Well, good morning. Thank you for being here and happy Easter to you. My name is Nate. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I get to be one of the pastors here, and we so appreciate you choosing to celebrate your Easter here with us at Grace. For the last six or seven weeks, we've been moving through a series called The Table. The series has kind of been moving through the book of Luke. One scholar says about the book of Luke, which is one of the four gospels, and the gospels are the books in the Bible that tell the story of the life of Jesus. And one scholar said about the book of Luke that in the book of Luke, Jesus is either going to, coming from, or attending a meal. Others have called it the hospitality gospel. And so we've been looking at the different meals in Jesus's life and kind of asking, how does he use the table, right? What does he do with meals? How does he integrate those into what he was trying to do in his life and in his ministry? And we've looked at the table as a reminder for us, the table as provision for us, the table to build community. And so this week, we want to point towards what is going to be the greatest meal, the greatest feast of all time. And this series, I think, has been a good one for Grace, because I was preaching it and they were awesome. But I think that it's been a good series for Grace because Grace people, we are table people, right? We love getting around the table. Our biggest event of the year, every year, the Hootenanny, the last is now we call it the sometimes annual Hootenanny because COVID made us not have it. But the last Sunday, every September, what do we do? We have a service. We celebrate. We go outside. We sit around a table. We talk with each other. Our meals are so much a part of all of our lives. Everything we do, every activity that we do, we tend to center around food, don't we? Even when we go do something that's not about food, when we get there, we make it about food. I took Lily, my daughter, she's seven, to her first basketball game. We went to see NC State. They just eked one out against the up-and-coming Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. Go Jackets. And the first thing we did, we're going to a game. There's no food involved with this. What's the first thing I do when we get there? We find our seats. Let's go get some stadium food. That's part of the experience. We need food. We include food in every aspect of our lives. I would be willing to bet that you already know what you're having for lunch. You want to get there and you want me to stop talking so that you can have it. We're going to celebrate. We're going to go eat food. When we get married, what's the first thing we do? Everybody goes to a room. We have a meal together. When someone dies, what do we do? We go to the funeral. We go to the service. And then if the family has friends, they go back to somebody's house and all their friends have provided food. Even when we have babies, what do we do? People just bring you meals for weeks. We call it a meal train. There's a whole name for it. Everything we do is centered around the table. And so we've been asking, how does Jesus use the table to impact us and to do his ministry and to execute his goals in his life. And as we've done that, we've been building towards what is and will be the greatest feast of all time. Most people call it the marriage supper of the Lamb. This is what we do when we get to heaven. I want to read about it to you so that you know where it comes from and what it says. And then I want to unpack it a little bit and tell you what's happening there. In Revelation chapter 19, beginning in verse me, write this, blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he said to me, these are the true words of God. I don't know what you think about when you think about heaven. And I don't know what all is going to be there and how it's all going to work. But I know that when we get there, the first scheduled group activity God has for us is to eat together. When we get there, the first thing he wants us to do is come around the table and celebrate the marriage supper of the Lamb. Now, the language that we read there in Revelation is a culmination of much of the language throughout Scripture, where Jesus is referred to as the Lamb of God and where the church is referred to as the Bride of Christ. And one day, Jesus has promised us that he's going to come back crashing through the clouds and he's going to take his church and sweep us up into heaven, the church as his collective bride, and it will be the marriage of the church to the Lamb. Jesus will claim his bride, and then when the marriage is there and done, and the wedding has happened, we're all going to sit down, and we are going to have a feast. And like I said, it's the first scheduled activity in heaven. I don't know what else we'll do there. I would assume after this one particular session, maybe we'll have some breakout sessions, like some free time. The optional, I think they'll probably, it is Master's Sunday. So I think they'll probably, I don't think, I think God probably looks at Augusta National and says, yeah, that's as good as I can do. And he's just going to take it. That's why it's called Amen Corner. He's just going to take it and just put it in heaven and then we all get to play it, right? But before we do that, we're going to sit down to this meal together. We're going to have a feast. And I love to think about what will be at that meal. I love to think about who will be there. Easter is the holiday that gives us hope. Easter is the holiday that makes these promises. I love, and I share this quote every year from John Paul II. We do not give way to despair, for we are the Easter people, and hallelujah is our song. And one of the things that we hope to in the promises of Easter, or cling to in the promises of Easter, is that when we sit at that marriage supper of the Lamb, the people that we have loved and lost to know Jesus will be there too. I lost my pawpaw when I was 19. He's my favorite human that's ever lived. Because of him, I know that there will be fried catfish at that supper of the Lamb. And I can't wait to have it with him. I've sat with people, some in my own family, some of you, some friends, who are sitting in the wake of the loss of their parent or their child or their husband or their wife or their friend. And the only thing that you can say there is that there is a hope in Christ that you will be reunited for them. It's the only thing that begins to take away the sting of death is the knowledge that one day at this great supper, I will see them again. So when we think about what's there, the people that we have loved and lost and who know Jesus are there. And they're saving you a seat. But I also like to think about what's not there. You know what's not at the marriage supper of the Lamb? You guys are going to meals later, right? There's going to be family there. For some of you, it's going to be weird. It's going to be tense. You can't laugh right now because they're sitting next to you. You're not sure if you're really looking forward to it. It might even be one of these deals where you kind of be glad when it's over. None of that will be there at the marriage supper of the Lamb. There is no tension there. Nothing but love. And I love to think about this too. The people that you have loved and the people that you have lost and that you will have lost are imperfect people, right? You know that old saying, hurt people hurt people? The people who loved you and hurt you, because it's confusing sometimes, when you see them in heaven, they don't hurt anymore. They will be able to love you perfectly. They will be the best possible versions of themselves. That father figure that you grew up with, who you know they loved you, but they never said it because they weren't the type to say things like that. He's going to tell you when you see him again because whatever emotional crud that they taught guys in the 1930s and 40s won't be there anymore. That mom or dad that you watched age, whose memories, your memories of them, the most clear ones are sometimes the ones that you want the least, that person's gone. It's the best version of themselves. We love you most. You know what else isn't there? Your crudud. You're sins. You're guilt. Chasing you and hounding you when there's worship songs singing and when you walk into a church and when people talk about Jesus. When you're in heaven, none of that's there anymore. It's done. I don't know what song it is that we're singing this morning, but there's a line in one of them about when that final battle against pain is done. We don't have to fight ourselves anymore in heaven. You know what else isn't in heaven? Faith. Hope. We don't need those anymore. Romans 8 says that you don't hope for what you can see. In heaven, we don't have to hope anymore. We don't have to choose faith anymore. We don't have to wrestle with complicated doubts and issues anymore. It's just peace. It's just love. It's just joy and exuberance. It's just purity. And I'm talking about the marriage supper of the Lamb this morning. I'm trying to paint a picture for you of what it could possibly be. Because Easter is what secures our ticket to that meal. You understand? Easter, what we're celebrating today, the empty tomb, is what secures our ticket to the marriage supper of the Lamb. It's what we can place our faith in to know that we are invited to. And I love Easter, and I love the promise of Easter. And Aaron, in one of the songs, read one of my favorite passages in the Bible, and probably my favorite group of words in the Bible. It's my favorite statement in the whole Bible. We actually, this morning, I'm getting emotional. I'll calm down. Just hang in there. This morning, I was able to, I was home for Easter bunny stuff. And one of the things that Lily got this year, and Jen made sure, Jen's my wife, not just a lady I talk about. Jen made sure to tell Lily that we gave you the Bible. The bunny did not bring that, okay? So we gave you the Bible. And the very first thing we did is I opened up to Luke chapter 24, and I said, can you find verses four and five? And she read the Easter story, which is the only sermon I needed today. But in those verses, Mary, Magdalene, and a couple of the other ladies have gone back to the tomb to dress the body of Jesus with spices. And when they get there, the stones rolled away. The tomb is empty. And they're looking around. And the angel says, the best sentence in the whole Bible, why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen. Do you understand that if that verse isn't there, if that tomb's not empty, and if that never happens, that none of this matters? Do you understand if Easter isn't true, that we're all stupid? Like Paul says, if Easter's not true, then Christians are to be most pitied of all people, because we just parade through life trumpeting this hope that's hokum. If Easter's not true, then we're just coming here and we're singing songs that make us feel good and we're leaving with our morals so that we can feel like we have something to teach our children and we can feel better about ourselves and our neighbor. And that's all we're doing if Easter's not true. If Easter's not true, then you will never conquer your sin. You will die fighting it and your crud will exist forever. If Easter is not true, then when you lost that person who you love, who believes in Jesus as well, then it was goodbye, and that's it, and death is final, and there still is sting, and we should not have hope. If Easter is not true, then all that's left is eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die. Everything hinges on Easter. And what I love about Easter is it brings everything together in our faith. I say often that to be a Christian, you need to believe Jesus. You need to believe that he was who he says he was, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. We need to believe that he was who he says he was. He's the Son of God who came to take away the sins of the world, and who else but the Son of God could raise himself from the dead? We need to believe that he did what he said he did, that he actually died, and that he actually rose again. And that there was actually an empty tomb on the outskirts of Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. And then we believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do, which is to come crashing back through the clouds to claim his bride and take us to dinner. And to secure for us a perfect eternity. It is the hope to which we cling. And Easter is an invitation from Jesus himself to that marriage supper of the Lamb. So I would tell you this morning that if you want to be at that supper, if you want to go to the marriage supper of the Lamb, the greatest feast of all time, if you want to exist in this perfect eternity where you see your lost loved ones who also know and love Jesus, if you want to exist in this perfect eternity where all of your crud is gone and people can love each other perfectly and we get to see the face of our Savior and we get to cry out hallelujah to the face of our God and we get to experience perfect joy and bliss and peace. If you want to experience that, then all you have to do is accept God's invitation. If you want to go to the marriage supper of the Lamb, all you have to do is accept the invitation sealed through Easter and secured through the death of Christ. If you haven't done that, I'm not going to try to bring you to a point of decision right now. Because frankly, after doing a life of ministry, I just don't think that's quite how it works. But what I would invite you to do is to consider it. If this is true, then it's worth considering. If the marriage supper of the Lamb is real, I want to go. And I want to meet my Jesus. And if that tomb really was empty, and everybody who trumpets that hope isn't just faking it, then it's the most important thing that's ever happened. And you know, as Jesus extends that invitation to his supper, to the marriage supper of the Lamb, I think another reason that this series resonates with grace is because we think of ourselves as a table too. We're not a cruise ship or a battleship. We don't talk about being on mission. We consider ourselves a banquet table. And everyone's invited. Broken people. Hurt people. People who don't believe people who simply want to experience community and I think that every time we gather and we think of ourselves as a family gathering around a table and and every time we sing, and every time we raise our voices, and every time the Spirit stirs our affection for Jesus, that it's a whisper of what it will be like at the marriage supper of the Lamb. So I just wanted to finish today by inviting you to that whisper every week. If you're someone who churches in a regular part of your life, I hope you'll find a church that speaks to you. And if you think that could be grace, then we'd love to see you back next week and a lot of weeks after that. But I'm going to pray now and we're going to move into our last time of worship. And I'll just say this. It's good. It's real good. Let's pray. Father, thank you for sending your son. Thank you that he lived and that he died and that he rose and that he invites us to heaven with you. God, we look forward to that marriage supper of the Lamb, to being claimed back to you by Jesus. We look forward to the eternity that you promise and secure. And God, I pray for us in this room that we would make it a habit to gather with your family for the weekly reminder and promise of what's to come. As we close in song, God, I just pray that it would be sweet and that the Spirit would move and that we would turn our hearts towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.
Well, good morning. Thank you for being here and happy Easter to you. My name is Nate. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I get to be one of the pastors here, and we so appreciate you choosing to celebrate your Easter here with us at Grace. For the last six or seven weeks, we've been moving through a series called The Table. The series has kind of been moving through the book of Luke. One scholar says about the book of Luke, which is one of the four gospels, and the gospels are the books in the Bible that tell the story of the life of Jesus. And one scholar said about the book of Luke that in the book of Luke, Jesus is either going to, coming from, or attending a meal. Others have called it the hospitality gospel. And so we've been looking at the different meals in Jesus's life and kind of asking, how does he use the table, right? What does he do with meals? How does he integrate those into what he was trying to do in his life and in his ministry? And we've looked at the table as a reminder for us, the table as provision for us, the table to build community. And so this week, we want to point towards what is going to be the greatest meal, the greatest feast of all time. And this series, I think, has been a good one for Grace, because I was preaching it and they were awesome. But I think that it's been a good series for Grace because Grace people, we are table people, right? We love getting around the table. Our biggest event of the year, every year, the Hootenanny, the last is now we call it the sometimes annual Hootenanny because COVID made us not have it. But the last Sunday, every September, what do we do? We have a service. We celebrate. We go outside. We sit around a table. We talk with each other. Our meals are so much a part of all of our lives. Everything we do, every activity that we do, we tend to center around food, don't we? Even when we go do something that's not about food, when we get there, we make it about food. I took Lily, my daughter, she's seven, to her first basketball game. We went to see NC State. They just eked one out against the up-and-coming Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. Go Jackets. And the first thing we did, we're going to a game. There's no food involved with this. What's the first thing I do when we get there? We find our seats. Let's go get some stadium food. That's part of the experience. We need food. We include food in every aspect of our lives. I would be willing to bet that you already know what you're having for lunch. You want to get there and you want me to stop talking so that you can have it. We're going to celebrate. We're going to go eat food. When we get married, what's the first thing we do? Everybody goes to a room. We have a meal together. When someone dies, what do we do? We go to the funeral. We go to the service. And then if the family has friends, they go back to somebody's house and all their friends have provided food. Even when we have babies, what do we do? People just bring you meals for weeks. We call it a meal train. There's a whole name for it. Everything we do is centered around the table. And so we've been asking, how does Jesus use the table to impact us and to do his ministry and to execute his goals in his life. And as we've done that, we've been building towards what is and will be the greatest feast of all time. Most people call it the marriage supper of the Lamb. This is what we do when we get to heaven. I want to read about it to you so that you know where it comes from and what it says. And then I want to unpack it a little bit and tell you what's happening there. In Revelation chapter 19, beginning in verse me, write this, blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he said to me, these are the true words of God. I don't know what you think about when you think about heaven. And I don't know what all is going to be there and how it's all going to work. But I know that when we get there, the first scheduled group activity God has for us is to eat together. When we get there, the first thing he wants us to do is come around the table and celebrate the marriage supper of the Lamb. Now, the language that we read there in Revelation is a culmination of much of the language throughout Scripture, where Jesus is referred to as the Lamb of God and where the church is referred to as the Bride of Christ. And one day, Jesus has promised us that he's going to come back crashing through the clouds and he's going to take his church and sweep us up into heaven, the church as his collective bride, and it will be the marriage of the church to the Lamb. Jesus will claim his bride, and then when the marriage is there and done, and the wedding has happened, we're all going to sit down, and we are going to have a feast. And like I said, it's the first scheduled activity in heaven. I don't know what else we'll do there. I would assume after this one particular session, maybe we'll have some breakout sessions, like some free time. The optional, I think they'll probably, it is Master's Sunday. So I think they'll probably, I don't think, I think God probably looks at Augusta National and says, yeah, that's as good as I can do. And he's just going to take it. That's why it's called Amen Corner. He's just going to take it and just put it in heaven and then we all get to play it, right? But before we do that, we're going to sit down to this meal together. We're going to have a feast. And I love to think about what will be at that meal. I love to think about who will be there. Easter is the holiday that gives us hope. Easter is the holiday that makes these promises. I love, and I share this quote every year from John Paul II. We do not give way to despair, for we are the Easter people, and hallelujah is our song. And one of the things that we hope to in the promises of Easter, or cling to in the promises of Easter, is that when we sit at that marriage supper of the Lamb, the people that we have loved and lost to know Jesus will be there too. I lost my pawpaw when I was 19. He's my favorite human that's ever lived. Because of him, I know that there will be fried catfish at that supper of the Lamb. And I can't wait to have it with him. I've sat with people, some in my own family, some of you, some friends, who are sitting in the wake of the loss of their parent or their child or their husband or their wife or their friend. And the only thing that you can say there is that there is a hope in Christ that you will be reunited for them. It's the only thing that begins to take away the sting of death is the knowledge that one day at this great supper, I will see them again. So when we think about what's there, the people that we have loved and lost and who know Jesus are there. And they're saving you a seat. But I also like to think about what's not there. You know what's not at the marriage supper of the Lamb? You guys are going to meals later, right? There's going to be family there. For some of you, it's going to be weird. It's going to be tense. You can't laugh right now because they're sitting next to you. You're not sure if you're really looking forward to it. It might even be one of these deals where you kind of be glad when it's over. None of that will be there at the marriage supper of the Lamb. There is no tension there. Nothing but love. And I love to think about this too. The people that you have loved and the people that you have lost and that you will have lost are imperfect people, right? You know that old saying, hurt people hurt people? The people who loved you and hurt you, because it's confusing sometimes, when you see them in heaven, they don't hurt anymore. They will be able to love you perfectly. They will be the best possible versions of themselves. That father figure that you grew up with, who you know they loved you, but they never said it because they weren't the type to say things like that. He's going to tell you when you see him again because whatever emotional crud that they taught guys in the 1930s and 40s won't be there anymore. That mom or dad that you watched age, whose memories, your memories of them, the most clear ones are sometimes the ones that you want the least, that person's gone. It's the best version of themselves. We love you most. You know what else isn't there? Your crudud. You're sins. You're guilt. Chasing you and hounding you when there's worship songs singing and when you walk into a church and when people talk about Jesus. When you're in heaven, none of that's there anymore. It's done. I don't know what song it is that we're singing this morning, but there's a line in one of them about when that final battle against pain is done. We don't have to fight ourselves anymore in heaven. You know what else isn't in heaven? Faith. Hope. We don't need those anymore. Romans 8 says that you don't hope for what you can see. In heaven, we don't have to hope anymore. We don't have to choose faith anymore. We don't have to wrestle with complicated doubts and issues anymore. It's just peace. It's just love. It's just joy and exuberance. It's just purity. And I'm talking about the marriage supper of the Lamb this morning. I'm trying to paint a picture for you of what it could possibly be. Because Easter is what secures our ticket to that meal. You understand? Easter, what we're celebrating today, the empty tomb, is what secures our ticket to the marriage supper of the Lamb. It's what we can place our faith in to know that we are invited to. And I love Easter, and I love the promise of Easter. And Aaron, in one of the songs, read one of my favorite passages in the Bible, and probably my favorite group of words in the Bible. It's my favorite statement in the whole Bible. We actually, this morning, I'm getting emotional. I'll calm down. Just hang in there. This morning, I was able to, I was home for Easter bunny stuff. And one of the things that Lily got this year, and Jen made sure, Jen's my wife, not just a lady I talk about. Jen made sure to tell Lily that we gave you the Bible. The bunny did not bring that, okay? So we gave you the Bible. And the very first thing we did is I opened up to Luke chapter 24, and I said, can you find verses four and five? And she read the Easter story, which is the only sermon I needed today. But in those verses, Mary, Magdalene, and a couple of the other ladies have gone back to the tomb to dress the body of Jesus with spices. And when they get there, the stones rolled away. The tomb is empty. And they're looking around. And the angel says, the best sentence in the whole Bible, why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen. Do you understand that if that verse isn't there, if that tomb's not empty, and if that never happens, that none of this matters? Do you understand if Easter isn't true, that we're all stupid? Like Paul says, if Easter's not true, then Christians are to be most pitied of all people, because we just parade through life trumpeting this hope that's hokum. If Easter's not true, then we're just coming here and we're singing songs that make us feel good and we're leaving with our morals so that we can feel like we have something to teach our children and we can feel better about ourselves and our neighbor. And that's all we're doing if Easter's not true. If Easter's not true, then you will never conquer your sin. You will die fighting it and your crud will exist forever. If Easter is not true, then when you lost that person who you love, who believes in Jesus as well, then it was goodbye, and that's it, and death is final, and there still is sting, and we should not have hope. If Easter is not true, then all that's left is eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die. Everything hinges on Easter. And what I love about Easter is it brings everything together in our faith. I say often that to be a Christian, you need to believe Jesus. You need to believe that he was who he says he was, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. We need to believe that he was who he says he was. He's the Son of God who came to take away the sins of the world, and who else but the Son of God could raise himself from the dead? We need to believe that he did what he said he did, that he actually died, and that he actually rose again. And that there was actually an empty tomb on the outskirts of Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. And then we believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do, which is to come crashing back through the clouds to claim his bride and take us to dinner. And to secure for us a perfect eternity. It is the hope to which we cling. And Easter is an invitation from Jesus himself to that marriage supper of the Lamb. So I would tell you this morning that if you want to be at that supper, if you want to go to the marriage supper of the Lamb, the greatest feast of all time, if you want to exist in this perfect eternity where you see your lost loved ones who also know and love Jesus, if you want to exist in this perfect eternity where all of your crud is gone and people can love each other perfectly and we get to see the face of our Savior and we get to cry out hallelujah to the face of our God and we get to experience perfect joy and bliss and peace. If you want to experience that, then all you have to do is accept God's invitation. If you want to go to the marriage supper of the Lamb, all you have to do is accept the invitation sealed through Easter and secured through the death of Christ. If you haven't done that, I'm not going to try to bring you to a point of decision right now. Because frankly, after doing a life of ministry, I just don't think that's quite how it works. But what I would invite you to do is to consider it. If this is true, then it's worth considering. If the marriage supper of the Lamb is real, I want to go. And I want to meet my Jesus. And if that tomb really was empty, and everybody who trumpets that hope isn't just faking it, then it's the most important thing that's ever happened. And you know, as Jesus extends that invitation to his supper, to the marriage supper of the Lamb, I think another reason that this series resonates with grace is because we think of ourselves as a table too. We're not a cruise ship or a battleship. We don't talk about being on mission. We consider ourselves a banquet table. And everyone's invited. Broken people. Hurt people. People who don't believe people who simply want to experience community and I think that every time we gather and we think of ourselves as a family gathering around a table and and every time we sing, and every time we raise our voices, and every time the Spirit stirs our affection for Jesus, that it's a whisper of what it will be like at the marriage supper of the Lamb. So I just wanted to finish today by inviting you to that whisper every week. If you're someone who churches in a regular part of your life, I hope you'll find a church that speaks to you. And if you think that could be grace, then we'd love to see you back next week and a lot of weeks after that. But I'm going to pray now and we're going to move into our last time of worship. And I'll just say this. It's good. It's real good. Let's pray. Father, thank you for sending your son. Thank you that he lived and that he died and that he rose and that he invites us to heaven with you. God, we look forward to that marriage supper of the Lamb, to being claimed back to you by Jesus. We look forward to the eternity that you promise and secure. And God, I pray for us in this room that we would make it a habit to gather with your family for the weekly reminder and promise of what's to come. As we close in song, God, I just pray that it would be sweet and that the Spirit would move and that we would turn our hearts towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.
Well, good morning. Thank you for being here and happy Easter to you. My name is Nate. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I get to be one of the pastors here, and we so appreciate you choosing to celebrate your Easter here with us at Grace. For the last six or seven weeks, we've been moving through a series called The Table. The series has kind of been moving through the book of Luke. One scholar says about the book of Luke, which is one of the four gospels, and the gospels are the books in the Bible that tell the story of the life of Jesus. And one scholar said about the book of Luke that in the book of Luke, Jesus is either going to, coming from, or attending a meal. Others have called it the hospitality gospel. And so we've been looking at the different meals in Jesus's life and kind of asking, how does he use the table, right? What does he do with meals? How does he integrate those into what he was trying to do in his life and in his ministry? And we've looked at the table as a reminder for us, the table as provision for us, the table to build community. And so this week, we want to point towards what is going to be the greatest meal, the greatest feast of all time. And this series, I think, has been a good one for Grace, because I was preaching it and they were awesome. But I think that it's been a good series for Grace because Grace people, we are table people, right? We love getting around the table. Our biggest event of the year, every year, the Hootenanny, the last is now we call it the sometimes annual Hootenanny because COVID made us not have it. But the last Sunday, every September, what do we do? We have a service. We celebrate. We go outside. We sit around a table. We talk with each other. Our meals are so much a part of all of our lives. Everything we do, every activity that we do, we tend to center around food, don't we? Even when we go do something that's not about food, when we get there, we make it about food. I took Lily, my daughter, she's seven, to her first basketball game. We went to see NC State. They just eked one out against the up-and-coming Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. Go Jackets. And the first thing we did, we're going to a game. There's no food involved with this. What's the first thing I do when we get there? We find our seats. Let's go get some stadium food. That's part of the experience. We need food. We include food in every aspect of our lives. I would be willing to bet that you already know what you're having for lunch. You want to get there and you want me to stop talking so that you can have it. We're going to celebrate. We're going to go eat food. When we get married, what's the first thing we do? Everybody goes to a room. We have a meal together. When someone dies, what do we do? We go to the funeral. We go to the service. And then if the family has friends, they go back to somebody's house and all their friends have provided food. Even when we have babies, what do we do? People just bring you meals for weeks. We call it a meal train. There's a whole name for it. Everything we do is centered around the table. And so we've been asking, how does Jesus use the table to impact us and to do his ministry and to execute his goals in his life. And as we've done that, we've been building towards what is and will be the greatest feast of all time. Most people call it the marriage supper of the Lamb. This is what we do when we get to heaven. I want to read about it to you so that you know where it comes from and what it says. And then I want to unpack it a little bit and tell you what's happening there. In Revelation chapter 19, beginning in verse me, write this, blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he said to me, these are the true words of God. I don't know what you think about when you think about heaven. And I don't know what all is going to be there and how it's all going to work. But I know that when we get there, the first scheduled group activity God has for us is to eat together. When we get there, the first thing he wants us to do is come around the table and celebrate the marriage supper of the Lamb. Now, the language that we read there in Revelation is a culmination of much of the language throughout Scripture, where Jesus is referred to as the Lamb of God and where the church is referred to as the Bride of Christ. And one day, Jesus has promised us that he's going to come back crashing through the clouds and he's going to take his church and sweep us up into heaven, the church as his collective bride, and it will be the marriage of the church to the Lamb. Jesus will claim his bride, and then when the marriage is there and done, and the wedding has happened, we're all going to sit down, and we are going to have a feast. And like I said, it's the first scheduled activity in heaven. I don't know what else we'll do there. I would assume after this one particular session, maybe we'll have some breakout sessions, like some free time. The optional, I think they'll probably, it is Master's Sunday. So I think they'll probably, I don't think, I think God probably looks at Augusta National and says, yeah, that's as good as I can do. And he's just going to take it. That's why it's called Amen Corner. He's just going to take it and just put it in heaven and then we all get to play it, right? But before we do that, we're going to sit down to this meal together. We're going to have a feast. And I love to think about what will be at that meal. I love to think about who will be there. Easter is the holiday that gives us hope. Easter is the holiday that makes these promises. I love, and I share this quote every year from John Paul II. We do not give way to despair, for we are the Easter people, and hallelujah is our song. And one of the things that we hope to in the promises of Easter, or cling to in the promises of Easter, is that when we sit at that marriage supper of the Lamb, the people that we have loved and lost to know Jesus will be there too. I lost my pawpaw when I was 19. He's my favorite human that's ever lived. Because of him, I know that there will be fried catfish at that supper of the Lamb. And I can't wait to have it with him. I've sat with people, some in my own family, some of you, some friends, who are sitting in the wake of the loss of their parent or their child or their husband or their wife or their friend. And the only thing that you can say there is that there is a hope in Christ that you will be reunited for them. It's the only thing that begins to take away the sting of death is the knowledge that one day at this great supper, I will see them again. So when we think about what's there, the people that we have loved and lost and who know Jesus are there. And they're saving you a seat. But I also like to think about what's not there. You know what's not at the marriage supper of the Lamb? You guys are going to meals later, right? There's going to be family there. For some of you, it's going to be weird. It's going to be tense. You can't laugh right now because they're sitting next to you. You're not sure if you're really looking forward to it. It might even be one of these deals where you kind of be glad when it's over. None of that will be there at the marriage supper of the Lamb. There is no tension there. Nothing but love. And I love to think about this too. The people that you have loved and the people that you have lost and that you will have lost are imperfect people, right? You know that old saying, hurt people hurt people? The people who loved you and hurt you, because it's confusing sometimes, when you see them in heaven, they don't hurt anymore. They will be able to love you perfectly. They will be the best possible versions of themselves. That father figure that you grew up with, who you know they loved you, but they never said it because they weren't the type to say things like that. He's going to tell you when you see him again because whatever emotional crud that they taught guys in the 1930s and 40s won't be there anymore. That mom or dad that you watched age, whose memories, your memories of them, the most clear ones are sometimes the ones that you want the least, that person's gone. It's the best version of themselves. We love you most. You know what else isn't there? Your crudud. You're sins. You're guilt. Chasing you and hounding you when there's worship songs singing and when you walk into a church and when people talk about Jesus. When you're in heaven, none of that's there anymore. It's done. I don't know what song it is that we're singing this morning, but there's a line in one of them about when that final battle against pain is done. We don't have to fight ourselves anymore in heaven. You know what else isn't in heaven? Faith. Hope. We don't need those anymore. Romans 8 says that you don't hope for what you can see. In heaven, we don't have to hope anymore. We don't have to choose faith anymore. We don't have to wrestle with complicated doubts and issues anymore. It's just peace. It's just love. It's just joy and exuberance. It's just purity. And I'm talking about the marriage supper of the Lamb this morning. I'm trying to paint a picture for you of what it could possibly be. Because Easter is what secures our ticket to that meal. You understand? Easter, what we're celebrating today, the empty tomb, is what secures our ticket to the marriage supper of the Lamb. It's what we can place our faith in to know that we are invited to. And I love Easter, and I love the promise of Easter. And Aaron, in one of the songs, read one of my favorite passages in the Bible, and probably my favorite group of words in the Bible. It's my favorite statement in the whole Bible. We actually, this morning, I'm getting emotional. I'll calm down. Just hang in there. This morning, I was able to, I was home for Easter bunny stuff. And one of the things that Lily got this year, and Jen made sure, Jen's my wife, not just a lady I talk about. Jen made sure to tell Lily that we gave you the Bible. The bunny did not bring that, okay? So we gave you the Bible. And the very first thing we did is I opened up to Luke chapter 24, and I said, can you find verses four and five? And she read the Easter story, which is the only sermon I needed today. But in those verses, Mary, Magdalene, and a couple of the other ladies have gone back to the tomb to dress the body of Jesus with spices. And when they get there, the stones rolled away. The tomb is empty. And they're looking around. And the angel says, the best sentence in the whole Bible, why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen. Do you understand that if that verse isn't there, if that tomb's not empty, and if that never happens, that none of this matters? Do you understand if Easter isn't true, that we're all stupid? Like Paul says, if Easter's not true, then Christians are to be most pitied of all people, because we just parade through life trumpeting this hope that's hokum. If Easter's not true, then we're just coming here and we're singing songs that make us feel good and we're leaving with our morals so that we can feel like we have something to teach our children and we can feel better about ourselves and our neighbor. And that's all we're doing if Easter's not true. If Easter's not true, then you will never conquer your sin. You will die fighting it and your crud will exist forever. If Easter is not true, then when you lost that person who you love, who believes in Jesus as well, then it was goodbye, and that's it, and death is final, and there still is sting, and we should not have hope. If Easter is not true, then all that's left is eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die. Everything hinges on Easter. And what I love about Easter is it brings everything together in our faith. I say often that to be a Christian, you need to believe Jesus. You need to believe that he was who he says he was, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. We need to believe that he was who he says he was. He's the Son of God who came to take away the sins of the world, and who else but the Son of God could raise himself from the dead? We need to believe that he did what he said he did, that he actually died, and that he actually rose again. And that there was actually an empty tomb on the outskirts of Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. And then we believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do, which is to come crashing back through the clouds to claim his bride and take us to dinner. And to secure for us a perfect eternity. It is the hope to which we cling. And Easter is an invitation from Jesus himself to that marriage supper of the Lamb. So I would tell you this morning that if you want to be at that supper, if you want to go to the marriage supper of the Lamb, the greatest feast of all time, if you want to exist in this perfect eternity where you see your lost loved ones who also know and love Jesus, if you want to exist in this perfect eternity where all of your crud is gone and people can love each other perfectly and we get to see the face of our Savior and we get to cry out hallelujah to the face of our God and we get to experience perfect joy and bliss and peace. If you want to experience that, then all you have to do is accept God's invitation. If you want to go to the marriage supper of the Lamb, all you have to do is accept the invitation sealed through Easter and secured through the death of Christ. If you haven't done that, I'm not going to try to bring you to a point of decision right now. Because frankly, after doing a life of ministry, I just don't think that's quite how it works. But what I would invite you to do is to consider it. If this is true, then it's worth considering. If the marriage supper of the Lamb is real, I want to go. And I want to meet my Jesus. And if that tomb really was empty, and everybody who trumpets that hope isn't just faking it, then it's the most important thing that's ever happened. And you know, as Jesus extends that invitation to his supper, to the marriage supper of the Lamb, I think another reason that this series resonates with grace is because we think of ourselves as a table too. We're not a cruise ship or a battleship. We don't talk about being on mission. We consider ourselves a banquet table. And everyone's invited. Broken people. Hurt people. People who don't believe people who simply want to experience community and I think that every time we gather and we think of ourselves as a family gathering around a table and and every time we sing, and every time we raise our voices, and every time the Spirit stirs our affection for Jesus, that it's a whisper of what it will be like at the marriage supper of the Lamb. So I just wanted to finish today by inviting you to that whisper every week. If you're someone who churches in a regular part of your life, I hope you'll find a church that speaks to you. And if you think that could be grace, then we'd love to see you back next week and a lot of weeks after that. But I'm going to pray now and we're going to move into our last time of worship. And I'll just say this. It's good. It's real good. Let's pray. Father, thank you for sending your son. Thank you that he lived and that he died and that he rose and that he invites us to heaven with you. God, we look forward to that marriage supper of the Lamb, to being claimed back to you by Jesus. We look forward to the eternity that you promise and secure. And God, I pray for us in this room that we would make it a habit to gather with your family for the weekly reminder and promise of what's to come. As we close in song, God, I just pray that it would be sweet and that the Spirit would move and that we would turn our hearts towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.
Amen. Well, good morning. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here, and I'm one of the pastors here, and I was just, sometimes for me, I know this will not surprise those of you that know me, well, sometimes for me, worship gets so overwhelming that I can't keep singing because I'm going to start crying, and then I'm going to be a mess when I get up here, and I have actual things I need to say. But I just love getting to go to church with y'all so much. And Easter makes me so happy, and rightly so. I mean, I love all the accoutrements around Easter, right? I love all the bright colors. I love the dresses. Mikey's got a seersucker suit on. I knew he would. We've got a bow tie in the room. This is fantastic. I love how joyful and energetic and bright Easter is, but it should be because Easter is the most joyful day of the year because it's the day that Jesus wins. And because we believe in that victory and in that joy, Christians are and ought to be the most joyful of all people. And I remind you every Easter of my favorite, it might be my favorite quote. It's definitely my favorite Easter quote from, I believe, Pope John Paul II, who said, For we do not give way to despair, for we are the Easter people, and hallelujah is our song. I love that truth. And this morning, as we focus on Easter, in my preparation, because I don't know if you realize this, but the Easter message is every pastor's least favorite sermon of the year. Because we have to write a sermon with maximum pressure because you brought your sons and daughters and your grandmas and your grandpas. All right. It's maximum pressure, maximum exposure, and you already know my material, right? So it's, well, I hate it every time. Every time it's out there, I just, it just looms. I'm like, what are you going to do this year, buddy? But as I was preparing, my mind was consistently drawn to this, I think, underappreciated figure in the Gospels, a woman named Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene was with Jesus for his entire ministry. So the disciples, we've probably heard of them. The disciples were with Jesus for his whole ministry, the 12, but there was as many as 120 people in this nomadic caravan around Jesus. And Mary Magdalene was part of that. She's mentioned 12 times by name in the Gospels, which is more than all but three of the disciples. She was very much a part of Jesus's life and Jesus's ministry. And I think to view Easter through her eyes, to experience it as she experienced it, can help us think about Easter in a new and helpful way as well. So Mary Magdalene, she's probably most famous for in this scene during Holy Week where Jesus is eating at the home of a Pharisee. And Mary comes in amidst these religious leaders, these pretentious, pious men, because once you achieve things in life, you start to think you're important. And that's what these men did, like most men do. And she shows up. And she shows up, and she's weeping. And she pulls out some perfume called Oxnard that had this incredibly strong smell. And she empties the bottle on Jesus's feet. And then she cleanses, she washes his feet with her tears and her hair and this perfume. And the Pharisees are appalled because Mary Magdalene had a reputation that prior to knowing Jesus, prior to her conversion, she was a woman of ill repute, we'll say, on Easter. She did not have a good reputation. And the religious leaders are appalled that Jesus would allow this woman to touch him, let alone wash his feet and cry on him. And Jesus, this is not the point of this morning's message, but it's such a great line. He looks at the Pharisees when they express disappointment and judgment in this, and he looks at the Pharisees and he says, when I came over here, this is a loose paraphrase, but when I walked in, you didn't shake my hand. You didn't hug me. You didn't greet me with a kiss. You didn't act excited to see me. You didn't even give me a good seat. You made me sit in the folding chair, and you're in the recliner. You didn't even care. She comes in, she sees me, she weeps, and she washes my feet, and she welcomes me with a kiss. He who has forgiven little loves little. He who has forgiven much loves much. And what Jesus is saying is that our appreciation of him operates in direct correlation with our realization of our need for him. And you Pharisees don't realize you need me, but Mary Magdalene does. And here's what's really interesting about that moment to me is I would argue, and I'm open to be wrong, but I would argue that in Jesus's life, there was two people who existed who knew what Jesus actually came to do. There was two people who knew what Jesus actually meant to do. Everybody in his life assumed that he came to sit, he was to be a physical king on a physical throne over a physical kingdom. But Jesus knew that he came to sit on an eternal throne in an eternal kingdom. And nobody realized that except for Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist. John the Baptist had died. There was no one around him who knew what he came to do anymore. There was no one around him who understood him. But I believe that Mary Magdalene alone understood who Jesus was and what he came to do. He was so misunderstood that his own disciples, the week on Palm Sunday, the week before he's crucified, is going into Jerusalem. And his own disciples are following him, debating about who gets to be what in his kingdom. I get to be the secretary of defense. I get to be the vice president. And then when that conversation doesn't go well, their mom goes to Jesus and says, will you let my sons have an honorable place in your kingdom? And he says, woman, you don't know what you're asking for. no one did because no one understood Jesus and what he came to do. Jesus knew that when he walked through those gates of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, that he was setting in motion a series of events that was going to lead to his crucifixion and death. He knew it. He knew he was stirring up a hornet's nest. His disciples did not know that. In fact, Peter tried to talk Jesus out of it when he says, you can't go. If you go, they could arrest you. They could crucify you. This is going to be bad news, Jesus. You can't do this. And Jesus utters that famous line, get behind me, Satan. Your will is not in the Father's will. Not even Peter understood what Jesus came to do. But when Mary Magdalene went into that room with those Pharisees and with her Jesus, and she knelt and she wept and she poured that perfume, she was preparing him for burial. She knew what he was about to do. And I can't imagine what it is to sit with a friend that you love and know that he is about to die. To know that she is about to die. And it's not illness. He's going to be murdered. And she knows it. And she weeps. And I think she weeps because she probably had a sense that she was the only one who knew. And she had a sense of what was to come. But she was the only one who knew that he was going to die. And she believed in the Savior and believed that he was going to be a king, but she did not know how it was going to work out. And here she is preparing her friend for burial, knowing the road that he is about to walk. And so a few days later, he is crucified. And he is buried. And who goes in there to treat his body with spices according to the custom? Mary Magdalene. Who is at the crucifixion? Mary Magdalene. You'll remember the only disciple who had the guts to go to the crucifixion was John. The rest of them skedaddled when the water got hot. They got out of there. John went and stood next to Mary and Mary Magdalene went. She was at the crucifixion. And then she was at the grave. And then on Sunday morning she gathered the spices again and she went to the tomb. And this is what happened when she got there. On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the woman took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of Lord Jesus. While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright, the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, this is the best line in the whole Bible. Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen. Mary goes to the tomb. She goes to serve her Savior. Her Savior has died. She does not know what's going to happen. She walked for three years with him. This is the man that restored her dignity, that gave her peace, that loved her when she felt very unlovable, that restored her to purpose, that gave her meaning. It was probably the first man to love her well. And she's going to serve him, no doubt at the height of grief. Hoping beyond hope that he had a plan when he hung on that cross. But she does not know what the plan is. And she goes to serve him. And she gets there. The tomb is empty. And there's two angels inside. And they said, what are you doing here? Why are you looking for Jesus? This is the place for dead people. He's not dead. Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is risen, just as he said. And she runs back to the disciples. There's another gospel that gives us this part of the story, that she's in the garden leaving the tomb, and she sees what she thinks is a gardener. And she cries out, Rabbani, which means my rabbi, my Jesus. And I don't know this to be true. This is reckless speculation. Okay, you think what you want to think. I think that the reason that God let Mary Magdalene be the one to discover the empty tomb is because she was the only one who knew he was going to be in it. And that we don't appreciate her faith enough. Maybe the most faithful figure in the Bible. She rushes back to the disciples. She tells them the tomb is empty. Jesus isn't there. He's alive. The disciples think the women are crazy, which feels on brand. And then the disciples run to the tomb. In John's gospel, he makes sure to let you know that he was the first one there. He won the race. Good job, John. And then they know that he's alive and that he has risen. And then soon he appears to them in the upper room where they've been gathered and huddled, not knowing what to do. And then Thomas gets the disrespectful and overly simplistic moniker of doubtful because he was the only one with the guts to touch the scars on Jesus' hand and feet to make sure it was actually him. But I want us to look at that Sunday morning for Mary. Mary was going to serve her Savior. She was trusting on him to show up and do something, but she didn't know what. She went to serve her Savior even when she was unsure. She went to love her Savior even when she didn't understand, even when he didn't make any sense, even when everybody around her is sitting in a room on silent Saturday wondering what to do with ourselves now because this man that we love has died, our Savior has died, the place where we put all of our faith has let us down, and I don't know how to pick up my life here anymore. I don't know how to move on from this place. Complete disillusionment, complete confusion, just complete destitution. And in the middle of that, Mary gathers spices and she goes to treat the carcass of her Savior, not knowing what was going to happen, just hoping that somehow Jesus would show up. And then she's in the garden and she says, because Jesus showed up. And Easter exists to remind us every year that Jesus always shows up. In tragedy, he's there. In triumph, he is there. In terrible times and in good times, he is there. Jesus always shows up. And when I see the azaleas bloom in the spring, I'm reminded that Easter is near. And Easter reminds me that Jesus always shows up when we need him most. When we don't even know we need him. When we don't even necessarily believe in him, Jesus still shows up and patiently waits for our faith. So if you're here and you're a believer, be reminded by Easter that Jesus always shows up. He's the only hope we have that will never fail us. He always shows up. If you're here today and you don't believe, you've been begrudgingly brought by family. Thank you for sitting quietly for a minute. But I want you to know that Jesus shows up for you too. And he will not stop. And he will keep showing up in your life and offering you his love and the dignity and the purpose and the forgiveness and the redemption and the restoration that he gave Mary. And when we receive it, we will love him as Mary did. But let Easter remind us this year that Jesus always shows up. He did then, he does now, and he will then too. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for Easter and the joy that it brings and all that it is. Thank you for the opportunity to celebrate, to love you, to reflect on you, and to celebrate the victory that you won for us against sin and shame and death and pain. Thank you that one day we will be with you and you will be with us and there will be no more weeping or crying or pain anymore for the former things have passed away. Thank you that Easter reminds us that you show up and that we can look forward to you showing up again when you come crashing through the clouds to claim us. Thank you for all that Easter is and all that it represents. I pray that we would hold it and celebrate it well. In Jesus' name, amen.
Amen. Well, good morning. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here, and I'm one of the pastors here, and I was just, sometimes for me, I know this will not surprise those of you that know me, well, sometimes for me, worship gets so overwhelming that I can't keep singing because I'm going to start crying, and then I'm going to be a mess when I get up here, and I have actual things I need to say. But I just love getting to go to church with y'all so much. And Easter makes me so happy, and rightly so. I mean, I love all the accoutrements around Easter, right? I love all the bright colors. I love the dresses. Mikey's got a seersucker suit on. I knew he would. We've got a bow tie in the room. This is fantastic. I love how joyful and energetic and bright Easter is, but it should be because Easter is the most joyful day of the year because it's the day that Jesus wins. And because we believe in that victory and in that joy, Christians are and ought to be the most joyful of all people. And I remind you every Easter of my favorite, it might be my favorite quote. It's definitely my favorite Easter quote from, I believe, Pope John Paul II, who said, For we do not give way to despair, for we are the Easter people, and hallelujah is our song. I love that truth. And this morning, as we focus on Easter, in my preparation, because I don't know if you realize this, but the Easter message is every pastor's least favorite sermon of the year. Because we have to write a sermon with maximum pressure because you brought your sons and daughters and your grandmas and your grandpas. All right. It's maximum pressure, maximum exposure, and you already know my material, right? So it's, well, I hate it every time. Every time it's out there, I just, it just looms. I'm like, what are you going to do this year, buddy? But as I was preparing, my mind was consistently drawn to this, I think, underappreciated figure in the Gospels, a woman named Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene was with Jesus for his entire ministry. So the disciples, we've probably heard of them. The disciples were with Jesus for his whole ministry, the 12, but there was as many as 120 people in this nomadic caravan around Jesus. And Mary Magdalene was part of that. She's mentioned 12 times by name in the Gospels, which is more than all but three of the disciples. She was very much a part of Jesus's life and Jesus's ministry. And I think to view Easter through her eyes, to experience it as she experienced it, can help us think about Easter in a new and helpful way as well. So Mary Magdalene, she's probably most famous for in this scene during Holy Week where Jesus is eating at the home of a Pharisee. And Mary comes in amidst these religious leaders, these pretentious, pious men, because once you achieve things in life, you start to think you're important. And that's what these men did, like most men do. And she shows up. And she shows up, and she's weeping. And she pulls out some perfume called Oxnard that had this incredibly strong smell. And she empties the bottle on Jesus's feet. And then she cleanses, she washes his feet with her tears and her hair and this perfume. And the Pharisees are appalled because Mary Magdalene had a reputation that prior to knowing Jesus, prior to her conversion, she was a woman of ill repute, we'll say, on Easter. She did not have a good reputation. And the religious leaders are appalled that Jesus would allow this woman to touch him, let alone wash his feet and cry on him. And Jesus, this is not the point of this morning's message, but it's such a great line. He looks at the Pharisees when they express disappointment and judgment in this, and he looks at the Pharisees and he says, when I came over here, this is a loose paraphrase, but when I walked in, you didn't shake my hand. You didn't hug me. You didn't greet me with a kiss. You didn't act excited to see me. You didn't even give me a good seat. You made me sit in the folding chair, and you're in the recliner. You didn't even care. She comes in, she sees me, she weeps, and she washes my feet, and she welcomes me with a kiss. He who has forgiven little loves little. He who has forgiven much loves much. And what Jesus is saying is that our appreciation of him operates in direct correlation with our realization of our need for him. And you Pharisees don't realize you need me, but Mary Magdalene does. And here's what's really interesting about that moment to me is I would argue, and I'm open to be wrong, but I would argue that in Jesus's life, there was two people who existed who knew what Jesus actually came to do. There was two people who knew what Jesus actually meant to do. Everybody in his life assumed that he came to sit, he was to be a physical king on a physical throne over a physical kingdom. But Jesus knew that he came to sit on an eternal throne in an eternal kingdom. And nobody realized that except for Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist. John the Baptist had died. There was no one around him who knew what he came to do anymore. There was no one around him who understood him. But I believe that Mary Magdalene alone understood who Jesus was and what he came to do. He was so misunderstood that his own disciples, the week on Palm Sunday, the week before he's crucified, is going into Jerusalem. And his own disciples are following him, debating about who gets to be what in his kingdom. I get to be the secretary of defense. I get to be the vice president. And then when that conversation doesn't go well, their mom goes to Jesus and says, will you let my sons have an honorable place in your kingdom? And he says, woman, you don't know what you're asking for. no one did because no one understood Jesus and what he came to do. Jesus knew that when he walked through those gates of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, that he was setting in motion a series of events that was going to lead to his crucifixion and death. He knew it. He knew he was stirring up a hornet's nest. His disciples did not know that. In fact, Peter tried to talk Jesus out of it when he says, you can't go. If you go, they could arrest you. They could crucify you. This is going to be bad news, Jesus. You can't do this. And Jesus utters that famous line, get behind me, Satan. Your will is not in the Father's will. Not even Peter understood what Jesus came to do. But when Mary Magdalene went into that room with those Pharisees and with her Jesus, and she knelt and she wept and she poured that perfume, she was preparing him for burial. She knew what he was about to do. And I can't imagine what it is to sit with a friend that you love and know that he is about to die. To know that she is about to die. And it's not illness. He's going to be murdered. And she knows it. And she weeps. And I think she weeps because she probably had a sense that she was the only one who knew. And she had a sense of what was to come. But she was the only one who knew that he was going to die. And she believed in the Savior and believed that he was going to be a king, but she did not know how it was going to work out. And here she is preparing her friend for burial, knowing the road that he is about to walk. And so a few days later, he is crucified. And he is buried. And who goes in there to treat his body with spices according to the custom? Mary Magdalene. Who is at the crucifixion? Mary Magdalene. You'll remember the only disciple who had the guts to go to the crucifixion was John. The rest of them skedaddled when the water got hot. They got out of there. John went and stood next to Mary and Mary Magdalene went. She was at the crucifixion. And then she was at the grave. And then on Sunday morning she gathered the spices again and she went to the tomb. And this is what happened when she got there. On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the woman took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of Lord Jesus. While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright, the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, this is the best line in the whole Bible. Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen. Mary goes to the tomb. She goes to serve her Savior. Her Savior has died. She does not know what's going to happen. She walked for three years with him. This is the man that restored her dignity, that gave her peace, that loved her when she felt very unlovable, that restored her to purpose, that gave her meaning. It was probably the first man to love her well. And she's going to serve him, no doubt at the height of grief. Hoping beyond hope that he had a plan when he hung on that cross. But she does not know what the plan is. And she goes to serve him. And she gets there. The tomb is empty. And there's two angels inside. And they said, what are you doing here? Why are you looking for Jesus? This is the place for dead people. He's not dead. Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is risen, just as he said. And she runs back to the disciples. There's another gospel that gives us this part of the story, that she's in the garden leaving the tomb, and she sees what she thinks is a gardener. And she cries out, Rabbani, which means my rabbi, my Jesus. And I don't know this to be true. This is reckless speculation. Okay, you think what you want to think. I think that the reason that God let Mary Magdalene be the one to discover the empty tomb is because she was the only one who knew he was going to be in it. And that we don't appreciate her faith enough. Maybe the most faithful figure in the Bible. She rushes back to the disciples. She tells them the tomb is empty. Jesus isn't there. He's alive. The disciples think the women are crazy, which feels on brand. And then the disciples run to the tomb. In John's gospel, he makes sure to let you know that he was the first one there. He won the race. Good job, John. And then they know that he's alive and that he has risen. And then soon he appears to them in the upper room where they've been gathered and huddled, not knowing what to do. And then Thomas gets the disrespectful and overly simplistic moniker of doubtful because he was the only one with the guts to touch the scars on Jesus' hand and feet to make sure it was actually him. But I want us to look at that Sunday morning for Mary. Mary was going to serve her Savior. She was trusting on him to show up and do something, but she didn't know what. She went to serve her Savior even when she was unsure. She went to love her Savior even when she didn't understand, even when he didn't make any sense, even when everybody around her is sitting in a room on silent Saturday wondering what to do with ourselves now because this man that we love has died, our Savior has died, the place where we put all of our faith has let us down, and I don't know how to pick up my life here anymore. I don't know how to move on from this place. Complete disillusionment, complete confusion, just complete destitution. And in the middle of that, Mary gathers spices and she goes to treat the carcass of her Savior, not knowing what was going to happen, just hoping that somehow Jesus would show up. And then she's in the garden and she says, because Jesus showed up. And Easter exists to remind us every year that Jesus always shows up. In tragedy, he's there. In triumph, he is there. In terrible times and in good times, he is there. Jesus always shows up. And when I see the azaleas bloom in the spring, I'm reminded that Easter is near. And Easter reminds me that Jesus always shows up when we need him most. When we don't even know we need him. When we don't even necessarily believe in him, Jesus still shows up and patiently waits for our faith. So if you're here and you're a believer, be reminded by Easter that Jesus always shows up. He's the only hope we have that will never fail us. He always shows up. If you're here today and you don't believe, you've been begrudgingly brought by family. Thank you for sitting quietly for a minute. But I want you to know that Jesus shows up for you too. And he will not stop. And he will keep showing up in your life and offering you his love and the dignity and the purpose and the forgiveness and the redemption and the restoration that he gave Mary. And when we receive it, we will love him as Mary did. But let Easter remind us this year that Jesus always shows up. He did then, he does now, and he will then too. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for Easter and the joy that it brings and all that it is. Thank you for the opportunity to celebrate, to love you, to reflect on you, and to celebrate the victory that you won for us against sin and shame and death and pain. Thank you that one day we will be with you and you will be with us and there will be no more weeping or crying or pain anymore for the former things have passed away. Thank you that Easter reminds us that you show up and that we can look forward to you showing up again when you come crashing through the clouds to claim us. Thank you for all that Easter is and all that it represents. I pray that we would hold it and celebrate it well. In Jesus' name, amen.
Amen. Well, good morning. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here, and I'm one of the pastors here, and I was just, sometimes for me, I know this will not surprise those of you that know me, well, sometimes for me, worship gets so overwhelming that I can't keep singing because I'm going to start crying, and then I'm going to be a mess when I get up here, and I have actual things I need to say. But I just love getting to go to church with y'all so much. And Easter makes me so happy, and rightly so. I mean, I love all the accoutrements around Easter, right? I love all the bright colors. I love the dresses. Mikey's got a seersucker suit on. I knew he would. We've got a bow tie in the room. This is fantastic. I love how joyful and energetic and bright Easter is, but it should be because Easter is the most joyful day of the year because it's the day that Jesus wins. And because we believe in that victory and in that joy, Christians are and ought to be the most joyful of all people. And I remind you every Easter of my favorite, it might be my favorite quote. It's definitely my favorite Easter quote from, I believe, Pope John Paul II, who said, For we do not give way to despair, for we are the Easter people, and hallelujah is our song. I love that truth. And this morning, as we focus on Easter, in my preparation, because I don't know if you realize this, but the Easter message is every pastor's least favorite sermon of the year. Because we have to write a sermon with maximum pressure because you brought your sons and daughters and your grandmas and your grandpas. All right. It's maximum pressure, maximum exposure, and you already know my material, right? So it's, well, I hate it every time. Every time it's out there, I just, it just looms. I'm like, what are you going to do this year, buddy? But as I was preparing, my mind was consistently drawn to this, I think, underappreciated figure in the Gospels, a woman named Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene was with Jesus for his entire ministry. So the disciples, we've probably heard of them. The disciples were with Jesus for his whole ministry, the 12, but there was as many as 120 people in this nomadic caravan around Jesus. And Mary Magdalene was part of that. She's mentioned 12 times by name in the Gospels, which is more than all but three of the disciples. She was very much a part of Jesus's life and Jesus's ministry. And I think to view Easter through her eyes, to experience it as she experienced it, can help us think about Easter in a new and helpful way as well. So Mary Magdalene, she's probably most famous for in this scene during Holy Week where Jesus is eating at the home of a Pharisee. And Mary comes in amidst these religious leaders, these pretentious, pious men, because once you achieve things in life, you start to think you're important. And that's what these men did, like most men do. And she shows up. And she shows up, and she's weeping. And she pulls out some perfume called Oxnard that had this incredibly strong smell. And she empties the bottle on Jesus's feet. And then she cleanses, she washes his feet with her tears and her hair and this perfume. And the Pharisees are appalled because Mary Magdalene had a reputation that prior to knowing Jesus, prior to her conversion, she was a woman of ill repute, we'll say, on Easter. She did not have a good reputation. And the religious leaders are appalled that Jesus would allow this woman to touch him, let alone wash his feet and cry on him. And Jesus, this is not the point of this morning's message, but it's such a great line. He looks at the Pharisees when they express disappointment and judgment in this, and he looks at the Pharisees and he says, when I came over here, this is a loose paraphrase, but when I walked in, you didn't shake my hand. You didn't hug me. You didn't greet me with a kiss. You didn't act excited to see me. You didn't even give me a good seat. You made me sit in the folding chair, and you're in the recliner. You didn't even care. She comes in, she sees me, she weeps, and she washes my feet, and she welcomes me with a kiss. He who has forgiven little loves little. He who has forgiven much loves much. And what Jesus is saying is that our appreciation of him operates in direct correlation with our realization of our need for him. And you Pharisees don't realize you need me, but Mary Magdalene does. And here's what's really interesting about that moment to me is I would argue, and I'm open to be wrong, but I would argue that in Jesus's life, there was two people who existed who knew what Jesus actually came to do. There was two people who knew what Jesus actually meant to do. Everybody in his life assumed that he came to sit, he was to be a physical king on a physical throne over a physical kingdom. But Jesus knew that he came to sit on an eternal throne in an eternal kingdom. And nobody realized that except for Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist. John the Baptist had died. There was no one around him who knew what he came to do anymore. There was no one around him who understood him. But I believe that Mary Magdalene alone understood who Jesus was and what he came to do. He was so misunderstood that his own disciples, the week on Palm Sunday, the week before he's crucified, is going into Jerusalem. And his own disciples are following him, debating about who gets to be what in his kingdom. I get to be the secretary of defense. I get to be the vice president. And then when that conversation doesn't go well, their mom goes to Jesus and says, will you let my sons have an honorable place in your kingdom? And he says, woman, you don't know what you're asking for. no one did because no one understood Jesus and what he came to do. Jesus knew that when he walked through those gates of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, that he was setting in motion a series of events that was going to lead to his crucifixion and death. He knew it. He knew he was stirring up a hornet's nest. His disciples did not know that. In fact, Peter tried to talk Jesus out of it when he says, you can't go. If you go, they could arrest you. They could crucify you. This is going to be bad news, Jesus. You can't do this. And Jesus utters that famous line, get behind me, Satan. Your will is not in the Father's will. Not even Peter understood what Jesus came to do. But when Mary Magdalene went into that room with those Pharisees and with her Jesus, and she knelt and she wept and she poured that perfume, she was preparing him for burial. She knew what he was about to do. And I can't imagine what it is to sit with a friend that you love and know that he is about to die. To know that she is about to die. And it's not illness. He's going to be murdered. And she knows it. And she weeps. And I think she weeps because she probably had a sense that she was the only one who knew. And she had a sense of what was to come. But she was the only one who knew that he was going to die. And she believed in the Savior and believed that he was going to be a king, but she did not know how it was going to work out. And here she is preparing her friend for burial, knowing the road that he is about to walk. And so a few days later, he is crucified. And he is buried. And who goes in there to treat his body with spices according to the custom? Mary Magdalene. Who is at the crucifixion? Mary Magdalene. You'll remember the only disciple who had the guts to go to the crucifixion was John. The rest of them skedaddled when the water got hot. They got out of there. John went and stood next to Mary and Mary Magdalene went. She was at the crucifixion. And then she was at the grave. And then on Sunday morning she gathered the spices again and she went to the tomb. And this is what happened when she got there. On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the woman took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of Lord Jesus. While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright, the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, this is the best line in the whole Bible. Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen. Mary goes to the tomb. She goes to serve her Savior. Her Savior has died. She does not know what's going to happen. She walked for three years with him. This is the man that restored her dignity, that gave her peace, that loved her when she felt very unlovable, that restored her to purpose, that gave her meaning. It was probably the first man to love her well. And she's going to serve him, no doubt at the height of grief. Hoping beyond hope that he had a plan when he hung on that cross. But she does not know what the plan is. And she goes to serve him. And she gets there. The tomb is empty. And there's two angels inside. And they said, what are you doing here? Why are you looking for Jesus? This is the place for dead people. He's not dead. Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is risen, just as he said. And she runs back to the disciples. There's another gospel that gives us this part of the story, that she's in the garden leaving the tomb, and she sees what she thinks is a gardener. And she cries out, Rabbani, which means my rabbi, my Jesus. And I don't know this to be true. This is reckless speculation. Okay, you think what you want to think. I think that the reason that God let Mary Magdalene be the one to discover the empty tomb is because she was the only one who knew he was going to be in it. And that we don't appreciate her faith enough. Maybe the most faithful figure in the Bible. She rushes back to the disciples. She tells them the tomb is empty. Jesus isn't there. He's alive. The disciples think the women are crazy, which feels on brand. And then the disciples run to the tomb. In John's gospel, he makes sure to let you know that he was the first one there. He won the race. Good job, John. And then they know that he's alive and that he has risen. And then soon he appears to them in the upper room where they've been gathered and huddled, not knowing what to do. And then Thomas gets the disrespectful and overly simplistic moniker of doubtful because he was the only one with the guts to touch the scars on Jesus' hand and feet to make sure it was actually him. But I want us to look at that Sunday morning for Mary. Mary was going to serve her Savior. She was trusting on him to show up and do something, but she didn't know what. She went to serve her Savior even when she was unsure. She went to love her Savior even when she didn't understand, even when he didn't make any sense, even when everybody around her is sitting in a room on silent Saturday wondering what to do with ourselves now because this man that we love has died, our Savior has died, the place where we put all of our faith has let us down, and I don't know how to pick up my life here anymore. I don't know how to move on from this place. Complete disillusionment, complete confusion, just complete destitution. And in the middle of that, Mary gathers spices and she goes to treat the carcass of her Savior, not knowing what was going to happen, just hoping that somehow Jesus would show up. And then she's in the garden and she says, because Jesus showed up. And Easter exists to remind us every year that Jesus always shows up. In tragedy, he's there. In triumph, he is there. In terrible times and in good times, he is there. Jesus always shows up. And when I see the azaleas bloom in the spring, I'm reminded that Easter is near. And Easter reminds me that Jesus always shows up when we need him most. When we don't even know we need him. When we don't even necessarily believe in him, Jesus still shows up and patiently waits for our faith. So if you're here and you're a believer, be reminded by Easter that Jesus always shows up. He's the only hope we have that will never fail us. He always shows up. If you're here today and you don't believe, you've been begrudgingly brought by family. Thank you for sitting quietly for a minute. But I want you to know that Jesus shows up for you too. And he will not stop. And he will keep showing up in your life and offering you his love and the dignity and the purpose and the forgiveness and the redemption and the restoration that he gave Mary. And when we receive it, we will love him as Mary did. But let Easter remind us this year that Jesus always shows up. He did then, he does now, and he will then too. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for Easter and the joy that it brings and all that it is. Thank you for the opportunity to celebrate, to love you, to reflect on you, and to celebrate the victory that you won for us against sin and shame and death and pain. Thank you that one day we will be with you and you will be with us and there will be no more weeping or crying or pain anymore for the former things have passed away. Thank you that Easter reminds us that you show up and that we can look forward to you showing up again when you come crashing through the clouds to claim us. Thank you for all that Easter is and all that it represents. I pray that we would hold it and celebrate it well. In Jesus' name, amen.
Welcome to Grace. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. To the moms, happy Mother's Day. We want to acknowledge you. So to the expectant moms, congratulations and hope. And to the new moms, congratulations and hope. And to the experienced moms, we are grateful to you. And to the young moms, we empathize with you. And to the hopeful moms, we pray for you and with you. And to the grieving moms we empathize with you and to the hopeful moms we pray for you and with you and to the grieving moms we offer you our condolences and our shoulders as well. So to all the moms represented in the room, we love you and we are grateful for you. As we launch into this new series called The Forgotten God, I wanted to start where Jesus starts in John chapter 16. We've been doing a series in John since February all through the spring, and so as we free up from that and launch into a series on the Holy Spirit, I thought it appropriate to go to John. So turn in your Bibles to John chapter 16, okay? And in that, in John chapter 16 and verse 7, we find this, what I think to be, an absurd statement. One of these statements that when you hear it, your first reaction is, that's not true. There's no way that's possibly true. Moms have said one of these things, okay? A lot of moms in the rooms, maybe not modern millennial moms because we have different ways now, but when I was a kid and I got in trouble, I got the belt. Before I got the belt, what did my mom tell me? This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you. I would always think, I'll trade you. If that's your concern, we can swap, like, you don't have to experience that pain. Let me save you from that, right? Like, when you're a kid and you hear that, you don't believe it. Like, that's not true. That's ridiculous. There's no way that's true. But then as you grow older, you realize that really is a true statement. I heard one of these absurd statements this week. I was so grateful that somebody in my small group gave me an example. I have somebody in my small group. I do a younger person's small group, young people, no kids. A guy named Connor. He is one of my current favorite humans. He's one of the most enthusiastic people. He does the announcements for us sometimes. He's going off to Colorado soon to be a medic out there for the summer. So anyways, I can say this, and he can't defend himself for a couple of months. He's at my house, and he and I got to talking about our love for sushi. I like sushi, and he likes sushi. And I'm like, oh, well, you got to tell me, like, what's the place? Like, where's the good place around here? We found one we like. We haven't found one we love. Where's the place around here? And he was like, actually, the best sushi. You want to know where it is? I'm like, yes, please. I want to know where it is. He goes, when I go home to Boone, North Carolina, and I stopped him right there. Get out of here. Don't tell me that the best sushi is in Boone. The sushi hub of the East Coast is in Boone, North Carolina. I'm sure it is, Connor. And he's like, no, no, no. And he keeps telling me how great it is. And I keep telling him how redneck he is, that the best sushi he can find is in Boone, North Carolina. And now listen, I didn't believe him at all. It felt absurd to me. And I don't know what's broken in me that I feel the need to correct him right away. And I can't just accept like, oh, that's good sushi. Like that's my fault. Okay. I'm a gross person for that. But when he said it, I just couldn't accept that that could possibly be true. Right? And maybe it is. Maybe it's delicious sushi. I don't know. But in John chapter 16, Jesus makes a statement that when he says it had to be, to me, patently absurd. We would respond to that like, this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you, or that the best sushi in the eastern coast is found in Boone, North Carolina. Like, that's how we would respond to this, I think. This is what Jesus says. I want us to see it together. And a little bit of context for this verse, what's going on here. John chapters 13 through 17 represent a portion of scripture that's referred to as the farewell discourse. They're at the last supper. They've been doing Jesus and the disciples are eating dinner together. It's the last night they're going to spend together. They've been doing life together for three years. Jesus has been pouring into them, teaching them, showing them how to be disciples and how to do ministry. And he just kind of does this download of important information on them at the end of his life. And in the middle of this, in chapter 16, Jesus is talking to them about the fact that he's going to go away. I'm not going to be here all the time. I'm going to leave you, which is a bummer for the disciples because they're expecting to be with Jesus for the rest of their life. But he's telling them and trying to get them ready for, I'm going to go away, like I'm going to die. I'm not going to always be here. And then this translation, the ESV calls the Holy Spirit the helper, but some translations call him the comforter. So the point of this verse is Jesus is saying, guys, I got to go away, but it's better for you. It's to your advantage that I actually go from you, that you don't have my physical presence with you, because if I don't go, you'll never receive the helper or you'll never receive the comforter, is what he's telling you. And this is how Jesus chooses to introduce the Holy Spirit to the disciples and really to us. And we're calling this series, as Jesus refers to him here as the helper, and we begin to talk about the Holy Spirit, we're calling this series The Forgotten God, because in a lot of ways, that's really what the Holy Spirit is. If you're a Christian, if you would call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then you believe in a triune God, a God that is three parts, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. They are all God. They are all part of God. I don't know how to explain the Trinity to you. I went to undergrad for theology. I got a master's degree in theology. I've been in ministry for 10 years. I've read books on it. And all I can say is, I don't know how to explain the Trinity to you. But I know that it exists. I know that it's a thing. I know the Bible talks about it and that all three parts are equal, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And we in our churches, large swaths of the church, kind of forget about the Holy Spirit. We talk a lot about God the Father. We pray to Him. We worship Him. We sing songs to Him. We talk a lot about God the Son. We preach about Him. We spend 12 weeks going through the stories about Him. But the Spirit, sometimes we sing to the Spirit. Sometimes we refer to the Spirit maybe without knowing it. The video that we watched before I came up here talking about your presence is welcome here, that's represented by the Spirit. Maybe we don't know that. But very often, particularly in conservative church circles, we forget about the Holy Spirit. Now, I have theories on this. I think that we're afraid of what we don't understand. And if we don't understand something, that we tend to just avoid it. We can kind of understand the idea of a son. We can kind of understand the idea of a father. And so those parts of God, we can kind of grasp a little bit, and we see them a little bit more in Scripture than we see the Spirit. But the Spirit is unknown. The Bible describes it as the wind. You don't know when it's going to come or go. We're told that the Spirit is in us, that you are the temple. As a believer, you are the temple of the Holy Spirit, that you actually have God in you, which is a really difficult thing to understand or to grasp. You're told that the Holy Spirit empowers you in ways that we're going to explore in this series. And it's, if we're honest, confusing and sometimes intimidating. And I think because of that, it makes us uncomfortable and we tend to avoid the things that we don't understand that make us uncomfortable. And so sometimes we forget the Spirit. But Jesus introduces the Spirit by making what I think is kind of an absurd statement on its face. And so what I want to do today is ask about this statement, how can Jesus' claim be true? How can Jesus' claim be true? How can that possibly be true, that it's actually better for the disciples and better for us to not have the physical presence of Jesus with us, but instead have the Holy Spirit or the helper or the comforter? How can that possibly be true? As we answer that, we're going to draw two conclusions today that each launch their own question. If that's true, then what about this? And if that's true, then what about this? And then those two answers should spark in us a natural question. And those three questions are going to make up the rest of the series. So I'll tell you, at the beginning, you're not going to walk home with the big to-do list today or with the thing that's really going to change your thinking. The take-home from today is to continue to attend and learn about the rest of the roles of the Spirit. Today is a setup for the series as we learn about the Holy Spirit. Now here's why I think that this is an absurd statement on its face. I would have expected Peter. Peter was the one, he was the ready, fire, aim guy. He was the one that spoke before he thought. He just said whatever he felt. That was Peter. I would have expected Peter when Jesus said, it is actually better for you that I go. I would have expected him to interrupt Jesus like I interrupted Connor about the boon sushi, right? Come on, that can't possibly be true. That can't be right. Because think about this. The more I thought about this, the more I felt it was, it had to be difficult for the disciples to accept what Jesus is saying. If you're a believer, if you call Jesus your Savior, how much different would your life be if Jesus were physically present next to you all day, every day, like he was for the disciples? They woke up next to that dude in the same room as that dude, at least in the same house. They spent every day with him. He would go off and pray for a little while, but he would always come back and find him. His physical presence, he was ever present. He was there all the time. If you're a Christian, how much different would your life be if Jesus were right there next to you all the time? Think about that. Can you imagine yourself in a situation where maybe you didn't know what to say? You're talking to your kid, and they ask you a really hard question. You're like, gosh, I don't know. You're in a Bible study and somebody asks a question. You're with a friend. You're just getting a beer or a coffee and they ask a question that's really difficult to answer. What do I do about my marriage? I feel broken down about this and you don't know the right thing to say. What do we do about our child and you don't know the right thing to say? What if Jesus were right there next to you and you could look at him and be like, oh Jesus, what do you think? What should I say? What if you could do that? What if when you're reading the Bible, if you've ever tried to read the Bible, it can be difficult to understand sometimes. And for a lot of us, that's why we don't read it more is because we read it and we're like, gosh, I kind of understand nine words in this book. And then we just kind of put it down and we move on to the next thing. We don't really get what it's talking about. What if when we read the Bible, we could be like, Jesus, I do not understand this part. Can you come here for a second and show me this? That'd be amazing. There's this scene in Luke. Luke's the only one that records it. When Jesus comes back from the dead, he's resurrected, there's these two guys walking on a road to a town called Emmaus, and Jesus appears to them. And they don't know who he is. He's just a dude walking next to them. And it says that Jesus began to explain to them all of the scriptures, which to them was the Old Testament, and how it related to him. Listen, that's the greatest Bible study of all time. If you said, Nate, you can go to any moment in history, it's not hyperbole to say, I very well may go to that moment and be like, can I just walk with Jesus to a mass? I would love to hear him explain how the Old Testament points to him. I would love to just listen to Jesus as he taught about the Bible. Can you imagine? And what if he was right there next to you? Anytime you read it, you'd be like, hey, I don't understand this part. Can you help? What if when you were looking for a church, he could come to church with you? And halfway through the sermon, you could be like, you like this guy? Yeah, me neither. We'll keep looking. But what if he could just tell you? What if he could tell you like, no, he's no good, but man, they need you. Like, stick around. Wouldn't it be great to know for sure? What if he didn't know what to do or a decision to make? Do I take the promotion? Do I take the job? Or do I turn it down? Do I look for a new job? Do I go back to work? What if you could just look at Jesus and be like, what do I do? How about this? You think you'd sin less? Like maybe by a small amount? Are you kidding me? Of course. You'd start to cut somebody off in traffic and Jesus would be in the passenger seat and you'd kind of look at him and be like, you're right. Not that big of a deal, I guess. You created all of this. I guess it's okay. Imagine how much kinder, more gracious you would be. Maybe not you, but me. It would change things. If you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you came to church for mom. Thank you. I'll try to go fast. But just imagine if there is. If there is a God and he was personified in Jesus and he created the universe and he were right next to you, how much that would change things for you. What if you were hurting, and life was really hard, and you could just turn and lean into him, and just say, Jesus, this one's tough. Can you just be with me for a second? And he offers perfect peace. That's what the disciples had. You understand? That's what they had every day. And then Jesus says, you know what? It's better for you that you don't have that anymore. So the only possible thing we can ask is, how in the world is that true? It's what we wrote down on our paper. How can that claim be true? How is that possible? And so what we're going to do today is try to offer the best answer we can to that question and then understand that that's going to spark more questions that we're going to spend the rest of the series answering. To answer that question of how can it possibly be true that Jesus, that it's better for Jesus to go when we receive the Spirit and we no longer have the physical presence of Jesus in our lives, what I want to do, and you didn't see this one coming, is turn to 2 Kings 2 in the Old Testament. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there and make sure that I'm not making this story up. But it's about two guys who I think are the two most underrated people in all the Bible. Elijah and Elisha. They're amazing. Now, some Christians don't know that those are two different people. I've actually talked to people about that. I don't want to belittle you for that. I just think it's funny because we get it confused sometimes. And very few people know which one came first and which one did what. So I'm going to help you out here. This is just an aside. I thought about having Steve make a slide for this, but I thought it's probably a misuse of my authority in the church to text him on a Friday to do work on his off day for a joke slide. So I just didn't do it. All right. But I wanted to do the alphabet and then show you where they landed in the alphabet. Elijah has a J in it, which comes before an S. Elisha. All right. So that's how we remember it. Elijah comes before Elisha because J comes before S. And now listen, offer me grace. I've rehearsed my sermons before I do them, and you guys think I'm doing them off the cuff. I'm not. I've practiced this. And then every time I do it, I get them confused as I'm telling the story. So just give me grace and don't make fun of me, okay? You get up here and you do it, all right? It's hard. But we have Elisha and Elijah, and they are two of the most underrated people in the Bible. I think because they don't have a book named after them or something, but they're remarkable. Their faith is amazing. Elijah was this incredible man of God. Do you know that one time somebody died? A widow's son dies, and Elijah knew the widow. And somebody comes to him and tells him, hey, so-and-so's son has died. Do you know what Elijah's response was? God, why didn't you tell me? How come I'm finding out like this? Can you imagine being that close to God, where he's your personal Twitter feed, where something happens out in the world and you find out about it in some other way and you're like, God, what's the deal, man? How come you didn't tell me? That's how close he was to God. He was in a showdown with 450 prophets of Baal. And in this passage where he brings fire down from heaven from God to light up a soaking wet stack of wood in front of all of these prophets, we have the most sarcastic passage in Scripture, which makes me feel great. That it's there and it's okay. He is being a jerk to these prophets of Baal. And I'm like, get him, buddy. He raises a child from the dead. He's fed by ravens and by angels. He warns the evil king of Israel, if you don't get right, I'm going to bring a drought. And the king didn't get right, so he prayed. And there was a drought for three years. And then when the drought was lifted, he won a foot race against a chariot across the country to go tell somebody about it, carried by the Holy Spirit. Elijah was amazing. And he had this disciple, a guy that was following him named Elisha. And Elisha had spent a good portion of Elijah's ministry with him, watching him. And Elijah had the respect of all of Israel and all the other prophets and all the other religious people in the country. And Elisha was his heir apparent. He was the one being trained to take over the ministry of Elijah when he moved on, very much like the disciples were being trained by Jesus to take over his ministry once he moved on. And it got to the end of Elijah's life. And they actually knew that this was the day that he was going to die. I don't know how they knew that, but they did. And so they go to a town, they walk to a town together. And when they get there, the prophets in that town come up to Elisha and they say, hey, you know your master is going to die today. And he says, yeah, I don't want to talk about it. And they kind of interact there and they go to another place. And it's the same interaction. And then they end up on the banks of the Jordan River. And there's 50 prophets there. And they come to Elisha and they say, hey, you know your master is going to die today. And he says, I know, I don't want to talk about it. So they go to the Jordan River. They're trying to get alone so that they can talk. They walk over the Jordan River. Listen to this. This is ridiculous. There's a river in the way. They want to be over there. So what's Elijah do? He takes off his cloak, he rolls it up, and he hits the water, and then the waters part, and they walk across. I don't know of any other miracle of convenience in the Bible but this one, where he's like, God, these are new sandals. I don't want to get them wet. Thanks. And then they walk across the river. They get to the other side, and it says that they're walking and talking together. And Elijah says, before I go, is there anything else I can do for you? Is there anything you want? Is there anything you need? And Elisha says, I want a double portion of the Spirit that is on you. See, Elisha recognized that Elijah had performed all these miracles and did all these great things, but they were not by his own power. They were by the power of the Spirit of God resting on him. They were by the Holy Spirit. And this is the same way, incidentally, that Jesus performed his miracles and lived his life. Everything that he did, the casting out demons, raising Lazarus from the dead, healing the sick, feeding the poor, everything that he did was through the power of the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit that the disciples were going to be given access to, the same one that we are told we have. It was through the power of the Spirit. And Elisha recognized this power. So when Elijah said, what is it that you want? He said, give me a double portion of the Spirit that's on you. I want to be able to continue to do the ministry that you do. And Elijah's response is, you've asked for a very difficult thing. He says, I'll tell you what, soon I'm going to go up to heaven. And if you see me while I do it, then you'll receive a double portion of my spirit. So they continue to walk and talk. And in this amazing scene, a fiery chariot comes down from heaven, being pulled by fiery horses, and separates Elijah and Elisha. And catches Elijah and sweeps him up in a whirlwind, it says, up to heaven. You understand that Elijah wasn't made to experience death? It's just him and Enoch, one of the guys in the Bible who have never experienced death, those two. He was so righteous, loved God so much, so close to him, God didn't want him to have to experience it. So he sends a fiery chariot down to grab him and take him back up to heaven in a whirlwind. And as he's going back up to heaven, his cloak falls off of him and wafts back down to the ground where it lands on Elisha. And it was a symbolic transfer of the spirit that was on Elijah to the spirit of Elisha to empower him to continue the ministry of Elijah. And I've always loved that story. I've always thought it was amazing. I love the Old Testament. I love the stories and the narratives in the Old Testament. But it wasn't until I was going through the book of John in the fall, getting ready for the series in the spring, where I read this in chapter 16 and I went, oh my goodness. That story in 2 Kings chapter 2 is not there just for what happens in 2 Kings 2. You understand? It's a picture of Jesus transferring his spirit to the disciples. Elijah goes up to heaven still alive. Jesus ascends up to heaven still alive. A portion of his spirit descends onto Elisha so he can continue the ministry that Elijah has prepared him for. And this is what happens to the disciples. After Jesus dies and is resurrected in the beginning of Acts, we see Jesus go up into heaven and he tells them to wait on the gift of the spirit, the same gift that Elisha waited for. It transfers onto them in the form of flaming tongues. They receive the Spirit and they go out and they do ministry. That's the gift of the Spirit. And so one of the reasons that it's better for Jesus to go is because the Holy Spirit continues Jesus' ministry through us. You see? That's what he's doing with the disciples. That's what he was doing with us. The Holy Spirit continues Jesus' ministry through us. And that's the gifts of the Spirit. We're going to talk about those next week, what those are and why we have them. But this is what he was doing for the disciples. He had trained them for three years to prepare them to lead the church that he was going to leave behind, to lead the kingdom that he was going to establish here on earth. And they needed to be empowered. They needed to know what to say when they didn't know what to say. They needed to be able to cast out demons and perform miracles. They needed to be able to lead in ways that they were incapable of leading. They needed wisdom that they did not have. They needed to understand scriptures in ways that they did not understand it. So Jesus leaves behind the Spirit, just as Elijah did for Elisha, so that the disciples could continue the ministry of Jesus. And 2,000 years later, you sit here in a church. And at Grace, if you're a member here, we don't call you a member. We call you a partner. And we call you a partner because we believe that the church is an active organization whose job it is to advance forward the kingdom of God. And we're not looking for members to be a part of the club here. We're looking for partners to help us advance it. We believe that there's a job to be done and that God has assigned a portion of that job to Grace Raleigh, and we want to be faithful to the job that he's asked us to do. Furthermore, if you're a believer, if you're a Christian, the only reason that God doesn't nab you right up to heaven as soon as you accept him and deliver you into eternal bliss is so that you can stay here and build his kingdom and bring as many people possible with you on your way to heaven. The same reason he left the disciples behind, because we have work to do. So he leaves us his spirit to dwell in us, to continue his work through us. You see? And the Bible says that you have it. Ephesians tells us that if you're a believer, that you have received the spirit as a down payment or a guarantee on your salvation. Romans 8 tells us that the Spirit secures your salvation. He sanctifies you in the process of salvation, and he delivers you into that salvation in eternity. He's active in your life. So the first reason that it's better for Jesus to go is because when he does, we receive the Spirit that empowers us to continue the ministry that he's left behind for us. But that's not the only reason. It's not just outwardly focused. The other reason that it's better to have the Spirit is because the Holy Spirit continues Jesus' ministry to us. It doesn't just continue Jesus' ministry through us, it continues Jesus' ministry to us. This is the roles of the Spirit. And here's the amazing thing that I realized. As I was thinking through all the advantages of having Jesus physically present in our life, being able to ask Him any of those questions, can you explain the Bible to me? Can you comfort me? Can you help me understand this? Can you show me what to say? What I realized is Scripture pointedly describes the Holy Spirit in those ways. You know what one of the roles of the Holy Spirit is that we're going to talk about more? He's the illuminator. We can't understand the Bible without him active in our lives. We cannot. He explains this to us. We say it would be great to be able to turn to Jesus and go, what does this mean? We can. We said it would be great. He's called the comforter. We said it would be great to be able to turn to Jesus when we hurt and say, Jesus, I hurt. We can. He's the spirit. His name is paraclete, which means to come alongside, to walk through life with you, to help you, to advocate for you. Wouldn't it be great if we had somebody who could interpret our prayers for us and say what we really mean to God? We do, it's the Spirit. Wouldn't it be great if we had somebody who will show us what to say when we don't know what to say? We do, it's the Spirit. All the reasons that it would be great to have Jesus physically present in our life are true of the Spirit. We said if Jesus were with us, wouldn't we sin less? The Spirit is with us all the time, and one of his roles is to convict us when we've wandered outside of God's will. All the reasons that we would prefer to have the presence of Jesus in our life are fulfilled in the Spirit. So it's better that Jesus gives us the Spirit because now we don't have to go to a physical presence of Jesus because if he's next to you down the street, then he's not next to me. And I gotta either go to you or get him to come to me. But the Holy Spirit's with us all the time. And he continues Jesus' ministry through us by empowering us and he continues Jesus' ministry to us by fulfilling the roles of Jesus in our life personally. And all of this, so we're going to talk about that in the third week, the roles of the Spirit. The last week, we're going to tackle this question that if you're thinking with me, you should be asking, how do I synthesize what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? How do I synthesize what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? I'm told that God is with me. I'm told that God is in me. I'm told that God can help me speak in tongues when I need to do that. I'm told that He can do the miraculous, that he empowers me for his ministry. I'm told that I can turn to him and ask him to understand scripture at any time. I'm told that he comforts me. I'm told that he guides me. I'm told that he's right there and that he empowers me. I'm actually told that when he's in my life, the chains of sin are broken. I'm set free and I can live a new life without sin. That's what the Bible teaches. But I think one of the reasons that the Spirit to us sometimes is the forgotten God is because our experience with the Spirit doesn't always line up with what we've learned about the Spirit. And so how do we synthesize these things? And can I tell you something? You want to know why that one's last? Because I don't know yet. I don't know what I'm going to tell you. If you've been a believer for a long time and you have ideas, send them to me. Truly, this is going to be a group effort. But I felt like it was dishonest and disingenuine to do a series without analyzing that question that's been in my life for so long too. So I'll warn you in advance, the answer won't be complete, but it'll be the best that we can do. And it's a question that we have to answer as we talk about the Holy Spirit. So that's the series. How can it possibly be true that it's better for us that we don't have the physical presence of Jesus? Well, because he's with us all the time everywhere now through the Spirit. He empowers us to continue his ministry through us, and he continues Jesus's ministry to us. And then that begs the question, then how come what I know about the Spirit doesn't always sync up with what I've experienced of the Spirit? So for the next three weeks, we're going to tackle those three issues and hopefully leave here knowing a little bit more about the Spirit, acknowledging Him a little bit more, inviting Him and His presence and His influence into our life and seeing that played out a little bit more. So I'm going to pray for you through this series that you will see the Spirit living and active and influencing in your life in ways that you never have before simply because you're paying attention to Him and you're praying along with me that you would see His influence. I'm going to pray, but before I do, I want to remind you at the information table we, we have books called The Forgotten God, written by a guy named Francis Chan, all about the Holy Spirit. I found that book to be incredibly helpful, more helpful than anything I'm going to say to you for the next three weeks. So if you really want to dive into this, you can read that book. They're $10. There's a jar there in front of it. You can put the money in there if you want to steal a book from the church to go ahead. That's your deal. I don't really care. But they're $10 if you want, but take a book and read it while we're going through the series. All right, I'm going to pray, and then we're going to continue in our service. Father, we love you. Your spirit is welcome in our lives. We're sorry that we don't always understand it. We're sorry that we don't always welcome the spirit. We're sorry that we don't always understand the spirit. God, I'm sorry that I don't always seek to engage the spirit. I pray that as we move through this series together that we would be less intimidated and more in awe and wonder. God, may no part of you be forgotten by us. May we feel the influence of you and see the guiding of you through your spirit in our day-to-day lives even this week. In our parenting, in our work, in our hearts, in our conversations, in our going in and coming out. May we see the influence of the Spirit as you guide us in those things, Lord. It's in your Son's name that we ask these things. Amen.
Welcome to Grace. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. To the moms, happy Mother's Day. We want to acknowledge you. So to the expectant moms, congratulations and hope. And to the new moms, congratulations and hope. And to the experienced moms, we are grateful to you. And to the young moms, we empathize with you. And to the hopeful moms, we pray for you and with you. And to the grieving moms we empathize with you and to the hopeful moms we pray for you and with you and to the grieving moms we offer you our condolences and our shoulders as well. So to all the moms represented in the room, we love you and we are grateful for you. As we launch into this new series called The Forgotten God, I wanted to start where Jesus starts in John chapter 16. We've been doing a series in John since February all through the spring, and so as we free up from that and launch into a series on the Holy Spirit, I thought it appropriate to go to John. So turn in your Bibles to John chapter 16, okay? And in that, in John chapter 16 and verse 7, we find this, what I think to be, an absurd statement. One of these statements that when you hear it, your first reaction is, that's not true. There's no way that's possibly true. Moms have said one of these things, okay? A lot of moms in the rooms, maybe not modern millennial moms because we have different ways now, but when I was a kid and I got in trouble, I got the belt. Before I got the belt, what did my mom tell me? This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you. I would always think, I'll trade you. If that's your concern, we can swap, like, you don't have to experience that pain. Let me save you from that, right? Like, when you're a kid and you hear that, you don't believe it. Like, that's not true. That's ridiculous. There's no way that's true. But then as you grow older, you realize that really is a true statement. I heard one of these absurd statements this week. I was so grateful that somebody in my small group gave me an example. I have somebody in my small group. I do a younger person's small group, young people, no kids. A guy named Connor. He is one of my current favorite humans. He's one of the most enthusiastic people. He does the announcements for us sometimes. He's going off to Colorado soon to be a medic out there for the summer. So anyways, I can say this, and he can't defend himself for a couple of months. He's at my house, and he and I got to talking about our love for sushi. I like sushi, and he likes sushi. And I'm like, oh, well, you got to tell me, like, what's the place? Like, where's the good place around here? We found one we like. We haven't found one we love. Where's the place around here? And he was like, actually, the best sushi. You want to know where it is? I'm like, yes, please. I want to know where it is. He goes, when I go home to Boone, North Carolina, and I stopped him right there. Get out of here. Don't tell me that the best sushi is in Boone. The sushi hub of the East Coast is in Boone, North Carolina. I'm sure it is, Connor. And he's like, no, no, no. And he keeps telling me how great it is. And I keep telling him how redneck he is, that the best sushi he can find is in Boone, North Carolina. And now listen, I didn't believe him at all. It felt absurd to me. And I don't know what's broken in me that I feel the need to correct him right away. And I can't just accept like, oh, that's good sushi. Like that's my fault. Okay. I'm a gross person for that. But when he said it, I just couldn't accept that that could possibly be true. Right? And maybe it is. Maybe it's delicious sushi. I don't know. But in John chapter 16, Jesus makes a statement that when he says it had to be, to me, patently absurd. We would respond to that like, this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you, or that the best sushi in the eastern coast is found in Boone, North Carolina. Like, that's how we would respond to this, I think. This is what Jesus says. I want us to see it together. And a little bit of context for this verse, what's going on here. John chapters 13 through 17 represent a portion of scripture that's referred to as the farewell discourse. They're at the last supper. They've been doing Jesus and the disciples are eating dinner together. It's the last night they're going to spend together. They've been doing life together for three years. Jesus has been pouring into them, teaching them, showing them how to be disciples and how to do ministry. And he just kind of does this download of important information on them at the end of his life. And in the middle of this, in chapter 16, Jesus is talking to them about the fact that he's going to go away. I'm not going to be here all the time. I'm going to leave you, which is a bummer for the disciples because they're expecting to be with Jesus for the rest of their life. But he's telling them and trying to get them ready for, I'm going to go away, like I'm going to die. I'm not going to always be here. And then this translation, the ESV calls the Holy Spirit the helper, but some translations call him the comforter. So the point of this verse is Jesus is saying, guys, I got to go away, but it's better for you. It's to your advantage that I actually go from you, that you don't have my physical presence with you, because if I don't go, you'll never receive the helper or you'll never receive the comforter, is what he's telling you. And this is how Jesus chooses to introduce the Holy Spirit to the disciples and really to us. And we're calling this series, as Jesus refers to him here as the helper, and we begin to talk about the Holy Spirit, we're calling this series The Forgotten God, because in a lot of ways, that's really what the Holy Spirit is. If you're a Christian, if you would call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then you believe in a triune God, a God that is three parts, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. They are all God. They are all part of God. I don't know how to explain the Trinity to you. I went to undergrad for theology. I got a master's degree in theology. I've been in ministry for 10 years. I've read books on it. And all I can say is, I don't know how to explain the Trinity to you. But I know that it exists. I know that it's a thing. I know the Bible talks about it and that all three parts are equal, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And we in our churches, large swaths of the church, kind of forget about the Holy Spirit. We talk a lot about God the Father. We pray to Him. We worship Him. We sing songs to Him. We talk a lot about God the Son. We preach about Him. We spend 12 weeks going through the stories about Him. But the Spirit, sometimes we sing to the Spirit. Sometimes we refer to the Spirit maybe without knowing it. The video that we watched before I came up here talking about your presence is welcome here, that's represented by the Spirit. Maybe we don't know that. But very often, particularly in conservative church circles, we forget about the Holy Spirit. Now, I have theories on this. I think that we're afraid of what we don't understand. And if we don't understand something, that we tend to just avoid it. We can kind of understand the idea of a son. We can kind of understand the idea of a father. And so those parts of God, we can kind of grasp a little bit, and we see them a little bit more in Scripture than we see the Spirit. But the Spirit is unknown. The Bible describes it as the wind. You don't know when it's going to come or go. We're told that the Spirit is in us, that you are the temple. As a believer, you are the temple of the Holy Spirit, that you actually have God in you, which is a really difficult thing to understand or to grasp. You're told that the Holy Spirit empowers you in ways that we're going to explore in this series. And it's, if we're honest, confusing and sometimes intimidating. And I think because of that, it makes us uncomfortable and we tend to avoid the things that we don't understand that make us uncomfortable. And so sometimes we forget the Spirit. But Jesus introduces the Spirit by making what I think is kind of an absurd statement on its face. And so what I want to do today is ask about this statement, how can Jesus' claim be true? How can Jesus' claim be true? How can that possibly be true, that it's actually better for the disciples and better for us to not have the physical presence of Jesus with us, but instead have the Holy Spirit or the helper or the comforter? How can that possibly be true? As we answer that, we're going to draw two conclusions today that each launch their own question. If that's true, then what about this? And if that's true, then what about this? And then those two answers should spark in us a natural question. And those three questions are going to make up the rest of the series. So I'll tell you, at the beginning, you're not going to walk home with the big to-do list today or with the thing that's really going to change your thinking. The take-home from today is to continue to attend and learn about the rest of the roles of the Spirit. Today is a setup for the series as we learn about the Holy Spirit. Now here's why I think that this is an absurd statement on its face. I would have expected Peter. Peter was the one, he was the ready, fire, aim guy. He was the one that spoke before he thought. He just said whatever he felt. That was Peter. I would have expected Peter when Jesus said, it is actually better for you that I go. I would have expected him to interrupt Jesus like I interrupted Connor about the boon sushi, right? Come on, that can't possibly be true. That can't be right. Because think about this. The more I thought about this, the more I felt it was, it had to be difficult for the disciples to accept what Jesus is saying. If you're a believer, if you call Jesus your Savior, how much different would your life be if Jesus were physically present next to you all day, every day, like he was for the disciples? They woke up next to that dude in the same room as that dude, at least in the same house. They spent every day with him. He would go off and pray for a little while, but he would always come back and find him. His physical presence, he was ever present. He was there all the time. If you're a Christian, how much different would your life be if Jesus were right there next to you all the time? Think about that. Can you imagine yourself in a situation where maybe you didn't know what to say? You're talking to your kid, and they ask you a really hard question. You're like, gosh, I don't know. You're in a Bible study and somebody asks a question. You're with a friend. You're just getting a beer or a coffee and they ask a question that's really difficult to answer. What do I do about my marriage? I feel broken down about this and you don't know the right thing to say. What do we do about our child and you don't know the right thing to say? What if Jesus were right there next to you and you could look at him and be like, oh Jesus, what do you think? What should I say? What if you could do that? What if when you're reading the Bible, if you've ever tried to read the Bible, it can be difficult to understand sometimes. And for a lot of us, that's why we don't read it more is because we read it and we're like, gosh, I kind of understand nine words in this book. And then we just kind of put it down and we move on to the next thing. We don't really get what it's talking about. What if when we read the Bible, we could be like, Jesus, I do not understand this part. Can you come here for a second and show me this? That'd be amazing. There's this scene in Luke. Luke's the only one that records it. When Jesus comes back from the dead, he's resurrected, there's these two guys walking on a road to a town called Emmaus, and Jesus appears to them. And they don't know who he is. He's just a dude walking next to them. And it says that Jesus began to explain to them all of the scriptures, which to them was the Old Testament, and how it related to him. Listen, that's the greatest Bible study of all time. If you said, Nate, you can go to any moment in history, it's not hyperbole to say, I very well may go to that moment and be like, can I just walk with Jesus to a mass? I would love to hear him explain how the Old Testament points to him. I would love to just listen to Jesus as he taught about the Bible. Can you imagine? And what if he was right there next to you? Anytime you read it, you'd be like, hey, I don't understand this part. Can you help? What if when you were looking for a church, he could come to church with you? And halfway through the sermon, you could be like, you like this guy? Yeah, me neither. We'll keep looking. But what if he could just tell you? What if he could tell you like, no, he's no good, but man, they need you. Like, stick around. Wouldn't it be great to know for sure? What if he didn't know what to do or a decision to make? Do I take the promotion? Do I take the job? Or do I turn it down? Do I look for a new job? Do I go back to work? What if you could just look at Jesus and be like, what do I do? How about this? You think you'd sin less? Like maybe by a small amount? Are you kidding me? Of course. You'd start to cut somebody off in traffic and Jesus would be in the passenger seat and you'd kind of look at him and be like, you're right. Not that big of a deal, I guess. You created all of this. I guess it's okay. Imagine how much kinder, more gracious you would be. Maybe not you, but me. It would change things. If you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you came to church for mom. Thank you. I'll try to go fast. But just imagine if there is. If there is a God and he was personified in Jesus and he created the universe and he were right next to you, how much that would change things for you. What if you were hurting, and life was really hard, and you could just turn and lean into him, and just say, Jesus, this one's tough. Can you just be with me for a second? And he offers perfect peace. That's what the disciples had. You understand? That's what they had every day. And then Jesus says, you know what? It's better for you that you don't have that anymore. So the only possible thing we can ask is, how in the world is that true? It's what we wrote down on our paper. How can that claim be true? How is that possible? And so what we're going to do today is try to offer the best answer we can to that question and then understand that that's going to spark more questions that we're going to spend the rest of the series answering. To answer that question of how can it possibly be true that Jesus, that it's better for Jesus to go when we receive the Spirit and we no longer have the physical presence of Jesus in our lives, what I want to do, and you didn't see this one coming, is turn to 2 Kings 2 in the Old Testament. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there and make sure that I'm not making this story up. But it's about two guys who I think are the two most underrated people in all the Bible. Elijah and Elisha. They're amazing. Now, some Christians don't know that those are two different people. I've actually talked to people about that. I don't want to belittle you for that. I just think it's funny because we get it confused sometimes. And very few people know which one came first and which one did what. So I'm going to help you out here. This is just an aside. I thought about having Steve make a slide for this, but I thought it's probably a misuse of my authority in the church to text him on a Friday to do work on his off day for a joke slide. So I just didn't do it. All right. But I wanted to do the alphabet and then show you where they landed in the alphabet. Elijah has a J in it, which comes before an S. Elisha. All right. So that's how we remember it. Elijah comes before Elisha because J comes before S. And now listen, offer me grace. I've rehearsed my sermons before I do them, and you guys think I'm doing them off the cuff. I'm not. I've practiced this. And then every time I do it, I get them confused as I'm telling the story. So just give me grace and don't make fun of me, okay? You get up here and you do it, all right? It's hard. But we have Elisha and Elijah, and they are two of the most underrated people in the Bible. I think because they don't have a book named after them or something, but they're remarkable. Their faith is amazing. Elijah was this incredible man of God. Do you know that one time somebody died? A widow's son dies, and Elijah knew the widow. And somebody comes to him and tells him, hey, so-and-so's son has died. Do you know what Elijah's response was? God, why didn't you tell me? How come I'm finding out like this? Can you imagine being that close to God, where he's your personal Twitter feed, where something happens out in the world and you find out about it in some other way and you're like, God, what's the deal, man? How come you didn't tell me? That's how close he was to God. He was in a showdown with 450 prophets of Baal. And in this passage where he brings fire down from heaven from God to light up a soaking wet stack of wood in front of all of these prophets, we have the most sarcastic passage in Scripture, which makes me feel great. That it's there and it's okay. He is being a jerk to these prophets of Baal. And I'm like, get him, buddy. He raises a child from the dead. He's fed by ravens and by angels. He warns the evil king of Israel, if you don't get right, I'm going to bring a drought. And the king didn't get right, so he prayed. And there was a drought for three years. And then when the drought was lifted, he won a foot race against a chariot across the country to go tell somebody about it, carried by the Holy Spirit. Elijah was amazing. And he had this disciple, a guy that was following him named Elisha. And Elisha had spent a good portion of Elijah's ministry with him, watching him. And Elijah had the respect of all of Israel and all the other prophets and all the other religious people in the country. And Elisha was his heir apparent. He was the one being trained to take over the ministry of Elijah when he moved on, very much like the disciples were being trained by Jesus to take over his ministry once he moved on. And it got to the end of Elijah's life. And they actually knew that this was the day that he was going to die. I don't know how they knew that, but they did. And so they go to a town, they walk to a town together. And when they get there, the prophets in that town come up to Elisha and they say, hey, you know your master is going to die today. And he says, yeah, I don't want to talk about it. And they kind of interact there and they go to another place. And it's the same interaction. And then they end up on the banks of the Jordan River. And there's 50 prophets there. And they come to Elisha and they say, hey, you know your master is going to die today. And he says, I know, I don't want to talk about it. So they go to the Jordan River. They're trying to get alone so that they can talk. They walk over the Jordan River. Listen to this. This is ridiculous. There's a river in the way. They want to be over there. So what's Elijah do? He takes off his cloak, he rolls it up, and he hits the water, and then the waters part, and they walk across. I don't know of any other miracle of convenience in the Bible but this one, where he's like, God, these are new sandals. I don't want to get them wet. Thanks. And then they walk across the river. They get to the other side, and it says that they're walking and talking together. And Elijah says, before I go, is there anything else I can do for you? Is there anything you want? Is there anything you need? And Elisha says, I want a double portion of the Spirit that is on you. See, Elisha recognized that Elijah had performed all these miracles and did all these great things, but they were not by his own power. They were by the power of the Spirit of God resting on him. They were by the Holy Spirit. And this is the same way, incidentally, that Jesus performed his miracles and lived his life. Everything that he did, the casting out demons, raising Lazarus from the dead, healing the sick, feeding the poor, everything that he did was through the power of the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit that the disciples were going to be given access to, the same one that we are told we have. It was through the power of the Spirit. And Elisha recognized this power. So when Elijah said, what is it that you want? He said, give me a double portion of the Spirit that's on you. I want to be able to continue to do the ministry that you do. And Elijah's response is, you've asked for a very difficult thing. He says, I'll tell you what, soon I'm going to go up to heaven. And if you see me while I do it, then you'll receive a double portion of my spirit. So they continue to walk and talk. And in this amazing scene, a fiery chariot comes down from heaven, being pulled by fiery horses, and separates Elijah and Elisha. And catches Elijah and sweeps him up in a whirlwind, it says, up to heaven. You understand that Elijah wasn't made to experience death? It's just him and Enoch, one of the guys in the Bible who have never experienced death, those two. He was so righteous, loved God so much, so close to him, God didn't want him to have to experience it. So he sends a fiery chariot down to grab him and take him back up to heaven in a whirlwind. And as he's going back up to heaven, his cloak falls off of him and wafts back down to the ground where it lands on Elisha. And it was a symbolic transfer of the spirit that was on Elijah to the spirit of Elisha to empower him to continue the ministry of Elijah. And I've always loved that story. I've always thought it was amazing. I love the Old Testament. I love the stories and the narratives in the Old Testament. But it wasn't until I was going through the book of John in the fall, getting ready for the series in the spring, where I read this in chapter 16 and I went, oh my goodness. That story in 2 Kings chapter 2 is not there just for what happens in 2 Kings 2. You understand? It's a picture of Jesus transferring his spirit to the disciples. Elijah goes up to heaven still alive. Jesus ascends up to heaven still alive. A portion of his spirit descends onto Elisha so he can continue the ministry that Elijah has prepared him for. And this is what happens to the disciples. After Jesus dies and is resurrected in the beginning of Acts, we see Jesus go up into heaven and he tells them to wait on the gift of the spirit, the same gift that Elisha waited for. It transfers onto them in the form of flaming tongues. They receive the Spirit and they go out and they do ministry. That's the gift of the Spirit. And so one of the reasons that it's better for Jesus to go is because the Holy Spirit continues Jesus' ministry through us. You see? That's what he's doing with the disciples. That's what he was doing with us. The Holy Spirit continues Jesus' ministry through us. And that's the gifts of the Spirit. We're going to talk about those next week, what those are and why we have them. But this is what he was doing for the disciples. He had trained them for three years to prepare them to lead the church that he was going to leave behind, to lead the kingdom that he was going to establish here on earth. And they needed to be empowered. They needed to know what to say when they didn't know what to say. They needed to be able to cast out demons and perform miracles. They needed to be able to lead in ways that they were incapable of leading. They needed wisdom that they did not have. They needed to understand scriptures in ways that they did not understand it. So Jesus leaves behind the Spirit, just as Elijah did for Elisha, so that the disciples could continue the ministry of Jesus. And 2,000 years later, you sit here in a church. And at Grace, if you're a member here, we don't call you a member. We call you a partner. And we call you a partner because we believe that the church is an active organization whose job it is to advance forward the kingdom of God. And we're not looking for members to be a part of the club here. We're looking for partners to help us advance it. We believe that there's a job to be done and that God has assigned a portion of that job to Grace Raleigh, and we want to be faithful to the job that he's asked us to do. Furthermore, if you're a believer, if you're a Christian, the only reason that God doesn't nab you right up to heaven as soon as you accept him and deliver you into eternal bliss is so that you can stay here and build his kingdom and bring as many people possible with you on your way to heaven. The same reason he left the disciples behind, because we have work to do. So he leaves us his spirit to dwell in us, to continue his work through us. You see? And the Bible says that you have it. Ephesians tells us that if you're a believer, that you have received the spirit as a down payment or a guarantee on your salvation. Romans 8 tells us that the Spirit secures your salvation. He sanctifies you in the process of salvation, and he delivers you into that salvation in eternity. He's active in your life. So the first reason that it's better for Jesus to go is because when he does, we receive the Spirit that empowers us to continue the ministry that he's left behind for us. But that's not the only reason. It's not just outwardly focused. The other reason that it's better to have the Spirit is because the Holy Spirit continues Jesus' ministry to us. It doesn't just continue Jesus' ministry through us, it continues Jesus' ministry to us. This is the roles of the Spirit. And here's the amazing thing that I realized. As I was thinking through all the advantages of having Jesus physically present in our life, being able to ask Him any of those questions, can you explain the Bible to me? Can you comfort me? Can you help me understand this? Can you show me what to say? What I realized is Scripture pointedly describes the Holy Spirit in those ways. You know what one of the roles of the Holy Spirit is that we're going to talk about more? He's the illuminator. We can't understand the Bible without him active in our lives. We cannot. He explains this to us. We say it would be great to be able to turn to Jesus and go, what does this mean? We can. We said it would be great. He's called the comforter. We said it would be great to be able to turn to Jesus when we hurt and say, Jesus, I hurt. We can. He's the spirit. His name is paraclete, which means to come alongside, to walk through life with you, to help you, to advocate for you. Wouldn't it be great if we had somebody who could interpret our prayers for us and say what we really mean to God? We do, it's the Spirit. Wouldn't it be great if we had somebody who will show us what to say when we don't know what to say? We do, it's the Spirit. All the reasons that it would be great to have Jesus physically present in our life are true of the Spirit. We said if Jesus were with us, wouldn't we sin less? The Spirit is with us all the time, and one of his roles is to convict us when we've wandered outside of God's will. All the reasons that we would prefer to have the presence of Jesus in our life are fulfilled in the Spirit. So it's better that Jesus gives us the Spirit because now we don't have to go to a physical presence of Jesus because if he's next to you down the street, then he's not next to me. And I gotta either go to you or get him to come to me. But the Holy Spirit's with us all the time. And he continues Jesus' ministry through us by empowering us and he continues Jesus' ministry to us by fulfilling the roles of Jesus in our life personally. And all of this, so we're going to talk about that in the third week, the roles of the Spirit. The last week, we're going to tackle this question that if you're thinking with me, you should be asking, how do I synthesize what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? How do I synthesize what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? I'm told that God is with me. I'm told that God is in me. I'm told that God can help me speak in tongues when I need to do that. I'm told that He can do the miraculous, that he empowers me for his ministry. I'm told that I can turn to him and ask him to understand scripture at any time. I'm told that he comforts me. I'm told that he guides me. I'm told that he's right there and that he empowers me. I'm actually told that when he's in my life, the chains of sin are broken. I'm set free and I can live a new life without sin. That's what the Bible teaches. But I think one of the reasons that the Spirit to us sometimes is the forgotten God is because our experience with the Spirit doesn't always line up with what we've learned about the Spirit. And so how do we synthesize these things? And can I tell you something? You want to know why that one's last? Because I don't know yet. I don't know what I'm going to tell you. If you've been a believer for a long time and you have ideas, send them to me. Truly, this is going to be a group effort. But I felt like it was dishonest and disingenuine to do a series without analyzing that question that's been in my life for so long too. So I'll warn you in advance, the answer won't be complete, but it'll be the best that we can do. And it's a question that we have to answer as we talk about the Holy Spirit. So that's the series. How can it possibly be true that it's better for us that we don't have the physical presence of Jesus? Well, because he's with us all the time everywhere now through the Spirit. He empowers us to continue his ministry through us, and he continues Jesus's ministry to us. And then that begs the question, then how come what I know about the Spirit doesn't always sync up with what I've experienced of the Spirit? So for the next three weeks, we're going to tackle those three issues and hopefully leave here knowing a little bit more about the Spirit, acknowledging Him a little bit more, inviting Him and His presence and His influence into our life and seeing that played out a little bit more. So I'm going to pray for you through this series that you will see the Spirit living and active and influencing in your life in ways that you never have before simply because you're paying attention to Him and you're praying along with me that you would see His influence. I'm going to pray, but before I do, I want to remind you at the information table we, we have books called The Forgotten God, written by a guy named Francis Chan, all about the Holy Spirit. I found that book to be incredibly helpful, more helpful than anything I'm going to say to you for the next three weeks. So if you really want to dive into this, you can read that book. They're $10. There's a jar there in front of it. You can put the money in there if you want to steal a book from the church to go ahead. That's your deal. I don't really care. But they're $10 if you want, but take a book and read it while we're going through the series. All right, I'm going to pray, and then we're going to continue in our service. Father, we love you. Your spirit is welcome in our lives. We're sorry that we don't always understand it. We're sorry that we don't always welcome the spirit. We're sorry that we don't always understand the spirit. God, I'm sorry that I don't always seek to engage the spirit. I pray that as we move through this series together that we would be less intimidated and more in awe and wonder. God, may no part of you be forgotten by us. May we feel the influence of you and see the guiding of you through your spirit in our day-to-day lives even this week. In our parenting, in our work, in our hearts, in our conversations, in our going in and coming out. May we see the influence of the Spirit as you guide us in those things, Lord. It's in your Son's name that we ask these things. Amen.
Welcome to Grace. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. To the moms, happy Mother's Day. We want to acknowledge you. So to the expectant moms, congratulations and hope. And to the new moms, congratulations and hope. And to the experienced moms, we are grateful to you. And to the young moms, we empathize with you. And to the hopeful moms, we pray for you and with you. And to the grieving moms we empathize with you and to the hopeful moms we pray for you and with you and to the grieving moms we offer you our condolences and our shoulders as well. So to all the moms represented in the room, we love you and we are grateful for you. As we launch into this new series called The Forgotten God, I wanted to start where Jesus starts in John chapter 16. We've been doing a series in John since February all through the spring, and so as we free up from that and launch into a series on the Holy Spirit, I thought it appropriate to go to John. So turn in your Bibles to John chapter 16, okay? And in that, in John chapter 16 and verse 7, we find this, what I think to be, an absurd statement. One of these statements that when you hear it, your first reaction is, that's not true. There's no way that's possibly true. Moms have said one of these things, okay? A lot of moms in the rooms, maybe not modern millennial moms because we have different ways now, but when I was a kid and I got in trouble, I got the belt. Before I got the belt, what did my mom tell me? This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you. I would always think, I'll trade you. If that's your concern, we can swap, like, you don't have to experience that pain. Let me save you from that, right? Like, when you're a kid and you hear that, you don't believe it. Like, that's not true. That's ridiculous. There's no way that's true. But then as you grow older, you realize that really is a true statement. I heard one of these absurd statements this week. I was so grateful that somebody in my small group gave me an example. I have somebody in my small group. I do a younger person's small group, young people, no kids. A guy named Connor. He is one of my current favorite humans. He's one of the most enthusiastic people. He does the announcements for us sometimes. He's going off to Colorado soon to be a medic out there for the summer. So anyways, I can say this, and he can't defend himself for a couple of months. He's at my house, and he and I got to talking about our love for sushi. I like sushi, and he likes sushi. And I'm like, oh, well, you got to tell me, like, what's the place? Like, where's the good place around here? We found one we like. We haven't found one we love. Where's the place around here? And he was like, actually, the best sushi. You want to know where it is? I'm like, yes, please. I want to know where it is. He goes, when I go home to Boone, North Carolina, and I stopped him right there. Get out of here. Don't tell me that the best sushi is in Boone. The sushi hub of the East Coast is in Boone, North Carolina. I'm sure it is, Connor. And he's like, no, no, no. And he keeps telling me how great it is. And I keep telling him how redneck he is, that the best sushi he can find is in Boone, North Carolina. And now listen, I didn't believe him at all. It felt absurd to me. And I don't know what's broken in me that I feel the need to correct him right away. And I can't just accept like, oh, that's good sushi. Like that's my fault. Okay. I'm a gross person for that. But when he said it, I just couldn't accept that that could possibly be true. Right? And maybe it is. Maybe it's delicious sushi. I don't know. But in John chapter 16, Jesus makes a statement that when he says it had to be, to me, patently absurd. We would respond to that like, this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you, or that the best sushi in the eastern coast is found in Boone, North Carolina. Like, that's how we would respond to this, I think. This is what Jesus says. I want us to see it together. And a little bit of context for this verse, what's going on here. John chapters 13 through 17 represent a portion of scripture that's referred to as the farewell discourse. They're at the last supper. They've been doing Jesus and the disciples are eating dinner together. It's the last night they're going to spend together. They've been doing life together for three years. Jesus has been pouring into them, teaching them, showing them how to be disciples and how to do ministry. And he just kind of does this download of important information on them at the end of his life. And in the middle of this, in chapter 16, Jesus is talking to them about the fact that he's going to go away. I'm not going to be here all the time. I'm going to leave you, which is a bummer for the disciples because they're expecting to be with Jesus for the rest of their life. But he's telling them and trying to get them ready for, I'm going to go away, like I'm going to die. I'm not going to always be here. And then this translation, the ESV calls the Holy Spirit the helper, but some translations call him the comforter. So the point of this verse is Jesus is saying, guys, I got to go away, but it's better for you. It's to your advantage that I actually go from you, that you don't have my physical presence with you, because if I don't go, you'll never receive the helper or you'll never receive the comforter, is what he's telling you. And this is how Jesus chooses to introduce the Holy Spirit to the disciples and really to us. And we're calling this series, as Jesus refers to him here as the helper, and we begin to talk about the Holy Spirit, we're calling this series The Forgotten God, because in a lot of ways, that's really what the Holy Spirit is. If you're a Christian, if you would call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then you believe in a triune God, a God that is three parts, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. They are all God. They are all part of God. I don't know how to explain the Trinity to you. I went to undergrad for theology. I got a master's degree in theology. I've been in ministry for 10 years. I've read books on it. And all I can say is, I don't know how to explain the Trinity to you. But I know that it exists. I know that it's a thing. I know the Bible talks about it and that all three parts are equal, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And we in our churches, large swaths of the church, kind of forget about the Holy Spirit. We talk a lot about God the Father. We pray to Him. We worship Him. We sing songs to Him. We talk a lot about God the Son. We preach about Him. We spend 12 weeks going through the stories about Him. But the Spirit, sometimes we sing to the Spirit. Sometimes we refer to the Spirit maybe without knowing it. The video that we watched before I came up here talking about your presence is welcome here, that's represented by the Spirit. Maybe we don't know that. But very often, particularly in conservative church circles, we forget about the Holy Spirit. Now, I have theories on this. I think that we're afraid of what we don't understand. And if we don't understand something, that we tend to just avoid it. We can kind of understand the idea of a son. We can kind of understand the idea of a father. And so those parts of God, we can kind of grasp a little bit, and we see them a little bit more in Scripture than we see the Spirit. But the Spirit is unknown. The Bible describes it as the wind. You don't know when it's going to come or go. We're told that the Spirit is in us, that you are the temple. As a believer, you are the temple of the Holy Spirit, that you actually have God in you, which is a really difficult thing to understand or to grasp. You're told that the Holy Spirit empowers you in ways that we're going to explore in this series. And it's, if we're honest, confusing and sometimes intimidating. And I think because of that, it makes us uncomfortable and we tend to avoid the things that we don't understand that make us uncomfortable. And so sometimes we forget the Spirit. But Jesus introduces the Spirit by making what I think is kind of an absurd statement on its face. And so what I want to do today is ask about this statement, how can Jesus' claim be true? How can Jesus' claim be true? How can that possibly be true, that it's actually better for the disciples and better for us to not have the physical presence of Jesus with us, but instead have the Holy Spirit or the helper or the comforter? How can that possibly be true? As we answer that, we're going to draw two conclusions today that each launch their own question. If that's true, then what about this? And if that's true, then what about this? And then those two answers should spark in us a natural question. And those three questions are going to make up the rest of the series. So I'll tell you, at the beginning, you're not going to walk home with the big to-do list today or with the thing that's really going to change your thinking. The take-home from today is to continue to attend and learn about the rest of the roles of the Spirit. Today is a setup for the series as we learn about the Holy Spirit. Now here's why I think that this is an absurd statement on its face. I would have expected Peter. Peter was the one, he was the ready, fire, aim guy. He was the one that spoke before he thought. He just said whatever he felt. That was Peter. I would have expected Peter when Jesus said, it is actually better for you that I go. I would have expected him to interrupt Jesus like I interrupted Connor about the boon sushi, right? Come on, that can't possibly be true. That can't be right. Because think about this. The more I thought about this, the more I felt it was, it had to be difficult for the disciples to accept what Jesus is saying. If you're a believer, if you call Jesus your Savior, how much different would your life be if Jesus were physically present next to you all day, every day, like he was for the disciples? They woke up next to that dude in the same room as that dude, at least in the same house. They spent every day with him. He would go off and pray for a little while, but he would always come back and find him. His physical presence, he was ever present. He was there all the time. If you're a Christian, how much different would your life be if Jesus were right there next to you all the time? Think about that. Can you imagine yourself in a situation where maybe you didn't know what to say? You're talking to your kid, and they ask you a really hard question. You're like, gosh, I don't know. You're in a Bible study and somebody asks a question. You're with a friend. You're just getting a beer or a coffee and they ask a question that's really difficult to answer. What do I do about my marriage? I feel broken down about this and you don't know the right thing to say. What do we do about our child and you don't know the right thing to say? What if Jesus were right there next to you and you could look at him and be like, oh Jesus, what do you think? What should I say? What if you could do that? What if when you're reading the Bible, if you've ever tried to read the Bible, it can be difficult to understand sometimes. And for a lot of us, that's why we don't read it more is because we read it and we're like, gosh, I kind of understand nine words in this book. And then we just kind of put it down and we move on to the next thing. We don't really get what it's talking about. What if when we read the Bible, we could be like, Jesus, I do not understand this part. Can you come here for a second and show me this? That'd be amazing. There's this scene in Luke. Luke's the only one that records it. When Jesus comes back from the dead, he's resurrected, there's these two guys walking on a road to a town called Emmaus, and Jesus appears to them. And they don't know who he is. He's just a dude walking next to them. And it says that Jesus began to explain to them all of the scriptures, which to them was the Old Testament, and how it related to him. Listen, that's the greatest Bible study of all time. If you said, Nate, you can go to any moment in history, it's not hyperbole to say, I very well may go to that moment and be like, can I just walk with Jesus to a mass? I would love to hear him explain how the Old Testament points to him. I would love to just listen to Jesus as he taught about the Bible. Can you imagine? And what if he was right there next to you? Anytime you read it, you'd be like, hey, I don't understand this part. Can you help? What if when you were looking for a church, he could come to church with you? And halfway through the sermon, you could be like, you like this guy? Yeah, me neither. We'll keep looking. But what if he could just tell you? What if he could tell you like, no, he's no good, but man, they need you. Like, stick around. Wouldn't it be great to know for sure? What if he didn't know what to do or a decision to make? Do I take the promotion? Do I take the job? Or do I turn it down? Do I look for a new job? Do I go back to work? What if you could just look at Jesus and be like, what do I do? How about this? You think you'd sin less? Like maybe by a small amount? Are you kidding me? Of course. You'd start to cut somebody off in traffic and Jesus would be in the passenger seat and you'd kind of look at him and be like, you're right. Not that big of a deal, I guess. You created all of this. I guess it's okay. Imagine how much kinder, more gracious you would be. Maybe not you, but me. It would change things. If you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you came to church for mom. Thank you. I'll try to go fast. But just imagine if there is. If there is a God and he was personified in Jesus and he created the universe and he were right next to you, how much that would change things for you. What if you were hurting, and life was really hard, and you could just turn and lean into him, and just say, Jesus, this one's tough. Can you just be with me for a second? And he offers perfect peace. That's what the disciples had. You understand? That's what they had every day. And then Jesus says, you know what? It's better for you that you don't have that anymore. So the only possible thing we can ask is, how in the world is that true? It's what we wrote down on our paper. How can that claim be true? How is that possible? And so what we're going to do today is try to offer the best answer we can to that question and then understand that that's going to spark more questions that we're going to spend the rest of the series answering. To answer that question of how can it possibly be true that Jesus, that it's better for Jesus to go when we receive the Spirit and we no longer have the physical presence of Jesus in our lives, what I want to do, and you didn't see this one coming, is turn to 2 Kings 2 in the Old Testament. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there and make sure that I'm not making this story up. But it's about two guys who I think are the two most underrated people in all the Bible. Elijah and Elisha. They're amazing. Now, some Christians don't know that those are two different people. I've actually talked to people about that. I don't want to belittle you for that. I just think it's funny because we get it confused sometimes. And very few people know which one came first and which one did what. So I'm going to help you out here. This is just an aside. I thought about having Steve make a slide for this, but I thought it's probably a misuse of my authority in the church to text him on a Friday to do work on his off day for a joke slide. So I just didn't do it. All right. But I wanted to do the alphabet and then show you where they landed in the alphabet. Elijah has a J in it, which comes before an S. Elisha. All right. So that's how we remember it. Elijah comes before Elisha because J comes before S. And now listen, offer me grace. I've rehearsed my sermons before I do them, and you guys think I'm doing them off the cuff. I'm not. I've practiced this. And then every time I do it, I get them confused as I'm telling the story. So just give me grace and don't make fun of me, okay? You get up here and you do it, all right? It's hard. But we have Elisha and Elijah, and they are two of the most underrated people in the Bible. I think because they don't have a book named after them or something, but they're remarkable. Their faith is amazing. Elijah was this incredible man of God. Do you know that one time somebody died? A widow's son dies, and Elijah knew the widow. And somebody comes to him and tells him, hey, so-and-so's son has died. Do you know what Elijah's response was? God, why didn't you tell me? How come I'm finding out like this? Can you imagine being that close to God, where he's your personal Twitter feed, where something happens out in the world and you find out about it in some other way and you're like, God, what's the deal, man? How come you didn't tell me? That's how close he was to God. He was in a showdown with 450 prophets of Baal. And in this passage where he brings fire down from heaven from God to light up a soaking wet stack of wood in front of all of these prophets, we have the most sarcastic passage in Scripture, which makes me feel great. That it's there and it's okay. He is being a jerk to these prophets of Baal. And I'm like, get him, buddy. He raises a child from the dead. He's fed by ravens and by angels. He warns the evil king of Israel, if you don't get right, I'm going to bring a drought. And the king didn't get right, so he prayed. And there was a drought for three years. And then when the drought was lifted, he won a foot race against a chariot across the country to go tell somebody about it, carried by the Holy Spirit. Elijah was amazing. And he had this disciple, a guy that was following him named Elisha. And Elisha had spent a good portion of Elijah's ministry with him, watching him. And Elijah had the respect of all of Israel and all the other prophets and all the other religious people in the country. And Elisha was his heir apparent. He was the one being trained to take over the ministry of Elijah when he moved on, very much like the disciples were being trained by Jesus to take over his ministry once he moved on. And it got to the end of Elijah's life. And they actually knew that this was the day that he was going to die. I don't know how they knew that, but they did. And so they go to a town, they walk to a town together. And when they get there, the prophets in that town come up to Elisha and they say, hey, you know your master is going to die today. And he says, yeah, I don't want to talk about it. And they kind of interact there and they go to another place. And it's the same interaction. And then they end up on the banks of the Jordan River. And there's 50 prophets there. And they come to Elisha and they say, hey, you know your master is going to die today. And he says, I know, I don't want to talk about it. So they go to the Jordan River. They're trying to get alone so that they can talk. They walk over the Jordan River. Listen to this. This is ridiculous. There's a river in the way. They want to be over there. So what's Elijah do? He takes off his cloak, he rolls it up, and he hits the water, and then the waters part, and they walk across. I don't know of any other miracle of convenience in the Bible but this one, where he's like, God, these are new sandals. I don't want to get them wet. Thanks. And then they walk across the river. They get to the other side, and it says that they're walking and talking together. And Elijah says, before I go, is there anything else I can do for you? Is there anything you want? Is there anything you need? And Elisha says, I want a double portion of the Spirit that is on you. See, Elisha recognized that Elijah had performed all these miracles and did all these great things, but they were not by his own power. They were by the power of the Spirit of God resting on him. They were by the Holy Spirit. And this is the same way, incidentally, that Jesus performed his miracles and lived his life. Everything that he did, the casting out demons, raising Lazarus from the dead, healing the sick, feeding the poor, everything that he did was through the power of the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit that the disciples were going to be given access to, the same one that we are told we have. It was through the power of the Spirit. And Elisha recognized this power. So when Elijah said, what is it that you want? He said, give me a double portion of the Spirit that's on you. I want to be able to continue to do the ministry that you do. And Elijah's response is, you've asked for a very difficult thing. He says, I'll tell you what, soon I'm going to go up to heaven. And if you see me while I do it, then you'll receive a double portion of my spirit. So they continue to walk and talk. And in this amazing scene, a fiery chariot comes down from heaven, being pulled by fiery horses, and separates Elijah and Elisha. And catches Elijah and sweeps him up in a whirlwind, it says, up to heaven. You understand that Elijah wasn't made to experience death? It's just him and Enoch, one of the guys in the Bible who have never experienced death, those two. He was so righteous, loved God so much, so close to him, God didn't want him to have to experience it. So he sends a fiery chariot down to grab him and take him back up to heaven in a whirlwind. And as he's going back up to heaven, his cloak falls off of him and wafts back down to the ground where it lands on Elisha. And it was a symbolic transfer of the spirit that was on Elijah to the spirit of Elisha to empower him to continue the ministry of Elijah. And I've always loved that story. I've always thought it was amazing. I love the Old Testament. I love the stories and the narratives in the Old Testament. But it wasn't until I was going through the book of John in the fall, getting ready for the series in the spring, where I read this in chapter 16 and I went, oh my goodness. That story in 2 Kings chapter 2 is not there just for what happens in 2 Kings 2. You understand? It's a picture of Jesus transferring his spirit to the disciples. Elijah goes up to heaven still alive. Jesus ascends up to heaven still alive. A portion of his spirit descends onto Elisha so he can continue the ministry that Elijah has prepared him for. And this is what happens to the disciples. After Jesus dies and is resurrected in the beginning of Acts, we see Jesus go up into heaven and he tells them to wait on the gift of the spirit, the same gift that Elisha waited for. It transfers onto them in the form of flaming tongues. They receive the Spirit and they go out and they do ministry. That's the gift of the Spirit. And so one of the reasons that it's better for Jesus to go is because the Holy Spirit continues Jesus' ministry through us. You see? That's what he's doing with the disciples. That's what he was doing with us. The Holy Spirit continues Jesus' ministry through us. And that's the gifts of the Spirit. We're going to talk about those next week, what those are and why we have them. But this is what he was doing for the disciples. He had trained them for three years to prepare them to lead the church that he was going to leave behind, to lead the kingdom that he was going to establish here on earth. And they needed to be empowered. They needed to know what to say when they didn't know what to say. They needed to be able to cast out demons and perform miracles. They needed to be able to lead in ways that they were incapable of leading. They needed wisdom that they did not have. They needed to understand scriptures in ways that they did not understand it. So Jesus leaves behind the Spirit, just as Elijah did for Elisha, so that the disciples could continue the ministry of Jesus. And 2,000 years later, you sit here in a church. And at Grace, if you're a member here, we don't call you a member. We call you a partner. And we call you a partner because we believe that the church is an active organization whose job it is to advance forward the kingdom of God. And we're not looking for members to be a part of the club here. We're looking for partners to help us advance it. We believe that there's a job to be done and that God has assigned a portion of that job to Grace Raleigh, and we want to be faithful to the job that he's asked us to do. Furthermore, if you're a believer, if you're a Christian, the only reason that God doesn't nab you right up to heaven as soon as you accept him and deliver you into eternal bliss is so that you can stay here and build his kingdom and bring as many people possible with you on your way to heaven. The same reason he left the disciples behind, because we have work to do. So he leaves us his spirit to dwell in us, to continue his work through us. You see? And the Bible says that you have it. Ephesians tells us that if you're a believer, that you have received the spirit as a down payment or a guarantee on your salvation. Romans 8 tells us that the Spirit secures your salvation. He sanctifies you in the process of salvation, and he delivers you into that salvation in eternity. He's active in your life. So the first reason that it's better for Jesus to go is because when he does, we receive the Spirit that empowers us to continue the ministry that he's left behind for us. But that's not the only reason. It's not just outwardly focused. The other reason that it's better to have the Spirit is because the Holy Spirit continues Jesus' ministry to us. It doesn't just continue Jesus' ministry through us, it continues Jesus' ministry to us. This is the roles of the Spirit. And here's the amazing thing that I realized. As I was thinking through all the advantages of having Jesus physically present in our life, being able to ask Him any of those questions, can you explain the Bible to me? Can you comfort me? Can you help me understand this? Can you show me what to say? What I realized is Scripture pointedly describes the Holy Spirit in those ways. You know what one of the roles of the Holy Spirit is that we're going to talk about more? He's the illuminator. We can't understand the Bible without him active in our lives. We cannot. He explains this to us. We say it would be great to be able to turn to Jesus and go, what does this mean? We can. We said it would be great. He's called the comforter. We said it would be great to be able to turn to Jesus when we hurt and say, Jesus, I hurt. We can. He's the spirit. His name is paraclete, which means to come alongside, to walk through life with you, to help you, to advocate for you. Wouldn't it be great if we had somebody who could interpret our prayers for us and say what we really mean to God? We do, it's the Spirit. Wouldn't it be great if we had somebody who will show us what to say when we don't know what to say? We do, it's the Spirit. All the reasons that it would be great to have Jesus physically present in our life are true of the Spirit. We said if Jesus were with us, wouldn't we sin less? The Spirit is with us all the time, and one of his roles is to convict us when we've wandered outside of God's will. All the reasons that we would prefer to have the presence of Jesus in our life are fulfilled in the Spirit. So it's better that Jesus gives us the Spirit because now we don't have to go to a physical presence of Jesus because if he's next to you down the street, then he's not next to me. And I gotta either go to you or get him to come to me. But the Holy Spirit's with us all the time. And he continues Jesus' ministry through us by empowering us and he continues Jesus' ministry to us by fulfilling the roles of Jesus in our life personally. And all of this, so we're going to talk about that in the third week, the roles of the Spirit. The last week, we're going to tackle this question that if you're thinking with me, you should be asking, how do I synthesize what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? How do I synthesize what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? I'm told that God is with me. I'm told that God is in me. I'm told that God can help me speak in tongues when I need to do that. I'm told that He can do the miraculous, that he empowers me for his ministry. I'm told that I can turn to him and ask him to understand scripture at any time. I'm told that he comforts me. I'm told that he guides me. I'm told that he's right there and that he empowers me. I'm actually told that when he's in my life, the chains of sin are broken. I'm set free and I can live a new life without sin. That's what the Bible teaches. But I think one of the reasons that the Spirit to us sometimes is the forgotten God is because our experience with the Spirit doesn't always line up with what we've learned about the Spirit. And so how do we synthesize these things? And can I tell you something? You want to know why that one's last? Because I don't know yet. I don't know what I'm going to tell you. If you've been a believer for a long time and you have ideas, send them to me. Truly, this is going to be a group effort. But I felt like it was dishonest and disingenuine to do a series without analyzing that question that's been in my life for so long too. So I'll warn you in advance, the answer won't be complete, but it'll be the best that we can do. And it's a question that we have to answer as we talk about the Holy Spirit. So that's the series. How can it possibly be true that it's better for us that we don't have the physical presence of Jesus? Well, because he's with us all the time everywhere now through the Spirit. He empowers us to continue his ministry through us, and he continues Jesus's ministry to us. And then that begs the question, then how come what I know about the Spirit doesn't always sync up with what I've experienced of the Spirit? So for the next three weeks, we're going to tackle those three issues and hopefully leave here knowing a little bit more about the Spirit, acknowledging Him a little bit more, inviting Him and His presence and His influence into our life and seeing that played out a little bit more. So I'm going to pray for you through this series that you will see the Spirit living and active and influencing in your life in ways that you never have before simply because you're paying attention to Him and you're praying along with me that you would see His influence. I'm going to pray, but before I do, I want to remind you at the information table we, we have books called The Forgotten God, written by a guy named Francis Chan, all about the Holy Spirit. I found that book to be incredibly helpful, more helpful than anything I'm going to say to you for the next three weeks. So if you really want to dive into this, you can read that book. They're $10. There's a jar there in front of it. You can put the money in there if you want to steal a book from the church to go ahead. That's your deal. I don't really care. But they're $10 if you want, but take a book and read it while we're going through the series. All right, I'm going to pray, and then we're going to continue in our service. Father, we love you. Your spirit is welcome in our lives. We're sorry that we don't always understand it. We're sorry that we don't always welcome the spirit. We're sorry that we don't always understand the spirit. God, I'm sorry that I don't always seek to engage the spirit. I pray that as we move through this series together that we would be less intimidated and more in awe and wonder. God, may no part of you be forgotten by us. May we feel the influence of you and see the guiding of you through your spirit in our day-to-day lives even this week. In our parenting, in our work, in our hearts, in our conversations, in our going in and coming out. May we see the influence of the Spirit as you guide us in those things, Lord. It's in your Son's name that we ask these things. Amen.
Welcome to Grace. Thank you for being here. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. To the moms, happy Mother's Day. We want to acknowledge you. So to the expectant moms, congratulations and hope. And to the new moms, congratulations and hope. And to the experienced moms, we are grateful to you. And to the young moms, we empathize with you. And to the hopeful moms, we pray for you and with you. And to the grieving moms we empathize with you and to the hopeful moms we pray for you and with you and to the grieving moms we offer you our condolences and our shoulders as well. So to all the moms represented in the room, we love you and we are grateful for you. As we launch into this new series called The Forgotten God, I wanted to start where Jesus starts in John chapter 16. We've been doing a series in John since February all through the spring, and so as we free up from that and launch into a series on the Holy Spirit, I thought it appropriate to go to John. So turn in your Bibles to John chapter 16, okay? And in that, in John chapter 16 and verse 7, we find this, what I think to be, an absurd statement. One of these statements that when you hear it, your first reaction is, that's not true. There's no way that's possibly true. Moms have said one of these things, okay? A lot of moms in the rooms, maybe not modern millennial moms because we have different ways now, but when I was a kid and I got in trouble, I got the belt. Before I got the belt, what did my mom tell me? This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you. I would always think, I'll trade you. If that's your concern, we can swap, like, you don't have to experience that pain. Let me save you from that, right? Like, when you're a kid and you hear that, you don't believe it. Like, that's not true. That's ridiculous. There's no way that's true. But then as you grow older, you realize that really is a true statement. I heard one of these absurd statements this week. I was so grateful that somebody in my small group gave me an example. I have somebody in my small group. I do a younger person's small group, young people, no kids. A guy named Connor. He is one of my current favorite humans. He's one of the most enthusiastic people. He does the announcements for us sometimes. He's going off to Colorado soon to be a medic out there for the summer. So anyways, I can say this, and he can't defend himself for a couple of months. He's at my house, and he and I got to talking about our love for sushi. I like sushi, and he likes sushi. And I'm like, oh, well, you got to tell me, like, what's the place? Like, where's the good place around here? We found one we like. We haven't found one we love. Where's the place around here? And he was like, actually, the best sushi. You want to know where it is? I'm like, yes, please. I want to know where it is. He goes, when I go home to Boone, North Carolina, and I stopped him right there. Get out of here. Don't tell me that the best sushi is in Boone. The sushi hub of the East Coast is in Boone, North Carolina. I'm sure it is, Connor. And he's like, no, no, no. And he keeps telling me how great it is. And I keep telling him how redneck he is, that the best sushi he can find is in Boone, North Carolina. And now listen, I didn't believe him at all. It felt absurd to me. And I don't know what's broken in me that I feel the need to correct him right away. And I can't just accept like, oh, that's good sushi. Like that's my fault. Okay. I'm a gross person for that. But when he said it, I just couldn't accept that that could possibly be true. Right? And maybe it is. Maybe it's delicious sushi. I don't know. But in John chapter 16, Jesus makes a statement that when he says it had to be, to me, patently absurd. We would respond to that like, this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you, or that the best sushi in the eastern coast is found in Boone, North Carolina. Like, that's how we would respond to this, I think. This is what Jesus says. I want us to see it together. And a little bit of context for this verse, what's going on here. John chapters 13 through 17 represent a portion of scripture that's referred to as the farewell discourse. They're at the last supper. They've been doing Jesus and the disciples are eating dinner together. It's the last night they're going to spend together. They've been doing life together for three years. Jesus has been pouring into them, teaching them, showing them how to be disciples and how to do ministry. And he just kind of does this download of important information on them at the end of his life. And in the middle of this, in chapter 16, Jesus is talking to them about the fact that he's going to go away. I'm not going to be here all the time. I'm going to leave you, which is a bummer for the disciples because they're expecting to be with Jesus for the rest of their life. But he's telling them and trying to get them ready for, I'm going to go away, like I'm going to die. I'm not going to always be here. And then this translation, the ESV calls the Holy Spirit the helper, but some translations call him the comforter. So the point of this verse is Jesus is saying, guys, I got to go away, but it's better for you. It's to your advantage that I actually go from you, that you don't have my physical presence with you, because if I don't go, you'll never receive the helper or you'll never receive the comforter, is what he's telling you. And this is how Jesus chooses to introduce the Holy Spirit to the disciples and really to us. And we're calling this series, as Jesus refers to him here as the helper, and we begin to talk about the Holy Spirit, we're calling this series The Forgotten God, because in a lot of ways, that's really what the Holy Spirit is. If you're a Christian, if you would call God your Father and Jesus your Savior, then you believe in a triune God, a God that is three parts, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. They are all God. They are all part of God. I don't know how to explain the Trinity to you. I went to undergrad for theology. I got a master's degree in theology. I've been in ministry for 10 years. I've read books on it. And all I can say is, I don't know how to explain the Trinity to you. But I know that it exists. I know that it's a thing. I know the Bible talks about it and that all three parts are equal, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And we in our churches, large swaths of the church, kind of forget about the Holy Spirit. We talk a lot about God the Father. We pray to Him. We worship Him. We sing songs to Him. We talk a lot about God the Son. We preach about Him. We spend 12 weeks going through the stories about Him. But the Spirit, sometimes we sing to the Spirit. Sometimes we refer to the Spirit maybe without knowing it. The video that we watched before I came up here talking about your presence is welcome here, that's represented by the Spirit. Maybe we don't know that. But very often, particularly in conservative church circles, we forget about the Holy Spirit. Now, I have theories on this. I think that we're afraid of what we don't understand. And if we don't understand something, that we tend to just avoid it. We can kind of understand the idea of a son. We can kind of understand the idea of a father. And so those parts of God, we can kind of grasp a little bit, and we see them a little bit more in Scripture than we see the Spirit. But the Spirit is unknown. The Bible describes it as the wind. You don't know when it's going to come or go. We're told that the Spirit is in us, that you are the temple. As a believer, you are the temple of the Holy Spirit, that you actually have God in you, which is a really difficult thing to understand or to grasp. You're told that the Holy Spirit empowers you in ways that we're going to explore in this series. And it's, if we're honest, confusing and sometimes intimidating. And I think because of that, it makes us uncomfortable and we tend to avoid the things that we don't understand that make us uncomfortable. And so sometimes we forget the Spirit. But Jesus introduces the Spirit by making what I think is kind of an absurd statement on its face. And so what I want to do today is ask about this statement, how can Jesus' claim be true? How can Jesus' claim be true? How can that possibly be true, that it's actually better for the disciples and better for us to not have the physical presence of Jesus with us, but instead have the Holy Spirit or the helper or the comforter? How can that possibly be true? As we answer that, we're going to draw two conclusions today that each launch their own question. If that's true, then what about this? And if that's true, then what about this? And then those two answers should spark in us a natural question. And those three questions are going to make up the rest of the series. So I'll tell you, at the beginning, you're not going to walk home with the big to-do list today or with the thing that's really going to change your thinking. The take-home from today is to continue to attend and learn about the rest of the roles of the Spirit. Today is a setup for the series as we learn about the Holy Spirit. Now here's why I think that this is an absurd statement on its face. I would have expected Peter. Peter was the one, he was the ready, fire, aim guy. He was the one that spoke before he thought. He just said whatever he felt. That was Peter. I would have expected Peter when Jesus said, it is actually better for you that I go. I would have expected him to interrupt Jesus like I interrupted Connor about the boon sushi, right? Come on, that can't possibly be true. That can't be right. Because think about this. The more I thought about this, the more I felt it was, it had to be difficult for the disciples to accept what Jesus is saying. If you're a believer, if you call Jesus your Savior, how much different would your life be if Jesus were physically present next to you all day, every day, like he was for the disciples? They woke up next to that dude in the same room as that dude, at least in the same house. They spent every day with him. He would go off and pray for a little while, but he would always come back and find him. His physical presence, he was ever present. He was there all the time. If you're a Christian, how much different would your life be if Jesus were right there next to you all the time? Think about that. Can you imagine yourself in a situation where maybe you didn't know what to say? You're talking to your kid, and they ask you a really hard question. You're like, gosh, I don't know. You're in a Bible study and somebody asks a question. You're with a friend. You're just getting a beer or a coffee and they ask a question that's really difficult to answer. What do I do about my marriage? I feel broken down about this and you don't know the right thing to say. What do we do about our child and you don't know the right thing to say? What if Jesus were right there next to you and you could look at him and be like, oh Jesus, what do you think? What should I say? What if you could do that? What if when you're reading the Bible, if you've ever tried to read the Bible, it can be difficult to understand sometimes. And for a lot of us, that's why we don't read it more is because we read it and we're like, gosh, I kind of understand nine words in this book. And then we just kind of put it down and we move on to the next thing. We don't really get what it's talking about. What if when we read the Bible, we could be like, Jesus, I do not understand this part. Can you come here for a second and show me this? That'd be amazing. There's this scene in Luke. Luke's the only one that records it. When Jesus comes back from the dead, he's resurrected, there's these two guys walking on a road to a town called Emmaus, and Jesus appears to them. And they don't know who he is. He's just a dude walking next to them. And it says that Jesus began to explain to them all of the scriptures, which to them was the Old Testament, and how it related to him. Listen, that's the greatest Bible study of all time. If you said, Nate, you can go to any moment in history, it's not hyperbole to say, I very well may go to that moment and be like, can I just walk with Jesus to a mass? I would love to hear him explain how the Old Testament points to him. I would love to just listen to Jesus as he taught about the Bible. Can you imagine? And what if he was right there next to you? Anytime you read it, you'd be like, hey, I don't understand this part. Can you help? What if when you were looking for a church, he could come to church with you? And halfway through the sermon, you could be like, you like this guy? Yeah, me neither. We'll keep looking. But what if he could just tell you? What if he could tell you like, no, he's no good, but man, they need you. Like, stick around. Wouldn't it be great to know for sure? What if he didn't know what to do or a decision to make? Do I take the promotion? Do I take the job? Or do I turn it down? Do I look for a new job? Do I go back to work? What if you could just look at Jesus and be like, what do I do? How about this? You think you'd sin less? Like maybe by a small amount? Are you kidding me? Of course. You'd start to cut somebody off in traffic and Jesus would be in the passenger seat and you'd kind of look at him and be like, you're right. Not that big of a deal, I guess. You created all of this. I guess it's okay. Imagine how much kinder, more gracious you would be. Maybe not you, but me. It would change things. If you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you came to church for mom. Thank you. I'll try to go fast. But just imagine if there is. If there is a God and he was personified in Jesus and he created the universe and he were right next to you, how much that would change things for you. What if you were hurting, and life was really hard, and you could just turn and lean into him, and just say, Jesus, this one's tough. Can you just be with me for a second? And he offers perfect peace. That's what the disciples had. You understand? That's what they had every day. And then Jesus says, you know what? It's better for you that you don't have that anymore. So the only possible thing we can ask is, how in the world is that true? It's what we wrote down on our paper. How can that claim be true? How is that possible? And so what we're going to do today is try to offer the best answer we can to that question and then understand that that's going to spark more questions that we're going to spend the rest of the series answering. To answer that question of how can it possibly be true that Jesus, that it's better for Jesus to go when we receive the Spirit and we no longer have the physical presence of Jesus in our lives, what I want to do, and you didn't see this one coming, is turn to 2 Kings 2 in the Old Testament. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there and make sure that I'm not making this story up. But it's about two guys who I think are the two most underrated people in all the Bible. Elijah and Elisha. They're amazing. Now, some Christians don't know that those are two different people. I've actually talked to people about that. I don't want to belittle you for that. I just think it's funny because we get it confused sometimes. And very few people know which one came first and which one did what. So I'm going to help you out here. This is just an aside. I thought about having Steve make a slide for this, but I thought it's probably a misuse of my authority in the church to text him on a Friday to do work on his off day for a joke slide. So I just didn't do it. All right. But I wanted to do the alphabet and then show you where they landed in the alphabet. Elijah has a J in it, which comes before an S. Elisha. All right. So that's how we remember it. Elijah comes before Elisha because J comes before S. And now listen, offer me grace. I've rehearsed my sermons before I do them, and you guys think I'm doing them off the cuff. I'm not. I've practiced this. And then every time I do it, I get them confused as I'm telling the story. So just give me grace and don't make fun of me, okay? You get up here and you do it, all right? It's hard. But we have Elisha and Elijah, and they are two of the most underrated people in the Bible. I think because they don't have a book named after them or something, but they're remarkable. Their faith is amazing. Elijah was this incredible man of God. Do you know that one time somebody died? A widow's son dies, and Elijah knew the widow. And somebody comes to him and tells him, hey, so-and-so's son has died. Do you know what Elijah's response was? God, why didn't you tell me? How come I'm finding out like this? Can you imagine being that close to God, where he's your personal Twitter feed, where something happens out in the world and you find out about it in some other way and you're like, God, what's the deal, man? How come you didn't tell me? That's how close he was to God. He was in a showdown with 450 prophets of Baal. And in this passage where he brings fire down from heaven from God to light up a soaking wet stack of wood in front of all of these prophets, we have the most sarcastic passage in Scripture, which makes me feel great. That it's there and it's okay. He is being a jerk to these prophets of Baal. And I'm like, get him, buddy. He raises a child from the dead. He's fed by ravens and by angels. He warns the evil king of Israel, if you don't get right, I'm going to bring a drought. And the king didn't get right, so he prayed. And there was a drought for three years. And then when the drought was lifted, he won a foot race against a chariot across the country to go tell somebody about it, carried by the Holy Spirit. Elijah was amazing. And he had this disciple, a guy that was following him named Elisha. And Elisha had spent a good portion of Elijah's ministry with him, watching him. And Elijah had the respect of all of Israel and all the other prophets and all the other religious people in the country. And Elisha was his heir apparent. He was the one being trained to take over the ministry of Elijah when he moved on, very much like the disciples were being trained by Jesus to take over his ministry once he moved on. And it got to the end of Elijah's life. And they actually knew that this was the day that he was going to die. I don't know how they knew that, but they did. And so they go to a town, they walk to a town together. And when they get there, the prophets in that town come up to Elisha and they say, hey, you know your master is going to die today. And he says, yeah, I don't want to talk about it. And they kind of interact there and they go to another place. And it's the same interaction. And then they end up on the banks of the Jordan River. And there's 50 prophets there. And they come to Elisha and they say, hey, you know your master is going to die today. And he says, I know, I don't want to talk about it. So they go to the Jordan River. They're trying to get alone so that they can talk. They walk over the Jordan River. Listen to this. This is ridiculous. There's a river in the way. They want to be over there. So what's Elijah do? He takes off his cloak, he rolls it up, and he hits the water, and then the waters part, and they walk across. I don't know of any other miracle of convenience in the Bible but this one, where he's like, God, these are new sandals. I don't want to get them wet. Thanks. And then they walk across the river. They get to the other side, and it says that they're walking and talking together. And Elijah says, before I go, is there anything else I can do for you? Is there anything you want? Is there anything you need? And Elisha says, I want a double portion of the Spirit that is on you. See, Elisha recognized that Elijah had performed all these miracles and did all these great things, but they were not by his own power. They were by the power of the Spirit of God resting on him. They were by the Holy Spirit. And this is the same way, incidentally, that Jesus performed his miracles and lived his life. Everything that he did, the casting out demons, raising Lazarus from the dead, healing the sick, feeding the poor, everything that he did was through the power of the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit that the disciples were going to be given access to, the same one that we are told we have. It was through the power of the Spirit. And Elisha recognized this power. So when Elijah said, what is it that you want? He said, give me a double portion of the Spirit that's on you. I want to be able to continue to do the ministry that you do. And Elijah's response is, you've asked for a very difficult thing. He says, I'll tell you what, soon I'm going to go up to heaven. And if you see me while I do it, then you'll receive a double portion of my spirit. So they continue to walk and talk. And in this amazing scene, a fiery chariot comes down from heaven, being pulled by fiery horses, and separates Elijah and Elisha. And catches Elijah and sweeps him up in a whirlwind, it says, up to heaven. You understand that Elijah wasn't made to experience death? It's just him and Enoch, one of the guys in the Bible who have never experienced death, those two. He was so righteous, loved God so much, so close to him, God didn't want him to have to experience it. So he sends a fiery chariot down to grab him and take him back up to heaven in a whirlwind. And as he's going back up to heaven, his cloak falls off of him and wafts back down to the ground where it lands on Elisha. And it was a symbolic transfer of the spirit that was on Elijah to the spirit of Elisha to empower him to continue the ministry of Elijah. And I've always loved that story. I've always thought it was amazing. I love the Old Testament. I love the stories and the narratives in the Old Testament. But it wasn't until I was going through the book of John in the fall, getting ready for the series in the spring, where I read this in chapter 16 and I went, oh my goodness. That story in 2 Kings chapter 2 is not there just for what happens in 2 Kings 2. You understand? It's a picture of Jesus transferring his spirit to the disciples. Elijah goes up to heaven still alive. Jesus ascends up to heaven still alive. A portion of his spirit descends onto Elisha so he can continue the ministry that Elijah has prepared him for. And this is what happens to the disciples. After Jesus dies and is resurrected in the beginning of Acts, we see Jesus go up into heaven and he tells them to wait on the gift of the spirit, the same gift that Elisha waited for. It transfers onto them in the form of flaming tongues. They receive the Spirit and they go out and they do ministry. That's the gift of the Spirit. And so one of the reasons that it's better for Jesus to go is because the Holy Spirit continues Jesus' ministry through us. You see? That's what he's doing with the disciples. That's what he was doing with us. The Holy Spirit continues Jesus' ministry through us. And that's the gifts of the Spirit. We're going to talk about those next week, what those are and why we have them. But this is what he was doing for the disciples. He had trained them for three years to prepare them to lead the church that he was going to leave behind, to lead the kingdom that he was going to establish here on earth. And they needed to be empowered. They needed to know what to say when they didn't know what to say. They needed to be able to cast out demons and perform miracles. They needed to be able to lead in ways that they were incapable of leading. They needed wisdom that they did not have. They needed to understand scriptures in ways that they did not understand it. So Jesus leaves behind the Spirit, just as Elijah did for Elisha, so that the disciples could continue the ministry of Jesus. And 2,000 years later, you sit here in a church. And at Grace, if you're a member here, we don't call you a member. We call you a partner. And we call you a partner because we believe that the church is an active organization whose job it is to advance forward the kingdom of God. And we're not looking for members to be a part of the club here. We're looking for partners to help us advance it. We believe that there's a job to be done and that God has assigned a portion of that job to Grace Raleigh, and we want to be faithful to the job that he's asked us to do. Furthermore, if you're a believer, if you're a Christian, the only reason that God doesn't nab you right up to heaven as soon as you accept him and deliver you into eternal bliss is so that you can stay here and build his kingdom and bring as many people possible with you on your way to heaven. The same reason he left the disciples behind, because we have work to do. So he leaves us his spirit to dwell in us, to continue his work through us. You see? And the Bible says that you have it. Ephesians tells us that if you're a believer, that you have received the spirit as a down payment or a guarantee on your salvation. Romans 8 tells us that the Spirit secures your salvation. He sanctifies you in the process of salvation, and he delivers you into that salvation in eternity. He's active in your life. So the first reason that it's better for Jesus to go is because when he does, we receive the Spirit that empowers us to continue the ministry that he's left behind for us. But that's not the only reason. It's not just outwardly focused. The other reason that it's better to have the Spirit is because the Holy Spirit continues Jesus' ministry to us. It doesn't just continue Jesus' ministry through us, it continues Jesus' ministry to us. This is the roles of the Spirit. And here's the amazing thing that I realized. As I was thinking through all the advantages of having Jesus physically present in our life, being able to ask Him any of those questions, can you explain the Bible to me? Can you comfort me? Can you help me understand this? Can you show me what to say? What I realized is Scripture pointedly describes the Holy Spirit in those ways. You know what one of the roles of the Holy Spirit is that we're going to talk about more? He's the illuminator. We can't understand the Bible without him active in our lives. We cannot. He explains this to us. We say it would be great to be able to turn to Jesus and go, what does this mean? We can. We said it would be great. He's called the comforter. We said it would be great to be able to turn to Jesus when we hurt and say, Jesus, I hurt. We can. He's the spirit. His name is paraclete, which means to come alongside, to walk through life with you, to help you, to advocate for you. Wouldn't it be great if we had somebody who could interpret our prayers for us and say what we really mean to God? We do, it's the Spirit. Wouldn't it be great if we had somebody who will show us what to say when we don't know what to say? We do, it's the Spirit. All the reasons that it would be great to have Jesus physically present in our life are true of the Spirit. We said if Jesus were with us, wouldn't we sin less? The Spirit is with us all the time, and one of his roles is to convict us when we've wandered outside of God's will. All the reasons that we would prefer to have the presence of Jesus in our life are fulfilled in the Spirit. So it's better that Jesus gives us the Spirit because now we don't have to go to a physical presence of Jesus because if he's next to you down the street, then he's not next to me. And I gotta either go to you or get him to come to me. But the Holy Spirit's with us all the time. And he continues Jesus' ministry through us by empowering us and he continues Jesus' ministry to us by fulfilling the roles of Jesus in our life personally. And all of this, so we're going to talk about that in the third week, the roles of the Spirit. The last week, we're going to tackle this question that if you're thinking with me, you should be asking, how do I synthesize what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? How do I synthesize what I've learned about the Spirit with what I've experienced of the Spirit? I'm told that God is with me. I'm told that God is in me. I'm told that God can help me speak in tongues when I need to do that. I'm told that He can do the miraculous, that he empowers me for his ministry. I'm told that I can turn to him and ask him to understand scripture at any time. I'm told that he comforts me. I'm told that he guides me. I'm told that he's right there and that he empowers me. I'm actually told that when he's in my life, the chains of sin are broken. I'm set free and I can live a new life without sin. That's what the Bible teaches. But I think one of the reasons that the Spirit to us sometimes is the forgotten God is because our experience with the Spirit doesn't always line up with what we've learned about the Spirit. And so how do we synthesize these things? And can I tell you something? You want to know why that one's last? Because I don't know yet. I don't know what I'm going to tell you. If you've been a believer for a long time and you have ideas, send them to me. Truly, this is going to be a group effort. But I felt like it was dishonest and disingenuine to do a series without analyzing that question that's been in my life for so long too. So I'll warn you in advance, the answer won't be complete, but it'll be the best that we can do. And it's a question that we have to answer as we talk about the Holy Spirit. So that's the series. How can it possibly be true that it's better for us that we don't have the physical presence of Jesus? Well, because he's with us all the time everywhere now through the Spirit. He empowers us to continue his ministry through us, and he continues Jesus's ministry to us. And then that begs the question, then how come what I know about the Spirit doesn't always sync up with what I've experienced of the Spirit? So for the next three weeks, we're going to tackle those three issues and hopefully leave here knowing a little bit more about the Spirit, acknowledging Him a little bit more, inviting Him and His presence and His influence into our life and seeing that played out a little bit more. So I'm going to pray for you through this series that you will see the Spirit living and active and influencing in your life in ways that you never have before simply because you're paying attention to Him and you're praying along with me that you would see His influence. I'm going to pray, but before I do, I want to remind you at the information table we, we have books called The Forgotten God, written by a guy named Francis Chan, all about the Holy Spirit. I found that book to be incredibly helpful, more helpful than anything I'm going to say to you for the next three weeks. So if you really want to dive into this, you can read that book. They're $10. There's a jar there in front of it. You can put the money in there if you want to steal a book from the church to go ahead. That's your deal. I don't really care. But they're $10 if you want, but take a book and read it while we're going through the series. All right, I'm going to pray, and then we're going to continue in our service. Father, we love you. Your spirit is welcome in our lives. We're sorry that we don't always understand it. We're sorry that we don't always welcome the spirit. We're sorry that we don't always understand the spirit. God, I'm sorry that I don't always seek to engage the spirit. I pray that as we move through this series together that we would be less intimidated and more in awe and wonder. God, may no part of you be forgotten by us. May we feel the influence of you and see the guiding of you through your spirit in our day-to-day lives even this week. In our parenting, in our work, in our hearts, in our conversations, in our going in and coming out. May we see the influence of the Spirit as you guide us in those things, Lord. It's in your Son's name that we ask these things. Amen.
