was a religious rule, not too different from what we see in Muslim countries today. And the Sanhedrin got together somewhere around 250 BC, or maybe a little bit after, and one of the things that they affirmed was that the holy scriptures they had were the Holy Scriptures that would serve as the Old Testament. To them, it was 24 books that they called the Tanakh. To us, it's 39 books that we call the Old Testament, but they're the exact same. They grouped up a bunch of different books that we have separated out together, like Kings and Chronicles was one book, and now it's four. So they would group things together like that, but it's the same. Our 39 books are the same 24 books that they affirmed in 250 BC. And the Sanhedrin looked around and voted and they said, this is it. These are the Holy Scriptures. This is the Tanakh, the law and the prophets. In the New Testament, when we hear Jesus or one of the other writers refer to the law and the prophets, he's referring to the Old Testament, to the Tanakh. And that Old Testament has not been changed since 250 BC when they affirmed it. And the last book was Malachi, and it was written around 400 BC. So it had already existed as one big volume of works for at least 150 years before they ever addressed it. It hasn't changed since 400 BC, and it's not going to change in the future. The Old Testament is done, and that's how we got it. Now, the New Testament is interesting too, because at the time of Christ, there was a lot of writings. There's a lot of people writing a lot of different things. And after Christ left the scene, there was one universal church. We call it the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church was structured. They say that there was a pope in the line of succession of Peter, that there was the next guy who was in charge of the church, and the next guy after that. And then there's bishops all that fan out depending on where the church is based on geography. And every now and again, they would have what was called councils. And all the leaders from all the different churches and parishes, I suppose, and all the different areas would get together in this one city and they would debate theological ideas. And they would decide, this is something that the whole church believes. This is something that we are going to cast aside. An example of this is the Council of Nicaea, where they decided without a doubt that Christ is God. Before that, there was some disagreement in the church. Some people thought that Christ was simply a man, that he was a prophet, like the Islam religion claims that he is. Other people say, no, he is deity. He is God incarnate in the flesh. So they got together, they talked about it, they voted on it, and they decided moving forward, the Christian church believes that Jesus is the Son of God. It's a really pivotal council, and we still affirm that. But what we find is that towards about 393 and 398, there was two councils, the Council of Hippo and the Council of Carthage, where those people got together and they voted on what books were going to be included in the New Testament. This is called the canonization of Scripture, the complete, done, codified work. And they voted on which books would be included. And what's important to point out here is it wasn't like they all brought 60 books to the table and then they slowly whittled it down to these 27. They voted on the 27 books that we commonly accept as Scripture that were commonly accepted then. All they did is agree on what was essentially already agreed upon. If you don't believe me, I actually have a quote this morning. I don't do this a lot, okay? I don't belabor things like this a lot because I think they're boring and no one cares. But I think this morning it's important. I've got a quote for you by a guy named F.F. Bruce. You know he's important because he doesn't use a name. It's just his initials. And in the church world, that means you're super smart and also pretentious. Get over yourself, F.F. But F.F. Bruce said this about the councils, and I think it's great. Read with me here. That's a big, long, fancy way of saying they didn't introduce any new ideas. All they did is put a rubber stamp on, yep, these are the books that we hold as Holy Scripture. And it's the same 27 books that we have today. They affirmed 27 books in the New Testament. We have those same 27 books now. So that's how we got the Old Testament and the New Testament. You may want to know, another question you should ask is, how did they determine which books were allowed in? What was the criteria? Well, for a book to be included in the canon, it had to be apostolic, harmonious, accepted, and inspired. Again, for a book to be included in the New Testament, it had to meet these requirements. It had to be apostolic, had to be harmonious, had to be commonly accepted, and it had to be inspired. And when I say apostolic, what I mean is this. An apostle is someone who has an eyewitness account of Christ. So for a book to be apostolic, it has to be written by someone who has seen Jesus in the flesh, which is a really easy way to say that the canon is closed. Can God appear to somebody and speak to someone and ask them to write something down on his behalf? Sure he could if he wanted to, but he doesn't do that anymore in a way that's going to be included in Scripture. We're not going to add to the Bible because one of the ways to get included in the New Testament is to be someone who's an eyewitness of Christ. And since all those people are dead, we're not accepting any more entries in the Bible. It has to be harmonious, meaning it has to agree with other books that are accepted in Scripture. It can't disagree with the Tanakh. It can't disagree with the teachings in the Old Testament. It can't disagree with the teachings and the quotes of Jesus. The Gospels were the first New Testament books written, so it can't disagree with any of those. It has to be in harmony with the rest of the books included. It's got to be accepted, meaning there's no surprises at these councils. Nobody brought this thing that was written down by somebody else and said, hey, would you consider this? The books that were agreed upon in Hippo and in Carthage were books that everybody was already familiar with, that those guys had taught their congregations out of many, many times. They were commonly accepted books. And then they had to be inspired. And really, the first three things are ways to determine if they felt like it was inspired by God. And this is an important word. We talk about the Bible being inspired. But I don't know how often we talk about what that means. Did God take over the minds of these men and these women and they wrote it down verbatim as the Holy Spirit spoke it to them? Was God basically dictating to them what the Bible was supposed to say? The way that we think about inspiration and how it works, and I hold this with a loose hand because it's hard to be certain how inspiration works. The only people who can explain it to us are people who never wrote the Bible. So it's just guesses. But the fancy word for it, if you're interested in such a thing, is verbal plenary inspiration. And basically what it means is the Holy Spirit guides your thoughts and your ideas and then your personality and your intellect takes over and expresses those things. So the Holy Spirit's gonna present an idea to Paul and he's gonna write it out and it's gonna look a lot different than when James writes something out or when David writes something out or when Solomon writes something out. It's almost like if you were to go to the field next to the church. Now, a lot of you haven't been here in so long that you've forgotten that there's a field over there, but there is. It'd be like going to that field and telling you to take a lap once in an SUV and once in a sports car. The journey is going to be the same. The lap's going to be the same, but the experience in that lap is going to be different based, and that lap is going to be different based on the car that you took. It's going to feel different in the SUV. It's going to get done in a different amount of time. It's going to feel different in the sports car. It's the same way with translation and or with inspiration. God speaks to one person, and the way that that person writes it down is going to be different than the way that this person writes it down. But the path and the impact and the point are the same. So in that way, God breathed Scripture into these authors by directing their thoughts and directing their hearts and their heads to the ideas that he wanted them to write down. So it's not unless a book is inspired, is harmonious, is accepted, and is apostolic do we include it in the New Testament. That's how we got our Bible. And the last question I want to address today is how do we know we can trust it? And this is an important question. How do we know that this book that I hold in my hands is the same book, that these 39 books are the exact same as they were when they got approved by the Sanhedrin in 250 BC? How do I know that when I quote Genesis, it's the same Genesis that Jesus is quoting? How do I know that when I read the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 2,000 years later, that those are the actual words that Jesus spoke? How do I know that the letter that Paul wrote to Romans has been preserved enough over the years so that when I open up Romans 1, 19 through 20 and read to you what Paul said, that it's the same thing the church in the first century was hearing? How do we know that we can trust this book? It's an important question. I would think that there's really three main factors that help us understand how we can trust the Bible. The three biggest reasons we can trust the Bible we hold in our hands are preservation, consistency, and evidence. The three biggest reasons that I know we can trust this are preservation, consistency, and evidence. Here's what I mean. You guys may not know this. I find this fascinating. If you don't find this fascinating, I'm sorry. We're talking about Sabbath next week, and I'm real excited for it. But the preservation of Scripture, to me, is so crucial and interesting and vital that it's worth understanding how it happened. You may remember from reading the New Testament that sometimes there's these two groups of people that are put together, the scribes and the Pharisees. What you may not know is that to be a scribe was actually a full-on religious profession. It was a whole profession to be a scribe. And the whole job of a scribe is not necessarily to write new things, but to simply copy things that existed. The only way to get more copies of the book of Genesis is for someone to sit down and painstakingly copy by hand the book of Genesis, right? Gutenberg hadn't been around yet. We didn't have copiers, so we had to write things down by hand. And the process of doing this was excruciatingly detailed. And again, these are men, it was just men in that day, who have dedicated their entire lives to copying Scripture. And they had very strict rules around how they did it. The foremost rule that I've always appreciated is if they made a single mistake at all, no scratching out and moving on and writing a little note about what you meant, any mistake in the manuscript, you destroyed the whole thing. You burned the whole thing. Now listen, we might think, oh gosh, that sounds tedious at first, but I don't think you understand how tedious. Think about if I asked you, if it was your job in 2021 to hand copy the book of Genesis to perfection. Take the book of Genesis. It's about 50 chapters. I want you to write it out word for word. I want you to look at it in your Bible and I want you to write it down. You have to write it down in such a way that it's going to be legible and easy to read in a hundred years. There can't be anybody a hundred years from now that can't tell if that's a G or a C or an E or an F. It needs to be clear and legible. And if there's a single mistake at all, if you put a comma in the wrong part, if you put the quotations outside the period and they should be inside the period, whatever you do, if there's any mistakes, you have to destroy it and start over. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to nail 43 chapters and in the 44th chapter you write a T instead of an S and you have to destroy the whole thing? That's what they would do. That's how serious they were about this work. Whenever they would approach the word Yahweh, they would stop and get up from their desk and put their pen down and go and wash their hands and pray a prayer and make sure they were ceremonially clean before they would write it down. When they would finish a document to check it, they knew exactly how many words were in the book. If we're using Genesis, they knew exactly how many words were in Genesis. So they'd finish it. It's perfect. It's two years of effort. And then they would start the counting. And they knew how many words had to be in their manuscript and how many words were in the original one. They knew that. And if it was wrong, if the count was off by one word, no matter what, you destroy those years of effort and you start over. They knew the middle word. If there's 50,000 words, they knew the 25,000th word. And they would count to it. And then in the new manuscript, they would count back to it. And if the middle word didn't match up, they would destroy the copy as imperfect. And it seems tedious, and maybe it seems over the top, but here's the thing. It worked. And we get affirmations every so often of just how well it worked. I won't chase this rabbit hole too much because it gets into the weeds, but suffice it to say that in terms of manuscripts, the older ones you can find, the better off you are. The older you can find it, the closer to the original it is, right? If you find some manuscripts that are 1,000 years old, that means that things were written 1,000 years before that. They're a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, right? But if you can find something that's 1,800 years old, so the original was only written 200 years before that, well, now it's a copy of a copy. So the older it is, the more accurate it is. And there have been multiple times in the Christian world where we have translated our Bibles based on the oldest manuscripts that we could find and translated them all out and had them and they've been published and on the shelves for us to pick up and read. And then something will happen, like what happened with the Dead Sea Scrolls, I believe in the 1930s. And they'll find these scrolls that predate the ones that we've already found. They're actually older than the oldest ones that we have. And so then they frantically check, oh my gosh, these ones that we have, are they accurate to the older ones? And what they found out is that within 99.9%, they're accurate. That the newer ones we have are accurate to the old ones that we find every couple of years. Which means that this preservation, over time, it worked. It's accurate. The words that we read here are the very ones that were written by Paul, are the very things that were said by Jesus, are the very words of David that were quoted by Matthew. The words that we read are the ones that are written. This has been proven over and over again. We can also trust the Bible because of its consistency, because of how unified its message is. I've told you already that it was written by over 40 authors over the span of 1,400 years, over three continents, with three languages. And yet, there is not a single irreconcilable difference between any of the books or any of the words. And yet, it is entirely consistent with itself. It was written over that great span of time, yet not a single one of those authors introduced an idea that can't be supported by another author or that goes against what one of the other authors said. How can this be possible unless there is one author overseeing the writing of all of it? How can it be possible that all these men over all these cultures with all these languages and all these years can come together and produce one sound document that has no inconsistencies unless there's been one person orchestrating the writing of it all. And there are people who have dedicated their lives to tearing this book down. There are people who have dedicated their adult lives to finding imperfections in the text, to finding contradictions here that don't exist. There are emperors who have tried to burn it. There are societies who have tried to get rid of it. But the Bible stands the test of time. It's still here. It's still trustworthy. It's still the things that Jesus said back when he said them. And because of its consistency, we know that we can trust it. Finally, there's evidence. I won't get too far in the weeds on this, but do you know that the Bible, hundreds of years before it ever existed, I think Daniel is the one who primarily does this. Do you know the Bible predicts Alexander the Great and the Grecian Empire? And that the Bible predicts the Roman Empire? You know, we find artifacts all the time that show us that the stories in the Bible are true. I've been over to Israel and they take you from Jerusalem down this road through the valley of the shadow of death to get to this little town called Jericho. And if you know your old Bible, your old Bible, your Old Testament well, you'll know that Joshua marched around the walls of Jericho seven times and then the walls fell. And if you go to Jericho today and you look at where they've excavated the wall and you can see the layers of it all the way down to the very bottom, that when you get close to the bottom down there, that there is a layer about this thick of ash and char. I've seen it with my own eyes from the time Jericho was burned to the ground, just like it says in the book of Joshua. In the 60s, a mathematician put this experiment together, and I've always found it to be really interesting. It's not an experiment, it's just an illustration of the prophecies in the Old Testament. If you take all the prophecies in the Old Testament that are about the Messiah, that by his stripes he will be healed, that he will be born of a virgin, that he'll be from both Nazareth and Bethlehem, that he'll be from the line of David. If you take all of the prophecies that are made about Jesus in the Old Testament, that are made about this messianic figure in the Old Testament, and you try to have one life that could possibly fulfill all of those prophecies, that the statistical probability of that, of one person fulfilling all of the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled, is the same as covering the state of Texas a foot deep, it's either a foot deep or three feet deep, in silver dollars. You paint one of those silver dollars red and you just drop it in there with the rest of them. Then you get on a plane, you fly over Texas, you parachute down, you land on the coins, you bend down and you pick up the red one. There's the same chances of you doing that as there is of anyone ever living a life that fulfills all the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled. And yet, he lived it. Jesus bears out the truth of Scripture. We see in Jesus' life enough evidence to know that everything around that is true. So I think, and I've come to a place where I believe we can trust Scripture because we can trust the preservation of it, we can trust the consistency of it, and we can trust the evidence that bears out from it. Now, I'll tell you this, for the extra nerdy ones, I actually have a whole class that I developed that I did a lifetime ago in apologetics, and I have about 12 pages of notes. I only shared with you guys like four pages of notes this morning. If you want more on this stuff, if you want to go more in depth, let me know and I'll email that to you. If you have other questions, let me know and I will respond to those. But it feels appropriate to close out this sermon by offering you a little challenge. We've looked at the Bible. We've asked the questions. How can we trust it? Why is it such a big deal? It's the inspired word of God. It's a special revelation to us. We got it through a trustworthy series of events that have rendered it whole, and now we can trust it because of all the reasons that I just went through. And so it seems appropriate to issue this challenge to you in 2021. You may already be a couple days behind and that's all right, but here's the thing. Here's your challenge. I want to challenge you guys to read more of the Bible this year than you ever have before. That's the challenge. That's the challenge for us at Grace. I'm going to engage in that. I want to challenge you to read more of the Bible this year than you ever have before in a single year. That's going to mean different things for different people. You may be thinking to yourself, well, that's great. I've never read the Bible before. All right, well, then it's a low bar for you. Enjoy your success. I hope that it would continue. Set the bar higher for future years, but take a step. A lot of us are the kind of people who have sat down a bunch of times determined to read the Bible. Let this be the time that it sticks. Find a good pace that you can go at, a good rhythm for yourself. Let the Bible read itself to you. On the Bible app, you can have it read itself to you in your car or on your walk. I'm going to read through the Bible this year. I started last year and then I fell off the wagon. I'm going to make it my goal to read through the Bible this year. I'm just going to listen to the Bible this year in addition to what I'm reading on a regular basis. And it's worth stating that the Bible was actually written to be read aloud. So listening to it is a really good way to consume Scripture. If you're one who reads the Bible regularly, step it up. Let's let 2021 be the year that we read more of the Bible than we ever have. That's my challenge to you. All right, next week I'm going to come back and we're going to talk about this idea of Sabbath. What is it and why is it so important? But for now, I'm going to pray and we're going to close out the service with one more song. Pray with me. Father, we love you. Thank you so much for your word. Thank you that we can trust it. Thank you that we can build our lives on it. Thank you that it will never let us down. Thank you that it has stood the test of time and is trustworthy. Father, if we have any other questions about your word, give us the courage and the tenacity to seek those out. Give us the humility to accept what is true. Give us the clarity to reject what isn't. God, I pray once again that as we go throughout our weeks this week, that we would be people and instruments of peace for you in this country and a time when we need it so badly. God, thank you for your word. Make us students of it. Develop in us a hunger for it. In Jesus' name, amen.

It's good to get to be back with you in the saddle preaching live. I've been excited for this morning and I'm excited for this series. This series, Things You Should Know, I think that's what we're calling it. Yeah, it's right there on the screen next to me. Things You Should Know. I forgot what we named it back in the beginning of December, but I haven't forgotten what it's about. And it's based on this idea that there's things that we should all know as Christians, or that we at least nod along with as Christians, that we pretend that we know, that we may not actually know, right? Like there's a kind of a Christianese and another language that's spoken around churches. And I think sometimes we just kind of nod along with that because we don't want to look or feel dumb. And I know how it goes. I mean, you join a small group for the first time. You haven't really been involved in church in a while or just kind of cursory involvement. And then you show up in a small group and people start talking about stuff. And you might not know what they're talking about, but you don't want to feel dumb or silly or uninformed or make yourself look bad. So you don't say anything. And then you've been there so long that now I have to be one of the people that knows these things too. And so we just kind of nod along when people talk about grace and mercy or throw out Bible words like sanctification, and we just kind of act like we know what they're talking about when sometimes we really don't. And one of the things that I want you to know is that it's okay not to know stuff. It's actually really great to ask questions. One of my favorite things to do is to have my men's Bible study and have people in that study who are not very familiar with the text that we're covering because the questions that they ask are the best, but you have to be brave to ask questions because when you ask a question, you're admitting that I don't know this thing. And there's some stuff in the church that I think we nod along with, that we act like we know, when maybe we don't. And we want to be brave for you this month and ask those questions for you this month. And so this morning, the title of the sermon is simply the Bible. Questions that we might have about the Bible. I'm going to look at three questions that I think everybody has about Scripture that we might not know the answers to, but that I think every Christian should know. And now I'll warn you up front, this is not a normal sermon. This is far more informative. It's informational, this sermon is. The things that I'm going to share with you this morning are things that I wasn't exposed to until I was in Bible college, taking theology classes, or in grad school, in seminary, taking more theology classes. And there's a lot more to it than what we're going to cover this morning, but I wanted to take a morning, one Sunday, and address with you some common questions about the Bible, because again, I think every believer should know the answers to these questions. So I'll say up front, for some of you, you're going to love this. You're going to love it. Your notebook is out. You're ready. You're going to write these things down, and if you're a note taker, there's going to be a lot to write down. So get ready. Get your best possible pen. Some of you might not love this. This might not be your thing. And just to know, just for you to know, when I was praying before the sermon, my final words to God were, Father, make this helpful. And if it's not helpful, make it quick. Okay, so I'm with you. There's a lot of information, but I think you need to know this stuff, and I hope that you'll be interested in it. And actually, I want to know what you learned this morning. If I tell you something that you didn't know before, email me and tell me what you learned and tell me what you enjoyed. If there's other questions that you've always wanted to ask, email me and ask those questions. You can even tell me that I heard my friend ask this, so you don't even have to throw yourself under the bus. But get those questions to me. Get your responses to me. I want us to interact with the things we're talking about in this series. But I said I was going to give you three questions about the Bible that I think we should all be able to answer. And the first one is this. Why is the Bible a big deal? Why is the Bible such a big deal? Why do we make such a fuss about it? And it may seem like I'm going too simple on this, but I think it's an important question. Think about it. Think about where we place the Bible in our lives. I tell you guys all the time that there's no greater habit that anyone in their life could have than to read the Bible every day, than to spend time with God through prayer and in His Word every day. So we make a big deal out of the Bible. We hold the Bible up as the foremost authority in our lives. We believe and we teach at Grace that if you're walking with God, that you won't allow anything into your life until it's filtered through Scripture. That the biggest authority in your life of whether something is right or wrong or good or bad or from God or not is to go to Scripture and see what does it say. The entire church is built around the teachings of the Bible. Wars have been fought over it. People have died to preserve it. So it's worth asking the question, why is the Bible such a big deal? Well, the short answer is this. The Bible is a big deal because it's God's special revelation to us. We make such a fuss out of the Bible. The Bible is a big deal because it is God's special revelation to us. Now, here's what I mean. That word revelation, we're already getting into some technical Christian terms. That's not really a Christian term. That just means something that's revealed. It's the same root word there. It just means to reveal something. And so what we understand about ourselves and what you understand about you, whether you've ever thought about this or not, is that people can only know about you what you choose to reveal to them, right? If you meet somebody at a dinner party, you know you're never going to talk to them again. You can make up a totally false identity. They'll never know. You can tell them that you used to be a professional ball player. They won't know the difference. They'll Google you later. You won't exist, and it's fine. You'll never have that interaction again. But they only know about you what you choose to reveal about yourself. So when you meet someone in passing, it's just a cursory glance. They only know you by the way that you dress, by what you reveal, by how you present yourself to the world. The more someone is around you, the more they see you react and interact and respond, the more they learn about you and what's there. But again, people can only know about you what you choose to reveal to them about yourself, right? Well, the same is true of God. We can only know about God what he chooses to reveal about himself. And with him, it's in particular no more and no less. So with God, if we understand revelation to be what God chooses to reveal to us about himself, that we would get to know God the same way we would get to know anybody in our life, the same way other people would get to know us, then we have to understand that with God, there's two kinds of revelation. There's general revelation and special revelation. The way that I think about those is this. General revelation makes us aware of the presence of God, and special revelation gives us the details of that presence. General revelation is stuff that everybody can see. And Romans 1 actually sums up general revelation like this. This is what Paul says in Romans 1, looking at verse 19. He says, So he says, listen, God wrote himself in nature. Anybody who looks outward at nature, at the trees, at the seasons, at the rhythms of nature, the way the earth rotates around the sun, at how huge the universe is, at how small it can be, at the miracle of birth, at just the essence of life. As you look at nature, it points to a creator God. And as you look inward on what is written in your nature, it points to a creator God. Our moral compass, the fact that every civilization ever has prized bravery and bemoaned cowardice, has said that telling the truth is good and that being deceptive is bad. That moral code was written on our hearts by God. On our hearts, we have a longing for our Creator. So whether we look without or within, when we look at nature, God has written himself in nature. That is his general revelation, making all of us aware of his existence. But his special revelation, where he gives us the details of that existence, that's in the Bible. And here's what's incredible about that. What if we didn't have the Bible? What if we didn't know the details of this God that exists? Then he would just be to us this being that existed distant and cold, who had the authority to punish us, to start our life and to take our life, to manipulate circumstances to make us joyful or to make us miserable. It would be a God that we would hope to try to appease, but we wouldn't really know who he was. It would be a God that would inevitably incur fear and myth. But in God's goodness, he gave us the Bible. And it gives us the details of his existence. It's in his words that we find out, oh goodness, this God that created me loves me. This God that created me actually only created me so that I could spend eternity with him. That's how much he wants to be with me. This God who created me sent his son to die for me. This God who created me is love. He is goodness. He is gracious. He is merciful. This book tells us all we need to know about the God who created us. It is God's special revelation of himself to us. This is why we hold it in such high esteem. Because we believe that in these pages are the very words of God. And that this is, he could have chosen to reveal himself any way he wanted to, but what he chose to do is to reveal himself in the pages of Scripture. And in here we find him and who he is. It's an invitation to know our God better. That's why we make such a big deal out of the Bible. Now, the next question. And this one is important. I hope that some of you guys have asked this. I hope that some of you know some of the answers to this. But I think it's an important question. How did we even get the Bible? How did we get the Bible? How is it that I can go to the store and buy this, and these are the books that God wants in here, and these are the words that God wants in here, and these are the things that were written down however many years ago. How do we even get this? Because I don't know if you know this about the Bible, but the Bible is composed of an Old Testament and a New Testament. It totals 66 books. There's 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament. And you may or may not know, I mean, you probably know that there's been a lot of people who have contributed to writing the Bible, but there's actually over 40 authors that contribute to the Bible. Did you know that the Bible was written over the span of about 1,400 years across three different continents, Africa and Asia and Europe? And that it was written actually in three different languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. And through all of that time, through the span of 1,400 years, through the minds of over 40 authors on three continents and however many different cultures that was, and in three different languages, God inspired this written word. So how did it get to us? It's a fair question. When we talk about how it got to us, we can really talk about it in the Old and the New Testament. The Old Testament is pretty easy. In ancient Israel, there was a ruling body called the Sanhedrin. That was a lot like our Senate. It was made up of different parties. The two most famous parties in the Sanhedrin were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. We've probably heard of those before, at least the Pharisees, I would think. And then there was other little parties that weren't as influential, but were there, the Essenes and the Zealots. You can think of those as like the modern day libertarians. I know that my friend Tom Sartorius will appreciate that very much. But the Sanhedrin was made up of different parties, and those parties ruled Israel. It was a religious rule, not too different from what we see in Muslim countries today. And the Sanhedrin got together somewhere around 250 BC, or maybe a little bit after, and one of the things that they affirmed was that the holy scriptures they had were the Holy Scriptures that would serve as the Old Testament. To them, it was 24 books that they called the Tanakh. To us, it's 39 books that we call the Old Testament, but they're the exact same. They grouped up a bunch of different books that we have separated out together, like Kings and Chronicles was one book, and now it's four. So they would group things together like that, but it's the same. Our 39 books are the same 24 books that they affirmed in 250 BC. And the Sanhedrin looked around and voted and they said, this is it. These are the Holy Scriptures. This is the Tanakh, the law and the prophets. In the New Testament, when we hear Jesus or one of the other writers refer to the law and the prophets, he's referring to the Old Testament, to the Tanakh. And that Old Testament has not been changed since 250 BC when they affirmed it. And the last book was Malachi, and it was written around 400 BC. So it had already existed as one big volume of works for at least 150 years before they ever addressed it. It hasn't changed since 400 BC, and it's not going to change in the future. The Old Testament is done, and that's how we got it. Now, the New Testament is interesting too, because at the time of Christ, there was a lot of writings. There's a lot of people writing a lot of different things. And after Christ left the scene, there was one universal church. We call it the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church was structured. They say that there was a pope in the line of succession of Peter, that there was the next guy who was in charge of the church, and the next guy after that. And then there's bishops all that fan out depending on where the church is based on geography. And every now and again, they would have what was called councils. And all the leaders from all the different churches and parishes, I suppose, and all the different areas would get together in this one city and they would debate theological ideas. And they would decide, this is something that the whole church believes. This is something that we are going to cast aside. An example of this is the Council of Nicaea, where they decided without a doubt that Christ is God. Before that, there was some disagreement in the church. Some people thought that Christ was simply a man, that he was a prophet, like the Islam religion claims that he is. Other people say, no, he is deity. He is God incarnate in the flesh. So they got together, they talked about it, they voted on it, and they decided moving forward, the Christian church believes that Jesus is the Son of God. It's a really pivotal council, and we still affirm that. But what we find is that towards about 393 and 398, there was two councils, the Council of Hippo and the Council of Carthage, where those people got together and they voted on what books were going to be included in the New Testament. This is called the canonization of Scripture, the complete, done, codified work. And they voted on which books would be included. And what's important to point out here is it wasn't like they all brought 60 books to the table and then they slowly whittled it down to these 27. They voted on the 27 books that we commonly accept as Scripture that were commonly accepted then. All they did is agree on what was essentially already agreed upon. If you don't believe me, I actually have a quote this morning. I don't do this a lot, okay? I don't belabor things like this a lot because I think they're boring and no one cares. But I think this morning it's important. I've got a quote for you by a guy named F.F. Bruce. You know he's important because he doesn't use a name. It's just his initials. And in the church world, that means you're super smart and also pretentious. Get over yourself, F.F. But F.F. Bruce said this about the councils, and I think it's great. Read with me here. That's a big, long, fancy way of saying they didn't introduce any new ideas. All they did is put a rubber stamp on, yep, these are the books that we hold as Holy Scripture. And it's the same 27 books that we have today. They affirmed 27 books in the New Testament. We have those same 27 books now. So that's how we got the Old Testament and the New Testament. You may want to know, another question you should ask is, how did they determine which books were allowed in? What was the criteria? Well, for a book to be included in the canon, it had to be apostolic, harmonious, accepted, and inspired. Again, for a book to be included in the New Testament, it had to meet these requirements. It had to be apostolic, had to be harmonious, had to be commonly accepted, and it had to be inspired. And when I say apostolic, what I mean is this. An apostle is someone who has an eyewitness account of Christ. So for a book to be apostolic, it has to be written by someone who has seen Jesus in the flesh, which is a really easy way to say that the canon is closed. Can God appear to somebody and speak to someone and ask them to write something down on his behalf? Sure he could if he wanted to, but he doesn't do that anymore in a way that's going to be included in Scripture. We're not going to add to the Bible because one of the ways to get included in the New Testament is to be someone who's an eyewitness of Christ. And since all those people are dead, we're not accepting any more entries in the Bible. It has to be harmonious, meaning it has to agree with other books that are accepted in Scripture. It can't disagree with the Tanakh. It can't disagree with the teachings in the Old Testament. It can't disagree with the teachings and the quotes of Jesus. The Gospels were the first New Testament books written, so it can't disagree with any of those. It has to be in harmony with the rest of the books included. It's got to be accepted, meaning there's no surprises at these councils. Nobody brought this thing that was written down by somebody else and said, hey, would you consider this? The books that were agreed upon in Hippo and in Carthage were books that everybody was already familiar with, that those guys had taught their congregations out of many, many times. They were commonly accepted books. And then they had to be inspired. And really, the first three things are ways to determine if they felt like it was inspired by God. And this is an important word. We talk about the Bible being inspired. But I don't know how often we talk about what that means. Did God take over the minds of these men and these women and they wrote it down verbatim as the Holy Spirit spoke it to them? Was God basically dictating to them what the Bible was supposed to say? The way that we think about inspiration and how it works, and I hold this with a loose hand because it's hard to be certain how inspiration works. The only people who can explain it to us are people who never wrote the Bible. So it's just guesses. But the fancy word for it, if you're interested in such a thing, is verbal plenary inspiration. And basically what it means is the Holy Spirit guides your thoughts and your ideas and then your personality and your intellect takes over and expresses those things. So the Holy Spirit's gonna present an idea to Paul and he's gonna write it out and it's gonna look a lot different than when James writes something out or when David writes something out or when Solomon writes something out. It's almost like if you were to go to the field next to the church. Now, a lot of you haven't been here in so long that you've forgotten that there's a field over there, but there is. It'd be like going to that field and telling you to take a lap once in an SUV and once in a sports car. The journey is going to be the same. The lap's going to be the same, but the experience in that lap is going to be different based, and that lap is going to be different based on the car that you took. It's going to feel different in the SUV. It's going to get done in a different amount of time. It's going to feel different in the sports car. It's the same way with translation and or with inspiration. God speaks to one person, and the way that that person writes it down is going to be different than the way that this person writes it down. But the path and the impact and the point are the same. So in that way, God breathed Scripture into these authors by directing their thoughts and directing their hearts and their heads to the ideas that he wanted them to write down. So it's not unless a book is inspired, is harmonious, is accepted, and is apostolic do we include it in the New Testament. That's how we got our Bible. And the last question I want to address today is how do we know we can trust it? And this is an important question. How do we know that this book that I hold in my hands is the same book, that these 39 books are the exact same as they were when they got approved by the Sanhedrin in 250 BC? How do I know that when I quote Genesis, it's the same Genesis that Jesus is quoting? How do I know that when I read the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 2,000 years later, that those are the actual words that Jesus spoke? How do I know that the letter that Paul wrote to Romans has been preserved enough over the years so that when I open up Romans 1, 19 through 20 and read to you what Paul said, that it's the same thing the church in the first century was hearing? How do we know that we can trust this book? It's an important question. I would think that there's really three main factors that help us understand how we can trust the Bible. The three biggest reasons we can trust the Bible we hold in our hands are preservation, consistency, and evidence. The three biggest reasons that I know we can trust this are preservation, consistency, and evidence. Here's what I mean. You guys may not know this. I find this fascinating. If you don't find this fascinating, I'm sorry. We're talking about Sabbath next week, and I'm real excited for it. But the preservation of Scripture, to me, is so crucial and interesting and vital that it's worth understanding how it happened. You may remember from reading the New Testament that sometimes there's these two groups of people that are put together, the scribes and the Pharisees. What you may not know is that to be a scribe was actually a full-on religious profession. It was a whole profession to be a scribe. And the whole job of a scribe is not necessarily to write new things, but to simply copy things that existed. The only way to get more copies of the book of Genesis is for someone to sit down and painstakingly copy by hand the book of Genesis, right? Gutenberg hadn't been around yet. We didn't have copiers, so we had to write things down by hand. And the process of doing this was excruciatingly detailed. And again, these are men, it was just men in that day, who have dedicated their entire lives to copying Scripture. And they had very strict rules around how they did it. The foremost rule that I've always appreciated is if they made a single mistake at all, no scratching out and moving on and writing a little note about what you meant, any mistake in the manuscript, you destroyed the whole thing. You burned the whole thing. Now listen, we might think, oh gosh, that sounds tedious at first, but I don't think you understand how tedious. Think about if I asked you, if it was your job in 2021 to hand copy the book of Genesis to perfection. Take the book of Genesis. It's about 50 chapters. I want you to write it out word for word. I want you to look at it in your Bible and I want you to write it down. You have to write it down in such a way that it's going to be legible and easy to read in a hundred years. There can't be anybody a hundred years from now that can't tell if that's a G or a C or an E or an F. It needs to be clear and legible. And if there's a single mistake at all, if you put a comma in the wrong part, if you put the quotations outside the period and they should be inside the period, whatever you do, if there's any mistakes, you have to destroy it and start over. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to nail 43 chapters and in the 44th chapter you write a T instead of an S and you have to destroy the whole thing? That's what they would do. That's how serious they were about this work. Whenever they would approach the word Yahweh, they would stop and get up from their desk and put their pen down and go and wash their hands and pray a prayer and make sure they were ceremonially clean before they would write it down. When they would finish a document to check it, they knew exactly how many words were in the book. If we're using Genesis, they knew exactly how many words were in Genesis. So they'd finish it. It's perfect. It's two years of effort. And then they would start the counting. And they knew how many words had to be in their manuscript and how many words were in the original one. They knew that. And if it was wrong, if the count was off by one word, no matter what, you destroy those years of effort and you start over. They knew the middle word. If there's 50,000 words, they knew the 25,000th word. And they would count to it. And then in the new manuscript, they would count back to it. And if the middle word didn't match up, they would destroy the copy as imperfect. And it seems tedious, and maybe it seems over the top, but here's the thing. It worked. And we get affirmations every so often of just how well it worked. I won't chase this rabbit hole too much because it gets into the weeds, but suffice it to say that in terms of manuscripts, the older ones you can find, the better off you are. The older you can find it, the closer to the original it is, right? If you find some manuscripts that are 1,000 years old, that means that things were written 1,000 years before that. They're a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, right? But if you can find something that's 1,800 years old, so the original was only written 200 years before that, well, now it's a copy of a copy. So the older it is, the more accurate it is. And there have been multiple times in the Christian world where we have translated our Bibles based on the oldest manuscripts that we could find and translated them all out and had them and they've been published and on the shelves for us to pick up and read. And then something will happen, like what happened with the Dead Sea Scrolls, I believe in the 1930s. And they'll find these scrolls that predate the ones that we've already found. They're actually older than the oldest ones that we have. And so then they frantically check, oh my gosh, these ones that we have, are they accurate to the older ones? And what they found out is that within 99.9%, they're accurate. That the newer ones we have are accurate to the old ones that we find every couple of years. Which means that this preservation, over time, it worked. It's accurate. The words that we read here are the very ones that were written by Paul, are the very things that were said by Jesus, are the very words of David that were quoted by Matthew. The words that we read are the ones that are written. This has been proven over and over again. We can also trust the Bible because of its consistency, because of how unified its message is. I've told you already that it was written by over 40 authors over the span of 1,400 years, over three continents, with three languages. And yet, there is not a single irreconcilable difference between any of the books or any of the words. And yet, it is entirely consistent with itself. It was written over that great span of time, yet not a single one of those authors introduced an idea that can't be supported by another author or that goes against what one of the other authors said. How can this be possible unless there is one author overseeing the writing of all of it? How can it be possible that all these men over all these cultures with all these languages and all these years can come together and produce one sound document that has no inconsistencies unless there's been one person orchestrating the writing of it all. And there are people who have dedicated their lives to tearing this book down. There are people who have dedicated their adult lives to finding imperfections in the text, to finding contradictions here that don't exist. There are emperors who have tried to burn it. There are societies who have tried to get rid of it. But the Bible stands the test of time. It's still here. It's still trustworthy. It's still the things that Jesus said back when he said them. And because of its consistency, we know that we can trust it. Finally, there's evidence. I won't get too far in the weeds on this, but do you know that the Bible, hundreds of years before it ever existed, I think Daniel is the one who primarily does this. Do you know the Bible predicts Alexander the Great and the Grecian Empire? And that the Bible predicts the Roman Empire? You know, we find artifacts all the time that show us that the stories in the Bible are true. I've been over to Israel and they take you from Jerusalem down this road through the valley of the shadow of death to get to this little town called Jericho. And if you know your old Bible, your old Bible, your Old Testament well, you'll know that Joshua marched around the walls of Jericho seven times and then the walls fell. And if you go to Jericho today and you look at where they've excavated the wall and you can see the layers of it all the way down to the very bottom, that when you get close to the bottom down there, that there is a layer about this thick of ash and char. I've seen it with my own eyes from the time Jericho was burned to the ground, just like it says in the book of Joshua. In the 60s, a mathematician put this experiment together, and I've always found it to be really interesting. It's not an experiment, it's just an illustration of the prophecies in the Old Testament. If you take all the prophecies in the Old Testament that are about the Messiah, that by his stripes he will be healed, that he will be born of a virgin, that he'll be from both Nazareth and Bethlehem, that he'll be from the line of David. If you take all of the prophecies that are made about Jesus in the Old Testament, that are made about this messianic figure in the Old Testament, and you try to have one life that could possibly fulfill all of those prophecies, that the statistical probability of that, of one person fulfilling all of the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled, is the same as covering the state of Texas a foot deep, it's either a foot deep or three feet deep, in silver dollars. You paint one of those silver dollars red and you just drop it in there with the rest of them. Then you get on a plane, you fly over Texas, you parachute down, you land on the coins, you bend down and you pick up the red one. There's the same chances of you doing that as there is of anyone ever living a life that fulfills all the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled. And yet, he lived it. Jesus bears out the truth of Scripture. We see in Jesus' life enough evidence to know that everything around that is true. So I think, and I've come to a place where I believe we can trust Scripture because we can trust the preservation of it, we can trust the consistency of it, and we can trust the evidence that bears out from it. Now, I'll tell you this, for the extra nerdy ones, I actually have a whole class that I developed that I did a lifetime ago in apologetics, and I have about 12 pages of notes. I only shared with you guys like four pages of notes this morning. If you want more on this stuff, if you want to go more in depth, let me know and I'll email that to you. If you have other questions, let me know and I will respond to those. But it feels appropriate to close out this sermon by offering you a little challenge. We've looked at the Bible. We've asked the questions. How can we trust it? Why is it such a big deal? It's the inspired word of God. It's a special revelation to us. We got it through a trustworthy series of events that have rendered it whole, and now we can trust it because of all the reasons that I just went through. And so it seems appropriate to issue this challenge to you in 2021. You may already be a couple days behind and that's all right, but here's the thing. Here's your challenge. I want to challenge you guys to read more of the Bible this year than you ever have before. That's the challenge. That's the challenge for us at Grace. I'm going to engage in that. I want to challenge you to read more of the Bible this year than you ever have before in a single year. That's going to mean different things for different people. You may be thinking to yourself, well, that's great. I've never read the Bible before. All right, well, then it's a low bar for you. Enjoy your success. I hope that it would continue. Set the bar higher for future years, but take a step. A lot of us are the kind of people who have sat down a bunch of times determined to read the Bible. Let this be the time that it sticks. Find a good pace that you can go at, a good rhythm for yourself. Let the Bible read itself to you. On the Bible app, you can have it read itself to you in your car or on your walk. I'm going to read through the Bible this year. I started last year and then I fell off the wagon. I'm going to make it my goal to read through the Bible this year. I'm just going to listen to the Bible this year in addition to what I'm reading on a regular basis. And it's worth stating that the Bible was actually written to be read aloud. So listening to it is a really good way to consume Scripture. If you're one who reads the Bible regularly, step it up. Let's let 2021 be the year that we read more of the Bible than we ever have. That's my challenge to you. All right, next week I'm going to come back and we're going to talk about this idea of Sabbath. What is it and why is it so important? But for now, I'm going to pray and we're going to close out the service with one more song. Pray with me. Father, we love you. Thank you so much for your word. Thank you that we can trust it. Thank you that we can build our lives on it. Thank you that it will never let us down. Thank you that it has stood the test of time and is trustworthy. Father, if we have any other questions about your word, give us the courage and the tenacity to seek those out. Give us the humility to accept what is true. Give us the clarity to reject what isn't. God, I pray once again that as we go throughout our weeks this week, that we would be people and instruments of peace for you in this country and a time when we need it so badly. God, thank you for your word. Make us students of it. Develop in us a hunger for it. In Jesus' name, amen.

It's good to get to be back with you in the saddle preaching live. I've been excited for this morning and I'm excited for this series. This series, Things You Should Know, I think that's what we're calling it. Yeah, it's right there on the screen next to me. Things You Should Know. I forgot what we named it back in the beginning of December, but I haven't forgotten what it's about. And it's based on this idea that there's things that we should all know as Christians, or that we at least nod along with as Christians, that we pretend that we know, that we may not actually know, right? Like there's a kind of a Christianese and another language that's spoken around churches. And I think sometimes we just kind of nod along with that because we don't want to look or feel dumb. And I know how it goes. I mean, you join a small group for the first time. You haven't really been involved in church in a while or just kind of cursory involvement. And then you show up in a small group and people start talking about stuff. And you might not know what they're talking about, but you don't want to feel dumb or silly or uninformed or make yourself look bad. So you don't say anything. And then you've been there so long that now I have to be one of the people that knows these things too. And so we just kind of nod along when people talk about grace and mercy or throw out Bible words like sanctification, and we just kind of act like we know what they're talking about when sometimes we really don't. And one of the things that I want you to know is that it's okay not to know stuff. It's actually really great to ask questions. One of my favorite things to do is to have my men's Bible study and have people in that study who are not very familiar with the text that we're covering because the questions that they ask are the best, but you have to be brave to ask questions because when you ask a question, you're admitting that I don't know this thing. And there's some stuff in the church that I think we nod along with, that we act like we know, when maybe we don't. And we want to be brave for you this month and ask those questions for you this month. And so this morning, the title of the sermon is simply the Bible. Questions that we might have about the Bible. I'm going to look at three questions that I think everybody has about Scripture that we might not know the answers to, but that I think every Christian should know. And now I'll warn you up front, this is not a normal sermon. This is far more informative. It's informational, this sermon is. The things that I'm going to share with you this morning are things that I wasn't exposed to until I was in Bible college, taking theology classes, or in grad school, in seminary, taking more theology classes. And there's a lot more to it than what we're going to cover this morning, but I wanted to take a morning, one Sunday, and address with you some common questions about the Bible, because again, I think every believer should know the answers to these questions. So I'll say up front, for some of you, you're going to love this. You're going to love it. Your notebook is out. You're ready. You're going to write these things down, and if you're a note taker, there's going to be a lot to write down. So get ready. Get your best possible pen. Some of you might not love this. This might not be your thing. And just to know, just for you to know, when I was praying before the sermon, my final words to God were, Father, make this helpful. And if it's not helpful, make it quick. Okay, so I'm with you. There's a lot of information, but I think you need to know this stuff, and I hope that you'll be interested in it. And actually, I want to know what you learned this morning. If I tell you something that you didn't know before, email me and tell me what you learned and tell me what you enjoyed. If there's other questions that you've always wanted to ask, email me and ask those questions. You can even tell me that I heard my friend ask this, so you don't even have to throw yourself under the bus. But get those questions to me. Get your responses to me. I want us to interact with the things we're talking about in this series. But I said I was going to give you three questions about the Bible that I think we should all be able to answer. And the first one is this. Why is the Bible a big deal? Why is the Bible such a big deal? Why do we make such a fuss about it? And it may seem like I'm going too simple on this, but I think it's an important question. Think about it. Think about where we place the Bible in our lives. I tell you guys all the time that there's no greater habit that anyone in their life could have than to read the Bible every day, than to spend time with God through prayer and in His Word every day. So we make a big deal out of the Bible. We hold the Bible up as the foremost authority in our lives. We believe and we teach at Grace that if you're walking with God, that you won't allow anything into your life until it's filtered through Scripture. That the biggest authority in your life of whether something is right or wrong or good or bad or from God or not is to go to Scripture and see what does it say. The entire church is built around the teachings of the Bible. Wars have been fought over it. People have died to preserve it. So it's worth asking the question, why is the Bible such a big deal? Well, the short answer is this. The Bible is a big deal because it's God's special revelation to us. We make such a fuss out of the Bible. The Bible is a big deal because it is God's special revelation to us. Now, here's what I mean. That word revelation, we're already getting into some technical Christian terms. That's not really a Christian term. That just means something that's revealed. It's the same root word there. It just means to reveal something. And so what we understand about ourselves and what you understand about you, whether you've ever thought about this or not, is that people can only know about you what you choose to reveal to them, right? If you meet somebody at a dinner party, you know you're never going to talk to them again. You can make up a totally false identity. They'll never know. You can tell them that you used to be a professional ball player. They won't know the difference. They'll Google you later. You won't exist, and it's fine. You'll never have that interaction again. But they only know about you what you choose to reveal about yourself. So when you meet someone in passing, it's just a cursory glance. They only know you by the way that you dress, by what you reveal, by how you present yourself to the world. The more someone is around you, the more they see you react and interact and respond, the more they learn about you and what's there. But again, people can only know about you what you choose to reveal to them about yourself, right? Well, the same is true of God. We can only know about God what he chooses to reveal about himself. And with him, it's in particular no more and no less. So with God, if we understand revelation to be what God chooses to reveal to us about himself, that we would get to know God the same way we would get to know anybody in our life, the same way other people would get to know us, then we have to understand that with God, there's two kinds of revelation. There's general revelation and special revelation. The way that I think about those is this. General revelation makes us aware of the presence of God, and special revelation gives us the details of that presence. General revelation is stuff that everybody can see. And Romans 1 actually sums up general revelation like this. This is what Paul says in Romans 1, looking at verse 19. He says, So he says, listen, God wrote himself in nature. Anybody who looks outward at nature, at the trees, at the seasons, at the rhythms of nature, the way the earth rotates around the sun, at how huge the universe is, at how small it can be, at the miracle of birth, at just the essence of life. As you look at nature, it points to a creator God. And as you look inward on what is written in your nature, it points to a creator God. Our moral compass, the fact that every civilization ever has prized bravery and bemoaned cowardice, has said that telling the truth is good and that being deceptive is bad. That moral code was written on our hearts by God. On our hearts, we have a longing for our Creator. So whether we look without or within, when we look at nature, God has written himself in nature. That is his general revelation, making all of us aware of his existence. But his special revelation, where he gives us the details of that existence, that's in the Bible. And here's what's incredible about that. What if we didn't have the Bible? What if we didn't know the details of this God that exists? Then he would just be to us this being that existed distant and cold, who had the authority to punish us, to start our life and to take our life, to manipulate circumstances to make us joyful or to make us miserable. It would be a God that we would hope to try to appease, but we wouldn't really know who he was. It would be a God that would inevitably incur fear and myth. But in God's goodness, he gave us the Bible. And it gives us the details of his existence. It's in his words that we find out, oh goodness, this God that created me loves me. This God that created me actually only created me so that I could spend eternity with him. That's how much he wants to be with me. This God who created me sent his son to die for me. This God who created me is love. He is goodness. He is gracious. He is merciful. This book tells us all we need to know about the God who created us. It is God's special revelation of himself to us. This is why we hold it in such high esteem. Because we believe that in these pages are the very words of God. And that this is, he could have chosen to reveal himself any way he wanted to, but what he chose to do is to reveal himself in the pages of Scripture. And in here we find him and who he is. It's an invitation to know our God better. That's why we make such a big deal out of the Bible. Now, the next question. And this one is important. I hope that some of you guys have asked this. I hope that some of you know some of the answers to this. But I think it's an important question. How did we even get the Bible? How did we get the Bible? How is it that I can go to the store and buy this, and these are the books that God wants in here, and these are the words that God wants in here, and these are the things that were written down however many years ago. How do we even get this? Because I don't know if you know this about the Bible, but the Bible is composed of an Old Testament and a New Testament. It totals 66 books. There's 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament. And you may or may not know, I mean, you probably know that there's been a lot of people who have contributed to writing the Bible, but there's actually over 40 authors that contribute to the Bible. Did you know that the Bible was written over the span of about 1,400 years across three different continents, Africa and Asia and Europe? And that it was written actually in three different languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. And through all of that time, through the span of 1,400 years, through the minds of over 40 authors on three continents and however many different cultures that was, and in three different languages, God inspired this written word. So how did it get to us? It's a fair question. When we talk about how it got to us, we can really talk about it in the Old and the New Testament. The Old Testament is pretty easy. In ancient Israel, there was a ruling body called the Sanhedrin. That was a lot like our Senate. It was made up of different parties. The two most famous parties in the Sanhedrin were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. We've probably heard of those before, at least the Pharisees, I would think. And then there was other little parties that weren't as influential, but were there, the Essenes and the Zealots. You can think of those as like the modern day libertarians. I know that my friend Tom Sartorius will appreciate that very much. But the Sanhedrin was made up of different parties, and those parties ruled Israel. It was a religious rule, not too different from what we see in Muslim countries today. And the Sanhedrin got together somewhere around 250 BC, or maybe a little bit after, and one of the things that they affirmed was that the holy scriptures they had were the Holy Scriptures that would serve as the Old Testament. To them, it was 24 books that they called the Tanakh. To us, it's 39 books that we call the Old Testament, but they're the exact same. They grouped up a bunch of different books that we have separated out together, like Kings and Chronicles was one book, and now it's four. So they would group things together like that, but it's the same. Our 39 books are the same 24 books that they affirmed in 250 BC. And the Sanhedrin looked around and voted and they said, this is it. These are the Holy Scriptures. This is the Tanakh, the law and the prophets. In the New Testament, when we hear Jesus or one of the other writers refer to the law and the prophets, he's referring to the Old Testament, to the Tanakh. And that Old Testament has not been changed since 250 BC when they affirmed it. And the last book was Malachi, and it was written around 400 BC. So it had already existed as one big volume of works for at least 150 years before they ever addressed it. It hasn't changed since 400 BC, and it's not going to change in the future. The Old Testament is done, and that's how we got it. Now, the New Testament is interesting too, because at the time of Christ, there was a lot of writings. There's a lot of people writing a lot of different things. And after Christ left the scene, there was one universal church. We call it the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church was structured. They say that there was a pope in the line of succession of Peter, that there was the next guy who was in charge of the church, and the next guy after that. And then there's bishops all that fan out depending on where the church is based on geography. And every now and again, they would have what was called councils. And all the leaders from all the different churches and parishes, I suppose, and all the different areas would get together in this one city and they would debate theological ideas. And they would decide, this is something that the whole church believes. This is something that we are going to cast aside. An example of this is the Council of Nicaea, where they decided without a doubt that Christ is God. Before that, there was some disagreement in the church. Some people thought that Christ was simply a man, that he was a prophet, like the Islam religion claims that he is. Other people say, no, he is deity. He is God incarnate in the flesh. So they got together, they talked about it, they voted on it, and they decided moving forward, the Christian church believes that Jesus is the Son of God. It's a really pivotal council, and we still affirm that. But what we find is that towards about 393 and 398, there was two councils, the Council of Hippo and the Council of Carthage, where those people got together and they voted on what books were going to be included in the New Testament. This is called the canonization of Scripture, the complete, done, codified work. And they voted on which books would be included. And what's important to point out here is it wasn't like they all brought 60 books to the table and then they slowly whittled it down to these 27. They voted on the 27 books that we commonly accept as Scripture that were commonly accepted then. All they did is agree on what was essentially already agreed upon. If you don't believe me, I actually have a quote this morning. I don't do this a lot, okay? I don't belabor things like this a lot because I think they're boring and no one cares. But I think this morning it's important. I've got a quote for you by a guy named F.F. Bruce. You know he's important because he doesn't use a name. It's just his initials. And in the church world, that means you're super smart and also pretentious. Get over yourself, F.F. But F.F. Bruce said this about the councils, and I think it's great. Read with me here. That's a big, long, fancy way of saying they didn't introduce any new ideas. All they did is put a rubber stamp on, yep, these are the books that we hold as Holy Scripture. And it's the same 27 books that we have today. They affirmed 27 books in the New Testament. We have those same 27 books now. So that's how we got the Old Testament and the New Testament. You may want to know, another question you should ask is, how did they determine which books were allowed in? What was the criteria? Well, for a book to be included in the canon, it had to be apostolic, harmonious, accepted, and inspired. Again, for a book to be included in the New Testament, it had to meet these requirements. It had to be apostolic, had to be harmonious, had to be commonly accepted, and it had to be inspired. And when I say apostolic, what I mean is this. An apostle is someone who has an eyewitness account of Christ. So for a book to be apostolic, it has to be written by someone who has seen Jesus in the flesh, which is a really easy way to say that the canon is closed. Can God appear to somebody and speak to someone and ask them to write something down on his behalf? Sure he could if he wanted to, but he doesn't do that anymore in a way that's going to be included in Scripture. We're not going to add to the Bible because one of the ways to get included in the New Testament is to be someone who's an eyewitness of Christ. And since all those people are dead, we're not accepting any more entries in the Bible. It has to be harmonious, meaning it has to agree with other books that are accepted in Scripture. It can't disagree with the Tanakh. It can't disagree with the teachings in the Old Testament. It can't disagree with the teachings and the quotes of Jesus. The Gospels were the first New Testament books written, so it can't disagree with any of those. It has to be in harmony with the rest of the books included. It's got to be accepted, meaning there's no surprises at these councils. Nobody brought this thing that was written down by somebody else and said, hey, would you consider this? The books that were agreed upon in Hippo and in Carthage were books that everybody was already familiar with, that those guys had taught their congregations out of many, many times. They were commonly accepted books. And then they had to be inspired. And really, the first three things are ways to determine if they felt like it was inspired by God. And this is an important word. We talk about the Bible being inspired. But I don't know how often we talk about what that means. Did God take over the minds of these men and these women and they wrote it down verbatim as the Holy Spirit spoke it to them? Was God basically dictating to them what the Bible was supposed to say? The way that we think about inspiration and how it works, and I hold this with a loose hand because it's hard to be certain how inspiration works. The only people who can explain it to us are people who never wrote the Bible. So it's just guesses. But the fancy word for it, if you're interested in such a thing, is verbal plenary inspiration. And basically what it means is the Holy Spirit guides your thoughts and your ideas and then your personality and your intellect takes over and expresses those things. So the Holy Spirit's gonna present an idea to Paul and he's gonna write it out and it's gonna look a lot different than when James writes something out or when David writes something out or when Solomon writes something out. It's almost like if you were to go to the field next to the church. Now, a lot of you haven't been here in so long that you've forgotten that there's a field over there, but there is. It'd be like going to that field and telling you to take a lap once in an SUV and once in a sports car. The journey is going to be the same. The lap's going to be the same, but the experience in that lap is going to be different based, and that lap is going to be different based on the car that you took. It's going to feel different in the SUV. It's going to get done in a different amount of time. It's going to feel different in the sports car. It's the same way with translation and or with inspiration. God speaks to one person, and the way that that person writes it down is going to be different than the way that this person writes it down. But the path and the impact and the point are the same. So in that way, God breathed Scripture into these authors by directing their thoughts and directing their hearts and their heads to the ideas that he wanted them to write down. So it's not unless a book is inspired, is harmonious, is accepted, and is apostolic do we include it in the New Testament. That's how we got our Bible. And the last question I want to address today is how do we know we can trust it? And this is an important question. How do we know that this book that I hold in my hands is the same book, that these 39 books are the exact same as they were when they got approved by the Sanhedrin in 250 BC? How do I know that when I quote Genesis, it's the same Genesis that Jesus is quoting? How do I know that when I read the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 2,000 years later, that those are the actual words that Jesus spoke? How do I know that the letter that Paul wrote to Romans has been preserved enough over the years so that when I open up Romans 1, 19 through 20 and read to you what Paul said, that it's the same thing the church in the first century was hearing? How do we know that we can trust this book? It's an important question. I would think that there's really three main factors that help us understand how we can trust the Bible. The three biggest reasons we can trust the Bible we hold in our hands are preservation, consistency, and evidence. The three biggest reasons that I know we can trust this are preservation, consistency, and evidence. Here's what I mean. You guys may not know this. I find this fascinating. If you don't find this fascinating, I'm sorry. We're talking about Sabbath next week, and I'm real excited for it. But the preservation of Scripture, to me, is so crucial and interesting and vital that it's worth understanding how it happened. You may remember from reading the New Testament that sometimes there's these two groups of people that are put together, the scribes and the Pharisees. What you may not know is that to be a scribe was actually a full-on religious profession. It was a whole profession to be a scribe. And the whole job of a scribe is not necessarily to write new things, but to simply copy things that existed. The only way to get more copies of the book of Genesis is for someone to sit down and painstakingly copy by hand the book of Genesis, right? Gutenberg hadn't been around yet. We didn't have copiers, so we had to write things down by hand. And the process of doing this was excruciatingly detailed. And again, these are men, it was just men in that day, who have dedicated their entire lives to copying Scripture. And they had very strict rules around how they did it. The foremost rule that I've always appreciated is if they made a single mistake at all, no scratching out and moving on and writing a little note about what you meant, any mistake in the manuscript, you destroyed the whole thing. You burned the whole thing. Now listen, we might think, oh gosh, that sounds tedious at first, but I don't think you understand how tedious. Think about if I asked you, if it was your job in 2021 to hand copy the book of Genesis to perfection. Take the book of Genesis. It's about 50 chapters. I want you to write it out word for word. I want you to look at it in your Bible and I want you to write it down. You have to write it down in such a way that it's going to be legible and easy to read in a hundred years. There can't be anybody a hundred years from now that can't tell if that's a G or a C or an E or an F. It needs to be clear and legible. And if there's a single mistake at all, if you put a comma in the wrong part, if you put the quotations outside the period and they should be inside the period, whatever you do, if there's any mistakes, you have to destroy it and start over. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to nail 43 chapters and in the 44th chapter you write a T instead of an S and you have to destroy the whole thing? That's what they would do. That's how serious they were about this work. Whenever they would approach the word Yahweh, they would stop and get up from their desk and put their pen down and go and wash their hands and pray a prayer and make sure they were ceremonially clean before they would write it down. When they would finish a document to check it, they knew exactly how many words were in the book. If we're using Genesis, they knew exactly how many words were in Genesis. So they'd finish it. It's perfect. It's two years of effort. And then they would start the counting. And they knew how many words had to be in their manuscript and how many words were in the original one. They knew that. And if it was wrong, if the count was off by one word, no matter what, you destroy those years of effort and you start over. They knew the middle word. If there's 50,000 words, they knew the 25,000th word. And they would count to it. And then in the new manuscript, they would count back to it. And if the middle word didn't match up, they would destroy the copy as imperfect. And it seems tedious, and maybe it seems over the top, but here's the thing. It worked. And we get affirmations every so often of just how well it worked. I won't chase this rabbit hole too much because it gets into the weeds, but suffice it to say that in terms of manuscripts, the older ones you can find, the better off you are. The older you can find it, the closer to the original it is, right? If you find some manuscripts that are 1,000 years old, that means that things were written 1,000 years before that. They're a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, right? But if you can find something that's 1,800 years old, so the original was only written 200 years before that, well, now it's a copy of a copy. So the older it is, the more accurate it is. And there have been multiple times in the Christian world where we have translated our Bibles based on the oldest manuscripts that we could find and translated them all out and had them and they've been published and on the shelves for us to pick up and read. And then something will happen, like what happened with the Dead Sea Scrolls, I believe in the 1930s. And they'll find these scrolls that predate the ones that we've already found. They're actually older than the oldest ones that we have. And so then they frantically check, oh my gosh, these ones that we have, are they accurate to the older ones? And what they found out is that within 99.9%, they're accurate. That the newer ones we have are accurate to the old ones that we find every couple of years. Which means that this preservation, over time, it worked. It's accurate. The words that we read here are the very ones that were written by Paul, are the very things that were said by Jesus, are the very words of David that were quoted by Matthew. The words that we read are the ones that are written. This has been proven over and over again. We can also trust the Bible because of its consistency, because of how unified its message is. I've told you already that it was written by over 40 authors over the span of 1,400 years, over three continents, with three languages. And yet, there is not a single irreconcilable difference between any of the books or any of the words. And yet, it is entirely consistent with itself. It was written over that great span of time, yet not a single one of those authors introduced an idea that can't be supported by another author or that goes against what one of the other authors said. How can this be possible unless there is one author overseeing the writing of all of it? How can it be possible that all these men over all these cultures with all these languages and all these years can come together and produce one sound document that has no inconsistencies unless there's been one person orchestrating the writing of it all. And there are people who have dedicated their lives to tearing this book down. There are people who have dedicated their adult lives to finding imperfections in the text, to finding contradictions here that don't exist. There are emperors who have tried to burn it. There are societies who have tried to get rid of it. But the Bible stands the test of time. It's still here. It's still trustworthy. It's still the things that Jesus said back when he said them. And because of its consistency, we know that we can trust it. Finally, there's evidence. I won't get too far in the weeds on this, but do you know that the Bible, hundreds of years before it ever existed, I think Daniel is the one who primarily does this. Do you know the Bible predicts Alexander the Great and the Grecian Empire? And that the Bible predicts the Roman Empire? You know, we find artifacts all the time that show us that the stories in the Bible are true. I've been over to Israel and they take you from Jerusalem down this road through the valley of the shadow of death to get to this little town called Jericho. And if you know your old Bible, your old Bible, your Old Testament well, you'll know that Joshua marched around the walls of Jericho seven times and then the walls fell. And if you go to Jericho today and you look at where they've excavated the wall and you can see the layers of it all the way down to the very bottom, that when you get close to the bottom down there, that there is a layer about this thick of ash and char. I've seen it with my own eyes from the time Jericho was burned to the ground, just like it says in the book of Joshua. In the 60s, a mathematician put this experiment together, and I've always found it to be really interesting. It's not an experiment, it's just an illustration of the prophecies in the Old Testament. If you take all the prophecies in the Old Testament that are about the Messiah, that by his stripes he will be healed, that he will be born of a virgin, that he'll be from both Nazareth and Bethlehem, that he'll be from the line of David. If you take all of the prophecies that are made about Jesus in the Old Testament, that are made about this messianic figure in the Old Testament, and you try to have one life that could possibly fulfill all of those prophecies, that the statistical probability of that, of one person fulfilling all of the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled, is the same as covering the state of Texas a foot deep, it's either a foot deep or three feet deep, in silver dollars. You paint one of those silver dollars red and you just drop it in there with the rest of them. Then you get on a plane, you fly over Texas, you parachute down, you land on the coins, you bend down and you pick up the red one. There's the same chances of you doing that as there is of anyone ever living a life that fulfills all the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled. And yet, he lived it. Jesus bears out the truth of Scripture. We see in Jesus' life enough evidence to know that everything around that is true. So I think, and I've come to a place where I believe we can trust Scripture because we can trust the preservation of it, we can trust the consistency of it, and we can trust the evidence that bears out from it. Now, I'll tell you this, for the extra nerdy ones, I actually have a whole class that I developed that I did a lifetime ago in apologetics, and I have about 12 pages of notes. I only shared with you guys like four pages of notes this morning. If you want more on this stuff, if you want to go more in depth, let me know and I'll email that to you. If you have other questions, let me know and I will respond to those. But it feels appropriate to close out this sermon by offering you a little challenge. We've looked at the Bible. We've asked the questions. How can we trust it? Why is it such a big deal? It's the inspired word of God. It's a special revelation to us. We got it through a trustworthy series of events that have rendered it whole, and now we can trust it because of all the reasons that I just went through. And so it seems appropriate to issue this challenge to you in 2021. You may already be a couple days behind and that's all right, but here's the thing. Here's your challenge. I want to challenge you guys to read more of the Bible this year than you ever have before. That's the challenge. That's the challenge for us at Grace. I'm going to engage in that. I want to challenge you to read more of the Bible this year than you ever have before in a single year. That's going to mean different things for different people. You may be thinking to yourself, well, that's great. I've never read the Bible before. All right, well, then it's a low bar for you. Enjoy your success. I hope that it would continue. Set the bar higher for future years, but take a step. A lot of us are the kind of people who have sat down a bunch of times determined to read the Bible. Let this be the time that it sticks. Find a good pace that you can go at, a good rhythm for yourself. Let the Bible read itself to you. On the Bible app, you can have it read itself to you in your car or on your walk. I'm going to read through the Bible this year. I started last year and then I fell off the wagon. I'm going to make it my goal to read through the Bible this year. I'm just going to listen to the Bible this year in addition to what I'm reading on a regular basis. And it's worth stating that the Bible was actually written to be read aloud. So listening to it is a really good way to consume Scripture. If you're one who reads the Bible regularly, step it up. Let's let 2021 be the year that we read more of the Bible than we ever have. That's my challenge to you. All right, next week I'm going to come back and we're going to talk about this idea of Sabbath. What is it and why is it so important? But for now, I'm going to pray and we're going to close out the service with one more song. Pray with me. Father, we love you. Thank you so much for your word. Thank you that we can trust it. Thank you that we can build our lives on it. Thank you that it will never let us down. Thank you that it has stood the test of time and is trustworthy. Father, if we have any other questions about your word, give us the courage and the tenacity to seek those out. Give us the humility to accept what is true. Give us the clarity to reject what isn't. God, I pray once again that as we go throughout our weeks this week, that we would be people and instruments of peace for you in this country and a time when we need it so badly. God, thank you for your word. Make us students of it. Develop in us a hunger for it. In Jesus' name, amen.

This is good. I've been preaching to Steve for 22 weeks on Thursday mornings. This is great. This is the first morning. Jen and I moved into a new house in April, beginning of April. This is the first morning I've woken up in my new house Sunday morning and driven to church and now preach. So this is really, really great. So good morning to you, Grace. Good morning to you online. I wanted to say to those of you who are watching from home and just reiterate, you are every bit as much a participant in what's happening this morning and in this church as anybody who comes in person. And we are now in this new season of life as a church. This is the new season of grace. We are one church that meets in a bunch of different locations, both here and now, like Kyle said, all over the world online now. And this is what church is going to be for the foreseeable future. We're going to be like this for a long time. I don't know if you guys have thought that through, but this is a new season in the life of Grace as a church because we have to be one church in multiple locations. It's going to be a while before everybody feels all the way comfortable coming back. We're going to grow back into a need for children's ministry as that starts back up. And so this is the new season for Grace, which is kind of crazy to say, because I don't know if you know this, the last time we met in person, I was announcing to you the pledge total of our campaign. That's a thing that happened. And then COVID started, and here we are. So even though this plan, the way that 2020 has played out, and this new season of grace that we're facing is not our plan. God knew what was going to happen. His hand has been on us this entire time, and it will continue to be on us. He will continue to be with us. We have always said that God's hand is on grace. He's made it evident that he loves grace, and we are every bit as confident now that his hand remains on grace. And I need nothing more than this. I was talking with Joe as worship started this morning. Joe's the moderator of our board, and I went, this is great. I didn't expect this. All you brave souls to be here, this is wonderful to get to see everybody. So we are excited. And as we move into this new season in the life of grace, I did want to say just thank you a ton. There have been some people working behind the scenes, and whenever you want to call out any one individual person, it gets a little murky because so many people have been doing so very much. We've had people watching our practice online streams and giving feedback. We've had people showing up to work in the booth and help out behind the scenes. We've had Erin, her whole ministry, our children's pastor, has changed and she's just been killing it online. Kyle's switched everything to online. Everybody just up and changed their job in this quarantine and have done so much to push the church forward. But as we started this new season of grace, I would be remiss if I didn't point out to you the hard work of Steve Goldberg, our worship pastor. When we went in March, when we realized, hey, we have to go totally online. We have to find a way to record a sermon, release it online, and be totally online. And we'd like to have a virtual lobby where people can still talk to each other. And also, we need a new webpage. And we need somebody to record the sermon and edit it and upload it and be ready to go. Steve? And then when the elders, when we realized as elders that in June, we're going to have to go live. We're going to have to do a live stream. We really don't have a choice. We're going to have to be able to do this when we come back because when we begin to resume in-person gatherings, because not everyone's going to feel comfortable doing that. There's costs involved. There's technical attitudes involved. There's different things that you have to do. It's a big, huge stressor. And once again, as a church, we went, Steve? And he knocked it out of the park. So his job fundamentally changed in COVID. He has been a huge servant to the church and is the reason, the biggest human reason that we exist as a body right now because of the work that he's done behind the scenes. So we are grateful to Steve. Thank you, Steve, for that. As we jump back into the series, we are in the series called A Time of Kings. We're walking through the Book of Kings. We know it to be the Book of Kings. Our Bible divides it into two, 1 and 2 Kings, but it was originally all one big scroll that got divided in half because it was just too long of a scroll to carry around. This morning, we are in 2 Kings chapter 10. So if you have a Bible there at home, go ahead and turn there. If you have one here in the service, turn to the Bible. The Bible in front of you, in the seat back in front of you, has not been touched for over like six months. So it's good. It's clean. You can touch it. But we're going to be in 2 Kings chapter 10. In this chapter, there's a principle pointed out that reminded me of a book that was written back in 2001. It's almost 20 years old. If you're a business leader, if you're in the corporate world at all, you have probably gone through this book, Good to Great by Jim Collins. It's a great perennial book. It's one of these wonderful leadership books. Incidentally, in these leadership books, whenever you read these leadership books, how to be an effective leader, how to grow an effective company, whatever it is, the result of it is the author will always land on, after different studies by like Duke and Stanford and Yale and whatever else, that to be an effective leader, you need to be humble and lead without an ego. You need to be a servant leader and put others first. These are the most effective leaders we see in the world. And as a believer, you just kind of go like, oh, you mean to lead like Jesus? That's what your research tells you? That's just an aside. But in this book, Good to Great, he looks at companies and he's asking the question, how do companies go from good, effective companies to really great, knocking it out of the park companies? What's the difference between something that's good and then taking it to the next level and making it great? He's got a lot of good ideas in there that stand the test of time. But the one that he leads the book with that I think is incredibly effective is this statement that I was reminded of as I looked at the story of Jehu this week. It's a statement it's in chapter one of the book. Good is the enemy of great. Good is the enemy of great. And what he means is that when we settle for good enough, that's the enemy of actually pursuing greatness. That so many people, so many corporations don't reach greatness because they settle for good enough. They get to good enough and then they go, great, that's perfect. And they don't actually get to be great. So its premise is that good is the enemy of great. And this is true in the professional world. It absolutely is. You know this to be true in your own lives. It's also true in marriage. It's true in how we parent our kids. It's true in our physical health. Settling for good enough is always the enemy of great. And the story this week points out to us that not only is that true in the professional world, but it's true in the spiritual world as well. I think when we look at the story of Jehu, what we see is that spiritually, good is the enemy of great. So if you have a Bible, go ahead and turn, like I said, to 2 Kings 10. I'm going to give you a little bit of the background of what's going on here with this story of Jehu. By the way, I don't think there's ever been a more redneck pronunciation of this particular king's name, J-E-H-U, Jehu, right guys? But as I looked at him this week, it became apparent to me that this is one of the more tragic figures in the book of Kings. And I would have thought that two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, if you asked me, who are the characters in this book that make you sad? I wouldn't have named Jehu. But the more I dove into his story, the more my heart broke for him and the potential that he had that he messed up. If you've been following along, you'll remember that two weeks ago, we looked at the showdown of Elijah against the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. And you might remember that the king at the time was a guy named King Ahab, married to a woman named Jezebel. And Ahab, when he took over as king, for whatever reason over Israel, he installed Baal as the God. This is the God that we're going to worship. So he had 450 prophets of Baal. He had temples erected to Baal all over the country. And that was the predominant religion in Israel, which broke the heart of God because these are his people. These are his children, the descendants of Abrahamal on Mount Carmel. If you haven't seen that sermon, there's a spoiler alert. Elijah wins. God wins. And he kills the 450 prophets of Baal. He turns the hearts of the people towards the Lord, but apparently not all the way. Because when Ahab dies, Jehu is his successor. Jehu takes over as king. And he immediately, you'll see in the preceding chapters, stamps out the lines of Ahab and Jezebel, which is an uncomfortable truth, but that's just what they did in the time of kings. That was part of the deal. And the very next step he takes after making sure that Ahab and Jezebel are no longer a threat is he puts to death all the prophets of Baal and he burns down the temples of Baal. He says, no more with this religion, not in my reign, it's done. And it's because Jehu had a heart for the Lord. He said, this is wrong. We're not going to do this in the Israel that I run. He burned them all down. He ran out the prophets. He killed the ones that remained. And he said, in this country, we honor God. This is what we do. And it's a great thing. This is why I think Jehu is a tragic figure, because if you've been paying attention, you know that after Solomon, David and Solomon ruled over Israel, all of Israel. But after Solomon, his son Rehoboam was a dummy and he was so prideful that he split the nation. Now there's the northern tribes of Israel and the southern tribe of Judah. After the Civil War, there is a split. As you follow the history of Judah through the book of Kings, they have, depending on who you ask, either three or seven good kings. Israel had no good kings, not a single good king as it existed as a sovereign nation, if you understand good to be a king who turned the hearts of the people back to the Lord, a king that was faithful to God. Israel didn't have a single good king. And here Jehu is, at the beginning of his reign, taking this huge step, doing this really great thing, this thing that was very bold, this thing that probably would have upset a good portion of the people who followed Baal, this thing that was loud and prominent and good. And he wiped away the prophets of Baal and he wiped away the temples of Baal. And he could have been a good king that changed the course of the nation of Israel, that changed the course of history for Israel for all of eternity. But he didn't do this one thing. And that's where we pick up the story in verse 28. Chapter 10,'s good. God says you've done a good thing. You came in and with faith, because you love me, you got rid of the prophets of Baal, you got rid of the idols of Baal, you got rid of the temples of Baal, and you have followed me. And because of that, this throne is going to be in your family for four generations. This is a good thing. He is on the precipice of potential now, Jehu is, the precipice of greatness. All he has to do is finish the drill. All he has to do is take the next step. He's done the hard thing. And God says, good, I'm going to honor this. But God's not done talking to Jehu. We pick it back up in verse 31. But Jehu was not careful to walk in the law of the Lord, the God nation split, everybody was still practicing Jews. And for every festival and holiday, they had to go to Jerusalem. And in Jerusalem, they would pay the temple tax. They would pay for their sacrifices. They would pay for a hotel stay. They'd go to the restaurants. They'd do the whole deal. It was a trip. It was a pilgrimage. And Jerusalem was getting all the tourist dollars. And Jeroboam went, this stinks because Jerusalem is in Judah. So he made up his own religion with golden calves and he put them in Bethel and in Dan and he told the Israelites, hey, good job. You don't have to go to Jerusalem anymore. You can stay right here and leave your tax and tourism dollars to the nation of Israel. It was an economic choice. And in doing so, he sinned against the Lord. And those golden calves stayed there through many kings, virtually ignored. But to the heart of God, they were offensive. And when Jeroboam took the great step of getting rid of all of the idols in Israel, he didn't get rid of these two idols, the original ones, the ones that were there from the beginning. And I don't know why he didn't do that. I don't know why. Your guess is as good as mine. He could have thought these are part of the heritage of the country. I don't want to mess with this. I don't want to offend people. People go there. They're tourist attractions now. I don't want to fool with it. I've ruffled enough feathers with the bail thing. I don't want to do this thing. He could have thought that. He could have just thought, they don't matter. Nobody cares. Nobody's going to worship these golden calves. Nobody does that anymore. It's an antiquated religion. It's part of our history. It doesn't matter now. They're no threat to God, so whatever. But for whatever reason, he left them behind. And because he left them behind, he didn't turn his heart completely to God. Because he left them behind, he didn't do his part in turning the hearts of the people completely to God. And over time, the worship of those golden calves began to creep back into the culture. And over time, the hearts of God's people were turned away from him again. And over time, it says at the end of this that God began, in verse 32, that the Lord began to cut off parts of Israel. Bit by bit, portions of the kingdom were taken away from Jehu and his descendants until in four generations they were carried away as slaves because of this fundamental mistake that he made. And to me, the lesson from Jehu and his reign that echoes down through the centuries is that partial obedience leads to total failure. Partial obedience, a half measure, not quite full measure, leads to total failure. Partial obedience under Jehu led to total failure. The steps he took with Baal were big, and they were bold, and they were brave, and they were courageous. And he gets credit for that obedience. But because he didn't take the full step, because he didn't go the whole way and take the full measure, eventually it led to his total failure. And you know, the Bible is replete with these examples where half measures don't get the job done, half measures lead to total failure. The most prominent example to me is the transition between the book of Joshua and the book of Judges. The book of Joshua is the sixth book in the Bible that tells the story of the conquest of the land of Canaan. God brings his people, led by Joshua the general, into the promised land that's now occupied by other tribes and nations and city-states. And the whole book of Joshua is a book of conquest sweeping through the nation, and God has given them the divine instruction to get rid of everybody who's not one of my children. This is your land. It's nobody else's. I don't want them here. They're going to contaminate the holiness of my people. Get rid of them. And the whole book is about how God goes before Joshua and his armies and makes that possible. But then the next book, the book of Judges starts. And the book of Judges starts off by telling us, Joshua did right and swept through the land and cleared it out. But he left a couple of pockets of some tribes and some villages that he must have thought were inconsequential. I don't know if he was battle weary and just didn't feel like it. I don't know if he didn't see them as a threat. And so he left them. They could never oppose anything to Israel that would be bad for us. They could never hurt us, but he left them behind. He offered partial obedience. And because it was partial and not full, the author of the book of Judges tells us that because Joshua left them behind, that they were a thorn in the side of the nation of Israel. And in the book of Judges, we see those little inconsequential people groups rise up and oppress God's people in Judges. And they stay there and they remain so much so that generations later when David is in the valley fighting Goliath, he is fighting a giant that is a descendant of the tribes that Joshua left behind because he wouldn't be completely obedient. We see over and over again in Scripture that partial obedience leads to total failure. And what I want us to see this morning is that these stories, the story of Jehu and overthrowing Baal but not the golden calves, the story of Joshua not cleansing the nation like he should have. These stories are not stories about cleansing a nation. They're not stories about getting rid of idols. That's not really what they're about. These stories are about our ongoing battle with sin. They're about our ongoing pursuit of holiness. These stories matter to us deeply because what we should learn from this story of Jehu and his partial obedience is that partial obedience leads to total failure in sin and sin, in lowercase sin and in uppercase sin. For us, here's what I mean. I think the easiest application of this lesson is for us to think about that one sin in our life that just eats our lunch. That one sin in our life that over the years, decades maybe, we just have to battle with over and over again and we experience different seasons of victory and different seasons of struggle with this sin, this one big sin. Many of you, when I said sin, this one big sin, half the room and half of you guys there at home went, yeah, I know what that is for me. You don't have to do a lot of soul searching. You, in fact, think I'm preaching right to you right now that the Holy Spirit gave me a special message, and I know what your sin is. Let me tell you something, I don't. I'm so glad we're not Catholic, and you don't have to confess to me because I don't want to know. But we have those. These big sins that we struggle with over and over and over again. And if you have one of those, come on. You know what that struggle is. You've taken the big measures, haven't you? You've knocked down all the prophets of Baal. You've burned down all the temples for this sin. But you left behind some golden calves because you didn't want to admit that was tempting too. Because maybe you were a little battle weary. You were tired of fighting that when you thought, those can't possibly trouble me. And you left a little remnant. You left a little thing. You left a little window. You left a little foothold behind. And over the years, that sin evolved back into something that was more debilitating than before. You been through that cycle? Yeah, I have too. This story from Jehu is a reminder that partial obedience leads to total failure. The easiest example of this sin, I'm sorry guys, I don't mean to make us, hey, welcome back. Let me make you super uncomfortable for a minute. The easiest example of this is lust, right? It's a sneaky, pernicious sin, man. You can sneak in anywhere. Now, if that's something we struggle with, we can give in to that struggle any time there's cell phone service. And we've taken the steps and we've done the things and we've tried to move past it and we've confessed and we've done the hard stuff and we've sat there in shame and we've been met with grace and we've said, I'm not going to mess it up again. But we leave these pockets, don't we? We leave these little golden idols where we say, certainly that couldn't be what does it. And over time, it builds and becomes just as debilitating as it ever was. And it's not just true of that sin. It's true of pride, or greed,, gluttony, or sloth. So let me just encourage you. If this is you, if you've got one of those sins in your life that's just kicking your tail, that as soon as I started talking about this, you knew what yours was. If that's you, can today be the day that you draw the line in the sand and you go, God, just show me everything I've got in my life that needs to come down so that I can move past this. Show me what full obedience looks like. I'm tired of partially obeying you and then totally failing. So show me what full obedience looks like in this sin. Can today be the day you do that? If you have one of those sins, and you would honestly, in your heart, listen, you don't have to lie to me. I have no idea what you're thinking. The people around you have no idea what you're thinking. If you have that in your life right now, and you think to yourself, you know what? I know that my life shouldn't have this sin in it, but I really like it. And honestly, I don't want it to go away. I'm happier when it's a part of my life. Can you just be brave enough to pray today that God would change your heart? Can you just admit that to the Father? Say, God, I have this sin in my life. I know it doesn't belong there, but I like it there. Will you please change my heart so that I'm not happy with this being a part of my life anymore? Will you just pray that and let the Lord work through that prayer? But this lesson, partial obedience leads to total failure, isn't just true of an individual, lowercase sin, but of all sin, of the sin nature that lives inside of us, of the sin nature that Jesus died so that we might be able to put to death. We can only battle that sin nature with Christ. We can only battle that sin nature with the Spirit. So even as we talk about battling all the sin that is in our hearts, we have to first acknowledge that Jesus expunged that from our hearts and we wander back into it because we're broken creatures. But I think in a church full of Christians, this is probably the more applicable way to look at this story. For many of us here in this room and at home, wherever you are, we don't have that one big sin. Sure, we sin. Nobody's perfect. But we don't have the one thing that if people found out about it, it would just tear us down. We don't have that, but we have sin. And I think for many of us, especially church people, this is where good is the enemy of great really comes into play. Because we feel like we're good enough, right? Maybe you got saved as an adult. Maybe you came to know Jesus as an adult and you look at your life now and you compare it to your life then and you think like, man, I'm totally different. Like I cuss way less, which in Christian circles has to mean you're godly. I cuss way less, right? I don't do the things I used to do. I used to drink this much, now I drink this much. I used to party with these people, now I don't do that. I used to have those friends, now I have these friends. I go to small group, I do all the things. I'm pretty good. So you compare yourself to who you used to be, you feel pretty good about life. Or maybe you've been in church for forever. Maybe you're like me, and as far back as your memory works, church and faith were a part of it. And so you think you're pretty good. You're pretty squared away. And yeah, sure, I mean, I could read my Bible more, but come on, just pastors read their Bible every day, right? Maybe most of the elders. People don't really do that. You know that you could pray more, but you're like, I mean, come on, who has time to pray like 30 minutes a day? Isn't that for little old ladies? Like, I got things to do. And we're pretty good. We look pretty okay. We compare ourselves to the right people. We're pretty spiritually healthy. But that partial obedience, those partial measures, allowing God to change portions of your heart, and then when he shows you this part of your heart, you go, God, I feel pretty good right now. Maybe you don't say that. Maybe you'd never have the audacity to say that to God in prayer, but we say it every day with the way that we act, right? Those partial measures, they lead to total failure just as much as anything else does. And when I say they lead to total failure, what I mean is if we're just cruising along, settling for good enough, not pursuing the Father, not engaging in a relationship with the Father, not daily pursuing Him through prayer and through reading His Word, and then something happens and our life gets shaken to its core and we need our God. We have not been investing in this relationship with Him and we don't have anywhere to go or to grasp and He feels so distant when we need Him so close. Or we're called to ministry or our kids have a question or we need to pour out and we realize that we're pouring from an empty vessel because we haven't been filling ourselves up because we've been settling for good enough. We've been settling for partial measures. It can lead to total failure. But you know, you know what scares me more than that total failure? You know what scares me more for myself and more for you in settling for good enough? It's the thought of what we're missing out on if we would pursue greatness. Think about Jehu. All Jehu had to do is take the next step and get rid of two cows, man. Get rid of those two golden calves, take the next step, take the full measure, and he would have been the lone good king in the nation of Israel. He would have forever changed the course of that nation. He would have been held up as a spiritual hero, and now he's lost history. Many of you never even heard of him before you walked in or before you tuned in this morning. He could have had such a better legacy. What richness and blessings of God did Jehu miss out on because he was partially obedient and he settled for good enough? And for you, what blessings of God are you foregoing by settling for good enough in your life? How much better of a spouse could your spouse have if you would refuse to settle for good enough in your life and you pursued holiness as God instructed you to pursue it. How much, think of your kids. How much better can we disciple our children if we would, as parents, refuse to settle for good enough and pursue greatness and pursue holiness and always go the full measure in our lives and in our hearts and always be willing to tear down the next thing that God shows us. What richness and blessing waits for us on the other side of complete surrender and obedience? We're told that at the right hand of God there are pleasures forevermore, that in his presence there are fullness of joy, that Jesus himself came that we might have life and have it to the full. And I am convinced that the only thing that is keeping us from not experiencing those pleasures and experiencing those joys and experiencing the full life that God has for us is our offerings of partial obedience rather than complete surrender. So look at the story of Jehu. Don't be scared of the consequences. Be aware of what he missed out on. And let's be people who determine, God, I don't want to miss those blessings that you have for me. I don't want to miss that richness that you have for me. I don't want to miss the relationship that you have waiting for me. I don't want my marriage to miss out on that. I don't want my kids to miss out on that. I don't want my next decades to miss out on that. And let's be people who learn from Jehu and apply it to sin and sin. And let today be the day that we say, I'm tearing down all the idols and getting rid of that big sin. And let today be the day that we say, I am going to stop offering partial obedience and start being willing to tear down everything that God shows me in my life so that I can experience all the blessing and all the joy and all the peace that he has for me. Let's do that together as a church. Let's pray. Father, you are good to us. God, I think about maybe some of the things that I've missed, some of the experiences that I haven't had or some of the joys that I would have loved that my half-hearted devotion to you has cost me. Father, may we not be a people of regret. May we not be a people of fear, but may we be a people with an anticipatory joy of what is waiting for us when we will simply surrender ourselves to you. And whatever situations we find ourselves in, whether it's facing a big sin that we're just so scared of, that's just so pernicious, or whether it's facing that sin monster in our life and the temptation to settle for good enough and not tear down the next thing. Wherever we are, God, would you give us the faith and the courage and the desire to take that next step? For those of us who are entrenched, admired in sin, would you simply change our hearts to not be happy with that anymore? Would you help us as a church walk in a pursuit of holiness towards you? Thank you for this morning, for this new phase of grace. We pray that your hand would continue to be on us as it has been in spite everything around us and sometimes in spite of us. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

This is good. I've been preaching to Steve for 22 weeks on Thursday mornings. This is great. This is the first morning. Jen and I moved into a new house in April, beginning of April. This is the first morning I've woken up in my new house Sunday morning and driven to church and now preach. So this is really, really great. So good morning to you, Grace. Good morning to you online. I wanted to say to those of you who are watching from home and just reiterate, you are every bit as much a participant in what's happening this morning and in this church as anybody who comes in person. And we are now in this new season of life as a church. This is the new season of grace. We are one church that meets in a bunch of different locations, both here and now, like Kyle said, all over the world online now. And this is what church is going to be for the foreseeable future. We're going to be like this for a long time. I don't know if you guys have thought that through, but this is a new season in the life of Grace as a church because we have to be one church in multiple locations. It's going to be a while before everybody feels all the way comfortable coming back. We're going to grow back into a need for children's ministry as that starts back up. And so this is the new season for Grace, which is kind of crazy to say, because I don't know if you know this, the last time we met in person, I was announcing to you the pledge total of our campaign. That's a thing that happened. And then COVID started, and here we are. So even though this plan, the way that 2020 has played out, and this new season of grace that we're facing is not our plan. God knew what was going to happen. His hand has been on us this entire time, and it will continue to be on us. He will continue to be with us. We have always said that God's hand is on grace. He's made it evident that he loves grace, and we are every bit as confident now that his hand remains on grace. And I need nothing more than this. I was talking with Joe as worship started this morning. Joe's the moderator of our board, and I went, this is great. I didn't expect this. All you brave souls to be here, this is wonderful to get to see everybody. So we are excited. And as we move into this new season in the life of grace, I did want to say just thank you a ton. There have been some people working behind the scenes, and whenever you want to call out any one individual person, it gets a little murky because so many people have been doing so very much. We've had people watching our practice online streams and giving feedback. We've had people showing up to work in the booth and help out behind the scenes. We've had Erin, her whole ministry, our children's pastor, has changed and she's just been killing it online. Kyle's switched everything to online. Everybody just up and changed their job in this quarantine and have done so much to push the church forward. But as we started this new season of grace, I would be remiss if I didn't point out to you the hard work of Steve Goldberg, our worship pastor. When we went in March, when we realized, hey, we have to go totally online. We have to find a way to record a sermon, release it online, and be totally online. And we'd like to have a virtual lobby where people can still talk to each other. And also, we need a new webpage. And we need somebody to record the sermon and edit it and upload it and be ready to go. Steve? And then when the elders, when we realized as elders that in June, we're going to have to go live. We're going to have to do a live stream. We really don't have a choice. We're going to have to be able to do this when we come back because when we begin to resume in-person gatherings, because not everyone's going to feel comfortable doing that. There's costs involved. There's technical attitudes involved. There's different things that you have to do. It's a big, huge stressor. And once again, as a church, we went, Steve? And he knocked it out of the park. So his job fundamentally changed in COVID. He has been a huge servant to the church and is the reason, the biggest human reason that we exist as a body right now because of the work that he's done behind the scenes. So we are grateful to Steve. Thank you, Steve, for that. As we jump back into the series, we are in the series called A Time of Kings. We're walking through the Book of Kings. We know it to be the Book of Kings. Our Bible divides it into two, 1 and 2 Kings, but it was originally all one big scroll that got divided in half because it was just too long of a scroll to carry around. This morning, we are in 2 Kings chapter 10. So if you have a Bible there at home, go ahead and turn there. If you have one here in the service, turn to the Bible. The Bible in front of you, in the seat back in front of you, has not been touched for over like six months. So it's good. It's clean. You can touch it. But we're going to be in 2 Kings chapter 10. In this chapter, there's a principle pointed out that reminded me of a book that was written back in 2001. It's almost 20 years old. If you're a business leader, if you're in the corporate world at all, you have probably gone through this book, Good to Great by Jim Collins. It's a great perennial book. It's one of these wonderful leadership books. Incidentally, in these leadership books, whenever you read these leadership books, how to be an effective leader, how to grow an effective company, whatever it is, the result of it is the author will always land on, after different studies by like Duke and Stanford and Yale and whatever else, that to be an effective leader, you need to be humble and lead without an ego. You need to be a servant leader and put others first. These are the most effective leaders we see in the world. And as a believer, you just kind of go like, oh, you mean to lead like Jesus? That's what your research tells you? That's just an aside. But in this book, Good to Great, he looks at companies and he's asking the question, how do companies go from good, effective companies to really great, knocking it out of the park companies? What's the difference between something that's good and then taking it to the next level and making it great? He's got a lot of good ideas in there that stand the test of time. But the one that he leads the book with that I think is incredibly effective is this statement that I was reminded of as I looked at the story of Jehu this week. It's a statement it's in chapter one of the book. Good is the enemy of great. Good is the enemy of great. And what he means is that when we settle for good enough, that's the enemy of actually pursuing greatness. That so many people, so many corporations don't reach greatness because they settle for good enough. They get to good enough and then they go, great, that's perfect. And they don't actually get to be great. So its premise is that good is the enemy of great. And this is true in the professional world. It absolutely is. You know this to be true in your own lives. It's also true in marriage. It's true in how we parent our kids. It's true in our physical health. Settling for good enough is always the enemy of great. And the story this week points out to us that not only is that true in the professional world, but it's true in the spiritual world as well. I think when we look at the story of Jehu, what we see is that spiritually, good is the enemy of great. So if you have a Bible, go ahead and turn, like I said, to 2 Kings 10. I'm going to give you a little bit of the background of what's going on here with this story of Jehu. By the way, I don't think there's ever been a more redneck pronunciation of this particular king's name, J-E-H-U, Jehu, right guys? But as I looked at him this week, it became apparent to me that this is one of the more tragic figures in the book of Kings. And I would have thought that two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, if you asked me, who are the characters in this book that make you sad? I wouldn't have named Jehu. But the more I dove into his story, the more my heart broke for him and the potential that he had that he messed up. If you've been following along, you'll remember that two weeks ago, we looked at the showdown of Elijah against the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. And you might remember that the king at the time was a guy named King Ahab, married to a woman named Jezebel. And Ahab, when he took over as king, for whatever reason over Israel, he installed Baal as the God. This is the God that we're going to worship. So he had 450 prophets of Baal. He had temples erected to Baal all over the country. And that was the predominant religion in Israel, which broke the heart of God because these are his people. These are his children, the descendants of Abrahamal on Mount Carmel. If you haven't seen that sermon, there's a spoiler alert. Elijah wins. God wins. And he kills the 450 prophets of Baal. He turns the hearts of the people towards the Lord, but apparently not all the way. Because when Ahab dies, Jehu is his successor. Jehu takes over as king. And he immediately, you'll see in the preceding chapters, stamps out the lines of Ahab and Jezebel, which is an uncomfortable truth, but that's just what they did in the time of kings. That was part of the deal. And the very next step he takes after making sure that Ahab and Jezebel are no longer a threat is he puts to death all the prophets of Baal and he burns down the temples of Baal. He says, no more with this religion, not in my reign, it's done. And it's because Jehu had a heart for the Lord. He said, this is wrong. We're not going to do this in the Israel that I run. He burned them all down. He ran out the prophets. He killed the ones that remained. And he said, in this country, we honor God. This is what we do. And it's a great thing. This is why I think Jehu is a tragic figure, because if you've been paying attention, you know that after Solomon, David and Solomon ruled over Israel, all of Israel. But after Solomon, his son Rehoboam was a dummy and he was so prideful that he split the nation. Now there's the northern tribes of Israel and the southern tribe of Judah. After the Civil War, there is a split. As you follow the history of Judah through the book of Kings, they have, depending on who you ask, either three or seven good kings. Israel had no good kings, not a single good king as it existed as a sovereign nation, if you understand good to be a king who turned the hearts of the people back to the Lord, a king that was faithful to God. Israel didn't have a single good king. And here Jehu is, at the beginning of his reign, taking this huge step, doing this really great thing, this thing that was very bold, this thing that probably would have upset a good portion of the people who followed Baal, this thing that was loud and prominent and good. And he wiped away the prophets of Baal and he wiped away the temples of Baal. And he could have been a good king that changed the course of the nation of Israel, that changed the course of history for Israel for all of eternity. But he didn't do this one thing. And that's where we pick up the story in verse 28. Chapter 10,'s good. God says you've done a good thing. You came in and with faith, because you love me, you got rid of the prophets of Baal, you got rid of the idols of Baal, you got rid of the temples of Baal, and you have followed me. And because of that, this throne is going to be in your family for four generations. This is a good thing. He is on the precipice of potential now, Jehu is, the precipice of greatness. All he has to do is finish the drill. All he has to do is take the next step. He's done the hard thing. And God says, good, I'm going to honor this. But God's not done talking to Jehu. We pick it back up in verse 31. But Jehu was not careful to walk in the law of the Lord, the God nation split, everybody was still practicing Jews. And for every festival and holiday, they had to go to Jerusalem. And in Jerusalem, they would pay the temple tax. They would pay for their sacrifices. They would pay for a hotel stay. They'd go to the restaurants. They'd do the whole deal. It was a trip. It was a pilgrimage. And Jerusalem was getting all the tourist dollars. And Jeroboam went, this stinks because Jerusalem is in Judah. So he made up his own religion with golden calves and he put them in Bethel and in Dan and he told the Israelites, hey, good job. You don't have to go to Jerusalem anymore. You can stay right here and leave your tax and tourism dollars to the nation of Israel. It was an economic choice. And in doing so, he sinned against the Lord. And those golden calves stayed there through many kings, virtually ignored. But to the heart of God, they were offensive. And when Jeroboam took the great step of getting rid of all of the idols in Israel, he didn't get rid of these two idols, the original ones, the ones that were there from the beginning. And I don't know why he didn't do that. I don't know why. Your guess is as good as mine. He could have thought these are part of the heritage of the country. I don't want to mess with this. I don't want to offend people. People go there. They're tourist attractions now. I don't want to fool with it. I've ruffled enough feathers with the bail thing. I don't want to do this thing. He could have thought that. He could have just thought, they don't matter. Nobody cares. Nobody's going to worship these golden calves. Nobody does that anymore. It's an antiquated religion. It's part of our history. It doesn't matter now. They're no threat to God, so whatever. But for whatever reason, he left them behind. And because he left them behind, he didn't turn his heart completely to God. Because he left them behind, he didn't do his part in turning the hearts of the people completely to God. And over time, the worship of those golden calves began to creep back into the culture. And over time, the hearts of God's people were turned away from him again. And over time, it says at the end of this that God began, in verse 32, that the Lord began to cut off parts of Israel. Bit by bit, portions of the kingdom were taken away from Jehu and his descendants until in four generations they were carried away as slaves because of this fundamental mistake that he made. And to me, the lesson from Jehu and his reign that echoes down through the centuries is that partial obedience leads to total failure. Partial obedience, a half measure, not quite full measure, leads to total failure. Partial obedience under Jehu led to total failure. The steps he took with Baal were big, and they were bold, and they were brave, and they were courageous. And he gets credit for that obedience. But because he didn't take the full step, because he didn't go the whole way and take the full measure, eventually it led to his total failure. And you know, the Bible is replete with these examples where half measures don't get the job done, half measures lead to total failure. The most prominent example to me is the transition between the book of Joshua and the book of Judges. The book of Joshua is the sixth book in the Bible that tells the story of the conquest of the land of Canaan. God brings his people, led by Joshua the general, into the promised land that's now occupied by other tribes and nations and city-states. And the whole book of Joshua is a book of conquest sweeping through the nation, and God has given them the divine instruction to get rid of everybody who's not one of my children. This is your land. It's nobody else's. I don't want them here. They're going to contaminate the holiness of my people. Get rid of them. And the whole book is about how God goes before Joshua and his armies and makes that possible. But then the next book, the book of Judges starts. And the book of Judges starts off by telling us, Joshua did right and swept through the land and cleared it out. But he left a couple of pockets of some tribes and some villages that he must have thought were inconsequential. I don't know if he was battle weary and just didn't feel like it. I don't know if he didn't see them as a threat. And so he left them. They could never oppose anything to Israel that would be bad for us. They could never hurt us, but he left them behind. He offered partial obedience. And because it was partial and not full, the author of the book of Judges tells us that because Joshua left them behind, that they were a thorn in the side of the nation of Israel. And in the book of Judges, we see those little inconsequential people groups rise up and oppress God's people in Judges. And they stay there and they remain so much so that generations later when David is in the valley fighting Goliath, he is fighting a giant that is a descendant of the tribes that Joshua left behind because he wouldn't be completely obedient. We see over and over again in Scripture that partial obedience leads to total failure. And what I want us to see this morning is that these stories, the story of Jehu and overthrowing Baal but not the golden calves, the story of Joshua not cleansing the nation like he should have. These stories are not stories about cleansing a nation. They're not stories about getting rid of idols. That's not really what they're about. These stories are about our ongoing battle with sin. They're about our ongoing pursuit of holiness. These stories matter to us deeply because what we should learn from this story of Jehu and his partial obedience is that partial obedience leads to total failure in sin and sin, in lowercase sin and in uppercase sin. For us, here's what I mean. I think the easiest application of this lesson is for us to think about that one sin in our life that just eats our lunch. That one sin in our life that over the years, decades maybe, we just have to battle with over and over again and we experience different seasons of victory and different seasons of struggle with this sin, this one big sin. Many of you, when I said sin, this one big sin, half the room and half of you guys there at home went, yeah, I know what that is for me. You don't have to do a lot of soul searching. You, in fact, think I'm preaching right to you right now that the Holy Spirit gave me a special message, and I know what your sin is. Let me tell you something, I don't. I'm so glad we're not Catholic, and you don't have to confess to me because I don't want to know. But we have those. These big sins that we struggle with over and over and over again. And if you have one of those, come on. You know what that struggle is. You've taken the big measures, haven't you? You've knocked down all the prophets of Baal. You've burned down all the temples for this sin. But you left behind some golden calves because you didn't want to admit that was tempting too. Because maybe you were a little battle weary. You were tired of fighting that when you thought, those can't possibly trouble me. And you left a little remnant. You left a little thing. You left a little window. You left a little foothold behind. And over the years, that sin evolved back into something that was more debilitating than before. You been through that cycle? Yeah, I have too. This story from Jehu is a reminder that partial obedience leads to total failure. The easiest example of this sin, I'm sorry guys, I don't mean to make us, hey, welcome back. Let me make you super uncomfortable for a minute. The easiest example of this is lust, right? It's a sneaky, pernicious sin, man. You can sneak in anywhere. Now, if that's something we struggle with, we can give in to that struggle any time there's cell phone service. And we've taken the steps and we've done the things and we've tried to move past it and we've confessed and we've done the hard stuff and we've sat there in shame and we've been met with grace and we've said, I'm not going to mess it up again. But we leave these pockets, don't we? We leave these little golden idols where we say, certainly that couldn't be what does it. And over time, it builds and becomes just as debilitating as it ever was. And it's not just true of that sin. It's true of pride, or greed,, gluttony, or sloth. So let me just encourage you. If this is you, if you've got one of those sins in your life that's just kicking your tail, that as soon as I started talking about this, you knew what yours was. If that's you, can today be the day that you draw the line in the sand and you go, God, just show me everything I've got in my life that needs to come down so that I can move past this. Show me what full obedience looks like. I'm tired of partially obeying you and then totally failing. So show me what full obedience looks like in this sin. Can today be the day you do that? If you have one of those sins, and you would honestly, in your heart, listen, you don't have to lie to me. I have no idea what you're thinking. The people around you have no idea what you're thinking. If you have that in your life right now, and you think to yourself, you know what? I know that my life shouldn't have this sin in it, but I really like it. And honestly, I don't want it to go away. I'm happier when it's a part of my life. Can you just be brave enough to pray today that God would change your heart? Can you just admit that to the Father? Say, God, I have this sin in my life. I know it doesn't belong there, but I like it there. Will you please change my heart so that I'm not happy with this being a part of my life anymore? Will you just pray that and let the Lord work through that prayer? But this lesson, partial obedience leads to total failure, isn't just true of an individual, lowercase sin, but of all sin, of the sin nature that lives inside of us, of the sin nature that Jesus died so that we might be able to put to death. We can only battle that sin nature with Christ. We can only battle that sin nature with the Spirit. So even as we talk about battling all the sin that is in our hearts, we have to first acknowledge that Jesus expunged that from our hearts and we wander back into it because we're broken creatures. But I think in a church full of Christians, this is probably the more applicable way to look at this story. For many of us here in this room and at home, wherever you are, we don't have that one big sin. Sure, we sin. Nobody's perfect. But we don't have the one thing that if people found out about it, it would just tear us down. We don't have that, but we have sin. And I think for many of us, especially church people, this is where good is the enemy of great really comes into play. Because we feel like we're good enough, right? Maybe you got saved as an adult. Maybe you came to know Jesus as an adult and you look at your life now and you compare it to your life then and you think like, man, I'm totally different. Like I cuss way less, which in Christian circles has to mean you're godly. I cuss way less, right? I don't do the things I used to do. I used to drink this much, now I drink this much. I used to party with these people, now I don't do that. I used to have those friends, now I have these friends. I go to small group, I do all the things. I'm pretty good. So you compare yourself to who you used to be, you feel pretty good about life. Or maybe you've been in church for forever. Maybe you're like me, and as far back as your memory works, church and faith were a part of it. And so you think you're pretty good. You're pretty squared away. And yeah, sure, I mean, I could read my Bible more, but come on, just pastors read their Bible every day, right? Maybe most of the elders. People don't really do that. You know that you could pray more, but you're like, I mean, come on, who has time to pray like 30 minutes a day? Isn't that for little old ladies? Like, I got things to do. And we're pretty good. We look pretty okay. We compare ourselves to the right people. We're pretty spiritually healthy. But that partial obedience, those partial measures, allowing God to change portions of your heart, and then when he shows you this part of your heart, you go, God, I feel pretty good right now. Maybe you don't say that. Maybe you'd never have the audacity to say that to God in prayer, but we say it every day with the way that we act, right? Those partial measures, they lead to total failure just as much as anything else does. And when I say they lead to total failure, what I mean is if we're just cruising along, settling for good enough, not pursuing the Father, not engaging in a relationship with the Father, not daily pursuing Him through prayer and through reading His Word, and then something happens and our life gets shaken to its core and we need our God. We have not been investing in this relationship with Him and we don't have anywhere to go or to grasp and He feels so distant when we need Him so close. Or we're called to ministry or our kids have a question or we need to pour out and we realize that we're pouring from an empty vessel because we haven't been filling ourselves up because we've been settling for good enough. We've been settling for partial measures. It can lead to total failure. But you know, you know what scares me more than that total failure? You know what scares me more for myself and more for you in settling for good enough? It's the thought of what we're missing out on if we would pursue greatness. Think about Jehu. All Jehu had to do is take the next step and get rid of two cows, man. Get rid of those two golden calves, take the next step, take the full measure, and he would have been the lone good king in the nation of Israel. He would have forever changed the course of that nation. He would have been held up as a spiritual hero, and now he's lost history. Many of you never even heard of him before you walked in or before you tuned in this morning. He could have had such a better legacy. What richness and blessings of God did Jehu miss out on because he was partially obedient and he settled for good enough? And for you, what blessings of God are you foregoing by settling for good enough in your life? How much better of a spouse could your spouse have if you would refuse to settle for good enough in your life and you pursued holiness as God instructed you to pursue it. How much, think of your kids. How much better can we disciple our children if we would, as parents, refuse to settle for good enough and pursue greatness and pursue holiness and always go the full measure in our lives and in our hearts and always be willing to tear down the next thing that God shows us. What richness and blessing waits for us on the other side of complete surrender and obedience? We're told that at the right hand of God there are pleasures forevermore, that in his presence there are fullness of joy, that Jesus himself came that we might have life and have it to the full. And I am convinced that the only thing that is keeping us from not experiencing those pleasures and experiencing those joys and experiencing the full life that God has for us is our offerings of partial obedience rather than complete surrender. So look at the story of Jehu. Don't be scared of the consequences. Be aware of what he missed out on. And let's be people who determine, God, I don't want to miss those blessings that you have for me. I don't want to miss that richness that you have for me. I don't want to miss the relationship that you have waiting for me. I don't want my marriage to miss out on that. I don't want my kids to miss out on that. I don't want my next decades to miss out on that. And let's be people who learn from Jehu and apply it to sin and sin. And let today be the day that we say, I'm tearing down all the idols and getting rid of that big sin. And let today be the day that we say, I am going to stop offering partial obedience and start being willing to tear down everything that God shows me in my life so that I can experience all the blessing and all the joy and all the peace that he has for me. Let's do that together as a church. Let's pray. Father, you are good to us. God, I think about maybe some of the things that I've missed, some of the experiences that I haven't had or some of the joys that I would have loved that my half-hearted devotion to you has cost me. Father, may we not be a people of regret. May we not be a people of fear, but may we be a people with an anticipatory joy of what is waiting for us when we will simply surrender ourselves to you. And whatever situations we find ourselves in, whether it's facing a big sin that we're just so scared of, that's just so pernicious, or whether it's facing that sin monster in our life and the temptation to settle for good enough and not tear down the next thing. Wherever we are, God, would you give us the faith and the courage and the desire to take that next step? For those of us who are entrenched, admired in sin, would you simply change our hearts to not be happy with that anymore? Would you help us as a church walk in a pursuit of holiness towards you? Thank you for this morning, for this new phase of grace. We pray that your hand would continue to be on us as it has been in spite everything around us and sometimes in spite of us. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

This is good. I've been preaching to Steve for 22 weeks on Thursday mornings. This is great. This is the first morning. Jen and I moved into a new house in April, beginning of April. This is the first morning I've woken up in my new house Sunday morning and driven to church and now preach. So this is really, really great. So good morning to you, Grace. Good morning to you online. I wanted to say to those of you who are watching from home and just reiterate, you are every bit as much a participant in what's happening this morning and in this church as anybody who comes in person. And we are now in this new season of life as a church. This is the new season of grace. We are one church that meets in a bunch of different locations, both here and now, like Kyle said, all over the world online now. And this is what church is going to be for the foreseeable future. We're going to be like this for a long time. I don't know if you guys have thought that through, but this is a new season in the life of Grace as a church because we have to be one church in multiple locations. It's going to be a while before everybody feels all the way comfortable coming back. We're going to grow back into a need for children's ministry as that starts back up. And so this is the new season for Grace, which is kind of crazy to say, because I don't know if you know this, the last time we met in person, I was announcing to you the pledge total of our campaign. That's a thing that happened. And then COVID started, and here we are. So even though this plan, the way that 2020 has played out, and this new season of grace that we're facing is not our plan. God knew what was going to happen. His hand has been on us this entire time, and it will continue to be on us. He will continue to be with us. We have always said that God's hand is on grace. He's made it evident that he loves grace, and we are every bit as confident now that his hand remains on grace. And I need nothing more than this. I was talking with Joe as worship started this morning. Joe's the moderator of our board, and I went, this is great. I didn't expect this. All you brave souls to be here, this is wonderful to get to see everybody. So we are excited. And as we move into this new season in the life of grace, I did want to say just thank you a ton. There have been some people working behind the scenes, and whenever you want to call out any one individual person, it gets a little murky because so many people have been doing so very much. We've had people watching our practice online streams and giving feedback. We've had people showing up to work in the booth and help out behind the scenes. We've had Erin, her whole ministry, our children's pastor, has changed and she's just been killing it online. Kyle's switched everything to online. Everybody just up and changed their job in this quarantine and have done so much to push the church forward. But as we started this new season of grace, I would be remiss if I didn't point out to you the hard work of Steve Goldberg, our worship pastor. When we went in March, when we realized, hey, we have to go totally online. We have to find a way to record a sermon, release it online, and be totally online. And we'd like to have a virtual lobby where people can still talk to each other. And also, we need a new webpage. And we need somebody to record the sermon and edit it and upload it and be ready to go. Steve? And then when the elders, when we realized as elders that in June, we're going to have to go live. We're going to have to do a live stream. We really don't have a choice. We're going to have to be able to do this when we come back because when we begin to resume in-person gatherings, because not everyone's going to feel comfortable doing that. There's costs involved. There's technical attitudes involved. There's different things that you have to do. It's a big, huge stressor. And once again, as a church, we went, Steve? And he knocked it out of the park. So his job fundamentally changed in COVID. He has been a huge servant to the church and is the reason, the biggest human reason that we exist as a body right now because of the work that he's done behind the scenes. So we are grateful to Steve. Thank you, Steve, for that. As we jump back into the series, we are in the series called A Time of Kings. We're walking through the Book of Kings. We know it to be the Book of Kings. Our Bible divides it into two, 1 and 2 Kings, but it was originally all one big scroll that got divided in half because it was just too long of a scroll to carry around. This morning, we are in 2 Kings chapter 10. So if you have a Bible there at home, go ahead and turn there. If you have one here in the service, turn to the Bible. The Bible in front of you, in the seat back in front of you, has not been touched for over like six months. So it's good. It's clean. You can touch it. But we're going to be in 2 Kings chapter 10. In this chapter, there's a principle pointed out that reminded me of a book that was written back in 2001. It's almost 20 years old. If you're a business leader, if you're in the corporate world at all, you have probably gone through this book, Good to Great by Jim Collins. It's a great perennial book. It's one of these wonderful leadership books. Incidentally, in these leadership books, whenever you read these leadership books, how to be an effective leader, how to grow an effective company, whatever it is, the result of it is the author will always land on, after different studies by like Duke and Stanford and Yale and whatever else, that to be an effective leader, you need to be humble and lead without an ego. You need to be a servant leader and put others first. These are the most effective leaders we see in the world. And as a believer, you just kind of go like, oh, you mean to lead like Jesus? That's what your research tells you? That's just an aside. But in this book, Good to Great, he looks at companies and he's asking the question, how do companies go from good, effective companies to really great, knocking it out of the park companies? What's the difference between something that's good and then taking it to the next level and making it great? He's got a lot of good ideas in there that stand the test of time. But the one that he leads the book with that I think is incredibly effective is this statement that I was reminded of as I looked at the story of Jehu this week. It's a statement it's in chapter one of the book. Good is the enemy of great. Good is the enemy of great. And what he means is that when we settle for good enough, that's the enemy of actually pursuing greatness. That so many people, so many corporations don't reach greatness because they settle for good enough. They get to good enough and then they go, great, that's perfect. And they don't actually get to be great. So its premise is that good is the enemy of great. And this is true in the professional world. It absolutely is. You know this to be true in your own lives. It's also true in marriage. It's true in how we parent our kids. It's true in our physical health. Settling for good enough is always the enemy of great. And the story this week points out to us that not only is that true in the professional world, but it's true in the spiritual world as well. I think when we look at the story of Jehu, what we see is that spiritually, good is the enemy of great. So if you have a Bible, go ahead and turn, like I said, to 2 Kings 10. I'm going to give you a little bit of the background of what's going on here with this story of Jehu. By the way, I don't think there's ever been a more redneck pronunciation of this particular king's name, J-E-H-U, Jehu, right guys? But as I looked at him this week, it became apparent to me that this is one of the more tragic figures in the book of Kings. And I would have thought that two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, if you asked me, who are the characters in this book that make you sad? I wouldn't have named Jehu. But the more I dove into his story, the more my heart broke for him and the potential that he had that he messed up. If you've been following along, you'll remember that two weeks ago, we looked at the showdown of Elijah against the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. And you might remember that the king at the time was a guy named King Ahab, married to a woman named Jezebel. And Ahab, when he took over as king, for whatever reason over Israel, he installed Baal as the God. This is the God that we're going to worship. So he had 450 prophets of Baal. He had temples erected to Baal all over the country. And that was the predominant religion in Israel, which broke the heart of God because these are his people. These are his children, the descendants of Abrahamal on Mount Carmel. If you haven't seen that sermon, there's a spoiler alert. Elijah wins. God wins. And he kills the 450 prophets of Baal. He turns the hearts of the people towards the Lord, but apparently not all the way. Because when Ahab dies, Jehu is his successor. Jehu takes over as king. And he immediately, you'll see in the preceding chapters, stamps out the lines of Ahab and Jezebel, which is an uncomfortable truth, but that's just what they did in the time of kings. That was part of the deal. And the very next step he takes after making sure that Ahab and Jezebel are no longer a threat is he puts to death all the prophets of Baal and he burns down the temples of Baal. He says, no more with this religion, not in my reign, it's done. And it's because Jehu had a heart for the Lord. He said, this is wrong. We're not going to do this in the Israel that I run. He burned them all down. He ran out the prophets. He killed the ones that remained. And he said, in this country, we honor God. This is what we do. And it's a great thing. This is why I think Jehu is a tragic figure, because if you've been paying attention, you know that after Solomon, David and Solomon ruled over Israel, all of Israel. But after Solomon, his son Rehoboam was a dummy and he was so prideful that he split the nation. Now there's the northern tribes of Israel and the southern tribe of Judah. After the Civil War, there is a split. As you follow the history of Judah through the book of Kings, they have, depending on who you ask, either three or seven good kings. Israel had no good kings, not a single good king as it existed as a sovereign nation, if you understand good to be a king who turned the hearts of the people back to the Lord, a king that was faithful to God. Israel didn't have a single good king. And here Jehu is, at the beginning of his reign, taking this huge step, doing this really great thing, this thing that was very bold, this thing that probably would have upset a good portion of the people who followed Baal, this thing that was loud and prominent and good. And he wiped away the prophets of Baal and he wiped away the temples of Baal. And he could have been a good king that changed the course of the nation of Israel, that changed the course of history for Israel for all of eternity. But he didn't do this one thing. And that's where we pick up the story in verse 28. Chapter 10,'s good. God says you've done a good thing. You came in and with faith, because you love me, you got rid of the prophets of Baal, you got rid of the idols of Baal, you got rid of the temples of Baal, and you have followed me. And because of that, this throne is going to be in your family for four generations. This is a good thing. He is on the precipice of potential now, Jehu is, the precipice of greatness. All he has to do is finish the drill. All he has to do is take the next step. He's done the hard thing. And God says, good, I'm going to honor this. But God's not done talking to Jehu. We pick it back up in verse 31. But Jehu was not careful to walk in the law of the Lord, the God nation split, everybody was still practicing Jews. And for every festival and holiday, they had to go to Jerusalem. And in Jerusalem, they would pay the temple tax. They would pay for their sacrifices. They would pay for a hotel stay. They'd go to the restaurants. They'd do the whole deal. It was a trip. It was a pilgrimage. And Jerusalem was getting all the tourist dollars. And Jeroboam went, this stinks because Jerusalem is in Judah. So he made up his own religion with golden calves and he put them in Bethel and in Dan and he told the Israelites, hey, good job. You don't have to go to Jerusalem anymore. You can stay right here and leave your tax and tourism dollars to the nation of Israel. It was an economic choice. And in doing so, he sinned against the Lord. And those golden calves stayed there through many kings, virtually ignored. But to the heart of God, they were offensive. And when Jeroboam took the great step of getting rid of all of the idols in Israel, he didn't get rid of these two idols, the original ones, the ones that were there from the beginning. And I don't know why he didn't do that. I don't know why. Your guess is as good as mine. He could have thought these are part of the heritage of the country. I don't want to mess with this. I don't want to offend people. People go there. They're tourist attractions now. I don't want to fool with it. I've ruffled enough feathers with the bail thing. I don't want to do this thing. He could have thought that. He could have just thought, they don't matter. Nobody cares. Nobody's going to worship these golden calves. Nobody does that anymore. It's an antiquated religion. It's part of our history. It doesn't matter now. They're no threat to God, so whatever. But for whatever reason, he left them behind. And because he left them behind, he didn't turn his heart completely to God. Because he left them behind, he didn't do his part in turning the hearts of the people completely to God. And over time, the worship of those golden calves began to creep back into the culture. And over time, the hearts of God's people were turned away from him again. And over time, it says at the end of this that God began, in verse 32, that the Lord began to cut off parts of Israel. Bit by bit, portions of the kingdom were taken away from Jehu and his descendants until in four generations they were carried away as slaves because of this fundamental mistake that he made. And to me, the lesson from Jehu and his reign that echoes down through the centuries is that partial obedience leads to total failure. Partial obedience, a half measure, not quite full measure, leads to total failure. Partial obedience under Jehu led to total failure. The steps he took with Baal were big, and they were bold, and they were brave, and they were courageous. And he gets credit for that obedience. But because he didn't take the full step, because he didn't go the whole way and take the full measure, eventually it led to his total failure. And you know, the Bible is replete with these examples where half measures don't get the job done, half measures lead to total failure. The most prominent example to me is the transition between the book of Joshua and the book of Judges. The book of Joshua is the sixth book in the Bible that tells the story of the conquest of the land of Canaan. God brings his people, led by Joshua the general, into the promised land that's now occupied by other tribes and nations and city-states. And the whole book of Joshua is a book of conquest sweeping through the nation, and God has given them the divine instruction to get rid of everybody who's not one of my children. This is your land. It's nobody else's. I don't want them here. They're going to contaminate the holiness of my people. Get rid of them. And the whole book is about how God goes before Joshua and his armies and makes that possible. But then the next book, the book of Judges starts. And the book of Judges starts off by telling us, Joshua did right and swept through the land and cleared it out. But he left a couple of pockets of some tribes and some villages that he must have thought were inconsequential. I don't know if he was battle weary and just didn't feel like it. I don't know if he didn't see them as a threat. And so he left them. They could never oppose anything to Israel that would be bad for us. They could never hurt us, but he left them behind. He offered partial obedience. And because it was partial and not full, the author of the book of Judges tells us that because Joshua left them behind, that they were a thorn in the side of the nation of Israel. And in the book of Judges, we see those little inconsequential people groups rise up and oppress God's people in Judges. And they stay there and they remain so much so that generations later when David is in the valley fighting Goliath, he is fighting a giant that is a descendant of the tribes that Joshua left behind because he wouldn't be completely obedient. We see over and over again in Scripture that partial obedience leads to total failure. And what I want us to see this morning is that these stories, the story of Jehu and overthrowing Baal but not the golden calves, the story of Joshua not cleansing the nation like he should have. These stories are not stories about cleansing a nation. They're not stories about getting rid of idols. That's not really what they're about. These stories are about our ongoing battle with sin. They're about our ongoing pursuit of holiness. These stories matter to us deeply because what we should learn from this story of Jehu and his partial obedience is that partial obedience leads to total failure in sin and sin, in lowercase sin and in uppercase sin. For us, here's what I mean. I think the easiest application of this lesson is for us to think about that one sin in our life that just eats our lunch. That one sin in our life that over the years, decades maybe, we just have to battle with over and over again and we experience different seasons of victory and different seasons of struggle with this sin, this one big sin. Many of you, when I said sin, this one big sin, half the room and half of you guys there at home went, yeah, I know what that is for me. You don't have to do a lot of soul searching. You, in fact, think I'm preaching right to you right now that the Holy Spirit gave me a special message, and I know what your sin is. Let me tell you something, I don't. I'm so glad we're not Catholic, and you don't have to confess to me because I don't want to know. But we have those. These big sins that we struggle with over and over and over again. And if you have one of those, come on. You know what that struggle is. You've taken the big measures, haven't you? You've knocked down all the prophets of Baal. You've burned down all the temples for this sin. But you left behind some golden calves because you didn't want to admit that was tempting too. Because maybe you were a little battle weary. You were tired of fighting that when you thought, those can't possibly trouble me. And you left a little remnant. You left a little thing. You left a little window. You left a little foothold behind. And over the years, that sin evolved back into something that was more debilitating than before. You been through that cycle? Yeah, I have too. This story from Jehu is a reminder that partial obedience leads to total failure. The easiest example of this sin, I'm sorry guys, I don't mean to make us, hey, welcome back. Let me make you super uncomfortable for a minute. The easiest example of this is lust, right? It's a sneaky, pernicious sin, man. You can sneak in anywhere. Now, if that's something we struggle with, we can give in to that struggle any time there's cell phone service. And we've taken the steps and we've done the things and we've tried to move past it and we've confessed and we've done the hard stuff and we've sat there in shame and we've been met with grace and we've said, I'm not going to mess it up again. But we leave these pockets, don't we? We leave these little golden idols where we say, certainly that couldn't be what does it. And over time, it builds and becomes just as debilitating as it ever was. And it's not just true of that sin. It's true of pride, or greed,, gluttony, or sloth. So let me just encourage you. If this is you, if you've got one of those sins in your life that's just kicking your tail, that as soon as I started talking about this, you knew what yours was. If that's you, can today be the day that you draw the line in the sand and you go, God, just show me everything I've got in my life that needs to come down so that I can move past this. Show me what full obedience looks like. I'm tired of partially obeying you and then totally failing. So show me what full obedience looks like in this sin. Can today be the day you do that? If you have one of those sins, and you would honestly, in your heart, listen, you don't have to lie to me. I have no idea what you're thinking. The people around you have no idea what you're thinking. If you have that in your life right now, and you think to yourself, you know what? I know that my life shouldn't have this sin in it, but I really like it. And honestly, I don't want it to go away. I'm happier when it's a part of my life. Can you just be brave enough to pray today that God would change your heart? Can you just admit that to the Father? Say, God, I have this sin in my life. I know it doesn't belong there, but I like it there. Will you please change my heart so that I'm not happy with this being a part of my life anymore? Will you just pray that and let the Lord work through that prayer? But this lesson, partial obedience leads to total failure, isn't just true of an individual, lowercase sin, but of all sin, of the sin nature that lives inside of us, of the sin nature that Jesus died so that we might be able to put to death. We can only battle that sin nature with Christ. We can only battle that sin nature with the Spirit. So even as we talk about battling all the sin that is in our hearts, we have to first acknowledge that Jesus expunged that from our hearts and we wander back into it because we're broken creatures. But I think in a church full of Christians, this is probably the more applicable way to look at this story. For many of us here in this room and at home, wherever you are, we don't have that one big sin. Sure, we sin. Nobody's perfect. But we don't have the one thing that if people found out about it, it would just tear us down. We don't have that, but we have sin. And I think for many of us, especially church people, this is where good is the enemy of great really comes into play. Because we feel like we're good enough, right? Maybe you got saved as an adult. Maybe you came to know Jesus as an adult and you look at your life now and you compare it to your life then and you think like, man, I'm totally different. Like I cuss way less, which in Christian circles has to mean you're godly. I cuss way less, right? I don't do the things I used to do. I used to drink this much, now I drink this much. I used to party with these people, now I don't do that. I used to have those friends, now I have these friends. I go to small group, I do all the things. I'm pretty good. So you compare yourself to who you used to be, you feel pretty good about life. Or maybe you've been in church for forever. Maybe you're like me, and as far back as your memory works, church and faith were a part of it. And so you think you're pretty good. You're pretty squared away. And yeah, sure, I mean, I could read my Bible more, but come on, just pastors read their Bible every day, right? Maybe most of the elders. People don't really do that. You know that you could pray more, but you're like, I mean, come on, who has time to pray like 30 minutes a day? Isn't that for little old ladies? Like, I got things to do. And we're pretty good. We look pretty okay. We compare ourselves to the right people. We're pretty spiritually healthy. But that partial obedience, those partial measures, allowing God to change portions of your heart, and then when he shows you this part of your heart, you go, God, I feel pretty good right now. Maybe you don't say that. Maybe you'd never have the audacity to say that to God in prayer, but we say it every day with the way that we act, right? Those partial measures, they lead to total failure just as much as anything else does. And when I say they lead to total failure, what I mean is if we're just cruising along, settling for good enough, not pursuing the Father, not engaging in a relationship with the Father, not daily pursuing Him through prayer and through reading His Word, and then something happens and our life gets shaken to its core and we need our God. We have not been investing in this relationship with Him and we don't have anywhere to go or to grasp and He feels so distant when we need Him so close. Or we're called to ministry or our kids have a question or we need to pour out and we realize that we're pouring from an empty vessel because we haven't been filling ourselves up because we've been settling for good enough. We've been settling for partial measures. It can lead to total failure. But you know, you know what scares me more than that total failure? You know what scares me more for myself and more for you in settling for good enough? It's the thought of what we're missing out on if we would pursue greatness. Think about Jehu. All Jehu had to do is take the next step and get rid of two cows, man. Get rid of those two golden calves, take the next step, take the full measure, and he would have been the lone good king in the nation of Israel. He would have forever changed the course of that nation. He would have been held up as a spiritual hero, and now he's lost history. Many of you never even heard of him before you walked in or before you tuned in this morning. He could have had such a better legacy. What richness and blessings of God did Jehu miss out on because he was partially obedient and he settled for good enough? And for you, what blessings of God are you foregoing by settling for good enough in your life? How much better of a spouse could your spouse have if you would refuse to settle for good enough in your life and you pursued holiness as God instructed you to pursue it. How much, think of your kids. How much better can we disciple our children if we would, as parents, refuse to settle for good enough and pursue greatness and pursue holiness and always go the full measure in our lives and in our hearts and always be willing to tear down the next thing that God shows us. What richness and blessing waits for us on the other side of complete surrender and obedience? We're told that at the right hand of God there are pleasures forevermore, that in his presence there are fullness of joy, that Jesus himself came that we might have life and have it to the full. And I am convinced that the only thing that is keeping us from not experiencing those pleasures and experiencing those joys and experiencing the full life that God has for us is our offerings of partial obedience rather than complete surrender. So look at the story of Jehu. Don't be scared of the consequences. Be aware of what he missed out on. And let's be people who determine, God, I don't want to miss those blessings that you have for me. I don't want to miss that richness that you have for me. I don't want to miss the relationship that you have waiting for me. I don't want my marriage to miss out on that. I don't want my kids to miss out on that. I don't want my next decades to miss out on that. And let's be people who learn from Jehu and apply it to sin and sin. And let today be the day that we say, I'm tearing down all the idols and getting rid of that big sin. And let today be the day that we say, I am going to stop offering partial obedience and start being willing to tear down everything that God shows me in my life so that I can experience all the blessing and all the joy and all the peace that he has for me. Let's do that together as a church. Let's pray. Father, you are good to us. God, I think about maybe some of the things that I've missed, some of the experiences that I haven't had or some of the joys that I would have loved that my half-hearted devotion to you has cost me. Father, may we not be a people of regret. May we not be a people of fear, but may we be a people with an anticipatory joy of what is waiting for us when we will simply surrender ourselves to you. And whatever situations we find ourselves in, whether it's facing a big sin that we're just so scared of, that's just so pernicious, or whether it's facing that sin monster in our life and the temptation to settle for good enough and not tear down the next thing. Wherever we are, God, would you give us the faith and the courage and the desire to take that next step? For those of us who are entrenched, admired in sin, would you simply change our hearts to not be happy with that anymore? Would you help us as a church walk in a pursuit of holiness towards you? Thank you for this morning, for this new phase of grace. We pray that your hand would continue to be on us as it has been in spite everything around us and sometimes in spite of us. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.