My name is Kyle Tolbert. I am the student pastor here at Grace. I am not the head pastor, so if this is your first time and you leave here and you're like, that guy does not know what he's talking about, I promise Nate will be back next week. He heard the student pastor was preaching and he headed right down to Florida, which is a joke. He actually, one of his good friends had his father pass away, so we definitely want to keep Nate in our prayers as well as keeping his friend and their family. Fun story about that song, when I was in high school, that song was popular. And by popular, I mean amongst like Christian folks because they just played it on the Christian radio station that we listened to all the time. And so me and one of my buddies, my best friend Brandon, we would ride around in the car. And when you don't have girlfriends, you sing two-part songs with your bros. And so he's got a great voice. He's kind of got a rocky feel to his voice. And so he obviously did the guy part. And then because of my just like immense, incredible range, I do the girl part, you know, the real high stuff. And so I came in and I was very excited to let Steve know that because he was like, this is the song we're going to do for this week for the hero. And I was like, dude, what if we do it, and I sang it for him, and I was like, what if we did it, and it's just me singing? And so fast forward a couple weeks, and it is now right now. And so apparently he decided that that was not the move, because clearly that was not me singing, because it sounded just, it was good, but I mean it was a little off. But it's awesome to be here this morning. We're talking about Obscure Heroes, the series basically that we've been doing for the entire summer of just talking about different people, different people and different stories within the Bible that maybe don't get told all the time, maybe that people don't quite know quite so well. And so this morning I am going to be talking about Josiah, which is a great name, so very excited to be doing so. But before I jump into really talking about Josiah, I want to jump into a little bit of history behind the Israel that Josiah was coming into. Josiah was a king in Israel, and so before we talk about him, we need to know what's going on behind the scenes, because who doesn't love history before I tell you history? And so basically, Israel was formulated by somebody who is not an obscure hero in the Bible is Moses. So God goes, tells Moses, hey, go get my people, tell Pharaoh to let my people go. We've seen the movie. Maybe we've even heard or read the story. But Moses goes, he brings Israel out of the Israelites, he brings his people out of slavery in Egypt and is basically walking them to what is referred to as the promised land, aka where Israel will establish roots. As they're going through this process and as they're in their camps and they're doing these things, they're basically building a nation. God is bringing them laws and he's bringing them rules. We know the Ten Commandments. We know these commandments. We've heard these things. God is giving these people the list of rules and laws of how this is how I want your society to function. This is what it'll look like. This is how you will live. These are the things that you need to value. These are the laws and the rules that you need to follow. And so as they go into this nation, there's something called a covenant that God makes with his people. And he says, you are my people. I've brought you here. I will continue to provide for you. I love you. I will provide for you. I will bring rain for your crops. I will protect you against other nations. I will do all of these things. But you have to uphold your end of the bargain. You have to continue to serve, to love, to worship me and me alone. There should not be other gods. There should not be other idols among you that you are worshiping or that you are following. In the same way, you should be living through these rules. They called it the book of the law. It's basically what we know and what we see as just like the Bible up to this point is what they had and what they walked through. And so he's saying, you need to follow these rules. You need to follow these laws. If you can't do these things, then I will send you into exile. There will be peace. I'll bring you peace. I'll do all this stuff. But if you can't uphold your end, then there will be consequences. And so there's a lot of listed there, the good and the bad, a lot of the covenant you can find in Leviticus 26. And so I'm just going to read all of it. Just kidding. But I am going to read Leviticus 26, 17, because I think it sets us up well for where we're going. It says, I will set my face against you so that you will be defeated by your enemies. Those who hate you will rule over you, and you will flee even when no one is pursuing you. Basically, this is just part of it. There's plenty more things. There's a lot of turmoil and death and disease that will come if they don't uphold this covenant. But this is where it talks about that he is basically going to send these people into exile. I think we know what exile is. It's basically sending people to live amongst people that are not theirs. And normally, just away from their home, away from their families, and away from the people who are like them. They're basically trying to live wherever they can, and in this time, normally what it means to be in exile is you're oftentimes slave labor, or you're just trying to find whatever you can to survive. And so it's, let's just say it's not good. And so now this, so we know that, now we know that as Josiah is coming into rule, he's coming into rule in Jerusalem, there are parts of Israel that have already been overcome and overtaken by other empires. And so this has already been going on. And so Josiah comes into rule in Jerusalem. And I think the way to intro Josiah is by the way that it intros him in scripture. And so that's what I want to do. We're going to be reading out of 2 Kings 22. And the reason why I want to do it, as opposed to just telling you who he was, is because I think it establishes well who he is. It establishes that he was the king. And it also establishes that my man was the king. And what I mean by that is this dude was the absolute man. Very clearly, you read three, it's like he's the guy who when he walks in, everyone goes, this guy, this guy's here, and you know it's going to be a great night because our boy Josiah is in the house. And so that's where we're going to start. We're going to start off with 2 Kings 1 and then 3. Number two is a lot of names. No need to read a lot of names because we're talking about Josiah this morning. Josiah was eight years old when he became king and he reigned in Jerusalem for 31 years. So off the bat, it's like, wait, what? He was eight? He was eight years old? Yes, he was eight years old when he became king and it said he reigned for 31 years. So clearly he was doing something right. I know sometimes people rule a long time because they're bad or whatever, but hey, that's why we have verse 3, because we realize that he was not bad. And so verse 3, to continue, said, And before we keep going, and this isn't my main point, or I guess it kind of is, but how incredible and what an incredible thing to be described as. That the description of Josiah is one, that he was king when he was eight, so this guy's been the king forever, figuratively and literally, but that he was seen as right in the eyes of the Lord, that he never wavered, he never turned to the left or to the right, but he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, and he followed in the footsteps of David, who is considered the greatest king of Israel. That's a good intro. That's good stuff. That's awesome. The first record after that, as it continues, of the first thing that the Bible talks about build up the temple. Also, go buy some wood to make it look nice. Essentially, as you guys have probably picked up, even this nation is in a bad spot. There's not people that are really following, worshiping God. And so, therefore, the temple is kind of run down. And so he's like, I feel like this is important. I feel like we need to build this up. I feel like this needs to be something that we're paying attention to. And so they go. They go. They give the money. They build up the temple. They make it look nice. And in the midst of that, the high priest at the time goes to Josiah's secretary and, and, and says, hey, I found the, the book of the law. And as we've already discussed, the book of the law is basically the book of rules of, of how they were meant to live, of the way that society runs, of, and it's, it's scripture. It's who God is. It's what God is. It's what God has done. And then it's also outlines the covenant that they have to follow. And so, um, he's like, oh, okay. So he reads some of it to the secretary, and the secretary goes, this is important. Like, this is something that I need to bring to Josiah. And so robes after you read things. I don't often, nor do I own robes. So maybe if I did, I would do it more, but I don't know. But basically, in this time, in biblical times, the reason why people would be overwhelmed with sorrow and torment, and they would tear their robes. And it was basically this look of, it was either sorrow or guilt or whatever it was. And basically what had happened is he was overcome with grief and guilt of, I have been living in this nation, and I've been ruling these people, and I had no idea that I was doing it so wrong. I had no idea that this is how I should have been leading, that I should have been leading my people this entire time to follow this book and to get rid of all of these idols and these gods that are trying to overtake this area and dealing with these false prophets who are basically talking about, hey, this is all okay. This is all good. People who are saying they're hearing from God and they're really just lying. All of these things were happening in his empire and in his country. And he realized, I'm at the forefront of this. I am the king who's allowing this to happen. And therefore he tore his robes because he was so overwhelmed. Because what he finally realized is, oh my gosh, look at this God. This God is so much better and so much greater than anything I ever knew or realized. How could we not be living our lives for them? And so he reacts. He said, so his next move, he tells Shaphan and he tells some of his other men, he said, go and inquire of the Lord for me and for the people of all Judah about what is written in this book that has been found. Great is the Lord's anger that burns against us because those who have gone before us have not obeyed the word of this book. They have not acted in accordance with all that is written there concerning us. So he's like, I just read the covenant, and I know for a fact that what God said not to do, we're doing. I know for a fact that it's because of our fathers, the people who came before us, that they have built into this nation, and because down the line, people cared less and less about God to the point that it's a big deal for them to find the word of God. To the point that this book that should have been at the helm of what they did in this society is something that is a big deal that they found. It's like, oh wait, what is this? And so he's like, I need you to go and talk to our forefront prophetess and ask her what she has to say. So at this time, prophets and prophetesses, they're not people who, they're not preachers, they're not pastors, they're literally people who have a direct line and a direct contact with God, and they're able to tell the people what God has to say. And so they go and they talk to her. We go verses 15 through verse 20. This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says concerning the words that you have heard, because your heart was responsive and you humbled yourself before the Lord. When you heard what I have spoken against this place and its people, then they would become a curse and be laid waste. And because you tore your robes and wept in my presence, I also have heard you, declares the Lord. Therefore, I will gather you to your ancestors, and you will be buried in peace. Your eyes will not see all the disaster I am going to bring this place. So they took this answer back to the king. I imagine this has to be a hard thing, right? It's got to be a hard thing to hear. In one hand, you're happy to hear, oh, wow, so because of my repentance and because of my tearing my clothes and realizing that the rest of my life was spent worshiping and serving this God, because of that, I get to die in peace, but that doesn't mean that the rest of my people do. I feel like there has to be a serious confliction inside of him of, I'm so happy that I get this, but at the same time, it sounds like, regardless of what I do and regardless of what I bring for these people, it's not going to matter. They're still going to experience this hurt, this exile, and this pain. I'm sure he's hit with a crossroads, but instead, we get his response. It starts in 23. The entire 23 basically just outlines his immediate response and then what he does for the remainder of his rule. So I'm going to read the first three verses. It says, Then all the people pled of God to my people. I have to let them know who this God is and this God that they should be loving and they should be serving because of how great and how vast he is. And this God who's telling us not to do all of these things, yet we're doing them. And the rest of his time, everything else in this story is basically him saying and doing all of the things that it asks him to do in this covenant and within this relationship. He goes and he starts burning up all of the other gods and he defiles all of these things that build up those gods and lift them up. As it talks about, he brings the covenant and has everyone commit to that covenant. And so for the rest of his life, his goal and his mission is to make sure that Israel knows this God and they have the ability to worship him. And that's a cool story, right? Let's get a thumbs up for that story. Like, it's great. That's awesome. That's awesome to hear. But when I started to think about it and when I started to read it and look more in depth, I was like, wait, I think not only was it really cool that he did this for God, I think that Josiah realized something that sometimes we forget or sometimes it's very hard to forget in this life. And it reminds me of this guy in my AP calculus class. I don't know if you know AP, advanced placement. It's just like, it's basically just hard classes. AP stands for hard classes, essentially. I know the letters don't match up, but trust me, I'm right. So we had AP calculus, and I had it with a bunch of my buddies because there was only one class offered for AP calculus at the time. And so a lot of my friends were in the class, and it was tough. I mean, I love math, and I worked hard, and so I was really growing from it and whatnot. But like, I'm not going to lie, it was tough. It was the hardest math that I had done. And so because of that, I'm like having to really like work at it. I'm working hard on homeworks. I'm like staying after class sometimes. I'm doing a lot of studying, all this stuff. One of my buddies was kind of in the same boat as me of, like, having always been good at math. He had never really had to try much in math, and that was kind of the way that he went about his AP calculus, you know? Like, we'll just say he was more concerned with getting a level 50 in Halo 3 than he was about getting a grade 100 in AP calculus, which is a funny joke for maybe two people in here, but those two people loved it. So, but the deal was he just didn't put the time and he didn't put the effort into preparing and getting ready for that first test. So here comes that first test. We take it. He gets the grade back, and my man got closer to a 50 on that test that he did in Halo. And what I mean is he got a 47 on the test. And so, which is bad. Like, 47 is bad out of 100. I think we can all agree. He had failed a test. And the thing is, he's a smart dude, especially in math. He had never come close to failing a test. So he's freaking out, you know? Like, he's like, what do I do? I don't know what to do. And so we so we're like, well, why don't you just like stay after, like when we head to lunch, you stay after for a couple minutes, just ask if you can take a retest. It's a first test, maybe she'll let you. And so he does, he stays after, we head on to lunch. And so he shows up a few minutes later, comes to the lunch table, and you know, we're like, I mean, we're good. Like, we're like, we're supportive guys or whatever. So we're calling him 47 the whole time at lunch. But we're like, so 47, like, did, what did she say? You know, like, is she going to let you take a retest or not? And he's like, no, she said no. And so everyone's like, oh, she's the worst. Like, you know, whatever. I can't believe she's like, you take a retest. Which like none of us really thought or believed because it was like early enough on syllabus day that she read that we couldn't take a retest where we weren't all not paying attention. So we knew it was happening, but sometimes you got to stand up for a homie. So she was the worst at that moment. And then he goes, but I asked if I could stay after a few days this week and next week to learn the stuff. And so once again, being supportive or whatever, we're just making fun of them. Like, dude, I don't think you get it. Like, you failed the test. It doesn't matter anymore. Like, you don't understand it. And so it was really funny until we get to the other fun thing about AP classes is that you take an AP test at the end of the year. And this test is basically just, it's a list of all, a bunch of the stuff that you worked on. It's very hard. It's even harder than the class, which is just, I was so thankful for. You always just say so thankful of like, this was the hardest thing I've ever done. Now let's take a test that's way harder than that. But that's what it was. And so we get into it. And the deal with AP tests is if you get a good enough grade, you don't have to take the class in college. And so that's the goal, you know. And so we take this test. Well, wouldn't you know that a lot of the questions had to do with that first test, the stuff that we had learned in that first section. So we get our AP tests back, and he passed it. And he's thrilled, and he's so excited. And I was like, what a smart guy. You know, like a guy who I originally called 47 and thought was quite a dummy actually was a really smart dude because what he realized is right now this is awful. I just failed a test. This is really bad for me right now. But there is something that is far more important and a far bigger deal on down the line that I know that I need and I'm going to be prepared for. I think that that is what Josiah realized for his people. I think when he read the book of the law, he truly realized and he truly understood his purpose, his life, and the life of the people on the planet. And I think what he realized is that this word of God is meaningful. It's real. It's a huge deal that it had changed his entire life. It had changed the way he looked. It had changed the way he thought. It had changed the way he acted. And it had changed his perspective on his life and the people's lives. You like how I backtracked because I forgot to say that? Me too. But it did. It changed his life, and it changed his entire perspective. And I think that what happened is the same thing that happened to my buddy 47 back in high school. I think what he realized is there's no way that I can save these people from what's to come here. Regardless of what I do, regardless of what I do to bring these people, regardless of how many people I have commit to this covenant and live out this covenant life, they're still going to deal with this exile. But what I think he understood and what I think he saw for the first time when he was hit with the word of God is that spiritual exile was far more devastating than physical exile. I think what he realized is, yes, I can't save these people on this earth. Yes, I can't save my people from the death, from the destruction, from the exile that's to come, but I will not be the person that allows them to be exiled for eternity. That there is an eternal home, there is an eternal resting place, that is the goal. Yes, I'm going to do everything I can to protect these people here, but my main and my ultimate goal is to make sure that these people are pushing ever more, ever more onto this this road heading to eternal life with God. Because what he realized is the ultimate prize is not on this life and not what you get to do in Israel or what we get to do here in Raleigh. It's what we get to experience when we finally get to meet God face to face for the first time in a perfect eternity. He said, is going to be built around the promise of I am going to make sure you know who this God is and you know that regardless of what happens to your home right here, that you have a true and an ultimate home in heaven. Turns out, my man was super right. They end up being exiled. Israel's able to come back in the future and is built up again, and yet still people talk about that they feel like wanderers, that they feel like sojourners, that even in their own home, the home that was built for them by God and given to them by God, they still didn't feel fully at home, like there was something missing. Jesus came, and he gave the perfect explanation for why. Jesus comes, and he describes why why and he tells you how you can figure it out. And so he comes and he basically, he looks at him, he says, Wanderers, this is not your home. You don't feel fully at home because you're not home. He says, you are citizens of heaven. Your heart belongs to heaven. Your heart belongs to God in eternity. You're here now, but your heart belongs to God in eternity. And so I am building a road. I'm making a path for you to go to your true home. Jesus comes. He lives a life of homelessness. He literally embodies a sojourner. He embodies a wanderer. Someone who walks from place to place is constantly put down. Most people hate him. A lot of people are following him as well. Basically embodying the fact that I am here to tell you that this is not your home. I'm here to tell you that this place is temporary and you should look forward to forever. That I have a Father who created you and His sole mission is to bring you to Him and all it takes is for you to come to Me. I've provided the path by dying for you, by killing the sin that has created this world that is imperfect and I want you to come and be a part of it with me. And my man Josiah, he knew it all along. His whole perspective, his whole mindset, everything that he did was completely changed when he was hit with the word of God because he understood for the first time, this isn't for me. This place, I'm going to do what I can here, but I've got a promise of eternity. And he realized that for his people. He said, I want these people to know that it is going to get bad, and it is going to get rough, and there are going to be bad things that happen and hard things that happen, but I promise you that this is not it, that there is far more than this. And so what did he do? He read this book to everyone. He wanted to make sure everyone could hear it and had access to it. And then he spent his entire life dedicated and devoted to these people getting to know God and to experience God. And so my question is when we're hit with the Word of God, when we spend time in the Word of God, when we're going to church and listening to sermons, when we're reading for ourselves, when we're listening to things, when we're doing devotions, when we're doing these things, are we allowing the gospel? Are we allowing the word of God? Is the word of God impacting our life? Is the word of God impacting my life? I put my because I think we should think about it in a very specific to me answer. I know a couple months ago, we kind of talked a little bit about this. We talked about reading Scripture. And Nate preached. He posted a question on Facebook. He said, just looking for some genuine answers, if anyone's willing, I just want to know how many of you feel like you get an adequate amount of time in the day or in a week spent in Scripture, getting to just spend time diving into Scripture and focusing on it. And he said he got a few responses that were kind of like, well, I just do devotion books, or I just listen to the Bible. I don't read it, I listen to it, or I just listen to sermons or whatever. And then all of that to say that the question at the end said, does that count? And his point, the point of that message and the point of him talking about that was to say, if you're asking if it counts, then you're probably not doing it in the right way. That if you're trying to do it as something as a check box of, I know I should read my Bible, so I'm just going to get through some of it. If you're doing it that way, then you're probably off. But what I will amend is that there is kind of a way to tell if it counts, and that is, is the Word of God impacting your life? It changed everything about Josiah. Has it changed everything about you? Or is it consistently changing you? Is your attitude, is your mindset, is your heart, and are your actions being impacted by this word of God? And so the first question, how do I see God? Are you consistently growing in who you see God and the way that you see God working in your life? One thing that my campus pastor at UGA used to say a lot is, are you worship by that, is are we worshiping God because of the things that he's provided for us? Because this is a church with a lot of awesome families, with great friends, with great jobs, and all of these incredible things. Are we worshiping God? Do we see God as someone who gives us those things and therefore we worship him? Or are we worshiping him because he's incredible and he's good? And yes, we're thankful for these things, but mostly we're thankful for him, for who he is, for his creation of us, for his son. Why is it different? Because when you worship someone for what they give you, then that builds a contingency plan. It means I'm only going to worship you while these things are going well. When you worship the benefactor, when you worship the person for who he is, then you can be Israel, then you can be exiled from your nation, you can be split from your family, you can see people die, or you can lose people in your lives, and you still love God. We just sang about, we just sang It Is Well. It Is Well was written after a man lost his wife and his kid. He wrote, It Is Well With my soul. He wrote those beautiful words amidst the biggest tragedy that he's ever experienced and that any of us could even imagine experiencing. That's someone who knows God. That's someone who has been impacted by the word of God enough to know that God is good regardless of what's going on in this life. The next question kind of stems from that is how do I view my life? Do you feel like you're wanderers or like you're sojourners on this earth? Like I love my life, I love my family, I love the people that are in my life, but man I cannot wait for heaven because I just can't wait to be with God. I know that it's very easy. A lot of us would say, obviously, yes, we want to go to heaven over going to hell, but how many of us are ready to go to heaven and leaving this earth? Oftentimes, I think we just think about it's the next place we'll be with our family, but guys, there's so much more important thing. Like when we realize who God is, what we realize is that heaven isn't just the next place that you'll be. It's the most perfect and incredible place that you'll be because you're finally with this God who created you and you no longer have anything that is pulling you away from him. You just get to experience the greatest joy that you could ever fathom. Pastor named John Piper, he writes good books and he's insane to listen to. Check him out. He said, There's a lot of big claims in that. And I'm not standing up here saying everyone needs to feel this way or you're not going to heaven. But what I am saying is that when we spend time in the word and when we allow the word to truly change our hearts and impact our hearts the way that I believe Josiah did, then it will change our hearts to move us to a place that we just love God and we love Jesus and we're so ready to see him and to meet him face to face. We're so tired of this earth and the things that are weighing us down and the things that are hurting us and the things that are causing us depression. We just want this joy of getting to know what this is. Are we ready for heaven because we're ready for perfection or are we ready for heaven because we're ready to see the face of God, and we're ready to meet Jesus? And the final question is, how do I live my life? This is a big step, and this is the scariest step. The consequences are far bigger for this one than for the other two, because those are personal. But you look, you see the way that Josiah reacted. You hear the words from the prophetess basically saying, you're good. You've figured it out. You've given your life to God and because of that, he's going to spare you from this exile and he's going to bring you to him. Was his reaction, all right, great, I'm good. Now I'm just going to keep leading and we'll just do our thing. No. His reaction was, if I'm good and I get to have this relationship and I get to go home where I get to meet my maker, then I want everyone else to have this ability too as well. I want everyone to understand that it gets better than this. I want everyone to understand that this is a God who wants to meet them and wants to bring them to his home. I want them to understand that regardless of how good or how bad this life is, your heart rests in heaven, and therefore, you've got something to look forward to that is better than any day that you'll spend on earth. Is that our hearts for people? Because I think if we believe that we are wanderers on this earth, I think if we believe that this earth is not our home and our home is in heaven, then we start to look and care a lot less about the consequences that come from bringing the gospel and from living out a Christian life in the open, in public, around the people that you interact with. I think we worry a lot less about those consequences and worry a lot more about the eternal consequences of what it means if I know that I have this gift and I have this salvation and I have this overwhelming joy that I'm holding back from you and I'm not bringing you, then I'm basically looking at you and saying, I know that this isn't it. I know that there's this perfect home that is greater than anything you could imagine and this God who created and loved you with every single aspect of his being, but I'm not going to tell you about him because I'm a little bit nervous about how you'll feel about me. And I'm not saying this to say, oh, you're the worst if you don't do it, because it'd be saying, Kyle, you're the worst for not doing it. I understand that it's hard. I understand that it's difficult, but that's why it's so important to figure out the first two. It's why it's so important to figure out and to understand who God is and therefore understand who you are and the fact that your life, the reason why when you accepted Christ, you didn't immediately die and go to heaven is because you are here to bring people to heaven with you. And it doesn't have to be an entire nation of people. We're not Josiah. It doesn't even have to be standing up on stage and preaching. I know not everyone has this gift. I know some people are nudging right next to you and saying, who does this guy? But when you start thinking about the world, when you start thinking about the nation, it gets big and it gets hard. But when you start looking at people and when you say, Thomas, Rachel, I know these people. I know they don't know about this. They need to know. Because it's the biggest, it's the most important aspect of my life. And much more importantly, it should be the most important aspect of them. I want them to come and experience this joy that comes from Christ. And I want them to ultimately have the ability to experience the joy of that eternal life with this God who loves us and created us and has given us everything. Let's pray. God, thank you for who you are. God, thank you that regardless of our situation here on this imperfect world, God, that we always have you to look forward to. That one day we will be able to see you face to face and be overwhelmed with the joy of who you are and get to spend eternity with you without death and disease and heartache and heartbreak and exile. God, I can't wait for that day. God, I pray that as we read scripture, as we grow closer to you and learn more about you, God, that we continue to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of you, of your love, of your goodness, and of your mercy. And I pray that that leads us on to bringing people with us. That our whole goal, our whole mission is to go and make more disciples of you so we can have more people in our true home. We love you. Amen.
My name is Kyle Tolbert. I am the student pastor here at Grace. I am not the head pastor, so if this is your first time and you leave here and you're like, that guy does not know what he's talking about, I promise Nate will be back next week. He heard the student pastor was preaching and he headed right down to Florida, which is a joke. He actually, one of his good friends had his father pass away, so we definitely want to keep Nate in our prayers as well as keeping his friend and their family. Fun story about that song, when I was in high school, that song was popular. And by popular, I mean amongst like Christian folks because they just played it on the Christian radio station that we listened to all the time. And so me and one of my buddies, my best friend Brandon, we would ride around in the car. And when you don't have girlfriends, you sing two-part songs with your bros. And so he's got a great voice. He's kind of got a rocky feel to his voice. And so he obviously did the guy part. And then because of my just like immense, incredible range, I do the girl part, you know, the real high stuff. And so I came in and I was very excited to let Steve know that because he was like, this is the song we're going to do for this week for the hero. And I was like, dude, what if we do it, and I sang it for him, and I was like, what if we did it, and it's just me singing? And so fast forward a couple weeks, and it is now right now. And so apparently he decided that that was not the move, because clearly that was not me singing, because it sounded just, it was good, but I mean it was a little off. But it's awesome to be here this morning. We're talking about Obscure Heroes, the series basically that we've been doing for the entire summer of just talking about different people, different people and different stories within the Bible that maybe don't get told all the time, maybe that people don't quite know quite so well. And so this morning I am going to be talking about Josiah, which is a great name, so very excited to be doing so. But before I jump into really talking about Josiah, I want to jump into a little bit of history behind the Israel that Josiah was coming into. Josiah was a king in Israel, and so before we talk about him, we need to know what's going on behind the scenes, because who doesn't love history before I tell you history? And so basically, Israel was formulated by somebody who is not an obscure hero in the Bible is Moses. So God goes, tells Moses, hey, go get my people, tell Pharaoh to let my people go. We've seen the movie. Maybe we've even heard or read the story. But Moses goes, he brings Israel out of the Israelites, he brings his people out of slavery in Egypt and is basically walking them to what is referred to as the promised land, aka where Israel will establish roots. As they're going through this process and as they're in their camps and they're doing these things, they're basically building a nation. God is bringing them laws and he's bringing them rules. We know the Ten Commandments. We know these commandments. We've heard these things. God is giving these people the list of rules and laws of how this is how I want your society to function. This is what it'll look like. This is how you will live. These are the things that you need to value. These are the laws and the rules that you need to follow. And so as they go into this nation, there's something called a covenant that God makes with his people. And he says, you are my people. I've brought you here. I will continue to provide for you. I love you. I will provide for you. I will bring rain for your crops. I will protect you against other nations. I will do all of these things. But you have to uphold your end of the bargain. You have to continue to serve, to love, to worship me and me alone. There should not be other gods. There should not be other idols among you that you are worshiping or that you are following. In the same way, you should be living through these rules. They called it the book of the law. It's basically what we know and what we see as just like the Bible up to this point is what they had and what they walked through. And so he's saying, you need to follow these rules. You need to follow these laws. If you can't do these things, then I will send you into exile. There will be peace. I'll bring you peace. I'll do all this stuff. But if you can't uphold your end, then there will be consequences. And so there's a lot of listed there, the good and the bad, a lot of the covenant you can find in Leviticus 26. And so I'm just going to read all of it. Just kidding. But I am going to read Leviticus 26, 17, because I think it sets us up well for where we're going. It says, I will set my face against you so that you will be defeated by your enemies. Those who hate you will rule over you, and you will flee even when no one is pursuing you. Basically, this is just part of it. There's plenty more things. There's a lot of turmoil and death and disease that will come if they don't uphold this covenant. But this is where it talks about that he is basically going to send these people into exile. I think we know what exile is. It's basically sending people to live amongst people that are not theirs. And normally, just away from their home, away from their families, and away from the people who are like them. They're basically trying to live wherever they can, and in this time, normally what it means to be in exile is you're oftentimes slave labor, or you're just trying to find whatever you can to survive. And so it's, let's just say it's not good. And so now this, so we know that, now we know that as Josiah is coming into rule, he's coming into rule in Jerusalem, there are parts of Israel that have already been overcome and overtaken by other empires. And so this has already been going on. And so Josiah comes into rule in Jerusalem. And I think the way to intro Josiah is by the way that it intros him in scripture. And so that's what I want to do. We're going to be reading out of 2 Kings 22. And the reason why I want to do it, as opposed to just telling you who he was, is because I think it establishes well who he is. It establishes that he was the king. And it also establishes that my man was the king. And what I mean by that is this dude was the absolute man. Very clearly, you read three, it's like he's the guy who when he walks in, everyone goes, this guy, this guy's here, and you know it's going to be a great night because our boy Josiah is in the house. And so that's where we're going to start. We're going to start off with 2 Kings 1 and then 3. Number two is a lot of names. No need to read a lot of names because we're talking about Josiah this morning. Josiah was eight years old when he became king and he reigned in Jerusalem for 31 years. So off the bat, it's like, wait, what? He was eight? He was eight years old? Yes, he was eight years old when he became king and it said he reigned for 31 years. So clearly he was doing something right. I know sometimes people rule a long time because they're bad or whatever, but hey, that's why we have verse 3, because we realize that he was not bad. And so verse 3, to continue, said, And before we keep going, and this isn't my main point, or I guess it kind of is, but how incredible and what an incredible thing to be described as. That the description of Josiah is one, that he was king when he was eight, so this guy's been the king forever, figuratively and literally, but that he was seen as right in the eyes of the Lord, that he never wavered, he never turned to the left or to the right, but he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, and he followed in the footsteps of David, who is considered the greatest king of Israel. That's a good intro. That's good stuff. That's awesome. The first record after that, as it continues, of the first thing that the Bible talks about build up the temple. Also, go buy some wood to make it look nice. Essentially, as you guys have probably picked up, even this nation is in a bad spot. There's not people that are really following, worshiping God. And so, therefore, the temple is kind of run down. And so he's like, I feel like this is important. I feel like we need to build this up. I feel like this needs to be something that we're paying attention to. And so they go. They go. They give the money. They build up the temple. They make it look nice. And in the midst of that, the high priest at the time goes to Josiah's secretary and, and, and says, hey, I found the, the book of the law. And as we've already discussed, the book of the law is basically the book of rules of, of how they were meant to live, of the way that society runs, of, and it's, it's scripture. It's who God is. It's what God is. It's what God has done. And then it's also outlines the covenant that they have to follow. And so, um, he's like, oh, okay. So he reads some of it to the secretary, and the secretary goes, this is important. Like, this is something that I need to bring to Josiah. And so robes after you read things. I don't often, nor do I own robes. So maybe if I did, I would do it more, but I don't know. But basically, in this time, in biblical times, the reason why people would be overwhelmed with sorrow and torment, and they would tear their robes. And it was basically this look of, it was either sorrow or guilt or whatever it was. And basically what had happened is he was overcome with grief and guilt of, I have been living in this nation, and I've been ruling these people, and I had no idea that I was doing it so wrong. I had no idea that this is how I should have been leading, that I should have been leading my people this entire time to follow this book and to get rid of all of these idols and these gods that are trying to overtake this area and dealing with these false prophets who are basically talking about, hey, this is all okay. This is all good. People who are saying they're hearing from God and they're really just lying. All of these things were happening in his empire and in his country. And he realized, I'm at the forefront of this. I am the king who's allowing this to happen. And therefore he tore his robes because he was so overwhelmed. Because what he finally realized is, oh my gosh, look at this God. This God is so much better and so much greater than anything I ever knew or realized. How could we not be living our lives for them? And so he reacts. He said, so his next move, he tells Shaphan and he tells some of his other men, he said, go and inquire of the Lord for me and for the people of all Judah about what is written in this book that has been found. Great is the Lord's anger that burns against us because those who have gone before us have not obeyed the word of this book. They have not acted in accordance with all that is written there concerning us. So he's like, I just read the covenant, and I know for a fact that what God said not to do, we're doing. I know for a fact that it's because of our fathers, the people who came before us, that they have built into this nation, and because down the line, people cared less and less about God to the point that it's a big deal for them to find the word of God. To the point that this book that should have been at the helm of what they did in this society is something that is a big deal that they found. It's like, oh wait, what is this? And so he's like, I need you to go and talk to our forefront prophetess and ask her what she has to say. So at this time, prophets and prophetesses, they're not people who, they're not preachers, they're not pastors, they're literally people who have a direct line and a direct contact with God, and they're able to tell the people what God has to say. And so they go and they talk to her. We go verses 15 through verse 20. This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says concerning the words that you have heard, because your heart was responsive and you humbled yourself before the Lord. When you heard what I have spoken against this place and its people, then they would become a curse and be laid waste. And because you tore your robes and wept in my presence, I also have heard you, declares the Lord. Therefore, I will gather you to your ancestors, and you will be buried in peace. Your eyes will not see all the disaster I am going to bring this place. So they took this answer back to the king. I imagine this has to be a hard thing, right? It's got to be a hard thing to hear. In one hand, you're happy to hear, oh, wow, so because of my repentance and because of my tearing my clothes and realizing that the rest of my life was spent worshiping and serving this God, because of that, I get to die in peace, but that doesn't mean that the rest of my people do. I feel like there has to be a serious confliction inside of him of, I'm so happy that I get this, but at the same time, it sounds like, regardless of what I do and regardless of what I bring for these people, it's not going to matter. They're still going to experience this hurt, this exile, and this pain. I'm sure he's hit with a crossroads, but instead, we get his response. It starts in 23. The entire 23 basically just outlines his immediate response and then what he does for the remainder of his rule. So I'm going to read the first three verses. It says, Then all the people pled of God to my people. I have to let them know who this God is and this God that they should be loving and they should be serving because of how great and how vast he is. And this God who's telling us not to do all of these things, yet we're doing them. And the rest of his time, everything else in this story is basically him saying and doing all of the things that it asks him to do in this covenant and within this relationship. He goes and he starts burning up all of the other gods and he defiles all of these things that build up those gods and lift them up. As it talks about, he brings the covenant and has everyone commit to that covenant. And so for the rest of his life, his goal and his mission is to make sure that Israel knows this God and they have the ability to worship him. And that's a cool story, right? Let's get a thumbs up for that story. Like, it's great. That's awesome. That's awesome to hear. But when I started to think about it and when I started to read it and look more in depth, I was like, wait, I think not only was it really cool that he did this for God, I think that Josiah realized something that sometimes we forget or sometimes it's very hard to forget in this life. And it reminds me of this guy in my AP calculus class. I don't know if you know AP, advanced placement. It's just like, it's basically just hard classes. AP stands for hard classes, essentially. I know the letters don't match up, but trust me, I'm right. So we had AP calculus, and I had it with a bunch of my buddies because there was only one class offered for AP calculus at the time. And so a lot of my friends were in the class, and it was tough. I mean, I love math, and I worked hard, and so I was really growing from it and whatnot. But like, I'm not going to lie, it was tough. It was the hardest math that I had done. And so because of that, I'm like having to really like work at it. I'm working hard on homeworks. I'm like staying after class sometimes. I'm doing a lot of studying, all this stuff. One of my buddies was kind of in the same boat as me of, like, having always been good at math. He had never really had to try much in math, and that was kind of the way that he went about his AP calculus, you know? Like, we'll just say he was more concerned with getting a level 50 in Halo 3 than he was about getting a grade 100 in AP calculus, which is a funny joke for maybe two people in here, but those two people loved it. So, but the deal was he just didn't put the time and he didn't put the effort into preparing and getting ready for that first test. So here comes that first test. We take it. He gets the grade back, and my man got closer to a 50 on that test that he did in Halo. And what I mean is he got a 47 on the test. And so, which is bad. Like, 47 is bad out of 100. I think we can all agree. He had failed a test. And the thing is, he's a smart dude, especially in math. He had never come close to failing a test. So he's freaking out, you know? Like, he's like, what do I do? I don't know what to do. And so we so we're like, well, why don't you just like stay after, like when we head to lunch, you stay after for a couple minutes, just ask if you can take a retest. It's a first test, maybe she'll let you. And so he does, he stays after, we head on to lunch. And so he shows up a few minutes later, comes to the lunch table, and you know, we're like, I mean, we're good. Like, we're like, we're supportive guys or whatever. So we're calling him 47 the whole time at lunch. But we're like, so 47, like, did, what did she say? You know, like, is she going to let you take a retest or not? And he's like, no, she said no. And so everyone's like, oh, she's the worst. Like, you know, whatever. I can't believe she's like, you take a retest. Which like none of us really thought or believed because it was like early enough on syllabus day that she read that we couldn't take a retest where we weren't all not paying attention. So we knew it was happening, but sometimes you got to stand up for a homie. So she was the worst at that moment. And then he goes, but I asked if I could stay after a few days this week and next week to learn the stuff. And so once again, being supportive or whatever, we're just making fun of them. Like, dude, I don't think you get it. Like, you failed the test. It doesn't matter anymore. Like, you don't understand it. And so it was really funny until we get to the other fun thing about AP classes is that you take an AP test at the end of the year. And this test is basically just, it's a list of all, a bunch of the stuff that you worked on. It's very hard. It's even harder than the class, which is just, I was so thankful for. You always just say so thankful of like, this was the hardest thing I've ever done. Now let's take a test that's way harder than that. But that's what it was. And so we get into it. And the deal with AP tests is if you get a good enough grade, you don't have to take the class in college. And so that's the goal, you know. And so we take this test. Well, wouldn't you know that a lot of the questions had to do with that first test, the stuff that we had learned in that first section. So we get our AP tests back, and he passed it. And he's thrilled, and he's so excited. And I was like, what a smart guy. You know, like a guy who I originally called 47 and thought was quite a dummy actually was a really smart dude because what he realized is right now this is awful. I just failed a test. This is really bad for me right now. But there is something that is far more important and a far bigger deal on down the line that I know that I need and I'm going to be prepared for. I think that that is what Josiah realized for his people. I think when he read the book of the law, he truly realized and he truly understood his purpose, his life, and the life of the people on the planet. And I think what he realized is that this word of God is meaningful. It's real. It's a huge deal that it had changed his entire life. It had changed the way he looked. It had changed the way he thought. It had changed the way he acted. And it had changed his perspective on his life and the people's lives. You like how I backtracked because I forgot to say that? Me too. But it did. It changed his life, and it changed his entire perspective. And I think that what happened is the same thing that happened to my buddy 47 back in high school. I think what he realized is there's no way that I can save these people from what's to come here. Regardless of what I do, regardless of what I do to bring these people, regardless of how many people I have commit to this covenant and live out this covenant life, they're still going to deal with this exile. But what I think he understood and what I think he saw for the first time when he was hit with the word of God is that spiritual exile was far more devastating than physical exile. I think what he realized is, yes, I can't save these people on this earth. Yes, I can't save my people from the death, from the destruction, from the exile that's to come, but I will not be the person that allows them to be exiled for eternity. That there is an eternal home, there is an eternal resting place, that is the goal. Yes, I'm going to do everything I can to protect these people here, but my main and my ultimate goal is to make sure that these people are pushing ever more, ever more onto this this road heading to eternal life with God. Because what he realized is the ultimate prize is not on this life and not what you get to do in Israel or what we get to do here in Raleigh. It's what we get to experience when we finally get to meet God face to face for the first time in a perfect eternity. He said, is going to be built around the promise of I am going to make sure you know who this God is and you know that regardless of what happens to your home right here, that you have a true and an ultimate home in heaven. Turns out, my man was super right. They end up being exiled. Israel's able to come back in the future and is built up again, and yet still people talk about that they feel like wanderers, that they feel like sojourners, that even in their own home, the home that was built for them by God and given to them by God, they still didn't feel fully at home, like there was something missing. Jesus came, and he gave the perfect explanation for why. Jesus comes, and he describes why why and he tells you how you can figure it out. And so he comes and he basically, he looks at him, he says, Wanderers, this is not your home. You don't feel fully at home because you're not home. He says, you are citizens of heaven. Your heart belongs to heaven. Your heart belongs to God in eternity. You're here now, but your heart belongs to God in eternity. And so I am building a road. I'm making a path for you to go to your true home. Jesus comes. He lives a life of homelessness. He literally embodies a sojourner. He embodies a wanderer. Someone who walks from place to place is constantly put down. Most people hate him. A lot of people are following him as well. Basically embodying the fact that I am here to tell you that this is not your home. I'm here to tell you that this place is temporary and you should look forward to forever. That I have a Father who created you and His sole mission is to bring you to Him and all it takes is for you to come to Me. I've provided the path by dying for you, by killing the sin that has created this world that is imperfect and I want you to come and be a part of it with me. And my man Josiah, he knew it all along. His whole perspective, his whole mindset, everything that he did was completely changed when he was hit with the word of God because he understood for the first time, this isn't for me. This place, I'm going to do what I can here, but I've got a promise of eternity. And he realized that for his people. He said, I want these people to know that it is going to get bad, and it is going to get rough, and there are going to be bad things that happen and hard things that happen, but I promise you that this is not it, that there is far more than this. And so what did he do? He read this book to everyone. He wanted to make sure everyone could hear it and had access to it. And then he spent his entire life dedicated and devoted to these people getting to know God and to experience God. And so my question is when we're hit with the Word of God, when we spend time in the Word of God, when we're going to church and listening to sermons, when we're reading for ourselves, when we're listening to things, when we're doing devotions, when we're doing these things, are we allowing the gospel? Are we allowing the word of God? Is the word of God impacting our life? Is the word of God impacting my life? I put my because I think we should think about it in a very specific to me answer. I know a couple months ago, we kind of talked a little bit about this. We talked about reading Scripture. And Nate preached. He posted a question on Facebook. He said, just looking for some genuine answers, if anyone's willing, I just want to know how many of you feel like you get an adequate amount of time in the day or in a week spent in Scripture, getting to just spend time diving into Scripture and focusing on it. And he said he got a few responses that were kind of like, well, I just do devotion books, or I just listen to the Bible. I don't read it, I listen to it, or I just listen to sermons or whatever. And then all of that to say that the question at the end said, does that count? And his point, the point of that message and the point of him talking about that was to say, if you're asking if it counts, then you're probably not doing it in the right way. That if you're trying to do it as something as a check box of, I know I should read my Bible, so I'm just going to get through some of it. If you're doing it that way, then you're probably off. But what I will amend is that there is kind of a way to tell if it counts, and that is, is the Word of God impacting your life? It changed everything about Josiah. Has it changed everything about you? Or is it consistently changing you? Is your attitude, is your mindset, is your heart, and are your actions being impacted by this word of God? And so the first question, how do I see God? Are you consistently growing in who you see God and the way that you see God working in your life? One thing that my campus pastor at UGA used to say a lot is, are you worship by that, is are we worshiping God because of the things that he's provided for us? Because this is a church with a lot of awesome families, with great friends, with great jobs, and all of these incredible things. Are we worshiping God? Do we see God as someone who gives us those things and therefore we worship him? Or are we worshiping him because he's incredible and he's good? And yes, we're thankful for these things, but mostly we're thankful for him, for who he is, for his creation of us, for his son. Why is it different? Because when you worship someone for what they give you, then that builds a contingency plan. It means I'm only going to worship you while these things are going well. When you worship the benefactor, when you worship the person for who he is, then you can be Israel, then you can be exiled from your nation, you can be split from your family, you can see people die, or you can lose people in your lives, and you still love God. We just sang about, we just sang It Is Well. It Is Well was written after a man lost his wife and his kid. He wrote, It Is Well With my soul. He wrote those beautiful words amidst the biggest tragedy that he's ever experienced and that any of us could even imagine experiencing. That's someone who knows God. That's someone who has been impacted by the word of God enough to know that God is good regardless of what's going on in this life. The next question kind of stems from that is how do I view my life? Do you feel like you're wanderers or like you're sojourners on this earth? Like I love my life, I love my family, I love the people that are in my life, but man I cannot wait for heaven because I just can't wait to be with God. I know that it's very easy. A lot of us would say, obviously, yes, we want to go to heaven over going to hell, but how many of us are ready to go to heaven and leaving this earth? Oftentimes, I think we just think about it's the next place we'll be with our family, but guys, there's so much more important thing. Like when we realize who God is, what we realize is that heaven isn't just the next place that you'll be. It's the most perfect and incredible place that you'll be because you're finally with this God who created you and you no longer have anything that is pulling you away from him. You just get to experience the greatest joy that you could ever fathom. Pastor named John Piper, he writes good books and he's insane to listen to. Check him out. He said, There's a lot of big claims in that. And I'm not standing up here saying everyone needs to feel this way or you're not going to heaven. But what I am saying is that when we spend time in the word and when we allow the word to truly change our hearts and impact our hearts the way that I believe Josiah did, then it will change our hearts to move us to a place that we just love God and we love Jesus and we're so ready to see him and to meet him face to face. We're so tired of this earth and the things that are weighing us down and the things that are hurting us and the things that are causing us depression. We just want this joy of getting to know what this is. Are we ready for heaven because we're ready for perfection or are we ready for heaven because we're ready to see the face of God, and we're ready to meet Jesus? And the final question is, how do I live my life? This is a big step, and this is the scariest step. The consequences are far bigger for this one than for the other two, because those are personal. But you look, you see the way that Josiah reacted. You hear the words from the prophetess basically saying, you're good. You've figured it out. You've given your life to God and because of that, he's going to spare you from this exile and he's going to bring you to him. Was his reaction, all right, great, I'm good. Now I'm just going to keep leading and we'll just do our thing. No. His reaction was, if I'm good and I get to have this relationship and I get to go home where I get to meet my maker, then I want everyone else to have this ability too as well. I want everyone to understand that it gets better than this. I want everyone to understand that this is a God who wants to meet them and wants to bring them to his home. I want them to understand that regardless of how good or how bad this life is, your heart rests in heaven, and therefore, you've got something to look forward to that is better than any day that you'll spend on earth. Is that our hearts for people? Because I think if we believe that we are wanderers on this earth, I think if we believe that this earth is not our home and our home is in heaven, then we start to look and care a lot less about the consequences that come from bringing the gospel and from living out a Christian life in the open, in public, around the people that you interact with. I think we worry a lot less about those consequences and worry a lot more about the eternal consequences of what it means if I know that I have this gift and I have this salvation and I have this overwhelming joy that I'm holding back from you and I'm not bringing you, then I'm basically looking at you and saying, I know that this isn't it. I know that there's this perfect home that is greater than anything you could imagine and this God who created and loved you with every single aspect of his being, but I'm not going to tell you about him because I'm a little bit nervous about how you'll feel about me. And I'm not saying this to say, oh, you're the worst if you don't do it, because it'd be saying, Kyle, you're the worst for not doing it. I understand that it's hard. I understand that it's difficult, but that's why it's so important to figure out the first two. It's why it's so important to figure out and to understand who God is and therefore understand who you are and the fact that your life, the reason why when you accepted Christ, you didn't immediately die and go to heaven is because you are here to bring people to heaven with you. And it doesn't have to be an entire nation of people. We're not Josiah. It doesn't even have to be standing up on stage and preaching. I know not everyone has this gift. I know some people are nudging right next to you and saying, who does this guy? But when you start thinking about the world, when you start thinking about the nation, it gets big and it gets hard. But when you start looking at people and when you say, Thomas, Rachel, I know these people. I know they don't know about this. They need to know. Because it's the biggest, it's the most important aspect of my life. And much more importantly, it should be the most important aspect of them. I want them to come and experience this joy that comes from Christ. And I want them to ultimately have the ability to experience the joy of that eternal life with this God who loves us and created us and has given us everything. Let's pray. God, thank you for who you are. God, thank you that regardless of our situation here on this imperfect world, God, that we always have you to look forward to. That one day we will be able to see you face to face and be overwhelmed with the joy of who you are and get to spend eternity with you without death and disease and heartache and heartbreak and exile. God, I can't wait for that day. God, I pray that as we read scripture, as we grow closer to you and learn more about you, God, that we continue to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of you, of your love, of your goodness, and of your mercy. And I pray that that leads us on to bringing people with us. That our whole goal, our whole mission is to go and make more disciples of you so we can have more people in our true home. We love you. Amen.
Good morning. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace Raleigh. And I just got to be up front with you first and foremost. It's been a little while since I've done something like this, since I've talked in front of a congregation like this. In fact, I think we have a picture of the last time I did it. That's me on the right. Okay, that was my bar mitzvah. That was several years ago. And a few things have changed since then, so I'm trying to adapt with that. So last week, Nate brought the first installment in our series of best practices. He talked about reading the Bible. And I don't know about you, but I felt convicted about that. And I, even as a pastor, do not spend as much time in the Bible as I think that I should. And I dedicated more time this week in the Bible, and I feel extremely blessed because of that. I've also heard that many of you are doing the same thing and that it's a blessing as well. I would like to encourage you to keep going with that, to keep on. And if those of you that haven't jumped in yet, it's not too late to start reading your Bible. Jump in, start today. I'm sure it will be a blessing in your lives. So a few months ago when we were talking about this series on best practices, Nate said to me, Steve, we're going to be doing one on worship. And as the worship pastor at Grace, I would like you to take that one. And I immediately said, oh, this is great. This is great. This is what I do. This is going to be so easy. This is low-hanging fruit. I've wanted to share with you for a long time. I really only get about a minute or so during each service each Sunday, so I get to share everything that I want to about worship. So I sat down, and I started putting my thoughts together, started doing some research, looking in the Bible, looking in my textbooks, and I quickly realized that if I were to share everything that I want to share with you guys about worship, we would easily be here for half the day. So we're not going to do that today. I can see all the... Okay, good. No, we're not going to do that today. What we're going to do today is just focus on what I think would be a good starting point on worship, and that is to talk about authentic worship. So we're going to be talking about authentic worship today. So when I was 12 years old, my uncle made me a tape. He dubbed it. Do you remember how to do that with the buttons and the this and then you undo it? Yeah. Okay. So he made me a tape of Jimi Hendrix live at Monterey. And if you're not familiar with this concert, this is the one where he hit the scene and he lit his guitar on fire, okay? So 12-year-old Steve hearing this for the first time, I could not believe what I was hearing. I immediately, immediately ran down to the garage. I grabbed my wiffle ball bat. I grabbed some string. I grabbed some tape. I ran back up to my room. I put the string on the bat. I put on the bat. I put on sunglasses, my best Hard Rock Cafe shirt, and I pretended to be Jimi Hendrix in the mirror. I had to be a part of it. Music has that way of affecting us deeply. Music goes into us. It affects us. Have you ever seen people who have Alzheimer's or maybe dementia, that they're living in another reality, and then somebody plays Amazing Grace or Just As I Am for them, and they have this moment of clarity, and they can sing every word and every note. This is how music affects us. The first time that I went to church with my wife, for those of you who don't know, we were separated at one point. We were heading toward divorce. We started going to church together. It was the music, when I walked in, the music that broke down those walls that I could hear the good news of Jesus. This is the effect that music has on us. But is all music worship? No. Is God looking just for music? No. He's looking for worship. So we're going to be talking about worship today. But worship is kind of a broad term. We can worship all kinds of things. We can worship God. That's good. We can worship other gods. Not so good. We can worship the universe, nature, our finances, our careers, our spouses, our children. So today I thought it would be good to kind of hone in on what we're talking about. We're going to be talking about authentic worship in the church, corporate worship. And so I have a definition for us that worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and hearts. So worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, bodies, and hearts. Did you know that praise and worship is mentioned over 400 times in the Bible? That we're commanded to worship over 50 times in the Bible? So anything that's mentioned that much in the Bible I think deserves for us to take a look at. So first of all, we want to look at why we don't praise the Lord with our breath, Psalm 98 says that the rocks will cry out and the rivers will clap their hands. Now we live close enough to the mountains here in Raleigh. Have you ever been next to a river and listened to the sound of that? Does it not sound like applause? And the rivers clap their hands for God. All of creation praises God. The next time that you're walking along a river, maybe taking a hike, take a moment and worship God right there. Not only did he create worship here, he created it in heaven. You understand? All of this goes away. But not worship. Worship is our primary activity in heaven. So he created it. Also, he is worthy of it. He is worthy of worship. Great is the Lord, most worthy of praise. His greatness no one can fathom. That's Psalm 145. He's the only one worthy of worship. Now, we sometimes get that wrong. We sometimes misstep. We sometimes put things ahead of God when maybe we shouldn't. If you do that, listen, you're not alone. John, we just did a series in John. He wrote the Gospel of John. He also wrote some letters and Revelation. John, in Revelation, And you know that this is true. And why do we know it's true? He wrote the book. He could have left that part out, but he didn't. He chose to keep it in there so that we can know that we're not alone in this. He's also present in worship. What did we talk about earlier for our definition? Worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. He's present in worship. This is something that I think we kind of take for granted nowadays, that he's present in worship, okay? Before Christ, to be in the presence of God was not a common thing. Before Christ, God dwelled in the Holy of Holies. Now, you have to understand that in Israel, there was the temple. Most people could not go into the inner part of the temple, the holy place. They were on the outskirts. They could not even be close to the presence of God there. Then, within that holy place, there was something called the Holy of Holies. And that's where the Ark of the Covenant was. The only person, there was only one person that could go in there. That was the high priest. Only one person could go into the presence of God, and that only happened once a year on the Day of Atonement, on Yom Kippur. Once a year, one person could be in the presence of God. Okay? And let me give you an idea of how serious they were about this. They were so serious that they would tie a rope around him when he went in so that in case he died while in there, they could pull him out. That's pretty amazing. I mean, the fact that that's how serious it was to be in the presence of God. Now, through Jesus, we're able to be in the presence of God. He says that wherever two or more are gathered in his name, he is present. So how do we do this? Well, worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. So with our voices, we can sing. The Lord is my strength and my shield. In him my heart trusts and I am helped. My heart exalts and with my song I give thanks to him. That's Psalm 28. We know this. There's time dedicated in our service to this. There are billboard charts called praise and worship. Singing connects us to God. It connects our hearts to our minds. In fact, praise is mentioned in multiple ways, this singing in the Old and New Testaments. We have tehillah, to praise vocally in song or shouts. Hallelujah, you might be familiar with. This is a shouting call for corporate praise. We have tada, which is to sing praises together as one community in harmony. This is what we do when we gather each week in worship. So we worship God in his presence with our voices and with our bodies also. We see this multiple times. Now I'm going to say a few verses here. I just want you to know that I'm not making this stuff up. I mean, this stuff is in the Bible as worthy offerings to God. I mean, this is acceptable worship to God. You can bow your head to God. The man bowed his head and worshiped the Lord, Genesis 24. You can lift your hands. So I will bless you as long as I live. In your name I will lift my hand, Psalm 63. This word is yadah, to lift or throw arms upward in praise and surrender. A similar one to this is spreading out your hands, like this. This is sabah, to reach out with affection to God, to feel his hold on us. This is almost like you're reaching out for a hug from God. This is I need you, God. Bowing your knee. praising God. We're getting excited about God. Clap your hands, all people. Shout to God with loud songs of joy. Psalm 47. Here's one of my personal favorites. Falling on your face before the Lord. Leviticus 9. And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offerings and the pieces of fat on the altar.. If you put your envelope in there, and the Lord's fire came and consumed it, I think we'd all shout and hit the floor, right? And you know what? We would be worshiping. Okay, dancing. Uh-oh. Dancing. Okay. And David danced before the Lord with all his might, and David was wearing a linen ephod. This is 2 Samuel 6. David is king of Israel. He's returning with the Ark of the Covenant to put it in the Holy of Holies. He's built a tabernacle for it. He's super excited. And how excited is he? He rips off his clothes and basically dances in his underwear through the streets. And I think we have a video of this. Anybody catch who that was? Richard Gere? You should go find that on Netflix. So what he's doing is halal. This is to boast foolishly, to make a show of it. But what do we see there, right? So he's dancing through the streets. He doesn't have his clothes on. Everybody's cheering and shouting, right? But what else did we see? We saw his wife looking out the window, right? Okay, and this is actually, ouch, right? Right? But David retorted to Michal, I was dancing before the Lord who chose me above your father and all his family. He appointed me as the leader of Israel, the people of the Lord. So I celebrate before the Lord. And then he goes one step further. Yes, I am willing to look even more foolish than this, even to be humiliated in my own eyes. But those servant girls who you mentioned will indeed think I am distinguished. He was dancing with abandonment before the Lord. How often have we been in this place? I'm sure we've all been there at some point in our lives where we've done something maybe vulnerable or something that we believed in or just put ourselves out there and people criticize that. They look down on us for it. It's happened to all of us. It's not a good feeling. On the other side of things, how often are we the Michal in that story where we look at someone and go, why are they doing that? Why are they acting that way? Maybe don't they know that we don't do that here? It's easy to see ourselves in both situations here. So we talked about worship is the activity of praising, worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. This is the authentic part I want to talk about. We worship with our hearts. It's good for us to worship. God created us to delight in him. We experience this delight a great deal in worship. In fact, Psalm 92 says, it is good to give thanks to, a few years ago, I was at a worship conference in Orlando. And it was one of the big conferences that they do every year. There are about 1,500 worship leaders there. And all the popular worship artists were there too. So we had like Hillsong and Bethel, Phil Wickham, Chris Tomlin, Elevation. I mean, it's a lot of the songs that we do here, those artists were there. And the times of worship were very powerful. I mean, they know how to usher you into the presence of God. And it was powerful. But at one point during the conference, the power went out. And everybody in the room, all 1,500 of us laughed first because, you know, we're all in worship ministry. It's like, ha, ha, ha, like we're elbowing each other. Like, it even happens to them. You know, look at them squirm. And so we were laughing. And then we see all the people dressed in all black coming, like running around the stage and everything with their flashlights trying to figure out what the problem is. And when it was obvious that the power wasn't going to just come back on, we kind of settled down a little bit. And out of the front of the room, there were maybe eight people or so, started singing, How Great Thou Art. We sang that this morning. Worship doesn't need the lights and the sound and all the stuff. Worship is about our voices, our bodies, and our hearts in God's presence. They started singing. It started rippling out as the verse was going. Everybody knows this song. We're all worship leaders. There's 1,500 of us singing relatively well in harmony. Okay? This moment was amazing. I'm singing my heart out. It gets to everybody singing and worshiping. The room is erupting in worship. We get to the chorus, and I go to sing, and nothing comes out. Nothing comes out. I'm so overwhelmed by what's happening that I fall to my knees and just lift my hands and try to whisper the words. I had never heard anything so beautiful, and I don't think I ever will until I get to heaven. That really was, I believe, a taste of what heaven is going to sound like. It's not going to sound like acoustic guitars and drums. It's going to sound like God's created people worshiping with our breath. This was authentic worship. So our authentic worship here is going to be us. It's not going to be what the church down the street is doing. If we copy what the church down the street is doing, it's not authentic, right? If we copy what they're doing online at megachurches and see how they're worshiping, it's not going to be authentic, because authentic worship comes from the heart. So we need to worship authentically like Grace Raleigh. We need to worship authentically like Grace Raleigh. Now, also, feeling something in your heart. Did you notice something in all this worship that I mentioned in the Bible that it's all actions? It's all things that you feel in your heart and you do. So authentic worship isn't going to be feeling something in your heart and not doing anything about it. That's not authentic either. Authentic worship is feeling it in your heart and expressing it. But are we going to look like the church down the street? No, we're not. We're going to look like us. So, we are going to have a time of worship here at the end of our service. And let me just tell you, as we go into that time, you know, grace is a very unique church, I think. Grace has been through a lot over the years. Grace is full of people who love each other. I will say that most people who come here for the first time, one of the first comments that they have is how much a family it feels like here, how friendly people are, how included they feel. What I'm trying to say is that this is a safe place. This is a place where family can be family with each other. If you are feeling a way to express yourself, let's not be the Michals in the story and say, what are they doing? We don't do that here. And listen, I know that it's going to look different. It's going to look different. It's going to look like us. And all that we want as a church is to worship God with all of our hearts. So I'd like to ask you all to stand and join me as we pray together. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you that we get the opportunity to glorify you in your presence. What an amazing thing it is that we can come into your presence and use the breath that you have given to us to just give back to you. Lord, we know that you work deeply in us, that you love us, that you knew us before we were born, that you know every hair on our heads. So Lord, we ask that that love just come through us now in a powerful way. And we pray all of this in Jesus' name. Amen. Let's worship together. You give life, You are love, You bring light to the darkness. You give hope, You restore every heart that is broken and great are you lord it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praise it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only you give life, You are love, You bring light to the darkness. You give hope, You restore every heart that is broken and great are you lord it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only is your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only he's so good and worthy of our praise. Let it pour out of you. will shout your praise our hearts will cry these bones will sing great are you lord and all the earth will shout your praise our hearts will cry these bones will sing pray are you lord and all the earth will shout your praise our Our hearts will cry. These bones will sing. Hey, are you Lord? It's your breath in our lungs. So we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise. It's your breath. In our lives. So we pour out our praise to you only. What a gift it is to be able to praise God freely and openly. And we can only do that because he allows us to. He created us to worship him and to glorify him. And he does that because he loves us. He is jealous of me. Love's like a hurricane. I am a tree bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy. When all of a sudden I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory And I realize just how beautiful you are How great your affections are for me And oh, how He loves us all. Oh, how He loves us. How He loves us all. He is jealous of me, loves like a hurricane. I am a tree bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy. When all of a sudden I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory And I realize just how beautiful you are and how great your affections are for me And oh, how He loves us all. Oh, how He loves us. How He loves us Oh, how He loves us Oh are his portion and he is our prize drawn to redemption by the grace in his eyes if his grace is an ocean we're all sinking and heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss and my heart turns violently inside of my chest I don't have time to maintain these regrets when I think about the way that he loves us oh how he loves us oh how he loves us Oh Oh how He loves us Oh how He loves us Oh how He loves Oh Oh, how He loves us. Oh, how He loves us. Oh, how He loves.
Good morning. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace Raleigh. And I just got to be up front with you first and foremost. It's been a little while since I've done something like this, since I've talked in front of a congregation like this. In fact, I think we have a picture of the last time I did it. That's me on the right. Okay, that was my bar mitzvah. That was several years ago. And a few things have changed since then, so I'm trying to adapt with that. So last week, Nate brought the first installment in our series of best practices. He talked about reading the Bible. And I don't know about you, but I felt convicted about that. And I, even as a pastor, do not spend as much time in the Bible as I think that I should. And I dedicated more time this week in the Bible, and I feel extremely blessed because of that. I've also heard that many of you are doing the same thing and that it's a blessing as well. I would like to encourage you to keep going with that, to keep on. And if those of you that haven't jumped in yet, it's not too late to start reading your Bible. Jump in, start today. I'm sure it will be a blessing in your lives. So a few months ago when we were talking about this series on best practices, Nate said to me, Steve, we're going to be doing one on worship. And as the worship pastor at Grace, I would like you to take that one. And I immediately said, oh, this is great. This is great. This is what I do. This is going to be so easy. This is low-hanging fruit. I've wanted to share with you for a long time. I really only get about a minute or so during each service each Sunday, so I get to share everything that I want to about worship. So I sat down, and I started putting my thoughts together, started doing some research, looking in the Bible, looking in my textbooks, and I quickly realized that if I were to share everything that I want to share with you guys about worship, we would easily be here for half the day. So we're not going to do that today. I can see all the... Okay, good. No, we're not going to do that today. What we're going to do today is just focus on what I think would be a good starting point on worship, and that is to talk about authentic worship. So we're going to be talking about authentic worship today. So when I was 12 years old, my uncle made me a tape. He dubbed it. Do you remember how to do that with the buttons and the this and then you undo it? Yeah. Okay. So he made me a tape of Jimi Hendrix live at Monterey. And if you're not familiar with this concert, this is the one where he hit the scene and he lit his guitar on fire, okay? So 12-year-old Steve hearing this for the first time, I could not believe what I was hearing. I immediately, immediately ran down to the garage. I grabbed my wiffle ball bat. I grabbed some string. I grabbed some tape. I ran back up to my room. I put the string on the bat. I put on the bat. I put on sunglasses, my best Hard Rock Cafe shirt, and I pretended to be Jimi Hendrix in the mirror. I had to be a part of it. Music has that way of affecting us deeply. Music goes into us. It affects us. Have you ever seen people who have Alzheimer's or maybe dementia, that they're living in another reality, and then somebody plays Amazing Grace or Just As I Am for them, and they have this moment of clarity, and they can sing every word and every note. This is how music affects us. The first time that I went to church with my wife, for those of you who don't know, we were separated at one point. We were heading toward divorce. We started going to church together. It was the music, when I walked in, the music that broke down those walls that I could hear the good news of Jesus. This is the effect that music has on us. But is all music worship? No. Is God looking just for music? No. He's looking for worship. So we're going to be talking about worship today. But worship is kind of a broad term. We can worship all kinds of things. We can worship God. That's good. We can worship other gods. Not so good. We can worship the universe, nature, our finances, our careers, our spouses, our children. So today I thought it would be good to kind of hone in on what we're talking about. We're going to be talking about authentic worship in the church, corporate worship. And so I have a definition for us that worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and hearts. So worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, bodies, and hearts. Did you know that praise and worship is mentioned over 400 times in the Bible? That we're commanded to worship over 50 times in the Bible? So anything that's mentioned that much in the Bible I think deserves for us to take a look at. So first of all, we want to look at why we don't praise the Lord with our breath, Psalm 98 says that the rocks will cry out and the rivers will clap their hands. Now we live close enough to the mountains here in Raleigh. Have you ever been next to a river and listened to the sound of that? Does it not sound like applause? And the rivers clap their hands for God. All of creation praises God. The next time that you're walking along a river, maybe taking a hike, take a moment and worship God right there. Not only did he create worship here, he created it in heaven. You understand? All of this goes away. But not worship. Worship is our primary activity in heaven. So he created it. Also, he is worthy of it. He is worthy of worship. Great is the Lord, most worthy of praise. His greatness no one can fathom. That's Psalm 145. He's the only one worthy of worship. Now, we sometimes get that wrong. We sometimes misstep. We sometimes put things ahead of God when maybe we shouldn't. If you do that, listen, you're not alone. John, we just did a series in John. He wrote the Gospel of John. He also wrote some letters and Revelation. John, in Revelation, And you know that this is true. And why do we know it's true? He wrote the book. He could have left that part out, but he didn't. He chose to keep it in there so that we can know that we're not alone in this. He's also present in worship. What did we talk about earlier for our definition? Worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. He's present in worship. This is something that I think we kind of take for granted nowadays, that he's present in worship, okay? Before Christ, to be in the presence of God was not a common thing. Before Christ, God dwelled in the Holy of Holies. Now, you have to understand that in Israel, there was the temple. Most people could not go into the inner part of the temple, the holy place. They were on the outskirts. They could not even be close to the presence of God there. Then, within that holy place, there was something called the Holy of Holies. And that's where the Ark of the Covenant was. The only person, there was only one person that could go in there. That was the high priest. Only one person could go into the presence of God, and that only happened once a year on the Day of Atonement, on Yom Kippur. Once a year, one person could be in the presence of God. Okay? And let me give you an idea of how serious they were about this. They were so serious that they would tie a rope around him when he went in so that in case he died while in there, they could pull him out. That's pretty amazing. I mean, the fact that that's how serious it was to be in the presence of God. Now, through Jesus, we're able to be in the presence of God. He says that wherever two or more are gathered in his name, he is present. So how do we do this? Well, worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. So with our voices, we can sing. The Lord is my strength and my shield. In him my heart trusts and I am helped. My heart exalts and with my song I give thanks to him. That's Psalm 28. We know this. There's time dedicated in our service to this. There are billboard charts called praise and worship. Singing connects us to God. It connects our hearts to our minds. In fact, praise is mentioned in multiple ways, this singing in the Old and New Testaments. We have tehillah, to praise vocally in song or shouts. Hallelujah, you might be familiar with. This is a shouting call for corporate praise. We have tada, which is to sing praises together as one community in harmony. This is what we do when we gather each week in worship. So we worship God in his presence with our voices and with our bodies also. We see this multiple times. Now I'm going to say a few verses here. I just want you to know that I'm not making this stuff up. I mean, this stuff is in the Bible as worthy offerings to God. I mean, this is acceptable worship to God. You can bow your head to God. The man bowed his head and worshiped the Lord, Genesis 24. You can lift your hands. So I will bless you as long as I live. In your name I will lift my hand, Psalm 63. This word is yadah, to lift or throw arms upward in praise and surrender. A similar one to this is spreading out your hands, like this. This is sabah, to reach out with affection to God, to feel his hold on us. This is almost like you're reaching out for a hug from God. This is I need you, God. Bowing your knee. praising God. We're getting excited about God. Clap your hands, all people. Shout to God with loud songs of joy. Psalm 47. Here's one of my personal favorites. Falling on your face before the Lord. Leviticus 9. And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offerings and the pieces of fat on the altar.. If you put your envelope in there, and the Lord's fire came and consumed it, I think we'd all shout and hit the floor, right? And you know what? We would be worshiping. Okay, dancing. Uh-oh. Dancing. Okay. And David danced before the Lord with all his might, and David was wearing a linen ephod. This is 2 Samuel 6. David is king of Israel. He's returning with the Ark of the Covenant to put it in the Holy of Holies. He's built a tabernacle for it. He's super excited. And how excited is he? He rips off his clothes and basically dances in his underwear through the streets. And I think we have a video of this. Anybody catch who that was? Richard Gere? You should go find that on Netflix. So what he's doing is halal. This is to boast foolishly, to make a show of it. But what do we see there, right? So he's dancing through the streets. He doesn't have his clothes on. Everybody's cheering and shouting, right? But what else did we see? We saw his wife looking out the window, right? Okay, and this is actually, ouch, right? Right? But David retorted to Michal, I was dancing before the Lord who chose me above your father and all his family. He appointed me as the leader of Israel, the people of the Lord. So I celebrate before the Lord. And then he goes one step further. Yes, I am willing to look even more foolish than this, even to be humiliated in my own eyes. But those servant girls who you mentioned will indeed think I am distinguished. He was dancing with abandonment before the Lord. How often have we been in this place? I'm sure we've all been there at some point in our lives where we've done something maybe vulnerable or something that we believed in or just put ourselves out there and people criticize that. They look down on us for it. It's happened to all of us. It's not a good feeling. On the other side of things, how often are we the Michal in that story where we look at someone and go, why are they doing that? Why are they acting that way? Maybe don't they know that we don't do that here? It's easy to see ourselves in both situations here. So we talked about worship is the activity of praising, worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. This is the authentic part I want to talk about. We worship with our hearts. It's good for us to worship. God created us to delight in him. We experience this delight a great deal in worship. In fact, Psalm 92 says, it is good to give thanks to, a few years ago, I was at a worship conference in Orlando. And it was one of the big conferences that they do every year. There are about 1,500 worship leaders there. And all the popular worship artists were there too. So we had like Hillsong and Bethel, Phil Wickham, Chris Tomlin, Elevation. I mean, it's a lot of the songs that we do here, those artists were there. And the times of worship were very powerful. I mean, they know how to usher you into the presence of God. And it was powerful. But at one point during the conference, the power went out. And everybody in the room, all 1,500 of us laughed first because, you know, we're all in worship ministry. It's like, ha, ha, ha, like we're elbowing each other. Like, it even happens to them. You know, look at them squirm. And so we were laughing. And then we see all the people dressed in all black coming, like running around the stage and everything with their flashlights trying to figure out what the problem is. And when it was obvious that the power wasn't going to just come back on, we kind of settled down a little bit. And out of the front of the room, there were maybe eight people or so, started singing, How Great Thou Art. We sang that this morning. Worship doesn't need the lights and the sound and all the stuff. Worship is about our voices, our bodies, and our hearts in God's presence. They started singing. It started rippling out as the verse was going. Everybody knows this song. We're all worship leaders. There's 1,500 of us singing relatively well in harmony. Okay? This moment was amazing. I'm singing my heart out. It gets to everybody singing and worshiping. The room is erupting in worship. We get to the chorus, and I go to sing, and nothing comes out. Nothing comes out. I'm so overwhelmed by what's happening that I fall to my knees and just lift my hands and try to whisper the words. I had never heard anything so beautiful, and I don't think I ever will until I get to heaven. That really was, I believe, a taste of what heaven is going to sound like. It's not going to sound like acoustic guitars and drums. It's going to sound like God's created people worshiping with our breath. This was authentic worship. So our authentic worship here is going to be us. It's not going to be what the church down the street is doing. If we copy what the church down the street is doing, it's not authentic, right? If we copy what they're doing online at megachurches and see how they're worshiping, it's not going to be authentic, because authentic worship comes from the heart. So we need to worship authentically like Grace Raleigh. We need to worship authentically like Grace Raleigh. Now, also, feeling something in your heart. Did you notice something in all this worship that I mentioned in the Bible that it's all actions? It's all things that you feel in your heart and you do. So authentic worship isn't going to be feeling something in your heart and not doing anything about it. That's not authentic either. Authentic worship is feeling it in your heart and expressing it. But are we going to look like the church down the street? No, we're not. We're going to look like us. So, we are going to have a time of worship here at the end of our service. And let me just tell you, as we go into that time, you know, grace is a very unique church, I think. Grace has been through a lot over the years. Grace is full of people who love each other. I will say that most people who come here for the first time, one of the first comments that they have is how much a family it feels like here, how friendly people are, how included they feel. What I'm trying to say is that this is a safe place. This is a place where family can be family with each other. If you are feeling a way to express yourself, let's not be the Michals in the story and say, what are they doing? We don't do that here. And listen, I know that it's going to look different. It's going to look different. It's going to look like us. And all that we want as a church is to worship God with all of our hearts. So I'd like to ask you all to stand and join me as we pray together. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you that we get the opportunity to glorify you in your presence. What an amazing thing it is that we can come into your presence and use the breath that you have given to us to just give back to you. Lord, we know that you work deeply in us, that you love us, that you knew us before we were born, that you know every hair on our heads. So Lord, we ask that that love just come through us now in a powerful way. And we pray all of this in Jesus' name. Amen. Let's worship together. You give life, You are love, You bring light to the darkness. You give hope, You restore every heart that is broken and great are you lord it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praise it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only you give life, You are love, You bring light to the darkness. You give hope, You restore every heart that is broken and great are you lord it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only is your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only he's so good and worthy of our praise. Let it pour out of you. will shout your praise our hearts will cry these bones will sing great are you lord and all the earth will shout your praise our hearts will cry these bones will sing pray are you lord and all the earth will shout your praise our Our hearts will cry. These bones will sing. Hey, are you Lord? It's your breath in our lungs. So we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise. It's your breath. In our lives. So we pour out our praise to you only. What a gift it is to be able to praise God freely and openly. And we can only do that because he allows us to. He created us to worship him and to glorify him. And he does that because he loves us. He is jealous of me. Love's like a hurricane. I am a tree bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy. When all of a sudden I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory And I realize just how beautiful you are How great your affections are for me And oh, how He loves us all. Oh, how He loves us. How He loves us all. He is jealous of me, loves like a hurricane. I am a tree bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy. When all of a sudden I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory And I realize just how beautiful you are and how great your affections are for me And oh, how He loves us all. Oh, how He loves us. How He loves us Oh, how He loves us Oh are his portion and he is our prize drawn to redemption by the grace in his eyes if his grace is an ocean we're all sinking and heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss and my heart turns violently inside of my chest I don't have time to maintain these regrets when I think about the way that he loves us oh how he loves us oh how he loves us Oh Oh how He loves us Oh how He loves us Oh how He loves Oh Oh, how He loves us. Oh, how He loves us. Oh, how He loves.
Good morning. My name is Steve Goldberg. I'm the worship pastor here at Grace Raleigh. And I just got to be up front with you first and foremost. It's been a little while since I've done something like this, since I've talked in front of a congregation like this. In fact, I think we have a picture of the last time I did it. That's me on the right. Okay, that was my bar mitzvah. That was several years ago. And a few things have changed since then, so I'm trying to adapt with that. So last week, Nate brought the first installment in our series of best practices. He talked about reading the Bible. And I don't know about you, but I felt convicted about that. And I, even as a pastor, do not spend as much time in the Bible as I think that I should. And I dedicated more time this week in the Bible, and I feel extremely blessed because of that. I've also heard that many of you are doing the same thing and that it's a blessing as well. I would like to encourage you to keep going with that, to keep on. And if those of you that haven't jumped in yet, it's not too late to start reading your Bible. Jump in, start today. I'm sure it will be a blessing in your lives. So a few months ago when we were talking about this series on best practices, Nate said to me, Steve, we're going to be doing one on worship. And as the worship pastor at Grace, I would like you to take that one. And I immediately said, oh, this is great. This is great. This is what I do. This is going to be so easy. This is low-hanging fruit. I've wanted to share with you for a long time. I really only get about a minute or so during each service each Sunday, so I get to share everything that I want to about worship. So I sat down, and I started putting my thoughts together, started doing some research, looking in the Bible, looking in my textbooks, and I quickly realized that if I were to share everything that I want to share with you guys about worship, we would easily be here for half the day. So we're not going to do that today. I can see all the... Okay, good. No, we're not going to do that today. What we're going to do today is just focus on what I think would be a good starting point on worship, and that is to talk about authentic worship. So we're going to be talking about authentic worship today. So when I was 12 years old, my uncle made me a tape. He dubbed it. Do you remember how to do that with the buttons and the this and then you undo it? Yeah. Okay. So he made me a tape of Jimi Hendrix live at Monterey. And if you're not familiar with this concert, this is the one where he hit the scene and he lit his guitar on fire, okay? So 12-year-old Steve hearing this for the first time, I could not believe what I was hearing. I immediately, immediately ran down to the garage. I grabbed my wiffle ball bat. I grabbed some string. I grabbed some tape. I ran back up to my room. I put the string on the bat. I put on the bat. I put on sunglasses, my best Hard Rock Cafe shirt, and I pretended to be Jimi Hendrix in the mirror. I had to be a part of it. Music has that way of affecting us deeply. Music goes into us. It affects us. Have you ever seen people who have Alzheimer's or maybe dementia, that they're living in another reality, and then somebody plays Amazing Grace or Just As I Am for them, and they have this moment of clarity, and they can sing every word and every note. This is how music affects us. The first time that I went to church with my wife, for those of you who don't know, we were separated at one point. We were heading toward divorce. We started going to church together. It was the music, when I walked in, the music that broke down those walls that I could hear the good news of Jesus. This is the effect that music has on us. But is all music worship? No. Is God looking just for music? No. He's looking for worship. So we're going to be talking about worship today. But worship is kind of a broad term. We can worship all kinds of things. We can worship God. That's good. We can worship other gods. Not so good. We can worship the universe, nature, our finances, our careers, our spouses, our children. So today I thought it would be good to kind of hone in on what we're talking about. We're going to be talking about authentic worship in the church, corporate worship. And so I have a definition for us that worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and hearts. So worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, bodies, and hearts. Did you know that praise and worship is mentioned over 400 times in the Bible? That we're commanded to worship over 50 times in the Bible? So anything that's mentioned that much in the Bible I think deserves for us to take a look at. So first of all, we want to look at why we don't praise the Lord with our breath, Psalm 98 says that the rocks will cry out and the rivers will clap their hands. Now we live close enough to the mountains here in Raleigh. Have you ever been next to a river and listened to the sound of that? Does it not sound like applause? And the rivers clap their hands for God. All of creation praises God. The next time that you're walking along a river, maybe taking a hike, take a moment and worship God right there. Not only did he create worship here, he created it in heaven. You understand? All of this goes away. But not worship. Worship is our primary activity in heaven. So he created it. Also, he is worthy of it. He is worthy of worship. Great is the Lord, most worthy of praise. His greatness no one can fathom. That's Psalm 145. He's the only one worthy of worship. Now, we sometimes get that wrong. We sometimes misstep. We sometimes put things ahead of God when maybe we shouldn't. If you do that, listen, you're not alone. John, we just did a series in John. He wrote the Gospel of John. He also wrote some letters and Revelation. John, in Revelation, And you know that this is true. And why do we know it's true? He wrote the book. He could have left that part out, but he didn't. He chose to keep it in there so that we can know that we're not alone in this. He's also present in worship. What did we talk about earlier for our definition? Worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. He's present in worship. This is something that I think we kind of take for granted nowadays, that he's present in worship, okay? Before Christ, to be in the presence of God was not a common thing. Before Christ, God dwelled in the Holy of Holies. Now, you have to understand that in Israel, there was the temple. Most people could not go into the inner part of the temple, the holy place. They were on the outskirts. They could not even be close to the presence of God there. Then, within that holy place, there was something called the Holy of Holies. And that's where the Ark of the Covenant was. The only person, there was only one person that could go in there. That was the high priest. Only one person could go into the presence of God, and that only happened once a year on the Day of Atonement, on Yom Kippur. Once a year, one person could be in the presence of God. Okay? And let me give you an idea of how serious they were about this. They were so serious that they would tie a rope around him when he went in so that in case he died while in there, they could pull him out. That's pretty amazing. I mean, the fact that that's how serious it was to be in the presence of God. Now, through Jesus, we're able to be in the presence of God. He says that wherever two or more are gathered in his name, he is present. So how do we do this? Well, worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. So with our voices, we can sing. The Lord is my strength and my shield. In him my heart trusts and I am helped. My heart exalts and with my song I give thanks to him. That's Psalm 28. We know this. There's time dedicated in our service to this. There are billboard charts called praise and worship. Singing connects us to God. It connects our hearts to our minds. In fact, praise is mentioned in multiple ways, this singing in the Old and New Testaments. We have tehillah, to praise vocally in song or shouts. Hallelujah, you might be familiar with. This is a shouting call for corporate praise. We have tada, which is to sing praises together as one community in harmony. This is what we do when we gather each week in worship. So we worship God in his presence with our voices and with our bodies also. We see this multiple times. Now I'm going to say a few verses here. I just want you to know that I'm not making this stuff up. I mean, this stuff is in the Bible as worthy offerings to God. I mean, this is acceptable worship to God. You can bow your head to God. The man bowed his head and worshiped the Lord, Genesis 24. You can lift your hands. So I will bless you as long as I live. In your name I will lift my hand, Psalm 63. This word is yadah, to lift or throw arms upward in praise and surrender. A similar one to this is spreading out your hands, like this. This is sabah, to reach out with affection to God, to feel his hold on us. This is almost like you're reaching out for a hug from God. This is I need you, God. Bowing your knee. praising God. We're getting excited about God. Clap your hands, all people. Shout to God with loud songs of joy. Psalm 47. Here's one of my personal favorites. Falling on your face before the Lord. Leviticus 9. And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offerings and the pieces of fat on the altar.. If you put your envelope in there, and the Lord's fire came and consumed it, I think we'd all shout and hit the floor, right? And you know what? We would be worshiping. Okay, dancing. Uh-oh. Dancing. Okay. And David danced before the Lord with all his might, and David was wearing a linen ephod. This is 2 Samuel 6. David is king of Israel. He's returning with the Ark of the Covenant to put it in the Holy of Holies. He's built a tabernacle for it. He's super excited. And how excited is he? He rips off his clothes and basically dances in his underwear through the streets. And I think we have a video of this. Anybody catch who that was? Richard Gere? You should go find that on Netflix. So what he's doing is halal. This is to boast foolishly, to make a show of it. But what do we see there, right? So he's dancing through the streets. He doesn't have his clothes on. Everybody's cheering and shouting, right? But what else did we see? We saw his wife looking out the window, right? Okay, and this is actually, ouch, right? Right? But David retorted to Michal, I was dancing before the Lord who chose me above your father and all his family. He appointed me as the leader of Israel, the people of the Lord. So I celebrate before the Lord. And then he goes one step further. Yes, I am willing to look even more foolish than this, even to be humiliated in my own eyes. But those servant girls who you mentioned will indeed think I am distinguished. He was dancing with abandonment before the Lord. How often have we been in this place? I'm sure we've all been there at some point in our lives where we've done something maybe vulnerable or something that we believed in or just put ourselves out there and people criticize that. They look down on us for it. It's happened to all of us. It's not a good feeling. On the other side of things, how often are we the Michal in that story where we look at someone and go, why are they doing that? Why are they acting that way? Maybe don't they know that we don't do that here? It's easy to see ourselves in both situations here. So we talked about worship is the activity of praising, worship is the activity of glorifying God in his presence with our voices, our bodies, and our hearts. This is the authentic part I want to talk about. We worship with our hearts. It's good for us to worship. God created us to delight in him. We experience this delight a great deal in worship. In fact, Psalm 92 says, it is good to give thanks to, a few years ago, I was at a worship conference in Orlando. And it was one of the big conferences that they do every year. There are about 1,500 worship leaders there. And all the popular worship artists were there too. So we had like Hillsong and Bethel, Phil Wickham, Chris Tomlin, Elevation. I mean, it's a lot of the songs that we do here, those artists were there. And the times of worship were very powerful. I mean, they know how to usher you into the presence of God. And it was powerful. But at one point during the conference, the power went out. And everybody in the room, all 1,500 of us laughed first because, you know, we're all in worship ministry. It's like, ha, ha, ha, like we're elbowing each other. Like, it even happens to them. You know, look at them squirm. And so we were laughing. And then we see all the people dressed in all black coming, like running around the stage and everything with their flashlights trying to figure out what the problem is. And when it was obvious that the power wasn't going to just come back on, we kind of settled down a little bit. And out of the front of the room, there were maybe eight people or so, started singing, How Great Thou Art. We sang that this morning. Worship doesn't need the lights and the sound and all the stuff. Worship is about our voices, our bodies, and our hearts in God's presence. They started singing. It started rippling out as the verse was going. Everybody knows this song. We're all worship leaders. There's 1,500 of us singing relatively well in harmony. Okay? This moment was amazing. I'm singing my heart out. It gets to everybody singing and worshiping. The room is erupting in worship. We get to the chorus, and I go to sing, and nothing comes out. Nothing comes out. I'm so overwhelmed by what's happening that I fall to my knees and just lift my hands and try to whisper the words. I had never heard anything so beautiful, and I don't think I ever will until I get to heaven. That really was, I believe, a taste of what heaven is going to sound like. It's not going to sound like acoustic guitars and drums. It's going to sound like God's created people worshiping with our breath. This was authentic worship. So our authentic worship here is going to be us. It's not going to be what the church down the street is doing. If we copy what the church down the street is doing, it's not authentic, right? If we copy what they're doing online at megachurches and see how they're worshiping, it's not going to be authentic, because authentic worship comes from the heart. So we need to worship authentically like Grace Raleigh. We need to worship authentically like Grace Raleigh. Now, also, feeling something in your heart. Did you notice something in all this worship that I mentioned in the Bible that it's all actions? It's all things that you feel in your heart and you do. So authentic worship isn't going to be feeling something in your heart and not doing anything about it. That's not authentic either. Authentic worship is feeling it in your heart and expressing it. But are we going to look like the church down the street? No, we're not. We're going to look like us. So, we are going to have a time of worship here at the end of our service. And let me just tell you, as we go into that time, you know, grace is a very unique church, I think. Grace has been through a lot over the years. Grace is full of people who love each other. I will say that most people who come here for the first time, one of the first comments that they have is how much a family it feels like here, how friendly people are, how included they feel. What I'm trying to say is that this is a safe place. This is a place where family can be family with each other. If you are feeling a way to express yourself, let's not be the Michals in the story and say, what are they doing? We don't do that here. And listen, I know that it's going to look different. It's going to look different. It's going to look like us. And all that we want as a church is to worship God with all of our hearts. So I'd like to ask you all to stand and join me as we pray together. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you that we get the opportunity to glorify you in your presence. What an amazing thing it is that we can come into your presence and use the breath that you have given to us to just give back to you. Lord, we know that you work deeply in us, that you love us, that you knew us before we were born, that you know every hair on our heads. So Lord, we ask that that love just come through us now in a powerful way. And we pray all of this in Jesus' name. Amen. Let's worship together. You give life, You are love, You bring light to the darkness. You give hope, You restore every heart that is broken and great are you lord it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praise it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only you give life, You are love, You bring light to the darkness. You give hope, You restore every heart that is broken and great are you lord it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only is your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only he's so good and worthy of our praise. Let it pour out of you. will shout your praise our hearts will cry these bones will sing great are you lord and all the earth will shout your praise our hearts will cry these bones will sing pray are you lord and all the earth will shout your praise our Our hearts will cry. These bones will sing. Hey, are you Lord? It's your breath in our lungs. So we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise we pour out our praises your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise to you only it's your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise we pour out our praise. We pour out our praise. It's your breath. In our lives. So we pour out our praise to you only. What a gift it is to be able to praise God freely and openly. And we can only do that because he allows us to. He created us to worship him and to glorify him. And he does that because he loves us. He is jealous of me. Love's like a hurricane. I am a tree bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy. When all of a sudden I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory And I realize just how beautiful you are How great your affections are for me And oh, how He loves us all. Oh, how He loves us. How He loves us all. He is jealous of me, loves like a hurricane. I am a tree bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy. When all of a sudden I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory And I realize just how beautiful you are and how great your affections are for me And oh, how He loves us all. Oh, how He loves us. How He loves us Oh, how He loves us Oh are his portion and he is our prize drawn to redemption by the grace in his eyes if his grace is an ocean we're all sinking and heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss and my heart turns violently inside of my chest I don't have time to maintain these regrets when I think about the way that he loves us oh how he loves us oh how he loves us Oh Oh how He loves us Oh how He loves us Oh how He loves Oh Oh, how He loves us. Oh, how He loves us. Oh, how He loves.
Good morning, Grace. It's good to get to share in another morning with you like this. Before I dive into the sermon, I just wanted to clarify something. This week I saw someone from Grace in person that I haven't seen in a long time. I happened to be wearing a suit. And as they got out of their car, the first thing they said to me is like, oh, you look slimmer. And I said, slimmer than what? And they said, well, you know, the camera, you know, it adds like 15 pounds. And so you just, I've only seen you on camera. And so seeing you in person, it's just a little different. I was kind of taken aback by that comment and just wanted to assure those of you who have been following along during COVID that if you think that makes looking a little chubby, that's the camera. I am the picture of health. If you could see me in person, you would note that I am both slim and trim and fit. So I'm just throwing that out there for the record. Now, as we jump into the sermon, we're in the middle of this series called We Are the church in the first century ought to still guide the church in the 21st century because we are still the church. This week we arrive at a passage that I think is really crucial to the story of the church and the story of Acts and impacts you in profound ways that you're probably unaware of. I've never heard a sermon on this passage before. We're going to be in Acts chapter 15. If you have a Bible, I hope that you'll turn there. I've never heard a sermon on this before. I've never heard it taught before. But as I go through Acts for myself, I see chapter 15 as this crucial turning point moment that has an incredible impact on the rest of Acts, but also the rest of the New Testament. It has an incredible impact on you and I think is super important in the narrative of the book of Acts. So I'm hoping that this morning, the sermon may be informative. It might be educational. This might be a place that we haven't stopped and camped out in before and sought to understand. And then hopefully it can also be inspirational in that it will encourage in us some behaviors and thought processes that we see come out of the story, and we can apply those to our own life. So in Acts chapter 15, the council, the leadership of the early church is getting together. By this time in the story, it's Peter and James and John and the disciples, but it's also a group of Pharisees and some other people who have now been grafted into the leaders of the church. Some other converts with leadership potential are now in this leadership council and they're faced with this question. This is a crucial question. And the tension that we see underlying this 15th chapter of Acts is a tension that we see massaged out in the book of Galatians. It's a tension that we see that exists throughout the book of Romans and in the book of Hebrews and a lot of other Pauline epistles, a lot of other of Paul's letters. This is a tension that runs throughout the New Testament, which is how is this new church going to handle the integration of the law and which portions of the law should we integrate? Here's what's happening. The church sprung up out of a Jewish culture and a Jewish faith. God chose the Hebrew people, the descendants of Abraham, to be his people. And he gave them laws through Moses that we're going to talk about in a minute. And then through those people, God brought the Messiah, Jesus, who died for the whole world. And now Gentiles, non-Jews, are being grafted into this faith. Paul and Barnabas are going out and they're reaching people throughout the region. They're planting churches in Asia Minor. And all of these Gentiles are coming to faith. And the Jews have only ever understood faith through the lens of the law. So they're faced with this question, how do we integrate the Gentiles who don't know our culture and our laws into our faith with our culture and laws? And this is a hugely important question. To understand and appreciate the importance of the question, we have to appreciate the law. The law was given to the Hebrew people by God through Moses. Moses comes down Mount Sinai. He's holding the tablets of the Ten Commandments. That's in the book of Exodus. And then in the book of Leviticus, God adds more laws to their laws until they have about 630 total laws. Over 270 thou shalts and over 330 thou shalt nots. And so when you start to look at all of that, that is the complexity of the Jewish faith and the Jewish law. And for centuries, they had adhered to that law. The law that they received dictated to them their rhythms of life, the ebbs and the flows of life. It dictated to them their days, the rhythm of their days and their weeks and their months and their calendars and their celebrations and even their decades. Even every 50 years there was a certain thing that they had to do according to the law, the year of Jubilee. It dictated to them their social structure. It dictated to them how they interacted. It dictated to them principles about marriage and about faith and about what they needed to do and what they shouldn't do. It was inculcated into them from a very young age. Not only did the law dictate to them the machinations of their society, but it was also the ruler by which your spirituality was measured. The better you were at following the law, the better you were at being what we would think of as a Christian. The better you were at being a believer, the more faithful you were. The sign that you were in, that you were a participant in the law, that you were a claimant of the promises made to the forefather Abraham was circumcision in the males. And so part of the law was to be circumcised and then everything flowed out of that. So to be a Jewish person was to know the law inside and out. It was to be raised to follow it well. It was to measure your spirituality by the law, and it was even to believe that your path to reconciliation with God, if you were to ask them, how can you be saved? What do you have to do? They would say, obey the law, follow the law well. And so Peter and the council are faced with this really difficult question. All of these Gentile people who have no knowledge of the law are coming to faith and want to be a part of the church. And we want them to be a part of the church as our new brothers and sisters, but how much of the law should we ask them to adhere to? What of these rules and standards and practices that we've been following should we now apply to them? This is an incredibly important question because whatever they answer in Acts chapter 15, whatever they say are laws that still apply to you and I. Whatever they say here applies to Gentile, non-Jewish people applies to us in our faith. And that's the question facing them. How much of the law do the new believers who aren't Jewish have to follow? And so they get together in their council and they begin to discuss this. And there's a group of more conservative, they used to be Pharisees and now they're integrated into this new church, and they think that they should at the very least be circumcised. We should apply that part of the law to them. And what's helpful to understand is we know, hindsight is 20-20, we know now in light of history that the whole purpose of the law was to hold up a mirror in front of you and show you your need for a Savior. Because the law kind of comes out of this question of, God, what do we have to do to be right with you? How can I live to satisfy you? What can I do to reconcile myself to you and earn my way into heaven? And God says, okay, if that's what you want to do, here's the law. Here's all the rules. Follow these perfectly and you can earn your way into heaven. And so generation after generation of Jewish person did their best to follow these rules, fell short, and now we realize that the whole reason for the law in the first place was to hold a mirror up in front of you so that you would see your need for Jesus. This is why Jesus says, I did not come to abolish the law, I came to fulfill it. Romans 8 tells us that Jesus fulfills the law on our behalf because we are unable to. He came, he fulfilled the law perfectly, he died a perfect death for us, and now we live in an era of grace and faith rather than obedience to the law, and that's what reconciles us to God. The disciples are still working this out. They're still understanding how this new era of grace and faith integrates with this old era of the law. That's what makes this such a crucial moment in the history of the church. So there are some that are saying that the new Gentiles should at least be circumcised. There's other laws that they should follow. Which ones do we think are the most important? Which ones do we want to keep in this new church? And Peter has this remarkable moment of compassion in the midst of this discussion. I want you to hear what Peter says in Acts chapter 15. I'm going to pick it up in the middle of verse 7. This is how Peter addresses the leadership. He says, Now here's what he's saying. He's saying the early days. He's referring back to Pentecost, which we discussed in God has intended this whole time for Gentiles to be a part of this family of faith. He's made them His children too. He makes no distinction. He looks at the heart. In light of that, He says this in verse 10. I love this. Now therefore, why let's just stop for a second. As we stop and think which parts of the law should we apply to these new believers, which parts of the law should they have to follow, what parts should they have to obey, let's just stop and be realistic about something. We're not good at this. Neither us nor our fathers successfully followed the law. We've never been good at this. And you can read into that that there is no generation of people in the history of histories who should be better at following the law than Peter's generation. Peter's generation has centuries of family history poured into understanding this law, into following it well. They followed parts of the law instinctually by this point. It was ingrained into them. They had millennia of the law preceding them. They had teachings. They had methods of imparting it on children. They had known it their whole life. There's no generation that has ever lived that should better follow the law than Peter's generation, yet he looks around at the room and he says, guys, we stink at this. None of us follow the law well. He calls it a yoke or a burden, meaning he's acknowledging that everybody in that room had felt the disappointment of trying to follow the law perfectly only to fail and have to get up and dust yourself back off and double down on your efforts at discipline this time. Everybody in that room had experienced the disappointment and the sense of failure that comes when you can't successfully follow the law. Everyone in that room knew what it was in their heart of hearts to be woefully short of the standard of God, yet project this public image like they were exactly what God was looking for. He knew the hypocrisy in that room and the struggle in that place. And praise God for leadership like Peter's when he knows that so well and so intimately that he identifies it as a burden in his own life. And he says, with all compassion, why would we place that on our new brothers and sisters? Why would we ask them to do that when we can't even do it? They're Gentiles. They have every disadvantage in the world. They have no idea of all the laws. The learning curve on that would be so steep. It would be so discouraging to them and their faith. We have no learning curve, and yet we still stink at it. Why would we place that on them? It's incredibly compassionate. It's this woke moment of Peter to just be honest and authentic and admit where they all fall short. And he calls out the room. And they all agree with him. They all in their own way say, yeah, that's a good point. Let's not burden them with that. So then they begin the process of distilling down all of the 630 laws to the bare essentials. As we look at all of these laws, what are the ones that we think are so important that they still need to be acknowledged? And we've done stuff like this before. We've had done this exercise. This is how we plan series at church a lot of times. The last time we did this, where we whittled things down to some bare essentials, was when we as a staff planned the parables series. And what we do when we plan a series is we put everything up on the whiteboard. I asked the staff, let's look up all the parables, and we wrote them down as 40, I think 40-something parables, and they're all up on the whiteboard. I asked the staff, let's look up all the parables and we wrote them down as 40, I think 40 something parables and they're all up on the whiteboard. And then I kind of look through them and I go, these are non-negotiables. These are ones that I love. I have to preach about it or it's going to just burn a hole in my chest. We've got to be able to do this. And then we look at some other ones and we go, what are the commonalities? What are the points of the parables? And we kind of look at ones that make similar points and then we pick the one that we feel like might be most impactful. And then from that group, we kind of say, all right, which ones are right for grace in this season and in this moment? Which ones do we need to hear and learn and be encouraged by the most? And so we whittle it down to the six or the eight, like bare essentials. These are the parables that we want to cover now. And you've done an exercise like that in your workplace and in your life too, and that's what the disciples are doing here. Of all the laws, which ones do we follow? Which ones do we tell the Gentiles, hey, these have been taken care of, but these are the ones that we think you should be mindful of? We get that answer later in the chapter, beginning in verse 28. This is the distillation of all the laws. I have in my Bible a note that you can't see, but it just says, that's it, in all capital letters with some exclamation marks and question marks, because this is what they've distilled it down to. They write a letter to the churches declaring their decision. And the letter says this in verse 28, That's it. That's it. 630 laws distilled down to those four things, and the first three are essentially the same thing. The first three is don't eat food that's been sacrificed to idols, which was a pagan practice. These churches existed in pagan cultures, and so there's a lot of things happening in their culture that didn't sync up with Scripture and the heart of God. And one of those things was don't eat of that meat. That's a pagan practice. Don't associate yourself with those people. That's highly offensive to Jews. Please don't do that. Then it says, This comes from Leviticus chapter 17. If you have notes there, make a note or make a note in your Bible. I have one in my Bible and just write Leviticus chapter 17. And in your free time, you can go back and read. But there's this whole explanation from God of why you don't eat the blood of an animal. And God explains that the very life essence of a creature is in its blood and that it's not ours to eat. That is sacred to God. So he tells us not to do that. That's near and dear to God. And to eat blood or to eat things that are strangled, to kill an animal by strangulation was a way to maintain the blood in the animal so that you could eat it later, which sounds repulsive to us, but that was a practice then. And all of those practices, eating food that was sacrificed to idols, eating food with blood or food that was strangled, were things that were deeply offensive to Jewish people. And so those three things can really be summed up in this idea of just don't do things that are, like, please just don't do things that are super offensive to Jewish people. There's going to be Jewish people in your midst. That's incredibly difficult for them to get over. Please don't offend them in that way. And please don't portray that image in society that you participate in those things. That's not what's best for those around you. And then there's a provision in there to avoid sexual immorality, which is probably just a good provision to put any time we're advising Christians or a group of people on anything throughout all of history. It's probably a good addendum to just say, hey, be careful with this. But it's particularly relevant in this culture because in those pagan cultures, they had far different rules and standards about sexual morality than Scripture does. In one of the cities, in Ephesus, there's a temple of Diana, and there was temple prostitutes that were priestesses that you could go and partake in any time you felt the need to. I read that in some of these cultures, intermarrying and family and cousins was a regular practice. And actually, if you go back to Leviticus 17 and then 18 following that same passage, it talks about that practice and advises and clearly gives laws against it. So in some ways, this is just a distillation of just those two chapters of the book of Leviticus. But what's going on in these pagan cities is that the north star of sexual morality was their culture. And Paul is saying shift that north star of sexual morality to Scripture, which just as an aside is still good advice for us today. It's very easy to shift our north star of sexual morality to what the culture defines as sexually moral, and it is our job to constantly maintain the north star of sexual morality to what the culture defines as sexually moral. And it is our job to constantly maintain the North Star of sexual morality as dictated to us by Scripture, by God's Word. But to me, there's a common theme in these provisions. As we ask the question, why these four things? Why is that what they landed on? I think that there's a common theme and a common concern in these that tells us the type of faith that we're supposed to have. As I read this and I see these provisions and this direction to the new church, what I hear coming from Peter and the council is this simple admonition to have a faith that considers others. What kind of rules and things should we follow? What should we concern ourselves with? We should concern ourselves with things that impact others. We should have a faith that considers others. And this, to me, makes a ton of sense. Those rules about what to eat, That's all about how it looks to other people. How does it look to the Jewish people? How does it look to the pagan people? Have a faith that considers them and not wanting to give the wrong impression or not wanting to give offense. Just be unselfish in that way. Be selfless in that way. And don't let yourself eat or partake in those things because of how it might be perceived. Have a faith that considers others over yourself. And isn't that the root of sexual sin? Isn't all sexual immorality fundamentally selfish? Isn't all sexual activity outside the bonds of a loving marriage fundamentally selfish? Because we take things from that person that aren't ours, and we give things to that person that aren't ours to give because they belong to our spouse. And in the end, sexual sin is a fundamentally selfish and self-seeking sin. And when we avoid that sin, we consider others. And so I hear Peter saying here, have a faith that considers others, that is others focused. And as I think about practically how to do that out of this story, out of this instance occurrence in the book of Acts, what are the things that we can pull out of this that we can apply to our faith today so that we can live out a faith that considers others? I think the first thing that we can do is that we can consider others by passing on a compassionate faith. We consider others by passing on a compassionate faith. I love the example of Peter in this passage where he says, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait. This part of our faith isn't working for us. Why would we pass that on to the next generation of believers? Guys, we're not good at this. This is a burden. This element of our faith discourages us and actually causes distance from God, not a clinging to God. So why would we perpetuate that in the next generation of believers? And as I think about my own life and the faith that I've inherited, I can see both sides of that happening in my life. I was led spiritually by people who grew up largely in the Southern Baptist Church in the 60s and the 70s. And when I say I was led by people, I mean my parents, I mean my pastor, I mean those that poured into me as I grew up. And in the 60s and 70s, the Southern Baptist Church was incredibly legalistic. Incredibly legalistic. You couldn't dance ever. You couldn't have dancing at your wedding. There's no talk of alcohol ever. Everyone's a teetotaler. If you did that, you're definitely a sinner and not a Christian. You could not go to the movie theaters. You could not play cards. Skirts had to be certain lengths. There was all these provisions and rules around the faith. And my spiritual leaders and my parents and their goodness and then their compassion looked at those elements of their faith and they said, these don't work for us. These aren't a true reflection of the heart of God. These discourage us and pull us away from God rather than encourage us to cling to him. So we're not going to pass on that legalism to the next generation. I grew up with a generation of leaders who passed on a compassionate faith and said, this part didn't work for us. This isn't from the heart of God, so we're not going to saddle you and burden you with that. But in the same way, as I think about what was passed on to me that I don't want to pass on to Lily and to those that I pass my faith on to, I think about how certain that generation was. I think about the certainty that people around me grew up with. My pastor was so certain about some things. People who poured into me were so certain about some things. They had very strong opinions about exactly when Jesus was going to return in the tribulation. I grew up with people who were so certain that Calvinism was right, that God chooses who he's going to save, and that we don't choose God. And I grew up around some people who said, no, you choose if you're going to choose God. He doesn't choose you. I grew up around some people who were certain that you couldn't lose your salvation and some people who were certain that you could. When I was growing up, it was so black and white. There was no gray. And as I've grown up in faith and become an adult leading my own family and now leading a church, and the rubber of theology meets the practical road of life. I've become far less certain about things. And I don't understand how things could be so black and white in a world that has so much gray, and scriptures that have so much nuance, and scriptures that lay things down next to each other like predestination and like self-determinism and go, yeah, both are true. And don't seem to want to resolve that for us. And so for me, I want to pass on compassionately the gift of uncertainty. I want the people that I lead, I want Lily to know, I want my church to know that it's okay not to be sure. Everything doesn't have to be black and white for us all the time. It's okay to wonder at God and not fully understand him. It's okay to not have all the answers. It's okay to go, is it possible that God chooses me to be saved? Yeah. Is it possible that I choose him? Yeah. Are both true? Yeah. It's okay to say, where does the intersection of my effort and then my prayer and asking God for his effort, where does that meet? What's the exact right amount of things to pray about and how long to pray for? And when do I just sit back and wait and ask God to come in and when do I meet him with my effort? I don't know. And that's all right. It's okay to not be certain about things as long as that uncertainty drives us into a deeper faith in God and his work through Jesus. So we ought to pass on a compassionate faith that's aware of the burdensome things that we might have added onto our faith We should maintain a simple faith. Jesus is constantly trying to get us to do this. This is what the disciples do. They distill all those 630 laws down to these four simple things that can be summed up and consider others. And Jesus is doing this too. Jesus says that the whole law and the prophets, all of those laws can be summed up in these two things. Love God with all your heart and your soul and your mind and love your neighbor as yourself. And then later he says, this new commandment I give you, love others as I have loved you. Jesus is constantly simplifying a faith. And we generationally are constantly complicating it. Adding all of these rules and regulations and standards by which we judge ourselves and others that Jesus didn't ask us to adopt. I think we're constantly complicating our faith. And if we want to have a faith like Peter did, like the early church did, then one of the things that we need to do is be constantly simplifying our faith. And judging our standards by, is this loving of God? Is this appreciative of Jesus, and is this loving for others? Am I living out a simple faith that considers others? So I hope that that's what we'll do. I hope that we'll take this lesson from the early church, that each of us will have a faith that considers others more important than ourselves and that we'll consider others in our faith by passing on to our children and to those around us a compassionate faith and that we personally will maintain a simple, pure faith that prizes Christ and a love for him above all else and lets everything else flow out of that. And in doing that, I think we can capture the essence of the direction that was given to the church in Acts chapter 15. Let's pray. Father, we sometimes make being a Christian so complicated. We ask questions like, is it a sin to do this? Is it wrong to do this? Is this something that God wants me to do? God, I pray that you would help us clarify and simplify those things. I pray that we would be men and women who are after your heart, who cling to you, who strip away the things from our religion that only serve to discourage us and pull us away from you, that we would lean into you more, that we would know your son well. Father, give us a compassionate, self-aware faith that we can pass on to others. Give us a simple faith that is unencumbered of any expectations that you didn't place on us yourself. Father, I pray that you would bless us in this difficult time. I pray that you would bind grace together in the midst of COVID and not being able to see one another. I just pray and ask that you would continue to keep your hand on this place. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.
Good morning, Grace. It's good to get to share in another morning with you like this. Before I dive into the sermon, I just wanted to clarify something. This week I saw someone from Grace in person that I haven't seen in a long time. I happened to be wearing a suit. And as they got out of their car, the first thing they said to me is like, oh, you look slimmer. And I said, slimmer than what? And they said, well, you know, the camera, you know, it adds like 15 pounds. And so you just, I've only seen you on camera. And so seeing you in person, it's just a little different. I was kind of taken aback by that comment and just wanted to assure those of you who have been following along during COVID that if you think that makes looking a little chubby, that's the camera. I am the picture of health. If you could see me in person, you would note that I am both slim and trim and fit. So I'm just throwing that out there for the record. Now, as we jump into the sermon, we're in the middle of this series called We Are the church in the first century ought to still guide the church in the 21st century because we are still the church. This week we arrive at a passage that I think is really crucial to the story of the church and the story of Acts and impacts you in profound ways that you're probably unaware of. I've never heard a sermon on this passage before. We're going to be in Acts chapter 15. If you have a Bible, I hope that you'll turn there. I've never heard a sermon on this before. I've never heard it taught before. But as I go through Acts for myself, I see chapter 15 as this crucial turning point moment that has an incredible impact on the rest of Acts, but also the rest of the New Testament. It has an incredible impact on you and I think is super important in the narrative of the book of Acts. So I'm hoping that this morning, the sermon may be informative. It might be educational. This might be a place that we haven't stopped and camped out in before and sought to understand. And then hopefully it can also be inspirational in that it will encourage in us some behaviors and thought processes that we see come out of the story, and we can apply those to our own life. So in Acts chapter 15, the council, the leadership of the early church is getting together. By this time in the story, it's Peter and James and John and the disciples, but it's also a group of Pharisees and some other people who have now been grafted into the leaders of the church. Some other converts with leadership potential are now in this leadership council and they're faced with this question. This is a crucial question. And the tension that we see underlying this 15th chapter of Acts is a tension that we see massaged out in the book of Galatians. It's a tension that we see that exists throughout the book of Romans and in the book of Hebrews and a lot of other Pauline epistles, a lot of other of Paul's letters. This is a tension that runs throughout the New Testament, which is how is this new church going to handle the integration of the law and which portions of the law should we integrate? Here's what's happening. The church sprung up out of a Jewish culture and a Jewish faith. God chose the Hebrew people, the descendants of Abraham, to be his people. And he gave them laws through Moses that we're going to talk about in a minute. And then through those people, God brought the Messiah, Jesus, who died for the whole world. And now Gentiles, non-Jews, are being grafted into this faith. Paul and Barnabas are going out and they're reaching people throughout the region. They're planting churches in Asia Minor. And all of these Gentiles are coming to faith. And the Jews have only ever understood faith through the lens of the law. So they're faced with this question, how do we integrate the Gentiles who don't know our culture and our laws into our faith with our culture and laws? And this is a hugely important question. To understand and appreciate the importance of the question, we have to appreciate the law. The law was given to the Hebrew people by God through Moses. Moses comes down Mount Sinai. He's holding the tablets of the Ten Commandments. That's in the book of Exodus. And then in the book of Leviticus, God adds more laws to their laws until they have about 630 total laws. Over 270 thou shalts and over 330 thou shalt nots. And so when you start to look at all of that, that is the complexity of the Jewish faith and the Jewish law. And for centuries, they had adhered to that law. The law that they received dictated to them their rhythms of life, the ebbs and the flows of life. It dictated to them their days, the rhythm of their days and their weeks and their months and their calendars and their celebrations and even their decades. Even every 50 years there was a certain thing that they had to do according to the law, the year of Jubilee. It dictated to them their social structure. It dictated to them how they interacted. It dictated to them principles about marriage and about faith and about what they needed to do and what they shouldn't do. It was inculcated into them from a very young age. Not only did the law dictate to them the machinations of their society, but it was also the ruler by which your spirituality was measured. The better you were at following the law, the better you were at being what we would think of as a Christian. The better you were at being a believer, the more faithful you were. The sign that you were in, that you were a participant in the law, that you were a claimant of the promises made to the forefather Abraham was circumcision in the males. And so part of the law was to be circumcised and then everything flowed out of that. So to be a Jewish person was to know the law inside and out. It was to be raised to follow it well. It was to measure your spirituality by the law, and it was even to believe that your path to reconciliation with God, if you were to ask them, how can you be saved? What do you have to do? They would say, obey the law, follow the law well. And so Peter and the council are faced with this really difficult question. All of these Gentile people who have no knowledge of the law are coming to faith and want to be a part of the church. And we want them to be a part of the church as our new brothers and sisters, but how much of the law should we ask them to adhere to? What of these rules and standards and practices that we've been following should we now apply to them? This is an incredibly important question because whatever they answer in Acts chapter 15, whatever they say are laws that still apply to you and I. Whatever they say here applies to Gentile, non-Jewish people applies to us in our faith. And that's the question facing them. How much of the law do the new believers who aren't Jewish have to follow? And so they get together in their council and they begin to discuss this. And there's a group of more conservative, they used to be Pharisees and now they're integrated into this new church, and they think that they should at the very least be circumcised. We should apply that part of the law to them. And what's helpful to understand is we know, hindsight is 20-20, we know now in light of history that the whole purpose of the law was to hold up a mirror in front of you and show you your need for a Savior. Because the law kind of comes out of this question of, God, what do we have to do to be right with you? How can I live to satisfy you? What can I do to reconcile myself to you and earn my way into heaven? And God says, okay, if that's what you want to do, here's the law. Here's all the rules. Follow these perfectly and you can earn your way into heaven. And so generation after generation of Jewish person did their best to follow these rules, fell short, and now we realize that the whole reason for the law in the first place was to hold a mirror up in front of you so that you would see your need for Jesus. This is why Jesus says, I did not come to abolish the law, I came to fulfill it. Romans 8 tells us that Jesus fulfills the law on our behalf because we are unable to. He came, he fulfilled the law perfectly, he died a perfect death for us, and now we live in an era of grace and faith rather than obedience to the law, and that's what reconciles us to God. The disciples are still working this out. They're still understanding how this new era of grace and faith integrates with this old era of the law. That's what makes this such a crucial moment in the history of the church. So there are some that are saying that the new Gentiles should at least be circumcised. There's other laws that they should follow. Which ones do we think are the most important? Which ones do we want to keep in this new church? And Peter has this remarkable moment of compassion in the midst of this discussion. I want you to hear what Peter says in Acts chapter 15. I'm going to pick it up in the middle of verse 7. This is how Peter addresses the leadership. He says, Now here's what he's saying. He's saying the early days. He's referring back to Pentecost, which we discussed in God has intended this whole time for Gentiles to be a part of this family of faith. He's made them His children too. He makes no distinction. He looks at the heart. In light of that, He says this in verse 10. I love this. Now therefore, why let's just stop for a second. As we stop and think which parts of the law should we apply to these new believers, which parts of the law should they have to follow, what parts should they have to obey, let's just stop and be realistic about something. We're not good at this. Neither us nor our fathers successfully followed the law. We've never been good at this. And you can read into that that there is no generation of people in the history of histories who should be better at following the law than Peter's generation. Peter's generation has centuries of family history poured into understanding this law, into following it well. They followed parts of the law instinctually by this point. It was ingrained into them. They had millennia of the law preceding them. They had teachings. They had methods of imparting it on children. They had known it their whole life. There's no generation that has ever lived that should better follow the law than Peter's generation, yet he looks around at the room and he says, guys, we stink at this. None of us follow the law well. He calls it a yoke or a burden, meaning he's acknowledging that everybody in that room had felt the disappointment of trying to follow the law perfectly only to fail and have to get up and dust yourself back off and double down on your efforts at discipline this time. Everybody in that room had experienced the disappointment and the sense of failure that comes when you can't successfully follow the law. Everyone in that room knew what it was in their heart of hearts to be woefully short of the standard of God, yet project this public image like they were exactly what God was looking for. He knew the hypocrisy in that room and the struggle in that place. And praise God for leadership like Peter's when he knows that so well and so intimately that he identifies it as a burden in his own life. And he says, with all compassion, why would we place that on our new brothers and sisters? Why would we ask them to do that when we can't even do it? They're Gentiles. They have every disadvantage in the world. They have no idea of all the laws. The learning curve on that would be so steep. It would be so discouraging to them and their faith. We have no learning curve, and yet we still stink at it. Why would we place that on them? It's incredibly compassionate. It's this woke moment of Peter to just be honest and authentic and admit where they all fall short. And he calls out the room. And they all agree with him. They all in their own way say, yeah, that's a good point. Let's not burden them with that. So then they begin the process of distilling down all of the 630 laws to the bare essentials. As we look at all of these laws, what are the ones that we think are so important that they still need to be acknowledged? And we've done stuff like this before. We've had done this exercise. This is how we plan series at church a lot of times. The last time we did this, where we whittled things down to some bare essentials, was when we as a staff planned the parables series. And what we do when we plan a series is we put everything up on the whiteboard. I asked the staff, let's look up all the parables, and we wrote them down as 40, I think 40-something parables, and they're all up on the whiteboard. I asked the staff, let's look up all the parables and we wrote them down as 40, I think 40 something parables and they're all up on the whiteboard. And then I kind of look through them and I go, these are non-negotiables. These are ones that I love. I have to preach about it or it's going to just burn a hole in my chest. We've got to be able to do this. And then we look at some other ones and we go, what are the commonalities? What are the points of the parables? And we kind of look at ones that make similar points and then we pick the one that we feel like might be most impactful. And then from that group, we kind of say, all right, which ones are right for grace in this season and in this moment? Which ones do we need to hear and learn and be encouraged by the most? And so we whittle it down to the six or the eight, like bare essentials. These are the parables that we want to cover now. And you've done an exercise like that in your workplace and in your life too, and that's what the disciples are doing here. Of all the laws, which ones do we follow? Which ones do we tell the Gentiles, hey, these have been taken care of, but these are the ones that we think you should be mindful of? We get that answer later in the chapter, beginning in verse 28. This is the distillation of all the laws. I have in my Bible a note that you can't see, but it just says, that's it, in all capital letters with some exclamation marks and question marks, because this is what they've distilled it down to. They write a letter to the churches declaring their decision. And the letter says this in verse 28, That's it. That's it. 630 laws distilled down to those four things, and the first three are essentially the same thing. The first three is don't eat food that's been sacrificed to idols, which was a pagan practice. These churches existed in pagan cultures, and so there's a lot of things happening in their culture that didn't sync up with Scripture and the heart of God. And one of those things was don't eat of that meat. That's a pagan practice. Don't associate yourself with those people. That's highly offensive to Jews. Please don't do that. Then it says, This comes from Leviticus chapter 17. If you have notes there, make a note or make a note in your Bible. I have one in my Bible and just write Leviticus chapter 17. And in your free time, you can go back and read. But there's this whole explanation from God of why you don't eat the blood of an animal. And God explains that the very life essence of a creature is in its blood and that it's not ours to eat. That is sacred to God. So he tells us not to do that. That's near and dear to God. And to eat blood or to eat things that are strangled, to kill an animal by strangulation was a way to maintain the blood in the animal so that you could eat it later, which sounds repulsive to us, but that was a practice then. And all of those practices, eating food that was sacrificed to idols, eating food with blood or food that was strangled, were things that were deeply offensive to Jewish people. And so those three things can really be summed up in this idea of just don't do things that are, like, please just don't do things that are super offensive to Jewish people. There's going to be Jewish people in your midst. That's incredibly difficult for them to get over. Please don't offend them in that way. And please don't portray that image in society that you participate in those things. That's not what's best for those around you. And then there's a provision in there to avoid sexual immorality, which is probably just a good provision to put any time we're advising Christians or a group of people on anything throughout all of history. It's probably a good addendum to just say, hey, be careful with this. But it's particularly relevant in this culture because in those pagan cultures, they had far different rules and standards about sexual morality than Scripture does. In one of the cities, in Ephesus, there's a temple of Diana, and there was temple prostitutes that were priestesses that you could go and partake in any time you felt the need to. I read that in some of these cultures, intermarrying and family and cousins was a regular practice. And actually, if you go back to Leviticus 17 and then 18 following that same passage, it talks about that practice and advises and clearly gives laws against it. So in some ways, this is just a distillation of just those two chapters of the book of Leviticus. But what's going on in these pagan cities is that the north star of sexual morality was their culture. And Paul is saying shift that north star of sexual morality to Scripture, which just as an aside is still good advice for us today. It's very easy to shift our north star of sexual morality to what the culture defines as sexually moral, and it is our job to constantly maintain the north star of sexual morality to what the culture defines as sexually moral. And it is our job to constantly maintain the North Star of sexual morality as dictated to us by Scripture, by God's Word. But to me, there's a common theme in these provisions. As we ask the question, why these four things? Why is that what they landed on? I think that there's a common theme and a common concern in these that tells us the type of faith that we're supposed to have. As I read this and I see these provisions and this direction to the new church, what I hear coming from Peter and the council is this simple admonition to have a faith that considers others. What kind of rules and things should we follow? What should we concern ourselves with? We should concern ourselves with things that impact others. We should have a faith that considers others. And this, to me, makes a ton of sense. Those rules about what to eat, That's all about how it looks to other people. How does it look to the Jewish people? How does it look to the pagan people? Have a faith that considers them and not wanting to give the wrong impression or not wanting to give offense. Just be unselfish in that way. Be selfless in that way. And don't let yourself eat or partake in those things because of how it might be perceived. Have a faith that considers others over yourself. And isn't that the root of sexual sin? Isn't all sexual immorality fundamentally selfish? Isn't all sexual activity outside the bonds of a loving marriage fundamentally selfish? Because we take things from that person that aren't ours, and we give things to that person that aren't ours to give because they belong to our spouse. And in the end, sexual sin is a fundamentally selfish and self-seeking sin. And when we avoid that sin, we consider others. And so I hear Peter saying here, have a faith that considers others, that is others focused. And as I think about practically how to do that out of this story, out of this instance occurrence in the book of Acts, what are the things that we can pull out of this that we can apply to our faith today so that we can live out a faith that considers others? I think the first thing that we can do is that we can consider others by passing on a compassionate faith. We consider others by passing on a compassionate faith. I love the example of Peter in this passage where he says, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait. This part of our faith isn't working for us. Why would we pass that on to the next generation of believers? Guys, we're not good at this. This is a burden. This element of our faith discourages us and actually causes distance from God, not a clinging to God. So why would we perpetuate that in the next generation of believers? And as I think about my own life and the faith that I've inherited, I can see both sides of that happening in my life. I was led spiritually by people who grew up largely in the Southern Baptist Church in the 60s and the 70s. And when I say I was led by people, I mean my parents, I mean my pastor, I mean those that poured into me as I grew up. And in the 60s and 70s, the Southern Baptist Church was incredibly legalistic. Incredibly legalistic. You couldn't dance ever. You couldn't have dancing at your wedding. There's no talk of alcohol ever. Everyone's a teetotaler. If you did that, you're definitely a sinner and not a Christian. You could not go to the movie theaters. You could not play cards. Skirts had to be certain lengths. There was all these provisions and rules around the faith. And my spiritual leaders and my parents and their goodness and then their compassion looked at those elements of their faith and they said, these don't work for us. These aren't a true reflection of the heart of God. These discourage us and pull us away from God rather than encourage us to cling to him. So we're not going to pass on that legalism to the next generation. I grew up with a generation of leaders who passed on a compassionate faith and said, this part didn't work for us. This isn't from the heart of God, so we're not going to saddle you and burden you with that. But in the same way, as I think about what was passed on to me that I don't want to pass on to Lily and to those that I pass my faith on to, I think about how certain that generation was. I think about the certainty that people around me grew up with. My pastor was so certain about some things. People who poured into me were so certain about some things. They had very strong opinions about exactly when Jesus was going to return in the tribulation. I grew up with people who were so certain that Calvinism was right, that God chooses who he's going to save, and that we don't choose God. And I grew up around some people who said, no, you choose if you're going to choose God. He doesn't choose you. I grew up around some people who were certain that you couldn't lose your salvation and some people who were certain that you could. When I was growing up, it was so black and white. There was no gray. And as I've grown up in faith and become an adult leading my own family and now leading a church, and the rubber of theology meets the practical road of life. I've become far less certain about things. And I don't understand how things could be so black and white in a world that has so much gray, and scriptures that have so much nuance, and scriptures that lay things down next to each other like predestination and like self-determinism and go, yeah, both are true. And don't seem to want to resolve that for us. And so for me, I want to pass on compassionately the gift of uncertainty. I want the people that I lead, I want Lily to know, I want my church to know that it's okay not to be sure. Everything doesn't have to be black and white for us all the time. It's okay to wonder at God and not fully understand him. It's okay to not have all the answers. It's okay to go, is it possible that God chooses me to be saved? Yeah. Is it possible that I choose him? Yeah. Are both true? Yeah. It's okay to say, where does the intersection of my effort and then my prayer and asking God for his effort, where does that meet? What's the exact right amount of things to pray about and how long to pray for? And when do I just sit back and wait and ask God to come in and when do I meet him with my effort? I don't know. And that's all right. It's okay to not be certain about things as long as that uncertainty drives us into a deeper faith in God and his work through Jesus. So we ought to pass on a compassionate faith that's aware of the burdensome things that we might have added onto our faith We should maintain a simple faith. Jesus is constantly trying to get us to do this. This is what the disciples do. They distill all those 630 laws down to these four simple things that can be summed up and consider others. And Jesus is doing this too. Jesus says that the whole law and the prophets, all of those laws can be summed up in these two things. Love God with all your heart and your soul and your mind and love your neighbor as yourself. And then later he says, this new commandment I give you, love others as I have loved you. Jesus is constantly simplifying a faith. And we generationally are constantly complicating it. Adding all of these rules and regulations and standards by which we judge ourselves and others that Jesus didn't ask us to adopt. I think we're constantly complicating our faith. And if we want to have a faith like Peter did, like the early church did, then one of the things that we need to do is be constantly simplifying our faith. And judging our standards by, is this loving of God? Is this appreciative of Jesus, and is this loving for others? Am I living out a simple faith that considers others? So I hope that that's what we'll do. I hope that we'll take this lesson from the early church, that each of us will have a faith that considers others more important than ourselves and that we'll consider others in our faith by passing on to our children and to those around us a compassionate faith and that we personally will maintain a simple, pure faith that prizes Christ and a love for him above all else and lets everything else flow out of that. And in doing that, I think we can capture the essence of the direction that was given to the church in Acts chapter 15. Let's pray. Father, we sometimes make being a Christian so complicated. We ask questions like, is it a sin to do this? Is it wrong to do this? Is this something that God wants me to do? God, I pray that you would help us clarify and simplify those things. I pray that we would be men and women who are after your heart, who cling to you, who strip away the things from our religion that only serve to discourage us and pull us away from you, that we would lean into you more, that we would know your son well. Father, give us a compassionate, self-aware faith that we can pass on to others. Give us a simple faith that is unencumbered of any expectations that you didn't place on us yourself. Father, I pray that you would bless us in this difficult time. I pray that you would bind grace together in the midst of COVID and not being able to see one another. I just pray and ask that you would continue to keep your hand on this place. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.
Good morning, Grace. It's good to get to share in another morning with you like this. Before I dive into the sermon, I just wanted to clarify something. This week I saw someone from Grace in person that I haven't seen in a long time. I happened to be wearing a suit. And as they got out of their car, the first thing they said to me is like, oh, you look slimmer. And I said, slimmer than what? And they said, well, you know, the camera, you know, it adds like 15 pounds. And so you just, I've only seen you on camera. And so seeing you in person, it's just a little different. I was kind of taken aback by that comment and just wanted to assure those of you who have been following along during COVID that if you think that makes looking a little chubby, that's the camera. I am the picture of health. If you could see me in person, you would note that I am both slim and trim and fit. So I'm just throwing that out there for the record. Now, as we jump into the sermon, we're in the middle of this series called We Are the church in the first century ought to still guide the church in the 21st century because we are still the church. This week we arrive at a passage that I think is really crucial to the story of the church and the story of Acts and impacts you in profound ways that you're probably unaware of. I've never heard a sermon on this passage before. We're going to be in Acts chapter 15. If you have a Bible, I hope that you'll turn there. I've never heard a sermon on this before. I've never heard it taught before. But as I go through Acts for myself, I see chapter 15 as this crucial turning point moment that has an incredible impact on the rest of Acts, but also the rest of the New Testament. It has an incredible impact on you and I think is super important in the narrative of the book of Acts. So I'm hoping that this morning, the sermon may be informative. It might be educational. This might be a place that we haven't stopped and camped out in before and sought to understand. And then hopefully it can also be inspirational in that it will encourage in us some behaviors and thought processes that we see come out of the story, and we can apply those to our own life. So in Acts chapter 15, the council, the leadership of the early church is getting together. By this time in the story, it's Peter and James and John and the disciples, but it's also a group of Pharisees and some other people who have now been grafted into the leaders of the church. Some other converts with leadership potential are now in this leadership council and they're faced with this question. This is a crucial question. And the tension that we see underlying this 15th chapter of Acts is a tension that we see massaged out in the book of Galatians. It's a tension that we see that exists throughout the book of Romans and in the book of Hebrews and a lot of other Pauline epistles, a lot of other of Paul's letters. This is a tension that runs throughout the New Testament, which is how is this new church going to handle the integration of the law and which portions of the law should we integrate? Here's what's happening. The church sprung up out of a Jewish culture and a Jewish faith. God chose the Hebrew people, the descendants of Abraham, to be his people. And he gave them laws through Moses that we're going to talk about in a minute. And then through those people, God brought the Messiah, Jesus, who died for the whole world. And now Gentiles, non-Jews, are being grafted into this faith. Paul and Barnabas are going out and they're reaching people throughout the region. They're planting churches in Asia Minor. And all of these Gentiles are coming to faith. And the Jews have only ever understood faith through the lens of the law. So they're faced with this question, how do we integrate the Gentiles who don't know our culture and our laws into our faith with our culture and laws? And this is a hugely important question. To understand and appreciate the importance of the question, we have to appreciate the law. The law was given to the Hebrew people by God through Moses. Moses comes down Mount Sinai. He's holding the tablets of the Ten Commandments. That's in the book of Exodus. And then in the book of Leviticus, God adds more laws to their laws until they have about 630 total laws. Over 270 thou shalts and over 330 thou shalt nots. And so when you start to look at all of that, that is the complexity of the Jewish faith and the Jewish law. And for centuries, they had adhered to that law. The law that they received dictated to them their rhythms of life, the ebbs and the flows of life. It dictated to them their days, the rhythm of their days and their weeks and their months and their calendars and their celebrations and even their decades. Even every 50 years there was a certain thing that they had to do according to the law, the year of Jubilee. It dictated to them their social structure. It dictated to them how they interacted. It dictated to them principles about marriage and about faith and about what they needed to do and what they shouldn't do. It was inculcated into them from a very young age. Not only did the law dictate to them the machinations of their society, but it was also the ruler by which your spirituality was measured. The better you were at following the law, the better you were at being what we would think of as a Christian. The better you were at being a believer, the more faithful you were. The sign that you were in, that you were a participant in the law, that you were a claimant of the promises made to the forefather Abraham was circumcision in the males. And so part of the law was to be circumcised and then everything flowed out of that. So to be a Jewish person was to know the law inside and out. It was to be raised to follow it well. It was to measure your spirituality by the law, and it was even to believe that your path to reconciliation with God, if you were to ask them, how can you be saved? What do you have to do? They would say, obey the law, follow the law well. And so Peter and the council are faced with this really difficult question. All of these Gentile people who have no knowledge of the law are coming to faith and want to be a part of the church. And we want them to be a part of the church as our new brothers and sisters, but how much of the law should we ask them to adhere to? What of these rules and standards and practices that we've been following should we now apply to them? This is an incredibly important question because whatever they answer in Acts chapter 15, whatever they say are laws that still apply to you and I. Whatever they say here applies to Gentile, non-Jewish people applies to us in our faith. And that's the question facing them. How much of the law do the new believers who aren't Jewish have to follow? And so they get together in their council and they begin to discuss this. And there's a group of more conservative, they used to be Pharisees and now they're integrated into this new church, and they think that they should at the very least be circumcised. We should apply that part of the law to them. And what's helpful to understand is we know, hindsight is 20-20, we know now in light of history that the whole purpose of the law was to hold up a mirror in front of you and show you your need for a Savior. Because the law kind of comes out of this question of, God, what do we have to do to be right with you? How can I live to satisfy you? What can I do to reconcile myself to you and earn my way into heaven? And God says, okay, if that's what you want to do, here's the law. Here's all the rules. Follow these perfectly and you can earn your way into heaven. And so generation after generation of Jewish person did their best to follow these rules, fell short, and now we realize that the whole reason for the law in the first place was to hold a mirror up in front of you so that you would see your need for Jesus. This is why Jesus says, I did not come to abolish the law, I came to fulfill it. Romans 8 tells us that Jesus fulfills the law on our behalf because we are unable to. He came, he fulfilled the law perfectly, he died a perfect death for us, and now we live in an era of grace and faith rather than obedience to the law, and that's what reconciles us to God. The disciples are still working this out. They're still understanding how this new era of grace and faith integrates with this old era of the law. That's what makes this such a crucial moment in the history of the church. So there are some that are saying that the new Gentiles should at least be circumcised. There's other laws that they should follow. Which ones do we think are the most important? Which ones do we want to keep in this new church? And Peter has this remarkable moment of compassion in the midst of this discussion. I want you to hear what Peter says in Acts chapter 15. I'm going to pick it up in the middle of verse 7. This is how Peter addresses the leadership. He says, Now here's what he's saying. He's saying the early days. He's referring back to Pentecost, which we discussed in God has intended this whole time for Gentiles to be a part of this family of faith. He's made them His children too. He makes no distinction. He looks at the heart. In light of that, He says this in verse 10. I love this. Now therefore, why let's just stop for a second. As we stop and think which parts of the law should we apply to these new believers, which parts of the law should they have to follow, what parts should they have to obey, let's just stop and be realistic about something. We're not good at this. Neither us nor our fathers successfully followed the law. We've never been good at this. And you can read into that that there is no generation of people in the history of histories who should be better at following the law than Peter's generation. Peter's generation has centuries of family history poured into understanding this law, into following it well. They followed parts of the law instinctually by this point. It was ingrained into them. They had millennia of the law preceding them. They had teachings. They had methods of imparting it on children. They had known it their whole life. There's no generation that has ever lived that should better follow the law than Peter's generation, yet he looks around at the room and he says, guys, we stink at this. None of us follow the law well. He calls it a yoke or a burden, meaning he's acknowledging that everybody in that room had felt the disappointment of trying to follow the law perfectly only to fail and have to get up and dust yourself back off and double down on your efforts at discipline this time. Everybody in that room had experienced the disappointment and the sense of failure that comes when you can't successfully follow the law. Everyone in that room knew what it was in their heart of hearts to be woefully short of the standard of God, yet project this public image like they were exactly what God was looking for. He knew the hypocrisy in that room and the struggle in that place. And praise God for leadership like Peter's when he knows that so well and so intimately that he identifies it as a burden in his own life. And he says, with all compassion, why would we place that on our new brothers and sisters? Why would we ask them to do that when we can't even do it? They're Gentiles. They have every disadvantage in the world. They have no idea of all the laws. The learning curve on that would be so steep. It would be so discouraging to them and their faith. We have no learning curve, and yet we still stink at it. Why would we place that on them? It's incredibly compassionate. It's this woke moment of Peter to just be honest and authentic and admit where they all fall short. And he calls out the room. And they all agree with him. They all in their own way say, yeah, that's a good point. Let's not burden them with that. So then they begin the process of distilling down all of the 630 laws to the bare essentials. As we look at all of these laws, what are the ones that we think are so important that they still need to be acknowledged? And we've done stuff like this before. We've had done this exercise. This is how we plan series at church a lot of times. The last time we did this, where we whittled things down to some bare essentials, was when we as a staff planned the parables series. And what we do when we plan a series is we put everything up on the whiteboard. I asked the staff, let's look up all the parables, and we wrote them down as 40, I think 40-something parables, and they're all up on the whiteboard. I asked the staff, let's look up all the parables and we wrote them down as 40, I think 40 something parables and they're all up on the whiteboard. And then I kind of look through them and I go, these are non-negotiables. These are ones that I love. I have to preach about it or it's going to just burn a hole in my chest. We've got to be able to do this. And then we look at some other ones and we go, what are the commonalities? What are the points of the parables? And we kind of look at ones that make similar points and then we pick the one that we feel like might be most impactful. And then from that group, we kind of say, all right, which ones are right for grace in this season and in this moment? Which ones do we need to hear and learn and be encouraged by the most? And so we whittle it down to the six or the eight, like bare essentials. These are the parables that we want to cover now. And you've done an exercise like that in your workplace and in your life too, and that's what the disciples are doing here. Of all the laws, which ones do we follow? Which ones do we tell the Gentiles, hey, these have been taken care of, but these are the ones that we think you should be mindful of? We get that answer later in the chapter, beginning in verse 28. This is the distillation of all the laws. I have in my Bible a note that you can't see, but it just says, that's it, in all capital letters with some exclamation marks and question marks, because this is what they've distilled it down to. They write a letter to the churches declaring their decision. And the letter says this in verse 28, That's it. That's it. 630 laws distilled down to those four things, and the first three are essentially the same thing. The first three is don't eat food that's been sacrificed to idols, which was a pagan practice. These churches existed in pagan cultures, and so there's a lot of things happening in their culture that didn't sync up with Scripture and the heart of God. And one of those things was don't eat of that meat. That's a pagan practice. Don't associate yourself with those people. That's highly offensive to Jews. Please don't do that. Then it says, This comes from Leviticus chapter 17. If you have notes there, make a note or make a note in your Bible. I have one in my Bible and just write Leviticus chapter 17. And in your free time, you can go back and read. But there's this whole explanation from God of why you don't eat the blood of an animal. And God explains that the very life essence of a creature is in its blood and that it's not ours to eat. That is sacred to God. So he tells us not to do that. That's near and dear to God. And to eat blood or to eat things that are strangled, to kill an animal by strangulation was a way to maintain the blood in the animal so that you could eat it later, which sounds repulsive to us, but that was a practice then. And all of those practices, eating food that was sacrificed to idols, eating food with blood or food that was strangled, were things that were deeply offensive to Jewish people. And so those three things can really be summed up in this idea of just don't do things that are, like, please just don't do things that are super offensive to Jewish people. There's going to be Jewish people in your midst. That's incredibly difficult for them to get over. Please don't offend them in that way. And please don't portray that image in society that you participate in those things. That's not what's best for those around you. And then there's a provision in there to avoid sexual immorality, which is probably just a good provision to put any time we're advising Christians or a group of people on anything throughout all of history. It's probably a good addendum to just say, hey, be careful with this. But it's particularly relevant in this culture because in those pagan cultures, they had far different rules and standards about sexual morality than Scripture does. In one of the cities, in Ephesus, there's a temple of Diana, and there was temple prostitutes that were priestesses that you could go and partake in any time you felt the need to. I read that in some of these cultures, intermarrying and family and cousins was a regular practice. And actually, if you go back to Leviticus 17 and then 18 following that same passage, it talks about that practice and advises and clearly gives laws against it. So in some ways, this is just a distillation of just those two chapters of the book of Leviticus. But what's going on in these pagan cities is that the north star of sexual morality was their culture. And Paul is saying shift that north star of sexual morality to Scripture, which just as an aside is still good advice for us today. It's very easy to shift our north star of sexual morality to what the culture defines as sexually moral, and it is our job to constantly maintain the north star of sexual morality to what the culture defines as sexually moral. And it is our job to constantly maintain the North Star of sexual morality as dictated to us by Scripture, by God's Word. But to me, there's a common theme in these provisions. As we ask the question, why these four things? Why is that what they landed on? I think that there's a common theme and a common concern in these that tells us the type of faith that we're supposed to have. As I read this and I see these provisions and this direction to the new church, what I hear coming from Peter and the council is this simple admonition to have a faith that considers others. What kind of rules and things should we follow? What should we concern ourselves with? We should concern ourselves with things that impact others. We should have a faith that considers others. And this, to me, makes a ton of sense. Those rules about what to eat, That's all about how it looks to other people. How does it look to the Jewish people? How does it look to the pagan people? Have a faith that considers them and not wanting to give the wrong impression or not wanting to give offense. Just be unselfish in that way. Be selfless in that way. And don't let yourself eat or partake in those things because of how it might be perceived. Have a faith that considers others over yourself. And isn't that the root of sexual sin? Isn't all sexual immorality fundamentally selfish? Isn't all sexual activity outside the bonds of a loving marriage fundamentally selfish? Because we take things from that person that aren't ours, and we give things to that person that aren't ours to give because they belong to our spouse. And in the end, sexual sin is a fundamentally selfish and self-seeking sin. And when we avoid that sin, we consider others. And so I hear Peter saying here, have a faith that considers others, that is others focused. And as I think about practically how to do that out of this story, out of this instance occurrence in the book of Acts, what are the things that we can pull out of this that we can apply to our faith today so that we can live out a faith that considers others? I think the first thing that we can do is that we can consider others by passing on a compassionate faith. We consider others by passing on a compassionate faith. I love the example of Peter in this passage where he says, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait. This part of our faith isn't working for us. Why would we pass that on to the next generation of believers? Guys, we're not good at this. This is a burden. This element of our faith discourages us and actually causes distance from God, not a clinging to God. So why would we perpetuate that in the next generation of believers? And as I think about my own life and the faith that I've inherited, I can see both sides of that happening in my life. I was led spiritually by people who grew up largely in the Southern Baptist Church in the 60s and the 70s. And when I say I was led by people, I mean my parents, I mean my pastor, I mean those that poured into me as I grew up. And in the 60s and 70s, the Southern Baptist Church was incredibly legalistic. Incredibly legalistic. You couldn't dance ever. You couldn't have dancing at your wedding. There's no talk of alcohol ever. Everyone's a teetotaler. If you did that, you're definitely a sinner and not a Christian. You could not go to the movie theaters. You could not play cards. Skirts had to be certain lengths. There was all these provisions and rules around the faith. And my spiritual leaders and my parents and their goodness and then their compassion looked at those elements of their faith and they said, these don't work for us. These aren't a true reflection of the heart of God. These discourage us and pull us away from God rather than encourage us to cling to him. So we're not going to pass on that legalism to the next generation. I grew up with a generation of leaders who passed on a compassionate faith and said, this part didn't work for us. This isn't from the heart of God, so we're not going to saddle you and burden you with that. But in the same way, as I think about what was passed on to me that I don't want to pass on to Lily and to those that I pass my faith on to, I think about how certain that generation was. I think about the certainty that people around me grew up with. My pastor was so certain about some things. People who poured into me were so certain about some things. They had very strong opinions about exactly when Jesus was going to return in the tribulation. I grew up with people who were so certain that Calvinism was right, that God chooses who he's going to save, and that we don't choose God. And I grew up around some people who said, no, you choose if you're going to choose God. He doesn't choose you. I grew up around some people who were certain that you couldn't lose your salvation and some people who were certain that you could. When I was growing up, it was so black and white. There was no gray. And as I've grown up in faith and become an adult leading my own family and now leading a church, and the rubber of theology meets the practical road of life. I've become far less certain about things. And I don't understand how things could be so black and white in a world that has so much gray, and scriptures that have so much nuance, and scriptures that lay things down next to each other like predestination and like self-determinism and go, yeah, both are true. And don't seem to want to resolve that for us. And so for me, I want to pass on compassionately the gift of uncertainty. I want the people that I lead, I want Lily to know, I want my church to know that it's okay not to be sure. Everything doesn't have to be black and white for us all the time. It's okay to wonder at God and not fully understand him. It's okay to not have all the answers. It's okay to go, is it possible that God chooses me to be saved? Yeah. Is it possible that I choose him? Yeah. Are both true? Yeah. It's okay to say, where does the intersection of my effort and then my prayer and asking God for his effort, where does that meet? What's the exact right amount of things to pray about and how long to pray for? And when do I just sit back and wait and ask God to come in and when do I meet him with my effort? I don't know. And that's all right. It's okay to not be certain about things as long as that uncertainty drives us into a deeper faith in God and his work through Jesus. So we ought to pass on a compassionate faith that's aware of the burdensome things that we might have added onto our faith We should maintain a simple faith. Jesus is constantly trying to get us to do this. This is what the disciples do. They distill all those 630 laws down to these four simple things that can be summed up and consider others. And Jesus is doing this too. Jesus says that the whole law and the prophets, all of those laws can be summed up in these two things. Love God with all your heart and your soul and your mind and love your neighbor as yourself. And then later he says, this new commandment I give you, love others as I have loved you. Jesus is constantly simplifying a faith. And we generationally are constantly complicating it. Adding all of these rules and regulations and standards by which we judge ourselves and others that Jesus didn't ask us to adopt. I think we're constantly complicating our faith. And if we want to have a faith like Peter did, like the early church did, then one of the things that we need to do is be constantly simplifying our faith. And judging our standards by, is this loving of God? Is this appreciative of Jesus, and is this loving for others? Am I living out a simple faith that considers others? So I hope that that's what we'll do. I hope that we'll take this lesson from the early church, that each of us will have a faith that considers others more important than ourselves and that we'll consider others in our faith by passing on to our children and to those around us a compassionate faith and that we personally will maintain a simple, pure faith that prizes Christ and a love for him above all else and lets everything else flow out of that. And in doing that, I think we can capture the essence of the direction that was given to the church in Acts chapter 15. Let's pray. Father, we sometimes make being a Christian so complicated. We ask questions like, is it a sin to do this? Is it wrong to do this? Is this something that God wants me to do? God, I pray that you would help us clarify and simplify those things. I pray that we would be men and women who are after your heart, who cling to you, who strip away the things from our religion that only serve to discourage us and pull us away from you, that we would lean into you more, that we would know your son well. Father, give us a compassionate, self-aware faith that we can pass on to others. Give us a simple faith that is unencumbered of any expectations that you didn't place on us yourself. Father, I pray that you would bless us in this difficult time. I pray that you would bind grace together in the midst of COVID and not being able to see one another. I just pray and ask that you would continue to keep your hand on this place. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.
Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. Somebody's near those lights in the back. Can we hit them? Thanks, David. Both of them. There we go. I want to be able to see everybody, even Jim Adams in the back. Welcome to Grace. It's good to have you here. I'm so excited to be kicking off the fall. I really, as a pastor and just as a person who's no longer in school, hate the summertime. It is too hot. Nothing in my life calls for the temperature to be over 70 degrees. I really like football, and I really like two services, and I really like when small groups start. So I'm so excited to be launching into this new series. As a clerical note, as we begin here today, those of you that got the bulletin when you came in and you are my note takers and you like to fill in the blanks, I have bad news for you. I'm not going to use those today, okay? I'm going to use them kind of. There's going to be enough in the sermon that you can fill in the blanks if you really want to, but I went back to Alan running the computer and I said, we're just going to put the verse on the screen when I get to it. Other than that, don't worry about the notes because they're just going to mess me up this morning. Okay. So anyways, I just wanted you to know that. Don't get frustrated when you're like, I don't know what to write down. You're not gonna. It's going to be a big fun mystery. I want to take you to our staff meetings. We have staff meetings now every Tuesday, every Tuesday, full-time staff. So that's me and then Steve. Yeah, the one with the curly hair that comes up here sometimes. Steve, our worship pastor. Kyle, our excited student pastor. I'm a little worried that the stage is now too wide for him. It's got too much space up here. And then Aaron, our wonderful children's pastor. And then sometimes some of our part-time staff will join us for lunch and stick around for a meeting. So that's what we do every Tuesday. And so we go out to lunch and then we come back and we sit down in a room over there and we talk about whatever it is we need to talk about. And I don't know how your staff meetings go. I'm sure that you are all on staff or have been on staff in different places. You have meetings that everyone loves. And I don't know how well you guys stay focused, but I know for us, all of our meetings go at least 33% longer than they need to because all four of us are very prone to chasing rabbits. It can very easily go something like this. If you could please silence your cell phones, that would be super. I'm just messing around. I just always wanted to say that. We'll sit down in a meeting and we'll be like, okay, we got to plan the Hootenanny. Hootenanny's coming up. We got to plan it. Let's talk about it. What do we want to do here? And then I'll say like, what kind of food should we serve? And maybe Aaron will say, well, how about just hot dogs? Those are easy. Let's try hot dogs. And then Steve will go, oh, man, I was downtown, and I had the best hot dogs at Crazy 8's. They were so good. You guys have got to try this restaurant. And then Aaron will be like, yeah, Harris and I love that restaurant. That's the best. And then I'll hear about Harris, and I'll get excited and be like, hey, how's Harris doing? Is he doing okay? Has he been able to get out and golf lately? I know that dude likes golfing. And then Kyle will be like, yo, me and Harris just went frisbee golfing like yesterday. It was great. And I'll go, get out of here. Where did you go? And he'll say, we went to such and such park. And then Steve will go, Grayson loves that park. And then Aaron will say, I do too. And then I'll go, let's all get together and hang out at the park. What do we need to bring? Hot dogs? And then eventually somebody goes, hey, hey, hey, hootenanny. We've got to focus. And we go, oh, yeah, okay. And then we go. I mean, am I lying? That's totally how it goes. And we've got to stop. We get to wandering off. We get caught up in everything else, and then we have to refocus on what's important. And I bring that up because I think that that happens in life, right? I think that in life we all choose our priorities and our things that are important to us. If I were to ask any of you, what are the three most important things in your life, for most of the people in the room, even if you're lying because I'm the pastor, you would say, well, my faith and my family and then like job or friendships or whatever else comes next. We'd all say those things to one degree or another. But then as we get into life, sometimes that gets skewed a little bit because life just gets crazy. I was talking to somebody last week who said that they learned while all three of their daughters were in middle school, high school time, they got a new car, and they learned very quickly that the mom was putting 1,000 miles a week on her car just getting all the kids to all the different places that they needed to be. That's busy, man. That's hectic. We volunteer for stuff. We overextend. We fill our calendar so that we feel like we're doing something and we don't have any time in the margins. We got to go to meetings that we don't care about. A lot of us live our life out of a sense of ought. Someone asks us to do something and when we feel like since they asked me, I should say yes. And then we wake up in the morning resenting that thing that we have to do, but we go and we do it anyways because this is what good people do. And we just go on to the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. And I think that sometimes our years get away from us. And this is why holidays are great. Because holidays force us to slow down and focus on this thing that we've designated as important. Right? This is how Mother's Day works. We go through the year, and I don't know who gave it to us, Hallmark maybe, I can't back that up with paperwork, but we're grateful to them. We go through the year, and if we have a good mom, we take her for granted sometimes. We forget to tell her that she's awesome. We forget to thank her for all the things that she does. We forget to call her when we should. And we just kind of go through the year doing that. And then May comes and everybody goes, hey, hey, Mother's Day. All right. Say you're grateful. Oh, yes, thank you. And then we do the flowers and the hugs and we go eat at the restaurant with the bad service, right? That's what we do. It's the same for our anniversary. If you're married, you go through the year. And often, I mean, it never happens in my marriage with Jim, but I've heard that other people take one another for granted and they just go through the year kind of forgetting and then your anniversary comes up and you go, oh, that's right. And for that day, you focus on what's important. And I think that this is what holidays do for us. I think holidays orient us on what really matters. Holidays remind us to focus on what's actually important. This is why I think God instilled some holidays in the calendar in the Old Testament. This is an aside. I couldn't move through the sermon without saying this because it's something I've been thinking about with the rhythm of life. We're going to spend the next six weeks looking at the six festivals or holidays or feasts that God installed into the calendar of his people that we see in Leviticus chapter 16. We're going to look at those six holidays and figure out what they mean for us and what we're celebrating now as we remember them. And I've loved diving into them. I've learned more, more quickly than I have in a long time because this represented a big gap in my biblical knowledge. And so one of our great partners gave me a stack of books that I've just been reading through for every holiday. It's been so enriching. But one of the things I've been thinking about is if holidays serve to reorient us on what's important, to take our focus off all the stuff and focus us in on what really matters. And this is the rhythm that God has installed so that every now and again, at a certain rhythm over the course of the year, before we get too far off the mark, God goes, hey, and he focuses us. Then isn't this what happens on Sundays? As he installed the rhythm of church, we go through our weeks, and before we can get too far away, God brings us back into church and focuses us on him and says, hey, don't forget about me, I'm important. And isn't that what's great about the rhythm of waking up every day and spending time in God's word and time in prayer? I've said a bunch of times that you can develop no more important habit in your life than to spend time in God's Word and time in prayer every day. And if nothing else happens, if this sermon this morning is a dud and you leave here, you're like, I didn't get anything out of that. I wouldn't blame you. If you get up and you read the Bible in that particular week, you kind of go, gosh, I just didn't get anything out of this. I just didn't see anything today. Isn't it good that if nothing else happened, there's this rhythm in your life of bringing your focus back to God every day through prayer and through scripture reading and every week through church and then every so often through the holidays that he instills. I think there's something to a rhythm of life that reorients us on what's important. But we're going to spend the next six weeks looking at the festivals that God installed in the Hebrew calendar. We're going to do this with a little bit of an awareness of why God did this and when he started these in history. So just so we're all on the same page, the Hebrew nation really looks at the people of Israel, God's chosen people, they really look back at Abraham as their founding father, as their forefather. For Christianity, he's kind of the forefather or the founding father of the faith. For the unindoctrinated, he would be like our George Washington, okay? Like he was the guy. And so way back in Genesis 12, God made Abram, at the time he wasn't yet Abraham, some promises. Three promises of land of people and of blessing. I'm going to give you the land that we know as modern day Israel. Your descendants will be like the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore. That's going to be the Hebrew people, the Jewish people. There's going to be a bunch of them. And then one of your descendants is going to bless the whole earth, is the promise. So in Genesis 12, God makes these promises to Abraham, and through those promises, he becomes the forefather, the founding father of the Jewish faith and of our faith, if you're a believer. Then from him, he had some sons, and a couple generations later, there's Joseph. Joseph is a guy who ends up down in Egypt. All of Abraham's family moved down to live with Joseph. The Bible fast forwards 400 years between the end of Genesis and the beginning of Exodus, the first and second books of the Bible. And then we have Moses sitting there in Egypt. They are a people who are enslaved by Egypt and God tasks Moses in Exodus 3 and 4, the burning bush, with leading his people out of slavery. So Moses leads the people out of slavery. They're in the desert. They're wandering around, and it's this fascinating time. It's fascinating biblically, but just historically, if you like to think about things like this. Here's this nation of people, maybe about 500,000 strong, between three and 500,000 strong, that are living as nomads in the desert. And they have to now figure out life. They have to figure out laws. They have to figure out a religion. They have to figure out a civil structure. And so Moses installs a government and God gives them laws. This is the Ten Commandments that he carries down from the mountain. They start meeting. They set up a tabernacle, and they have a whole group of people called the Levites, or the priests, who are in charge of setting up the tabernacle and performing all the ceremonies necessary at the tabernacle to relate to the God that's meeting them. They start to form this little society, this little civilization. And as part of the civilization, God says, I want you to have six holidays that you observe every year. And so for the next six weeks, we're going to look at those six holidays. Because what these holidays do is they teach us and they show us that our God is a God of remembrance and he's a God of celebration. Our God is a God of remembrance and he is a God of celebration. He wants us at each of these holidays to remember something that he's done, to look back at something that he's done. He wants us to celebrate something that he's done. And I kind of like pointing that part of God's character out to people. I think sometimes we get the idea that church needs to be somber and sober and serious and that I should be wearing a suit and that we should put on our best for God and that it needs to be just high church of the utmost all the time, when really God designed fun. He initiated fun. He gave you the ability to smile. He likes laughter. He likes hearing your laughter. He likes watching us laugh together and enjoy one another, which is why in a couple of weeks when we have the Hootenanny, there's going to be a bunch of silly stuff and a bunch of funny stuff around that. We're going to have competitions in the service, and if you win one, you're going to get a fanny pack, and it's going to be the Hootenanny fanny. And you get to wear it to the Hootenanny so that everybody sees how awesome you are for the rest of the day. You're going to be the king or the queen of the hootenanny. It's going to be great. And we'll laugh and we'll giggle and we'll share stories and we'll talk about fantasy football. I'm going to win the league this year at the church. Worst to first, it's going to be an incredible story. And listen, God celebrates that. God ordains that. When we have the moments in here where we cry and we're brought low, those are holy moments. But when we have the moments where we celebrate and we're brought high, those are holy moments too because God initiated those. He is a God of remembrance and of celebration and we'll see these in the festivals. So this week we want to look at the first festival that God orders in Leviticus chapter 16. It's called the Feast of Trumpets, and it's initiated by the sounding of a trumpet, which is why we had Brandon come up and play the shofar at the beginning of the service. If you didn't get to see that because maybe you rolled in a little bit late, then you have to stay for the beginning of the next service. It's just a must. So he sounded the trumpet, and it initiated the service, and that's what they would do for the beginning of the next service. It's just, it's a must. So he sounded the trumpet and it initiated the service. And that's what they would do for the Feast of Trumpets is they would sound it and it would initiate and bring in the Jewish New Year is what it was a celebration of. Oddly enough, I don't know how it works out. Okay, I don't ask questions like this. Their New Year began in the seventh month of the year. It was a month called Tishri. It mirrored a large portion of September and the beginning of October. So according to the calendar, we're observing it and looking at it at exactly the right time. And I think that that's really cool because to me, this first full service, I mean, we had Labor Day, we did Grace Serves, and it was amazing. But this first full service in September, to me, initiates the new year at Grace, the new ministry year. And that may sound funny to you, but for me, the rhythms of the year kind of work like this. In September, everything's back, right? Small groups are back, people are back from vacation, and the church is full again, and people are consistent again, and schedules are a little bit more regular. And so September is a big month at Grace. And so we push hard in September. We get ready for it, and we push, push, push, and we go, go, go. And really, we push really hard until Christmas. And Christmas is a big celebration. And then we kind of take a deep breath, and we get ready because January is a huge month too. We gear up for January, then we push really hard to Easter and then through Mother's Day and then after Mother's Day, schedules kind of start to get irregular again. People go on vacation and we know that. That's perfectly fine. And then over the summer, we kind of take a deep breath and then we gear up for September again. So that's kind of the rhythm of church. And so to me, this Feast of Trumpets mirrors our new year as well. Their new year mirrors our new year. And so I thought it was a good place to start as we dive into these feasts. And they sound the trumpet because it was symbolic of a lot of things in Hebrew culture. The trumpet, the shofar, the ram's horn. And we have a small one, but you guys have probably seen those big, long, loud ones that would just fill the area with sound. You've probably seen those. Trumpets meant something to a Jewish person. There's the ram's horn, but then there was also a silver trumpet that was sometimes sounded. And the silver trumpet was emblematic or symbolic of the redemption that God buys for us, the way that he makes a way for us to be right with him. You would sound a shofar as a battle cry. You would sound it so that people would prepare for an announcement. It was sounded around the walls of Jericho. To me, one of the coolest things, because there's a parallel in our New Testament, is it would be sounded to call the workers in from the harvest. So it's time for synagogue or it's time for temple. One of the priests would go out and he would sound the shofar and all the people working out in the field would hear the sound far off and know to come in because it was time to gather for assembly. And I think that's really cool because in Thessalonians and in Corinthians, we're told that one day Jesus is going to come back and he's going to claim his children to himself. And if you're here and you're alive, then you are a worker in the field. You are active. You should be about actively bringing other people along with you to heaven. We all have work to do. That's one of the reasons why at Grace we have partners. We don't have members because we kind of believe that members tend to consume and that partners tend to contribute. And we believe that we are an entity that is about getting something done. So we're looking for people to partner with us. We are laborers in the field and workers for the harvest. And one day Jesus is going to return and he's going to call us home. And do you know what we're going to hear when he does that? The sound of a trumpet. I would bet everything I have that it's a shofar. What a beautiful parallel there is from the Old Testament to the New Testament promises. But I think the most profound symbolism that we see in the Feast of Trumpets is that the horn that was blown is symbolic of the ram that was caught in the thicket in Genesis 22. I told you that Abraham was the forefather of the Hebrew people and that God promised him that through you, you're going to have a ton of descendants. This was an issue because Abraham and his wife Sarah had not yet had any children. And so very late in life, I think Abraham was 99, if I remember my Bible correctly, they had a son named Isaac. And a few years into Isaac's life, God says, I'd like you to offer Isaac to me. And so Abraham, in obedience, gets up and takes the physical manifestation of the promises of God to this land, to this region of Moriah, up onto a hill, and he prepares to sacrifice him. And right at the moment where Abraham was going to strike down Isaac, he hears a voice that says, Abraham, Abraham, do not touch the boy. And there's a ram caught in the thicket. And the voice tells him, go and get the ram and let that die in Isaac's place. And so he goes and he gets it and he kills the ram and the ram dies so that Isaac doesn't have to. And it's the picture of the sacrificial system in the Old Testament that says and acknowledges that when we sin, and sin is any time we put our authority in our life over God's authority in our life. God says, I think that you should do this thing, and we go, no, I don't think so. I think I need to do this thing. That's sin. Whatever it is, it's when we elevate our judgment over God's in our life. And when we do that, we're separated from God. And that separation requires a death. And so God in his sovereignty in the Old Testament installed the sacrificial system so that essentially that ram dies so that Isaac doesn't have to. It's a picture of what's called a substitutionary atonement. And the really cool part of this is, this is what the Hebrew people would remember. So on the Feast of Trumpets, the trumpet is blown. It stands for all these things, but it most pointedly stands for the ram caught in the thicket in Genesis chapter 22. And so God told them, I want you to remember the promise that I made to Abraham, your forefather, and then remember how I kept it in the form of a ram. And now here you are today at the time in the land of Israel with the promises of God kept. And so what the Feast of Trumpets is really is a time for us to celebrate and remember the promises that God has kept to us and anticipate the promises that God has made to us. And so for a Christian, as we look at this festival, what we understand is that it points directly to Jesus. Do you know what the picture in Genesis 22, when Abraham takes Isaac up on the mount, do you know what that's a picture of? It's a picture of the crucifixion of Christ. Do you understand that all of Israel looked forward? They would celebrate the Feast of Trumpets every year. They would celebrate, next week we're going to look at Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. They would look at that and how there was an atoning work done for them. And they would anticipate one day God's going to send a Messiah, his son, a messianic figure, and he will be the atonement for us all. He will be the ram for us all. And so it was a remembrance of the promise that God made to Abraham and a looking forward to the fulfillment of that promise. And as believers now in 2019, we look back and we see how God kept his promise to Abraham and his people by providing Jesus. That the sacrifice of Jesus to that point is the apex and the perfection of history. That all of history before Jesus looked forward to him coming. That the feast of trumpets was a yearly reminder that we anticipate the coming of Jesus. And then after that, we anticipate this perfect utopia that God is going to create a new heaven and a new earth where his children live in peace, and that Jesus brings that about. And as New Testament believers, we see that the ram is really a picture of Jesus. And so the shofar that is sounded at the Feast of Trumpets to us is not a reminder of the ram. It's a thing that points to Jesus. And it's our job to remember on a day like this the promises that God made to us and kept so that we can gleefully anticipate the ones that he will keep. To me, the Feast of Trumpets is a big ceremony that's existed for thousands of years to point us to what I believe is the most hopeful passage in all of Scripture. If you were to talk to an ancient Hebrew person on the day of the Feast of Trumpets, they would tell you that one of the promises they were anticipating, the main promise they were anticipating was being in eternity with God one day. It was a utopia that God is going to create with a new heaven and a new earth. And if you were to talk to a Christian and say, what are you hoping in? We would tell you, ultimately, we are hoping in an eternity spent with God. And in Revelation chapter 21, one through four, we see this eternity kind of synopsized in four verses. John writes this. The dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will be their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore for the former things have passed away. If you are a believer, if you call God your father and Jesus your savior, then that is the hope that you cling to. When life doesn't make sense, when things get hard, when days are dark, that is the hope that we cling to. And we cling to that hope because Romans tells us that our hope will not be put to shame. We cling to that hope because we remember the other promises that God has kept. And if he's kept those promises, then I know he'll keep that promise. If he's been faithful to his church through Jesus and his death, then I know that he'll be faithful to his church through Jesus and his return. I know that I'll hear a trumpet again one day and I know that he's gonna call me into this promise in Revelation where all the wrong things will be made right and all the sad things will be made untrue. And all the things that you don't understand in this life will make sense. And so on the Feast of Trumpets, we reflect on the promises that God has kept. And we eagerly anticipate the ones that he will fulfill. We do that as a body of believers, as the church Big C Church. We do that as Grace, Little C Church. It would be right and good to reflect on where the church has been and how God has been faithful to us through the years and anticipate what we believe his promises are about our church as we move forward. And I think most importantly this morning, it's a time for us as individuals to reflect on the promises that God has kept in our life and be hopeful about the things that he will bring about in our life. Some of us are walking through hard times. For some of us, our anxiety level when we walked in here is up to here. We're struggling with depression. We're struggling with anxiety. We're struggling with sleepless nights. We're struggling with indecision or pain or hardship or grief. And if we're not struggling now, we know enough about life to know that those days come, that there's dark days too. And the Feast of Trumpets slows us down in the midst of our anxiety and focuses us and says, hey, do you remember all the things that God has done for you so far? He will see you through the next thing. And so I think it's right and good today for all of us, no matter where we are, no matter how we felt when we walked in the room, to remember the ways that God has come through for us in the past and know that he will come through for us in the future. I've shared with you guys before that the most difficult season of my life was our miscarriage. We struggled for a long time to get pregnant. We finally did, and then we learned that we had lost the baby. Those are the darkest months of my life. That shook my faith the most. That made me the most angry with God. Those days were the most difficult ones to pray. Those were hard. And I remember those moments. But now I have a three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Lily. And she's the fulfillment of things. She's the promise of God. She's my physical manifestation of his goodness that he will come through for me. And every now and again, I get to put her to bed. Most nights not because Jen is her favorite and she makes that very clear. She will tell me, Mommy is my favorite. I do not like you today. Okay. Same as our friends. But when I do get to put her to bed, we do the whole routine. And then finally we lay down and I'm laying there next to her and I sing her some songs. And the last song that I always sing is God is so good. God is so good. He's so good. He's so good to me. And she doesn't know it. She thinks I'm just singing. But she's the goodness. And the last stanza, there's a bunch of different ways you can sing that song, but the last stanza that I always sing when I put her to bed at night is God answers prayer. He answers prayer. He's so good to us. He answers prayer in your life too. You have the manifestations of God's goodness in your life too. And the Feast of Trumpets, even in the hardest of times, focuses us on the promises that God has kept for us in the past and gives us hope even when we don't see how, even when we can't piece together why, that God will fulfill those promises in the future, that he will see us through again. So today, that's what we celebrate. I'd like you to pray with me, and then we're going to move into a time of communion together. Father, we love you. You are so good to us. You do answer prayer. God, you've seen us through so many seasons of our lives. You've come through in so many ways. Father, I pray specifically for those who came in with heavy hearts this morning for whatever reason. That you would focus them in on the things that you've done for them in the past so that they might have a little hope that the future is bright too. God, thank you for all the manifestations of the goodness in our life. I pray that we would take a minute today and realize those before we get out of here, before we run out and let life pick up again and forget what we should be focused on. I pray that we would each take just a minute and be grateful for your goodness in our life and the way that you've come through for us in the past. God, be with our brothers and sisters, our family members who are hurting. Pray that you would heal them. Pray that you would give them your peace. And we thank you that you are a God of celebration and that you are a God of remembrance, Lord. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.
Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. Somebody's near those lights in the back. Can we hit them? Thanks, David. Both of them. There we go. I want to be able to see everybody, even Jim Adams in the back. Welcome to Grace. It's good to have you here. I'm so excited to be kicking off the fall. I really, as a pastor and just as a person who's no longer in school, hate the summertime. It is too hot. Nothing in my life calls for the temperature to be over 70 degrees. I really like football, and I really like two services, and I really like when small groups start. So I'm so excited to be launching into this new series. As a clerical note, as we begin here today, those of you that got the bulletin when you came in and you are my note takers and you like to fill in the blanks, I have bad news for you. I'm not going to use those today, okay? I'm going to use them kind of. There's going to be enough in the sermon that you can fill in the blanks if you really want to, but I went back to Alan running the computer and I said, we're just going to put the verse on the screen when I get to it. Other than that, don't worry about the notes because they're just going to mess me up this morning. Okay. So anyways, I just wanted you to know that. Don't get frustrated when you're like, I don't know what to write down. You're not gonna. It's going to be a big fun mystery. I want to take you to our staff meetings. We have staff meetings now every Tuesday, every Tuesday, full-time staff. So that's me and then Steve. Yeah, the one with the curly hair that comes up here sometimes. Steve, our worship pastor. Kyle, our excited student pastor. I'm a little worried that the stage is now too wide for him. It's got too much space up here. And then Aaron, our wonderful children's pastor. And then sometimes some of our part-time staff will join us for lunch and stick around for a meeting. So that's what we do every Tuesday. And so we go out to lunch and then we come back and we sit down in a room over there and we talk about whatever it is we need to talk about. And I don't know how your staff meetings go. I'm sure that you are all on staff or have been on staff in different places. You have meetings that everyone loves. And I don't know how well you guys stay focused, but I know for us, all of our meetings go at least 33% longer than they need to because all four of us are very prone to chasing rabbits. It can very easily go something like this. If you could please silence your cell phones, that would be super. I'm just messing around. I just always wanted to say that. We'll sit down in a meeting and we'll be like, okay, we got to plan the Hootenanny. Hootenanny's coming up. We got to plan it. Let's talk about it. What do we want to do here? And then I'll say like, what kind of food should we serve? And maybe Aaron will say, well, how about just hot dogs? Those are easy. Let's try hot dogs. And then Steve will go, oh, man, I was downtown, and I had the best hot dogs at Crazy 8's. They were so good. You guys have got to try this restaurant. And then Aaron will be like, yeah, Harris and I love that restaurant. That's the best. And then I'll hear about Harris, and I'll get excited and be like, hey, how's Harris doing? Is he doing okay? Has he been able to get out and golf lately? I know that dude likes golfing. And then Kyle will be like, yo, me and Harris just went frisbee golfing like yesterday. It was great. And I'll go, get out of here. Where did you go? And he'll say, we went to such and such park. And then Steve will go, Grayson loves that park. And then Aaron will say, I do too. And then I'll go, let's all get together and hang out at the park. What do we need to bring? Hot dogs? And then eventually somebody goes, hey, hey, hey, hootenanny. We've got to focus. And we go, oh, yeah, okay. And then we go. I mean, am I lying? That's totally how it goes. And we've got to stop. We get to wandering off. We get caught up in everything else, and then we have to refocus on what's important. And I bring that up because I think that that happens in life, right? I think that in life we all choose our priorities and our things that are important to us. If I were to ask any of you, what are the three most important things in your life, for most of the people in the room, even if you're lying because I'm the pastor, you would say, well, my faith and my family and then like job or friendships or whatever else comes next. We'd all say those things to one degree or another. But then as we get into life, sometimes that gets skewed a little bit because life just gets crazy. I was talking to somebody last week who said that they learned while all three of their daughters were in middle school, high school time, they got a new car, and they learned very quickly that the mom was putting 1,000 miles a week on her car just getting all the kids to all the different places that they needed to be. That's busy, man. That's hectic. We volunteer for stuff. We overextend. We fill our calendar so that we feel like we're doing something and we don't have any time in the margins. We got to go to meetings that we don't care about. A lot of us live our life out of a sense of ought. Someone asks us to do something and when we feel like since they asked me, I should say yes. And then we wake up in the morning resenting that thing that we have to do, but we go and we do it anyways because this is what good people do. And we just go on to the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. And I think that sometimes our years get away from us. And this is why holidays are great. Because holidays force us to slow down and focus on this thing that we've designated as important. Right? This is how Mother's Day works. We go through the year, and I don't know who gave it to us, Hallmark maybe, I can't back that up with paperwork, but we're grateful to them. We go through the year, and if we have a good mom, we take her for granted sometimes. We forget to tell her that she's awesome. We forget to thank her for all the things that she does. We forget to call her when we should. And we just kind of go through the year doing that. And then May comes and everybody goes, hey, hey, Mother's Day. All right. Say you're grateful. Oh, yes, thank you. And then we do the flowers and the hugs and we go eat at the restaurant with the bad service, right? That's what we do. It's the same for our anniversary. If you're married, you go through the year. And often, I mean, it never happens in my marriage with Jim, but I've heard that other people take one another for granted and they just go through the year kind of forgetting and then your anniversary comes up and you go, oh, that's right. And for that day, you focus on what's important. And I think that this is what holidays do for us. I think holidays orient us on what really matters. Holidays remind us to focus on what's actually important. This is why I think God instilled some holidays in the calendar in the Old Testament. This is an aside. I couldn't move through the sermon without saying this because it's something I've been thinking about with the rhythm of life. We're going to spend the next six weeks looking at the six festivals or holidays or feasts that God installed into the calendar of his people that we see in Leviticus chapter 16. We're going to look at those six holidays and figure out what they mean for us and what we're celebrating now as we remember them. And I've loved diving into them. I've learned more, more quickly than I have in a long time because this represented a big gap in my biblical knowledge. And so one of our great partners gave me a stack of books that I've just been reading through for every holiday. It's been so enriching. But one of the things I've been thinking about is if holidays serve to reorient us on what's important, to take our focus off all the stuff and focus us in on what really matters. And this is the rhythm that God has installed so that every now and again, at a certain rhythm over the course of the year, before we get too far off the mark, God goes, hey, and he focuses us. Then isn't this what happens on Sundays? As he installed the rhythm of church, we go through our weeks, and before we can get too far away, God brings us back into church and focuses us on him and says, hey, don't forget about me, I'm important. And isn't that what's great about the rhythm of waking up every day and spending time in God's word and time in prayer? I've said a bunch of times that you can develop no more important habit in your life than to spend time in God's Word and time in prayer every day. And if nothing else happens, if this sermon this morning is a dud and you leave here, you're like, I didn't get anything out of that. I wouldn't blame you. If you get up and you read the Bible in that particular week, you kind of go, gosh, I just didn't get anything out of this. I just didn't see anything today. Isn't it good that if nothing else happened, there's this rhythm in your life of bringing your focus back to God every day through prayer and through scripture reading and every week through church and then every so often through the holidays that he instills. I think there's something to a rhythm of life that reorients us on what's important. But we're going to spend the next six weeks looking at the festivals that God installed in the Hebrew calendar. We're going to do this with a little bit of an awareness of why God did this and when he started these in history. So just so we're all on the same page, the Hebrew nation really looks at the people of Israel, God's chosen people, they really look back at Abraham as their founding father, as their forefather. For Christianity, he's kind of the forefather or the founding father of the faith. For the unindoctrinated, he would be like our George Washington, okay? Like he was the guy. And so way back in Genesis 12, God made Abram, at the time he wasn't yet Abraham, some promises. Three promises of land of people and of blessing. I'm going to give you the land that we know as modern day Israel. Your descendants will be like the stars in the sky and the sand on the shore. That's going to be the Hebrew people, the Jewish people. There's going to be a bunch of them. And then one of your descendants is going to bless the whole earth, is the promise. So in Genesis 12, God makes these promises to Abraham, and through those promises, he becomes the forefather, the founding father of the Jewish faith and of our faith, if you're a believer. Then from him, he had some sons, and a couple generations later, there's Joseph. Joseph is a guy who ends up down in Egypt. All of Abraham's family moved down to live with Joseph. The Bible fast forwards 400 years between the end of Genesis and the beginning of Exodus, the first and second books of the Bible. And then we have Moses sitting there in Egypt. They are a people who are enslaved by Egypt and God tasks Moses in Exodus 3 and 4, the burning bush, with leading his people out of slavery. So Moses leads the people out of slavery. They're in the desert. They're wandering around, and it's this fascinating time. It's fascinating biblically, but just historically, if you like to think about things like this. Here's this nation of people, maybe about 500,000 strong, between three and 500,000 strong, that are living as nomads in the desert. And they have to now figure out life. They have to figure out laws. They have to figure out a religion. They have to figure out a civil structure. And so Moses installs a government and God gives them laws. This is the Ten Commandments that he carries down from the mountain. They start meeting. They set up a tabernacle, and they have a whole group of people called the Levites, or the priests, who are in charge of setting up the tabernacle and performing all the ceremonies necessary at the tabernacle to relate to the God that's meeting them. They start to form this little society, this little civilization. And as part of the civilization, God says, I want you to have six holidays that you observe every year. And so for the next six weeks, we're going to look at those six holidays. Because what these holidays do is they teach us and they show us that our God is a God of remembrance and he's a God of celebration. Our God is a God of remembrance and he is a God of celebration. He wants us at each of these holidays to remember something that he's done, to look back at something that he's done. He wants us to celebrate something that he's done. And I kind of like pointing that part of God's character out to people. I think sometimes we get the idea that church needs to be somber and sober and serious and that I should be wearing a suit and that we should put on our best for God and that it needs to be just high church of the utmost all the time, when really God designed fun. He initiated fun. He gave you the ability to smile. He likes laughter. He likes hearing your laughter. He likes watching us laugh together and enjoy one another, which is why in a couple of weeks when we have the Hootenanny, there's going to be a bunch of silly stuff and a bunch of funny stuff around that. We're going to have competitions in the service, and if you win one, you're going to get a fanny pack, and it's going to be the Hootenanny fanny. And you get to wear it to the Hootenanny so that everybody sees how awesome you are for the rest of the day. You're going to be the king or the queen of the hootenanny. It's going to be great. And we'll laugh and we'll giggle and we'll share stories and we'll talk about fantasy football. I'm going to win the league this year at the church. Worst to first, it's going to be an incredible story. And listen, God celebrates that. God ordains that. When we have the moments in here where we cry and we're brought low, those are holy moments. But when we have the moments where we celebrate and we're brought high, those are holy moments too because God initiated those. He is a God of remembrance and of celebration and we'll see these in the festivals. So this week we want to look at the first festival that God orders in Leviticus chapter 16. It's called the Feast of Trumpets, and it's initiated by the sounding of a trumpet, which is why we had Brandon come up and play the shofar at the beginning of the service. If you didn't get to see that because maybe you rolled in a little bit late, then you have to stay for the beginning of the next service. It's just a must. So he sounded the trumpet, and it initiated the service, and that's what they would do for the beginning of the next service. It's just, it's a must. So he sounded the trumpet and it initiated the service. And that's what they would do for the Feast of Trumpets is they would sound it and it would initiate and bring in the Jewish New Year is what it was a celebration of. Oddly enough, I don't know how it works out. Okay, I don't ask questions like this. Their New Year began in the seventh month of the year. It was a month called Tishri. It mirrored a large portion of September and the beginning of October. So according to the calendar, we're observing it and looking at it at exactly the right time. And I think that that's really cool because to me, this first full service, I mean, we had Labor Day, we did Grace Serves, and it was amazing. But this first full service in September, to me, initiates the new year at Grace, the new ministry year. And that may sound funny to you, but for me, the rhythms of the year kind of work like this. In September, everything's back, right? Small groups are back, people are back from vacation, and the church is full again, and people are consistent again, and schedules are a little bit more regular. And so September is a big month at Grace. And so we push hard in September. We get ready for it, and we push, push, push, and we go, go, go. And really, we push really hard until Christmas. And Christmas is a big celebration. And then we kind of take a deep breath, and we get ready because January is a huge month too. We gear up for January, then we push really hard to Easter and then through Mother's Day and then after Mother's Day, schedules kind of start to get irregular again. People go on vacation and we know that. That's perfectly fine. And then over the summer, we kind of take a deep breath and then we gear up for September again. So that's kind of the rhythm of church. And so to me, this Feast of Trumpets mirrors our new year as well. Their new year mirrors our new year. And so I thought it was a good place to start as we dive into these feasts. And they sound the trumpet because it was symbolic of a lot of things in Hebrew culture. The trumpet, the shofar, the ram's horn. And we have a small one, but you guys have probably seen those big, long, loud ones that would just fill the area with sound. You've probably seen those. Trumpets meant something to a Jewish person. There's the ram's horn, but then there was also a silver trumpet that was sometimes sounded. And the silver trumpet was emblematic or symbolic of the redemption that God buys for us, the way that he makes a way for us to be right with him. You would sound a shofar as a battle cry. You would sound it so that people would prepare for an announcement. It was sounded around the walls of Jericho. To me, one of the coolest things, because there's a parallel in our New Testament, is it would be sounded to call the workers in from the harvest. So it's time for synagogue or it's time for temple. One of the priests would go out and he would sound the shofar and all the people working out in the field would hear the sound far off and know to come in because it was time to gather for assembly. And I think that's really cool because in Thessalonians and in Corinthians, we're told that one day Jesus is going to come back and he's going to claim his children to himself. And if you're here and you're alive, then you are a worker in the field. You are active. You should be about actively bringing other people along with you to heaven. We all have work to do. That's one of the reasons why at Grace we have partners. We don't have members because we kind of believe that members tend to consume and that partners tend to contribute. And we believe that we are an entity that is about getting something done. So we're looking for people to partner with us. We are laborers in the field and workers for the harvest. And one day Jesus is going to return and he's going to call us home. And do you know what we're going to hear when he does that? The sound of a trumpet. I would bet everything I have that it's a shofar. What a beautiful parallel there is from the Old Testament to the New Testament promises. But I think the most profound symbolism that we see in the Feast of Trumpets is that the horn that was blown is symbolic of the ram that was caught in the thicket in Genesis 22. I told you that Abraham was the forefather of the Hebrew people and that God promised him that through you, you're going to have a ton of descendants. This was an issue because Abraham and his wife Sarah had not yet had any children. And so very late in life, I think Abraham was 99, if I remember my Bible correctly, they had a son named Isaac. And a few years into Isaac's life, God says, I'd like you to offer Isaac to me. And so Abraham, in obedience, gets up and takes the physical manifestation of the promises of God to this land, to this region of Moriah, up onto a hill, and he prepares to sacrifice him. And right at the moment where Abraham was going to strike down Isaac, he hears a voice that says, Abraham, Abraham, do not touch the boy. And there's a ram caught in the thicket. And the voice tells him, go and get the ram and let that die in Isaac's place. And so he goes and he gets it and he kills the ram and the ram dies so that Isaac doesn't have to. And it's the picture of the sacrificial system in the Old Testament that says and acknowledges that when we sin, and sin is any time we put our authority in our life over God's authority in our life. God says, I think that you should do this thing, and we go, no, I don't think so. I think I need to do this thing. That's sin. Whatever it is, it's when we elevate our judgment over God's in our life. And when we do that, we're separated from God. And that separation requires a death. And so God in his sovereignty in the Old Testament installed the sacrificial system so that essentially that ram dies so that Isaac doesn't have to. It's a picture of what's called a substitutionary atonement. And the really cool part of this is, this is what the Hebrew people would remember. So on the Feast of Trumpets, the trumpet is blown. It stands for all these things, but it most pointedly stands for the ram caught in the thicket in Genesis chapter 22. And so God told them, I want you to remember the promise that I made to Abraham, your forefather, and then remember how I kept it in the form of a ram. And now here you are today at the time in the land of Israel with the promises of God kept. And so what the Feast of Trumpets is really is a time for us to celebrate and remember the promises that God has kept to us and anticipate the promises that God has made to us. And so for a Christian, as we look at this festival, what we understand is that it points directly to Jesus. Do you know what the picture in Genesis 22, when Abraham takes Isaac up on the mount, do you know what that's a picture of? It's a picture of the crucifixion of Christ. Do you understand that all of Israel looked forward? They would celebrate the Feast of Trumpets every year. They would celebrate, next week we're going to look at Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. They would look at that and how there was an atoning work done for them. And they would anticipate one day God's going to send a Messiah, his son, a messianic figure, and he will be the atonement for us all. He will be the ram for us all. And so it was a remembrance of the promise that God made to Abraham and a looking forward to the fulfillment of that promise. And as believers now in 2019, we look back and we see how God kept his promise to Abraham and his people by providing Jesus. That the sacrifice of Jesus to that point is the apex and the perfection of history. That all of history before Jesus looked forward to him coming. That the feast of trumpets was a yearly reminder that we anticipate the coming of Jesus. And then after that, we anticipate this perfect utopia that God is going to create a new heaven and a new earth where his children live in peace, and that Jesus brings that about. And as New Testament believers, we see that the ram is really a picture of Jesus. And so the shofar that is sounded at the Feast of Trumpets to us is not a reminder of the ram. It's a thing that points to Jesus. And it's our job to remember on a day like this the promises that God made to us and kept so that we can gleefully anticipate the ones that he will keep. To me, the Feast of Trumpets is a big ceremony that's existed for thousands of years to point us to what I believe is the most hopeful passage in all of Scripture. If you were to talk to an ancient Hebrew person on the day of the Feast of Trumpets, they would tell you that one of the promises they were anticipating, the main promise they were anticipating was being in eternity with God one day. It was a utopia that God is going to create with a new heaven and a new earth. And if you were to talk to a Christian and say, what are you hoping in? We would tell you, ultimately, we are hoping in an eternity spent with God. And in Revelation chapter 21, one through four, we see this eternity kind of synopsized in four verses. John writes this. The dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will be their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore for the former things have passed away. If you are a believer, if you call God your father and Jesus your savior, then that is the hope that you cling to. When life doesn't make sense, when things get hard, when days are dark, that is the hope that we cling to. And we cling to that hope because Romans tells us that our hope will not be put to shame. We cling to that hope because we remember the other promises that God has kept. And if he's kept those promises, then I know he'll keep that promise. If he's been faithful to his church through Jesus and his death, then I know that he'll be faithful to his church through Jesus and his return. I know that I'll hear a trumpet again one day and I know that he's gonna call me into this promise in Revelation where all the wrong things will be made right and all the sad things will be made untrue. And all the things that you don't understand in this life will make sense. And so on the Feast of Trumpets, we reflect on the promises that God has kept. And we eagerly anticipate the ones that he will fulfill. We do that as a body of believers, as the church Big C Church. We do that as Grace, Little C Church. It would be right and good to reflect on where the church has been and how God has been faithful to us through the years and anticipate what we believe his promises are about our church as we move forward. And I think most importantly this morning, it's a time for us as individuals to reflect on the promises that God has kept in our life and be hopeful about the things that he will bring about in our life. Some of us are walking through hard times. For some of us, our anxiety level when we walked in here is up to here. We're struggling with depression. We're struggling with anxiety. We're struggling with sleepless nights. We're struggling with indecision or pain or hardship or grief. And if we're not struggling now, we know enough about life to know that those days come, that there's dark days too. And the Feast of Trumpets slows us down in the midst of our anxiety and focuses us and says, hey, do you remember all the things that God has done for you so far? He will see you through the next thing. And so I think it's right and good today for all of us, no matter where we are, no matter how we felt when we walked in the room, to remember the ways that God has come through for us in the past and know that he will come through for us in the future. I've shared with you guys before that the most difficult season of my life was our miscarriage. We struggled for a long time to get pregnant. We finally did, and then we learned that we had lost the baby. Those are the darkest months of my life. That shook my faith the most. That made me the most angry with God. Those days were the most difficult ones to pray. Those were hard. And I remember those moments. But now I have a three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Lily. And she's the fulfillment of things. She's the promise of God. She's my physical manifestation of his goodness that he will come through for me. And every now and again, I get to put her to bed. Most nights not because Jen is her favorite and she makes that very clear. She will tell me, Mommy is my favorite. I do not like you today. Okay. Same as our friends. But when I do get to put her to bed, we do the whole routine. And then finally we lay down and I'm laying there next to her and I sing her some songs. And the last song that I always sing is God is so good. God is so good. He's so good. He's so good to me. And she doesn't know it. She thinks I'm just singing. But she's the goodness. And the last stanza, there's a bunch of different ways you can sing that song, but the last stanza that I always sing when I put her to bed at night is God answers prayer. He answers prayer. He's so good to us. He answers prayer in your life too. You have the manifestations of God's goodness in your life too. And the Feast of Trumpets, even in the hardest of times, focuses us on the promises that God has kept for us in the past and gives us hope even when we don't see how, even when we can't piece together why, that God will fulfill those promises in the future, that he will see us through again. So today, that's what we celebrate. I'd like you to pray with me, and then we're going to move into a time of communion together. Father, we love you. You are so good to us. You do answer prayer. God, you've seen us through so many seasons of our lives. You've come through in so many ways. Father, I pray specifically for those who came in with heavy hearts this morning for whatever reason. That you would focus them in on the things that you've done for them in the past so that they might have a little hope that the future is bright too. God, thank you for all the manifestations of the goodness in our life. I pray that we would take a minute today and realize those before we get out of here, before we run out and let life pick up again and forget what we should be focused on. I pray that we would each take just a minute and be grateful for your goodness in our life and the way that you've come through for us in the past. God, be with our brothers and sisters, our family members who are hurting. Pray that you would heal them. Pray that you would give them your peace. And we thank you that you are a God of celebration and that you are a God of remembrance, Lord. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.
