Luke

My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this very hot July Sunday. Hopefully it'll cool down and we can get back outside soon. This is the second part of our series called Obscure Heroes. To know the Bible, to be around church culture at all, is to know some of the main characters of the Bible, some of the people that are a little bit more prominent in the Bible. Even if you've not spent any time in church at all, we've heard of David and of Moses and of Paul, but there are some other people in the Bible that give us great examples of behavior or character that we should emulate that are worth exploring. And so we're investing our summer series in looking at some of these heroes that are a little bit lesser known in the Bible. Now, full disclosure, when I told Jen, my wife, what I was going to be preaching about this week and who I was going to be preaching about, a guy named Naaman in 2 Kings 5. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you don't, there's one in front of you. But we're going to be in 2 Kings 5 today looking at the story of Naaman. And so she pointed out, and I should tell you, that he is not really a hero. Okay? Like he's not, what he does isn't really great. So I told her what I was going to be preaching about and she goes, well, he's not really like that heroic. And I said, well, nobody cares. It's just like, it's just obscure heroes, but this is an obscure story. What's it matter? She was like, it matters. So if it matters to you, I apologize. I beg your forgiveness. All right. But I'm just not going to, I'm not going to check that box today. So this is more like an obscure story. Nonetheless, I think we can learn a lot from the example of Naaman. So if you look in second Kings chapter five, there is a general by the name of Naaman. He's the head general in the Syrian army, which was a really powerful army at this point in history. They're far more powerful than Israel. Israel is like a third world country at this point in history. They're really not impactful on the geopolitical scale. The Syrian army is, and Naaman is the general of this army. And so you have to figure, if you just think about in the ancient world ways to get famous, that pretty much the king in general is it. They didn't have Instagram. They didn't have any influencers back then. So like Naaman, that was all you got. So he had risen to prominence. He was at least regionally famous. If not, at the time, world famous. He was a heavy hitter. He was an important dude. And Naaman comes down with leprosy. We see leprosy through the Bible. It's in the Old Testament and it's in the New Testament. Leprosy was a disease that you got in your skin. I think you can still get it now. It's just we've fixed it. But you can still get it in your skin, and it begins to eat away at your skin, slowly but surely, killing you from the outside in. And to get leprosy was to receive a death sentence. If you contracted leprosy, somehow it was eventually going to eat away at you enough that it was going to kill you. Leprosy was certain death. And it didn't happen a lot in the upper echelons of the socioeconomic scale, but somehow or another, Naaman, maybe from his time spent out on the battlefield in foreign countries and things like that, Naaman contracted leprosy. And of course he feels like he's going to die. But on their last conquest through Israel, they brought back a little Jewish girl to serve Naaman's wife. And she hears that Naaman has leprosy, and she says in 2 Kings 5, she says, Oh, that my Lord would go, my Lord Naaman would go to Israel. There's a prophet there who can heal him. Now, she's talking about a man named Elisha. In the books of 1 and 2 Kings, there's two incredible prophets. I've said there's some of the most underrated figures in the Bible, Elijah and Elisha. One day I want to do a series through their lives, maybe next summer. It's just phenomenal stories. They were tremendous men of faith that God entrusted with tremendous power for the miracles that they would do. And apparently he had cured people before, even of leprosy. And so this little girl that they took back from Israel says, oh, that my Lord would go back to Israel and find Elisha, he could heal her. He could heal him. And so Naaman's wife goes to Naaman and says, hey, there's a prophet back in Israel that can heal you. Like, you should go back there. And so he decides to go. And I wonder, and I try to do this as I read stories in the Bible, and I would encourage you guys to do it too. Sometimes if we read stories in the Bible, if you were to open up your Bible and read 1 and 2 Kings, the stories move so fast. The narrative moves so quickly. There's so little nuance. It's just this happened, this happened, this happened, and then this is the end of the story. So I like to try to slow down and read the humanity into things and figure out what would I be thinking, what would I be feeling if I were in that situation. And I think that when we do this, when you'll read it on your own and you'll put your humanity into what's happening there, I think what you'll get is that the story starts to come alive for you a little bit. And so Naaman hears the testimony of this Hebrew girl and decides that he's going to travel hundreds of miles away to a third world country that's going to take him several weeks to do to go see a faith healer in the backwoods of Israel. Now what would it take for you to do that? If you got a diagnosis that nobody wants, it was a death sentence, you're definitely going to pass away. This is going to claim your life. But if you travel to the Dominican, to the back of a mountain there, there's a faith healer and he's going to make you feel better. How desperate would you have to be to go? Naaman went. He's not a believer. He doesn't believe in the Hebrew God. It's just a weird faith healer in the backwoods of a third world country, and he goes. And before he goes, what does he do? Naaman is so very American. He packs up all of his stuff, and he puts together a small fortune, some changes of clothes, which apparently are a big deal. Like if you wanted to be wealthy, have two jackets. So he puts together some change of clothes to offer to the person that's going to heal him and to the people around that person. He gathers together some livestock and some gold, and he takes a small fortune with him. Because when you get sick, what do we do? If you're diagnosed with something tough, what do you do? You marshal all your resources, you pull everything together, and you go to the best place that's going to treat you, and then you compensate them for their treatment. That's what Naaman's going to do. So he loads everything up, heads to Israel. He gets to Israel, and he tells his king he's going to go. He asks permission from the king of Syria, hey, there's a prophet in Israel, can I go see him? King of Syria says, yeah, sure, go ahead. Gives gives him a letter to carry with him to present. So he goes to Israel. He goes and he sees the king. And listen, what kind of a dude do you have to be to get the audience of a king when you just wander into a country? You have to be a big deal. So the king hears Naaman's here. Oh no, what does the general of the Syrian army want? And Naaman presents him with a letter. And the letter's from the king of Syria, and it says, be pleased to heal my servant Naaman of leprosy. And the Bible says that the king went and tore his clothes, because at this time in history, that's how you express anguish and sadness and despair and anxiety. And I've always wondered if these people had like spare, like tearing clothes that they got from Walmart. Like when I got sad, I would be like, time out. And then I would put on those things and probably pre-snip them and then tear them and then put on my nice kingly garb and be like, okay, that's terrible for those clothes. I don't know what he did. Maybe he just, he could tear outfits all he wanted. But he goes and he tears his clothes and he expresses this great sadness. Why has the king of Syria put this on me that he expects me to provoke him for war? Because it's an impossible task. I can't heal somebody from leprosy, much less the general of the most powerful army in the region right now. There's nothing I can do about this. This is a death sentence for him too. It's an excuse when Naaman goes there and he eventually dies because the king doesn't cure him. Then the Syrians can get ticked off at Israel and go sweeping through there again. And so the king, he's anxious. He is worried. He is in anguish. And word gets to Elisha, the chief prophet, that the king has gotten this letter. So he sends word to the king and he says, I've heard that you've torn your clothes. I hope it was the cheap ones that you got from Walmart. If you would just send Naaman to me, I'll take care of it. Send Naaman to me, I'll heal him. So the king says, okay, here's Naaman's address. You go and, or here's Elisha's address. You go and you see him. And I love how Naaman arrives. He goes to Elisha's house and it says, he arrived on his horses and chariots. So he brings his whole entourage with him. He arrives on his chariots. Nobody in Israel can afford a chariot. Israel has zero chariots. And so this is a huge deal. This is like when they line the streets for some political figure and on the line of Tahos come through and you're like, I don't know where, but somewhere in there, there's somebody that's important. So Naaman creates his own processional and arrives at the gate of Elisha's house, almost with this sense of, I'm here, congratulations. And he tells them, I'm here. And what does Elisha do? I love what Elisha does. What would you do? What would you do if one of the most famous people in the country showed up at your house, showed up at your office, and whoever works the front desk came to you, and they're like, excuse me, Nate, Peyton Manning's here to see you. What would you do? I don't know. I thought all week about who do I say that everybody recognizes as famous? I don't know what to say. Michael Jordan, Peyton Manning, whoever you want, Justin Timberlake, take your pick. Somebody shows up, they're super famous and they want to talk to you. What would you do? I would be like, Aaron, Steve, Kyle, which is, that's the staff here. Sorry, I'm out. I got to go talk to them. Like, I got to, I got to go see them. I would, hello, I'm the senior pastor. It's good to meet you. I'm glad that you're here to see me. Right? Of course, we would soak that up, wouldn't we? What's Elisha do? He grabs an intern. Hey, name is at the gate. Would you go tell him that if he'll dip in the Jordan River seven times that he'll be healed and he'll be good to go? Like, what's Elisha working on? Like a proposal? Like, I'm busy. But he just says, hey, go tell Naaman if he'll dip in the river seven times he'll be healed. And so the intern goes down and tells this to Naaman. And this is how Naaman receives it. If you have a Bible, you can look in 2 Kings 5. I love what he does. Verse 10 says, and Elisha sent a messenger to him saying, go and wash in the Jordan seven times and your flesh will be restored and you shall be clean. He doesn't even let him in. He's like, there's no reason for you to come in here and all that stuff. Just go to the Jordan River. You'll turned and went away in a rage. Naaman's ticked. He's ticked. I remember when I first got out of college, or when I was finishing up college, I sold cars. People don't know this about me, but I sold cars for like six months. And I was on the phone with a guy one day. He was a good old southern boy. And we were kind of going back and forth on the price of a truck. You know, he's got to ask for a price, and I've got to hang on. Let me go check with my manager, and I come back with the price. And it's a whole deal. It's real silly. And so we're going back and forth. And finally he goes, listen, son, am I talking to the man or am I talking to the boy? Because I need to be talking to the man. And I had to admit, I was not the man at Hayes Chrysler. Sir, you are talking to the boy. It was a very low moment in my life. If you know me well, you know that I need more of those and you do not feel sorry for me. And I had to admit, I'm not the decision maker here. That's what Naaman thought. Am I talking to the man or am I talking to the boy? He wanted to talk to the man. He wanted to be made over. He wanted to be fussed over. He wanted Elisha to come out and, oh, it's so great to have you. I'm honored to heal you. And then he wanted the chance after the healing to be able to offer his small fortune, right? He wanted to be able to offer a one-for-one exchange. None of us likes to get help without being able to reciprocate that help, without being able to feel like we in some way earned this or deserve this. He wanted to be able to compensate Elisha, and now he's robbed of that chance. He's not treated like he expects to be treated. Elisha is supposed to make this big scene and wave his hand over him, and I call on the name of the Lord and yada, yada. And he's like, no, just, you're good. Just see the water over there? Just go get in it. And he's going, I traveled hundreds of miles and brought all this stuff for this? You kidding me? I have rivers back home, and they're better than this backwoods river. And so he storms off. He takes his ball and goes home, and he sulks like a little kid. And a little while later, his servants go to him, and it's a loose paraphrase, but essentially they say, Naaman, what do you have to lose, man? You're out here. Just go do it. Just go do what he says. And I can imagine them saying, like, what's the worst that can happen? You get some Jordan River on you. You go home and you rinse off in the Farper. It'll be all right. Just do it. And so he goes after he's calmed down. He dips in the Jordan River, and he's healed of his leprosy. When he sees that he's healed of his leprosy, he's overjoyed. He rushes back to Elisha, and he tries to give him all the stuff. He tries to compensate him. Thank you. Here's this fortune that I brought. And Elisha's like, I don't need it. I didn't do that for your stuff, man. I just did that for you. God told me to heal you. I healed you. I don't need it. And he keeps trying to give it away to whoever will take it. And then a guy named Gehazi, one of Elisha's servants comes to him and he's like, actually, you know, on second thought, Elisha really does need the stuff. And Naaman gives him the stuff. And then Gehazi gets in trouble for taking the stuff. And that's a whole separate story if you keep reading on. But Naaman responds to this healing with a joyful and generous love. Here, here, take all my stuff. This was given to me. I want to be able to give this to you. And he leaves that space professing that there is one true God, and it is the God of Israel. We get a convert out of this interaction. Now, this is a good story, and it's a good one to unpack in the Old Testament. But how does it apply to us? I think we can begin to understand how it applies to us when we realize that leprosy in the Bible is always a picture of sin. We see leprosy in the Old Testament and the New Testament. When we see it in the New Testament, generally Jesus is interacting with them. If you contracted leprosy, you were sent to a colony. You were quarantined. You were no longer allowed to interact with general society. You were unclean. You were sent to a colony, and you were sent there to die. Can you imagine how depressing leper colonies would be? And Jesus walked into these places and he touched and he touched and he touched and he healed and he healed and he healed in the same way that Jesus walks through a sinful world and he heals and he heals and he restores. The picture of leprosy in the Bible is always a picture of sin. Leprosy was a disease that once you got it, it may have started small. In the story of Naaman, it says that he expected Elisha to come out and wave his hand over the place. So maybe leprosy was just starting to appear. Maybe it was on his arm and he could wrap it up. Maybe it was on his ribs and he could cover it up. Maybe it was in a place where if you looked at him, you didn't know that he had it, but he knew that he had it. And isn't that how sin works? When we have things in our lives that don't need to be there, sometimes we can cover it up. We can wrap it up. We can keep it from other people. And sin, just so we're clear, sometimes that word is misunderstood and it's used to make people feel guilty. But really, sin is anything that happens when we elevate our judgment in our life to equivocate God's judgment in our life. And when we say, no, God, I don't think that I want to do the thing that you want me to do. I'm going to do the thing that makes the most sense to me. That's sin. Whatever that is, whatever that looks like, whatever form that takes on. And when we get that, when we sin, just like leprosy, it is a disease that eats away at us and leads to certain death. Isn't this what Jesus, isn't this what God said in Genesis? He told Adam and Eve that if you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that you will surely die. And they ate of it and they didn't drop dead. So either God's a liar or he's not talking about physical death. He's talking about a spiritual death. And what he's saying is, if you elevate your judgment to mine and you throw off my lordship in your life and you become your own little God, then you have eternally separated yourself from me. That's a spiritual death. So sin, just like leprosy, leads to a certain death. Leprosy leads to a physical death. Sin leads to a spiritual death. But there's a parallel there. And in this story, Naaman is healed, but we should think about it as salvation. Naaman seeks salvation. And to be healed for his salvation, he had to accept the word of God and be obedient and humble himself and go dip in a river that didn't make any sense. For us to receive salvation, spiritual healing from God, we place our faith in what Jesus did on the cross for us. And in some ways, sometimes it doesn't make much sense. But we accept that free gift from Jesus. As we move through the Christian life and we understand salvation is, yes, an event when we place our faith in Christ, but it's also this ongoing process that the Bible calls sanctification, which just means becoming more like God in character. And that to be sanctified, to become more like God in character, it's every day this decision to trust on God rather than ourselves. It's every day to trust in God's way rather than our way. It's every day to trust in his lordship rather than our lordship. It's the same decision that Naaman had to make every day as we seek this salvation, as we fight off sin. And so what we see in the story of Naaman and what makes it relevant to us is that the physical healing of leprosy is a picture of our spiritual healing from sin. The physical healing of leprosy is a picture of our spiritual healing from sin. It works the same way. Naaman needed salvation for a disease that would lead to certain death. We need salvation from a disease that will lead to certain spiritual death or eternal separation from God. And what's interesting to me about this and where the rubber really meets the road in this story is, if I were to take you back to Damascus, back to Syria, when Naaman contracted leprosy, and he were to ask you, I need to be healed, what do you think my biggest obstacles are between health and unhealth? What do you think are the biggest things I need to overcome to be healed and to live? We would probably look at external factors, wouldn't we? We would look at the distance between he and Elisha. We would look at the cost. We would look at the probability of it actually working. We would look at all these other external factors. But what we see when we look at the story of Naaman is that Naaman's biggest obstacles for healing were his ego and his expectations. They were internal factors. His biggest obstacles to being healed, to salvation, were his ego and his expectations. He wanted to compensate. He wanted it to be a one-for-one exchange. He wanted to be able to look at Elisha and say, you are going to give me this, and I'm going to give you this. I earned this. I deserve this. It makes sense for you to heal me. We're going to both benefit from this exchange. His ego said that he needed to be able to contribute to it. And isn't that how we work too? I've been in church long enough to hear a line several times talking to people who are considering coming to faith. And they'll say something like, I do think that I want to become a Christian. I do think I want to get back into the church thing, but I just got some stuff I need to clean up first. Or I'll talk to somebody who wants to be baptized. We're going to do a baptism service in September, by the way, so start thinking about whether or not you might want to be a part of that. I've talked with so many people who are thinking about being baptized, but they'll say, yeah, I want to do that, but I've got some things that I need to get in order before I do that. When we say that, what are we doing? Our egos are saying, yeah, I'm going to take that step, but when I do, I'm going to deserve it. When I come to Jesus, it's going to be on my terms. When I come to Jesus, it's going to be because I'm worthy of it. It's going to be because I've gotten through white-knuckle discipline myself in line enough that I feel like I can approach him with a pure heart. When I get baptized, I'm going to earn the right to be baptized. I'm going to bring something to that exchange. It's going to feel like I deserve this gift from God of salvation. When we know that we bring nothing to that exchange. We don't pay God for it. We don't compensate him for his son. We just get our ego out of the way and we accept it. See, to get healed of leprosy, you have to first admit that you have it and that you desperately need to be healed. To get rid of the sin that's in our life, to be aligned with our Creator, to experience salvation, we have to first come to a place where we admit, I'm broken and I need healing. And that's a really hard thing for some of us. We have to come to a place where we admit, my lordship in my life is not working. I need your lordship. It's a hard place for some of us to get to. And what we see from the story of Naaman as we think about it in ourselves is that humility is a prerequisite for salvation. I would be willing to bet, and I don't know everybody enough to say this to you, and I'm sorry if this is too far, but I would be willing to bet that there are those of us who have kept kind of Christianity at arm's length for a while. We've considered it, it's there, and maybe we even think one day I will. Or maybe we think, I know that I should take it more seriously, but one day I will. I wonder if that obstacle between you and just a full bore faith is an ego. Is an, I want to do this on my terms. I'm not ready to accept that lordship all the way. I still think that I'm a pretty good authority in my life. And as long as that exists, as long as we think our rivers back home are good enough, we can't take the steps that God wants us to take. Humility, coming to him humbly, is a prerequisite for salvation. The other thing that got in Naaman's way were his expectations. He said, you're not going to come out and talk to me? You want me to go dip in the river? That's it? You're not going to wave your hand? There's not going to be this big thing and this huge ceremony. I expect that I'd at least get a good prayer out of this. None of that's going to happen. And so often we bring our own expectations to God, and then when he doesn't meet the expectations that we've created in our own heads, we push him off because he's not the God who he said he is, when he never said he would do any of that stuff. Naaman wasn't given those expectations by other prophets who said, listen, when you get to Israel, this is how healings work. That's just what he conjured up. And so when it didn't go according to his plan that he created in his own head, he rejected the plan that God presented him with because it didn't meet his expectations. But if you examine them, he had no right to those expectations. And so often I think we push God away because he doesn't meet the expectations that we created. And here's how this works. We have a tendency, if you think about it, and you think about who God is, we have a tendency to remake God in our own image. For most of us, God is simply the best possible version of us. I think about the things that I value in me, and we assume that God must be those things. And we never do it intentionally. No one would admit to this. No one would be like, oh yeah, totally, I do that. But if you think about who you think God is and how you think he should respond to different situations, what you picture God as is the best possible version of you. It's this version of you that you'll probably never attain, but God is probably that. So then when stuff happens in our life, we think, how would the best possible version of me respond to this? Well, it would respond this way, and that's not how God is responding, so he's not fair. When the God in heaven said, hey, I never gave you those expectations. I never promised you that. When we enter into a season of pain and suffering, when something happens in our life that we feel like isn't fair. And we say a loving God would never let this happen. He let it happen to person after person after person in the Bible. He let it happen to his own son. He let David's infant son die. We can go through story after story after story in the Bible where people who loved God and served him well had to deal with incredible pain. So where are we getting the expectation that when I go to God, everything is going to be good? We made that up. When I go to God, everything is going to go well for me. I'm going to close the sale. I'm going to do the business. My kids are going to finally behave because I'm raising them according to the right standards. Who gave you that expectation? Where are we getting that? Now, the expectation that God gives us is that all things work out in eternity. And that one day when we meet him, everything will make sense. I am confident there are things that are happening even now that I do not understand and I can't pretend to explain. But here's what I trust. One day I'll get to look God in the eye and if I even still care about all the stuff that happened here, if I were to ask him, God, why'd you let this stuff happen? If he would explain it to me in my heavenly form, I would go, okay, that makes sense. Can I get back to worshiping you now? I think so often our expectations that we generate, that God never signed up for, keep us from going to him and knowing him fully. Even expectations on the other end of the pendulum. Sometimes our expectations are, I've done so little. I've known better and not responded to it properly for so long that there's no way that God could accept me. And we let those expectations of God's response keep us away from him when that's not at all what he says. It says in Luke 15 that he's the father that runs to us and waits for us to come back to him. So in the story of Naaman, we see a person like us who was in need of salvation. We see a person like us and like me who very often keeps his ego and his expectations as an obstacle between him and the God that he desperately needs. And my prayer for you, even this morning, even as I was kneeling and praying before I would come preach, is that God would give you the courage and the honesty to see where your ego and your expectations in your life, and in my life, this is a me too thing, are keeping us from knowing God the way he wants to be known. Help us to identify those. Give us the courage to move past those. And if we do that, what will be the result? Look at what Naaman did. I believe. I'm in. Take all my stuff. I don't need it anyways. Naaman's response after humility and receiving the salvation was a joyful and generous love. The result of humble acceptance is a joyful and generous love. It's a love so big and so generous that I have grace for you as I watch you struggle through life. I have grace for you as I see clearly that your ego is keeping you from knowing everything about God that you could know. You have grace for me as you see my wrong expectations keeping me from knowing God well because you know that you've been met there with grace too. We have this contagious joy when we accept love in that way. Scripture tells us, Jesus tells us in Matthew that we are to honor God, that we are to love people in such a way that others will see our good works and so glorify our Father who is in heaven. That without us ever telling them about our faith, they will see our faith lived out and go, there's something different about them and I want it. Paul says in 2 Corinthians that we are led in a procession by Christ and that through us, one of my favorite phrases in the Bible, spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. This thing that just wafts into the lives of others passively as we move through their life and they look at us and they see something that's different. You know what's supposed to be different? A joyful and generous love. You know how we come by that love? By humbling ourselves before God and freely receiving his salvation and his love and his affirmation every day. And then we move through life like Naaman did after he got healed. So my prayer for you is that if there are places in your life where either your ego or your expectations are keeping you from knowing God, from submitting to him, that you would have the courage to see those things. And then ultimately, my prayer for us is that we would move through life like Naaman did at the end of this story with a joyful and generous love of God and love for others. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We are so grateful for you. We thank you for your word, for the Bible, for how rich it is, for everything that we can learn from it and see in it. God, I pray that you would help us to go and to read it on our own and to see the pages come to life and to, God, really study and invest in it. God, speak to us through your word even this week as we read it in the quiet of our own houses and offices. Father, I just pray that you would give us the courage, the clarity, the conviction to see where our ego, our expectations may be keeping us from you. If we see those, God, give us further courage to get them out of the way. And finally, Lord, let us love people with a generosity and a joy that can come only from you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this very hot July Sunday. Hopefully it'll cool down and we can get back outside soon. This is the second part of our series called Obscure Heroes. To know the Bible, to be around church culture at all, is to know some of the main characters of the Bible, some of the people that are a little bit more prominent in the Bible. Even if you've not spent any time in church at all, we've heard of David and of Moses and of Paul, but there are some other people in the Bible that give us great examples of behavior or character that we should emulate that are worth exploring. And so we're investing our summer series in looking at some of these heroes that are a little bit lesser known in the Bible. Now, full disclosure, when I told Jen, my wife, what I was going to be preaching about this week and who I was going to be preaching about, a guy named Naaman in 2 Kings 5. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you don't, there's one in front of you. But we're going to be in 2 Kings 5 today looking at the story of Naaman. And so she pointed out, and I should tell you, that he is not really a hero. Okay? Like he's not, what he does isn't really great. So I told her what I was going to be preaching about and she goes, well, he's not really like that heroic. And I said, well, nobody cares. It's just like, it's just obscure heroes, but this is an obscure story. What's it matter? She was like, it matters. So if it matters to you, I apologize. I beg your forgiveness. All right. But I'm just not going to, I'm not going to check that box today. So this is more like an obscure story. Nonetheless, I think we can learn a lot from the example of Naaman. So if you look in second Kings chapter five, there is a general by the name of Naaman. He's the head general in the Syrian army, which was a really powerful army at this point in history. They're far more powerful than Israel. Israel is like a third world country at this point in history. They're really not impactful on the geopolitical scale. The Syrian army is, and Naaman is the general of this army. And so you have to figure, if you just think about in the ancient world ways to get famous, that pretty much the king in general is it. They didn't have Instagram. They didn't have any influencers back then. So like Naaman, that was all you got. So he had risen to prominence. He was at least regionally famous. If not, at the time, world famous. He was a heavy hitter. He was an important dude. And Naaman comes down with leprosy. We see leprosy through the Bible. It's in the Old Testament and it's in the New Testament. Leprosy was a disease that you got in your skin. I think you can still get it now. It's just we've fixed it. But you can still get it in your skin, and it begins to eat away at your skin, slowly but surely, killing you from the outside in. And to get leprosy was to receive a death sentence. If you contracted leprosy, somehow it was eventually going to eat away at you enough that it was going to kill you. Leprosy was certain death. And it didn't happen a lot in the upper echelons of the socioeconomic scale, but somehow or another, Naaman, maybe from his time spent out on the battlefield in foreign countries and things like that, Naaman contracted leprosy. And of course he feels like he's going to die. But on their last conquest through Israel, they brought back a little Jewish girl to serve Naaman's wife. And she hears that Naaman has leprosy, and she says in 2 Kings 5, she says, Oh, that my Lord would go, my Lord Naaman would go to Israel. There's a prophet there who can heal him. Now, she's talking about a man named Elisha. In the books of 1 and 2 Kings, there's two incredible prophets. I've said there's some of the most underrated figures in the Bible, Elijah and Elisha. One day I want to do a series through their lives, maybe next summer. It's just phenomenal stories. They were tremendous men of faith that God entrusted with tremendous power for the miracles that they would do. And apparently he had cured people before, even of leprosy. And so this little girl that they took back from Israel says, oh, that my Lord would go back to Israel and find Elisha, he could heal her. He could heal him. And so Naaman's wife goes to Naaman and says, hey, there's a prophet back in Israel that can heal you. Like, you should go back there. And so he decides to go. And I wonder, and I try to do this as I read stories in the Bible, and I would encourage you guys to do it too. Sometimes if we read stories in the Bible, if you were to open up your Bible and read 1 and 2 Kings, the stories move so fast. The narrative moves so quickly. There's so little nuance. It's just this happened, this happened, this happened, and then this is the end of the story. So I like to try to slow down and read the humanity into things and figure out what would I be thinking, what would I be feeling if I were in that situation. And I think that when we do this, when you'll read it on your own and you'll put your humanity into what's happening there, I think what you'll get is that the story starts to come alive for you a little bit. And so Naaman hears the testimony of this Hebrew girl and decides that he's going to travel hundreds of miles away to a third world country that's going to take him several weeks to do to go see a faith healer in the backwoods of Israel. Now what would it take for you to do that? If you got a diagnosis that nobody wants, it was a death sentence, you're definitely going to pass away. This is going to claim your life. But if you travel to the Dominican, to the back of a mountain there, there's a faith healer and he's going to make you feel better. How desperate would you have to be to go? Naaman went. He's not a believer. He doesn't believe in the Hebrew God. It's just a weird faith healer in the backwoods of a third world country, and he goes. And before he goes, what does he do? Naaman is so very American. He packs up all of his stuff, and he puts together a small fortune, some changes of clothes, which apparently are a big deal. Like if you wanted to be wealthy, have two jackets. So he puts together some change of clothes to offer to the person that's going to heal him and to the people around that person. He gathers together some livestock and some gold, and he takes a small fortune with him. Because when you get sick, what do we do? If you're diagnosed with something tough, what do you do? You marshal all your resources, you pull everything together, and you go to the best place that's going to treat you, and then you compensate them for their treatment. That's what Naaman's going to do. So he loads everything up, heads to Israel. He gets to Israel, and he tells his king he's going to go. He asks permission from the king of Syria, hey, there's a prophet in Israel, can I go see him? King of Syria says, yeah, sure, go ahead. Gives gives him a letter to carry with him to present. So he goes to Israel. He goes and he sees the king. And listen, what kind of a dude do you have to be to get the audience of a king when you just wander into a country? You have to be a big deal. So the king hears Naaman's here. Oh no, what does the general of the Syrian army want? And Naaman presents him with a letter. And the letter's from the king of Syria, and it says, be pleased to heal my servant Naaman of leprosy. And the Bible says that the king went and tore his clothes, because at this time in history, that's how you express anguish and sadness and despair and anxiety. And I've always wondered if these people had like spare, like tearing clothes that they got from Walmart. Like when I got sad, I would be like, time out. And then I would put on those things and probably pre-snip them and then tear them and then put on my nice kingly garb and be like, okay, that's terrible for those clothes. I don't know what he did. Maybe he just, he could tear outfits all he wanted. But he goes and he tears his clothes and he expresses this great sadness. Why has the king of Syria put this on me that he expects me to provoke him for war? Because it's an impossible task. I can't heal somebody from leprosy, much less the general of the most powerful army in the region right now. There's nothing I can do about this. This is a death sentence for him too. It's an excuse when Naaman goes there and he eventually dies because the king doesn't cure him. Then the Syrians can get ticked off at Israel and go sweeping through there again. And so the king, he's anxious. He is worried. He is in anguish. And word gets to Elisha, the chief prophet, that the king has gotten this letter. So he sends word to the king and he says, I've heard that you've torn your clothes. I hope it was the cheap ones that you got from Walmart. If you would just send Naaman to me, I'll take care of it. Send Naaman to me, I'll heal him. So the king says, okay, here's Naaman's address. You go and, or here's Elisha's address. You go and you see him. And I love how Naaman arrives. He goes to Elisha's house and it says, he arrived on his horses and chariots. So he brings his whole entourage with him. He arrives on his chariots. Nobody in Israel can afford a chariot. Israel has zero chariots. And so this is a huge deal. This is like when they line the streets for some political figure and on the line of Tahos come through and you're like, I don't know where, but somewhere in there, there's somebody that's important. So Naaman creates his own processional and arrives at the gate of Elisha's house, almost with this sense of, I'm here, congratulations. And he tells them, I'm here. And what does Elisha do? I love what Elisha does. What would you do? What would you do if one of the most famous people in the country showed up at your house, showed up at your office, and whoever works the front desk came to you, and they're like, excuse me, Nate, Peyton Manning's here to see you. What would you do? I don't know. I thought all week about who do I say that everybody recognizes as famous? I don't know what to say. Michael Jordan, Peyton Manning, whoever you want, Justin Timberlake, take your pick. Somebody shows up, they're super famous and they want to talk to you. What would you do? I would be like, Aaron, Steve, Kyle, which is, that's the staff here. Sorry, I'm out. I got to go talk to them. Like, I got to, I got to go see them. I would, hello, I'm the senior pastor. It's good to meet you. I'm glad that you're here to see me. Right? Of course, we would soak that up, wouldn't we? What's Elisha do? He grabs an intern. Hey, name is at the gate. Would you go tell him that if he'll dip in the Jordan River seven times that he'll be healed and he'll be good to go? Like, what's Elisha working on? Like a proposal? Like, I'm busy. But he just says, hey, go tell Naaman if he'll dip in the river seven times he'll be healed. And so the intern goes down and tells this to Naaman. And this is how Naaman receives it. If you have a Bible, you can look in 2 Kings 5. I love what he does. Verse 10 says, and Elisha sent a messenger to him saying, go and wash in the Jordan seven times and your flesh will be restored and you shall be clean. He doesn't even let him in. He's like, there's no reason for you to come in here and all that stuff. Just go to the Jordan River. You'll turned and went away in a rage. Naaman's ticked. He's ticked. I remember when I first got out of college, or when I was finishing up college, I sold cars. People don't know this about me, but I sold cars for like six months. And I was on the phone with a guy one day. He was a good old southern boy. And we were kind of going back and forth on the price of a truck. You know, he's got to ask for a price, and I've got to hang on. Let me go check with my manager, and I come back with the price. And it's a whole deal. It's real silly. And so we're going back and forth. And finally he goes, listen, son, am I talking to the man or am I talking to the boy? Because I need to be talking to the man. And I had to admit, I was not the man at Hayes Chrysler. Sir, you are talking to the boy. It was a very low moment in my life. If you know me well, you know that I need more of those and you do not feel sorry for me. And I had to admit, I'm not the decision maker here. That's what Naaman thought. Am I talking to the man or am I talking to the boy? He wanted to talk to the man. He wanted to be made over. He wanted to be fussed over. He wanted Elisha to come out and, oh, it's so great to have you. I'm honored to heal you. And then he wanted the chance after the healing to be able to offer his small fortune, right? He wanted to be able to offer a one-for-one exchange. None of us likes to get help without being able to reciprocate that help, without being able to feel like we in some way earned this or deserve this. He wanted to be able to compensate Elisha, and now he's robbed of that chance. He's not treated like he expects to be treated. Elisha is supposed to make this big scene and wave his hand over him, and I call on the name of the Lord and yada, yada. And he's like, no, just, you're good. Just see the water over there? Just go get in it. And he's going, I traveled hundreds of miles and brought all this stuff for this? You kidding me? I have rivers back home, and they're better than this backwoods river. And so he storms off. He takes his ball and goes home, and he sulks like a little kid. And a little while later, his servants go to him, and it's a loose paraphrase, but essentially they say, Naaman, what do you have to lose, man? You're out here. Just go do it. Just go do what he says. And I can imagine them saying, like, what's the worst that can happen? You get some Jordan River on you. You go home and you rinse off in the Farper. It'll be all right. Just do it. And so he goes after he's calmed down. He dips in the Jordan River, and he's healed of his leprosy. When he sees that he's healed of his leprosy, he's overjoyed. He rushes back to Elisha, and he tries to give him all the stuff. He tries to compensate him. Thank you. Here's this fortune that I brought. And Elisha's like, I don't need it. I didn't do that for your stuff, man. I just did that for you. God told me to heal you. I healed you. I don't need it. And he keeps trying to give it away to whoever will take it. And then a guy named Gehazi, one of Elisha's servants comes to him and he's like, actually, you know, on second thought, Elisha really does need the stuff. And Naaman gives him the stuff. And then Gehazi gets in trouble for taking the stuff. And that's a whole separate story if you keep reading on. But Naaman responds to this healing with a joyful and generous love. Here, here, take all my stuff. This was given to me. I want to be able to give this to you. And he leaves that space professing that there is one true God, and it is the God of Israel. We get a convert out of this interaction. Now, this is a good story, and it's a good one to unpack in the Old Testament. But how does it apply to us? I think we can begin to understand how it applies to us when we realize that leprosy in the Bible is always a picture of sin. We see leprosy in the Old Testament and the New Testament. When we see it in the New Testament, generally Jesus is interacting with them. If you contracted leprosy, you were sent to a colony. You were quarantined. You were no longer allowed to interact with general society. You were unclean. You were sent to a colony, and you were sent there to die. Can you imagine how depressing leper colonies would be? And Jesus walked into these places and he touched and he touched and he touched and he healed and he healed and he healed in the same way that Jesus walks through a sinful world and he heals and he heals and he restores. The picture of leprosy in the Bible is always a picture of sin. Leprosy was a disease that once you got it, it may have started small. In the story of Naaman, it says that he expected Elisha to come out and wave his hand over the place. So maybe leprosy was just starting to appear. Maybe it was on his arm and he could wrap it up. Maybe it was on his ribs and he could cover it up. Maybe it was in a place where if you looked at him, you didn't know that he had it, but he knew that he had it. And isn't that how sin works? When we have things in our lives that don't need to be there, sometimes we can cover it up. We can wrap it up. We can keep it from other people. And sin, just so we're clear, sometimes that word is misunderstood and it's used to make people feel guilty. But really, sin is anything that happens when we elevate our judgment in our life to equivocate God's judgment in our life. And when we say, no, God, I don't think that I want to do the thing that you want me to do. I'm going to do the thing that makes the most sense to me. That's sin. Whatever that is, whatever that looks like, whatever form that takes on. And when we get that, when we sin, just like leprosy, it is a disease that eats away at us and leads to certain death. Isn't this what Jesus, isn't this what God said in Genesis? He told Adam and Eve that if you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that you will surely die. And they ate of it and they didn't drop dead. So either God's a liar or he's not talking about physical death. He's talking about a spiritual death. And what he's saying is, if you elevate your judgment to mine and you throw off my lordship in your life and you become your own little God, then you have eternally separated yourself from me. That's a spiritual death. So sin, just like leprosy, leads to a certain death. Leprosy leads to a physical death. Sin leads to a spiritual death. But there's a parallel there. And in this story, Naaman is healed, but we should think about it as salvation. Naaman seeks salvation. And to be healed for his salvation, he had to accept the word of God and be obedient and humble himself and go dip in a river that didn't make any sense. For us to receive salvation, spiritual healing from God, we place our faith in what Jesus did on the cross for us. And in some ways, sometimes it doesn't make much sense. But we accept that free gift from Jesus. As we move through the Christian life and we understand salvation is, yes, an event when we place our faith in Christ, but it's also this ongoing process that the Bible calls sanctification, which just means becoming more like God in character. And that to be sanctified, to become more like God in character, it's every day this decision to trust on God rather than ourselves. It's every day to trust in God's way rather than our way. It's every day to trust in his lordship rather than our lordship. It's the same decision that Naaman had to make every day as we seek this salvation, as we fight off sin. And so what we see in the story of Naaman and what makes it relevant to us is that the physical healing of leprosy is a picture of our spiritual healing from sin. The physical healing of leprosy is a picture of our spiritual healing from sin. It works the same way. Naaman needed salvation for a disease that would lead to certain death. We need salvation from a disease that will lead to certain spiritual death or eternal separation from God. And what's interesting to me about this and where the rubber really meets the road in this story is, if I were to take you back to Damascus, back to Syria, when Naaman contracted leprosy, and he were to ask you, I need to be healed, what do you think my biggest obstacles are between health and unhealth? What do you think are the biggest things I need to overcome to be healed and to live? We would probably look at external factors, wouldn't we? We would look at the distance between he and Elisha. We would look at the cost. We would look at the probability of it actually working. We would look at all these other external factors. But what we see when we look at the story of Naaman is that Naaman's biggest obstacles for healing were his ego and his expectations. They were internal factors. His biggest obstacles to being healed, to salvation, were his ego and his expectations. He wanted to compensate. He wanted it to be a one-for-one exchange. He wanted to be able to look at Elisha and say, you are going to give me this, and I'm going to give you this. I earned this. I deserve this. It makes sense for you to heal me. We're going to both benefit from this exchange. His ego said that he needed to be able to contribute to it. And isn't that how we work too? I've been in church long enough to hear a line several times talking to people who are considering coming to faith. And they'll say something like, I do think that I want to become a Christian. I do think I want to get back into the church thing, but I just got some stuff I need to clean up first. Or I'll talk to somebody who wants to be baptized. We're going to do a baptism service in September, by the way, so start thinking about whether or not you might want to be a part of that. I've talked with so many people who are thinking about being baptized, but they'll say, yeah, I want to do that, but I've got some things that I need to get in order before I do that. When we say that, what are we doing? Our egos are saying, yeah, I'm going to take that step, but when I do, I'm going to deserve it. When I come to Jesus, it's going to be on my terms. When I come to Jesus, it's going to be because I'm worthy of it. It's going to be because I've gotten through white-knuckle discipline myself in line enough that I feel like I can approach him with a pure heart. When I get baptized, I'm going to earn the right to be baptized. I'm going to bring something to that exchange. It's going to feel like I deserve this gift from God of salvation. When we know that we bring nothing to that exchange. We don't pay God for it. We don't compensate him for his son. We just get our ego out of the way and we accept it. See, to get healed of leprosy, you have to first admit that you have it and that you desperately need to be healed. To get rid of the sin that's in our life, to be aligned with our Creator, to experience salvation, we have to first come to a place where we admit, I'm broken and I need healing. And that's a really hard thing for some of us. We have to come to a place where we admit, my lordship in my life is not working. I need your lordship. It's a hard place for some of us to get to. And what we see from the story of Naaman as we think about it in ourselves is that humility is a prerequisite for salvation. I would be willing to bet, and I don't know everybody enough to say this to you, and I'm sorry if this is too far, but I would be willing to bet that there are those of us who have kept kind of Christianity at arm's length for a while. We've considered it, it's there, and maybe we even think one day I will. Or maybe we think, I know that I should take it more seriously, but one day I will. I wonder if that obstacle between you and just a full bore faith is an ego. Is an, I want to do this on my terms. I'm not ready to accept that lordship all the way. I still think that I'm a pretty good authority in my life. And as long as that exists, as long as we think our rivers back home are good enough, we can't take the steps that God wants us to take. Humility, coming to him humbly, is a prerequisite for salvation. The other thing that got in Naaman's way were his expectations. He said, you're not going to come out and talk to me? You want me to go dip in the river? That's it? You're not going to wave your hand? There's not going to be this big thing and this huge ceremony. I expect that I'd at least get a good prayer out of this. None of that's going to happen. And so often we bring our own expectations to God, and then when he doesn't meet the expectations that we've created in our own heads, we push him off because he's not the God who he said he is, when he never said he would do any of that stuff. Naaman wasn't given those expectations by other prophets who said, listen, when you get to Israel, this is how healings work. That's just what he conjured up. And so when it didn't go according to his plan that he created in his own head, he rejected the plan that God presented him with because it didn't meet his expectations. But if you examine them, he had no right to those expectations. And so often I think we push God away because he doesn't meet the expectations that we created. And here's how this works. We have a tendency, if you think about it, and you think about who God is, we have a tendency to remake God in our own image. For most of us, God is simply the best possible version of us. I think about the things that I value in me, and we assume that God must be those things. And we never do it intentionally. No one would admit to this. No one would be like, oh yeah, totally, I do that. But if you think about who you think God is and how you think he should respond to different situations, what you picture God as is the best possible version of you. It's this version of you that you'll probably never attain, but God is probably that. So then when stuff happens in our life, we think, how would the best possible version of me respond to this? Well, it would respond this way, and that's not how God is responding, so he's not fair. When the God in heaven said, hey, I never gave you those expectations. I never promised you that. When we enter into a season of pain and suffering, when something happens in our life that we feel like isn't fair. And we say a loving God would never let this happen. He let it happen to person after person after person in the Bible. He let it happen to his own son. He let David's infant son die. We can go through story after story after story in the Bible where people who loved God and served him well had to deal with incredible pain. So where are we getting the expectation that when I go to God, everything is going to be good? We made that up. When I go to God, everything is going to go well for me. I'm going to close the sale. I'm going to do the business. My kids are going to finally behave because I'm raising them according to the right standards. Who gave you that expectation? Where are we getting that? Now, the expectation that God gives us is that all things work out in eternity. And that one day when we meet him, everything will make sense. I am confident there are things that are happening even now that I do not understand and I can't pretend to explain. But here's what I trust. One day I'll get to look God in the eye and if I even still care about all the stuff that happened here, if I were to ask him, God, why'd you let this stuff happen? If he would explain it to me in my heavenly form, I would go, okay, that makes sense. Can I get back to worshiping you now? I think so often our expectations that we generate, that God never signed up for, keep us from going to him and knowing him fully. Even expectations on the other end of the pendulum. Sometimes our expectations are, I've done so little. I've known better and not responded to it properly for so long that there's no way that God could accept me. And we let those expectations of God's response keep us away from him when that's not at all what he says. It says in Luke 15 that he's the father that runs to us and waits for us to come back to him. So in the story of Naaman, we see a person like us who was in need of salvation. We see a person like us and like me who very often keeps his ego and his expectations as an obstacle between him and the God that he desperately needs. And my prayer for you, even this morning, even as I was kneeling and praying before I would come preach, is that God would give you the courage and the honesty to see where your ego and your expectations in your life, and in my life, this is a me too thing, are keeping us from knowing God the way he wants to be known. Help us to identify those. Give us the courage to move past those. And if we do that, what will be the result? Look at what Naaman did. I believe. I'm in. Take all my stuff. I don't need it anyways. Naaman's response after humility and receiving the salvation was a joyful and generous love. The result of humble acceptance is a joyful and generous love. It's a love so big and so generous that I have grace for you as I watch you struggle through life. I have grace for you as I see clearly that your ego is keeping you from knowing everything about God that you could know. You have grace for me as you see my wrong expectations keeping me from knowing God well because you know that you've been met there with grace too. We have this contagious joy when we accept love in that way. Scripture tells us, Jesus tells us in Matthew that we are to honor God, that we are to love people in such a way that others will see our good works and so glorify our Father who is in heaven. That without us ever telling them about our faith, they will see our faith lived out and go, there's something different about them and I want it. Paul says in 2 Corinthians that we are led in a procession by Christ and that through us, one of my favorite phrases in the Bible, spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. This thing that just wafts into the lives of others passively as we move through their life and they look at us and they see something that's different. You know what's supposed to be different? A joyful and generous love. You know how we come by that love? By humbling ourselves before God and freely receiving his salvation and his love and his affirmation every day. And then we move through life like Naaman did after he got healed. So my prayer for you is that if there are places in your life where either your ego or your expectations are keeping you from knowing God, from submitting to him, that you would have the courage to see those things. And then ultimately, my prayer for us is that we would move through life like Naaman did at the end of this story with a joyful and generous love of God and love for others. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We are so grateful for you. We thank you for your word, for the Bible, for how rich it is, for everything that we can learn from it and see in it. God, I pray that you would help us to go and to read it on our own and to see the pages come to life and to, God, really study and invest in it. God, speak to us through your word even this week as we read it in the quiet of our own houses and offices. Father, I just pray that you would give us the courage, the clarity, the conviction to see where our ego, our expectations may be keeping us from you. If we see those, God, give us further courage to get them out of the way. And finally, Lord, let us love people with a generosity and a joy that can come only from you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this very hot July Sunday. Hopefully it'll cool down and we can get back outside soon. This is the second part of our series called Obscure Heroes. To know the Bible, to be around church culture at all, is to know some of the main characters of the Bible, some of the people that are a little bit more prominent in the Bible. Even if you've not spent any time in church at all, we've heard of David and of Moses and of Paul, but there are some other people in the Bible that give us great examples of behavior or character that we should emulate that are worth exploring. And so we're investing our summer series in looking at some of these heroes that are a little bit lesser known in the Bible. Now, full disclosure, when I told Jen, my wife, what I was going to be preaching about this week and who I was going to be preaching about, a guy named Naaman in 2 Kings 5. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you don't, there's one in front of you. But we're going to be in 2 Kings 5 today looking at the story of Naaman. And so she pointed out, and I should tell you, that he is not really a hero. Okay? Like he's not, what he does isn't really great. So I told her what I was going to be preaching about and she goes, well, he's not really like that heroic. And I said, well, nobody cares. It's just like, it's just obscure heroes, but this is an obscure story. What's it matter? She was like, it matters. So if it matters to you, I apologize. I beg your forgiveness. All right. But I'm just not going to, I'm not going to check that box today. So this is more like an obscure story. Nonetheless, I think we can learn a lot from the example of Naaman. So if you look in second Kings chapter five, there is a general by the name of Naaman. He's the head general in the Syrian army, which was a really powerful army at this point in history. They're far more powerful than Israel. Israel is like a third world country at this point in history. They're really not impactful on the geopolitical scale. The Syrian army is, and Naaman is the general of this army. And so you have to figure, if you just think about in the ancient world ways to get famous, that pretty much the king in general is it. They didn't have Instagram. They didn't have any influencers back then. So like Naaman, that was all you got. So he had risen to prominence. He was at least regionally famous. If not, at the time, world famous. He was a heavy hitter. He was an important dude. And Naaman comes down with leprosy. We see leprosy through the Bible. It's in the Old Testament and it's in the New Testament. Leprosy was a disease that you got in your skin. I think you can still get it now. It's just we've fixed it. But you can still get it in your skin, and it begins to eat away at your skin, slowly but surely, killing you from the outside in. And to get leprosy was to receive a death sentence. If you contracted leprosy, somehow it was eventually going to eat away at you enough that it was going to kill you. Leprosy was certain death. And it didn't happen a lot in the upper echelons of the socioeconomic scale, but somehow or another, Naaman, maybe from his time spent out on the battlefield in foreign countries and things like that, Naaman contracted leprosy. And of course he feels like he's going to die. But on their last conquest through Israel, they brought back a little Jewish girl to serve Naaman's wife. And she hears that Naaman has leprosy, and she says in 2 Kings 5, she says, Oh, that my Lord would go, my Lord Naaman would go to Israel. There's a prophet there who can heal him. Now, she's talking about a man named Elisha. In the books of 1 and 2 Kings, there's two incredible prophets. I've said there's some of the most underrated figures in the Bible, Elijah and Elisha. One day I want to do a series through their lives, maybe next summer. It's just phenomenal stories. They were tremendous men of faith that God entrusted with tremendous power for the miracles that they would do. And apparently he had cured people before, even of leprosy. And so this little girl that they took back from Israel says, oh, that my Lord would go back to Israel and find Elisha, he could heal her. He could heal him. And so Naaman's wife goes to Naaman and says, hey, there's a prophet back in Israel that can heal you. Like, you should go back there. And so he decides to go. And I wonder, and I try to do this as I read stories in the Bible, and I would encourage you guys to do it too. Sometimes if we read stories in the Bible, if you were to open up your Bible and read 1 and 2 Kings, the stories move so fast. The narrative moves so quickly. There's so little nuance. It's just this happened, this happened, this happened, and then this is the end of the story. So I like to try to slow down and read the humanity into things and figure out what would I be thinking, what would I be feeling if I were in that situation. And I think that when we do this, when you'll read it on your own and you'll put your humanity into what's happening there, I think what you'll get is that the story starts to come alive for you a little bit. And so Naaman hears the testimony of this Hebrew girl and decides that he's going to travel hundreds of miles away to a third world country that's going to take him several weeks to do to go see a faith healer in the backwoods of Israel. Now what would it take for you to do that? If you got a diagnosis that nobody wants, it was a death sentence, you're definitely going to pass away. This is going to claim your life. But if you travel to the Dominican, to the back of a mountain there, there's a faith healer and he's going to make you feel better. How desperate would you have to be to go? Naaman went. He's not a believer. He doesn't believe in the Hebrew God. It's just a weird faith healer in the backwoods of a third world country, and he goes. And before he goes, what does he do? Naaman is so very American. He packs up all of his stuff, and he puts together a small fortune, some changes of clothes, which apparently are a big deal. Like if you wanted to be wealthy, have two jackets. So he puts together some change of clothes to offer to the person that's going to heal him and to the people around that person. He gathers together some livestock and some gold, and he takes a small fortune with him. Because when you get sick, what do we do? If you're diagnosed with something tough, what do you do? You marshal all your resources, you pull everything together, and you go to the best place that's going to treat you, and then you compensate them for their treatment. That's what Naaman's going to do. So he loads everything up, heads to Israel. He gets to Israel, and he tells his king he's going to go. He asks permission from the king of Syria, hey, there's a prophet in Israel, can I go see him? King of Syria says, yeah, sure, go ahead. Gives gives him a letter to carry with him to present. So he goes to Israel. He goes and he sees the king. And listen, what kind of a dude do you have to be to get the audience of a king when you just wander into a country? You have to be a big deal. So the king hears Naaman's here. Oh no, what does the general of the Syrian army want? And Naaman presents him with a letter. And the letter's from the king of Syria, and it says, be pleased to heal my servant Naaman of leprosy. And the Bible says that the king went and tore his clothes, because at this time in history, that's how you express anguish and sadness and despair and anxiety. And I've always wondered if these people had like spare, like tearing clothes that they got from Walmart. Like when I got sad, I would be like, time out. And then I would put on those things and probably pre-snip them and then tear them and then put on my nice kingly garb and be like, okay, that's terrible for those clothes. I don't know what he did. Maybe he just, he could tear outfits all he wanted. But he goes and he tears his clothes and he expresses this great sadness. Why has the king of Syria put this on me that he expects me to provoke him for war? Because it's an impossible task. I can't heal somebody from leprosy, much less the general of the most powerful army in the region right now. There's nothing I can do about this. This is a death sentence for him too. It's an excuse when Naaman goes there and he eventually dies because the king doesn't cure him. Then the Syrians can get ticked off at Israel and go sweeping through there again. And so the king, he's anxious. He is worried. He is in anguish. And word gets to Elisha, the chief prophet, that the king has gotten this letter. So he sends word to the king and he says, I've heard that you've torn your clothes. I hope it was the cheap ones that you got from Walmart. If you would just send Naaman to me, I'll take care of it. Send Naaman to me, I'll heal him. So the king says, okay, here's Naaman's address. You go and, or here's Elisha's address. You go and you see him. And I love how Naaman arrives. He goes to Elisha's house and it says, he arrived on his horses and chariots. So he brings his whole entourage with him. He arrives on his chariots. Nobody in Israel can afford a chariot. Israel has zero chariots. And so this is a huge deal. This is like when they line the streets for some political figure and on the line of Tahos come through and you're like, I don't know where, but somewhere in there, there's somebody that's important. So Naaman creates his own processional and arrives at the gate of Elisha's house, almost with this sense of, I'm here, congratulations. And he tells them, I'm here. And what does Elisha do? I love what Elisha does. What would you do? What would you do if one of the most famous people in the country showed up at your house, showed up at your office, and whoever works the front desk came to you, and they're like, excuse me, Nate, Peyton Manning's here to see you. What would you do? I don't know. I thought all week about who do I say that everybody recognizes as famous? I don't know what to say. Michael Jordan, Peyton Manning, whoever you want, Justin Timberlake, take your pick. Somebody shows up, they're super famous and they want to talk to you. What would you do? I would be like, Aaron, Steve, Kyle, which is, that's the staff here. Sorry, I'm out. I got to go talk to them. Like, I got to, I got to go see them. I would, hello, I'm the senior pastor. It's good to meet you. I'm glad that you're here to see me. Right? Of course, we would soak that up, wouldn't we? What's Elisha do? He grabs an intern. Hey, name is at the gate. Would you go tell him that if he'll dip in the Jordan River seven times that he'll be healed and he'll be good to go? Like, what's Elisha working on? Like a proposal? Like, I'm busy. But he just says, hey, go tell Naaman if he'll dip in the river seven times he'll be healed. And so the intern goes down and tells this to Naaman. And this is how Naaman receives it. If you have a Bible, you can look in 2 Kings 5. I love what he does. Verse 10 says, and Elisha sent a messenger to him saying, go and wash in the Jordan seven times and your flesh will be restored and you shall be clean. He doesn't even let him in. He's like, there's no reason for you to come in here and all that stuff. Just go to the Jordan River. You'll turned and went away in a rage. Naaman's ticked. He's ticked. I remember when I first got out of college, or when I was finishing up college, I sold cars. People don't know this about me, but I sold cars for like six months. And I was on the phone with a guy one day. He was a good old southern boy. And we were kind of going back and forth on the price of a truck. You know, he's got to ask for a price, and I've got to hang on. Let me go check with my manager, and I come back with the price. And it's a whole deal. It's real silly. And so we're going back and forth. And finally he goes, listen, son, am I talking to the man or am I talking to the boy? Because I need to be talking to the man. And I had to admit, I was not the man at Hayes Chrysler. Sir, you are talking to the boy. It was a very low moment in my life. If you know me well, you know that I need more of those and you do not feel sorry for me. And I had to admit, I'm not the decision maker here. That's what Naaman thought. Am I talking to the man or am I talking to the boy? He wanted to talk to the man. He wanted to be made over. He wanted to be fussed over. He wanted Elisha to come out and, oh, it's so great to have you. I'm honored to heal you. And then he wanted the chance after the healing to be able to offer his small fortune, right? He wanted to be able to offer a one-for-one exchange. None of us likes to get help without being able to reciprocate that help, without being able to feel like we in some way earned this or deserve this. He wanted to be able to compensate Elisha, and now he's robbed of that chance. He's not treated like he expects to be treated. Elisha is supposed to make this big scene and wave his hand over him, and I call on the name of the Lord and yada, yada. And he's like, no, just, you're good. Just see the water over there? Just go get in it. And he's going, I traveled hundreds of miles and brought all this stuff for this? You kidding me? I have rivers back home, and they're better than this backwoods river. And so he storms off. He takes his ball and goes home, and he sulks like a little kid. And a little while later, his servants go to him, and it's a loose paraphrase, but essentially they say, Naaman, what do you have to lose, man? You're out here. Just go do it. Just go do what he says. And I can imagine them saying, like, what's the worst that can happen? You get some Jordan River on you. You go home and you rinse off in the Farper. It'll be all right. Just do it. And so he goes after he's calmed down. He dips in the Jordan River, and he's healed of his leprosy. When he sees that he's healed of his leprosy, he's overjoyed. He rushes back to Elisha, and he tries to give him all the stuff. He tries to compensate him. Thank you. Here's this fortune that I brought. And Elisha's like, I don't need it. I didn't do that for your stuff, man. I just did that for you. God told me to heal you. I healed you. I don't need it. And he keeps trying to give it away to whoever will take it. And then a guy named Gehazi, one of Elisha's servants comes to him and he's like, actually, you know, on second thought, Elisha really does need the stuff. And Naaman gives him the stuff. And then Gehazi gets in trouble for taking the stuff. And that's a whole separate story if you keep reading on. But Naaman responds to this healing with a joyful and generous love. Here, here, take all my stuff. This was given to me. I want to be able to give this to you. And he leaves that space professing that there is one true God, and it is the God of Israel. We get a convert out of this interaction. Now, this is a good story, and it's a good one to unpack in the Old Testament. But how does it apply to us? I think we can begin to understand how it applies to us when we realize that leprosy in the Bible is always a picture of sin. We see leprosy in the Old Testament and the New Testament. When we see it in the New Testament, generally Jesus is interacting with them. If you contracted leprosy, you were sent to a colony. You were quarantined. You were no longer allowed to interact with general society. You were unclean. You were sent to a colony, and you were sent there to die. Can you imagine how depressing leper colonies would be? And Jesus walked into these places and he touched and he touched and he touched and he healed and he healed and he healed in the same way that Jesus walks through a sinful world and he heals and he heals and he restores. The picture of leprosy in the Bible is always a picture of sin. Leprosy was a disease that once you got it, it may have started small. In the story of Naaman, it says that he expected Elisha to come out and wave his hand over the place. So maybe leprosy was just starting to appear. Maybe it was on his arm and he could wrap it up. Maybe it was on his ribs and he could cover it up. Maybe it was in a place where if you looked at him, you didn't know that he had it, but he knew that he had it. And isn't that how sin works? When we have things in our lives that don't need to be there, sometimes we can cover it up. We can wrap it up. We can keep it from other people. And sin, just so we're clear, sometimes that word is misunderstood and it's used to make people feel guilty. But really, sin is anything that happens when we elevate our judgment in our life to equivocate God's judgment in our life. And when we say, no, God, I don't think that I want to do the thing that you want me to do. I'm going to do the thing that makes the most sense to me. That's sin. Whatever that is, whatever that looks like, whatever form that takes on. And when we get that, when we sin, just like leprosy, it is a disease that eats away at us and leads to certain death. Isn't this what Jesus, isn't this what God said in Genesis? He told Adam and Eve that if you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that you will surely die. And they ate of it and they didn't drop dead. So either God's a liar or he's not talking about physical death. He's talking about a spiritual death. And what he's saying is, if you elevate your judgment to mine and you throw off my lordship in your life and you become your own little God, then you have eternally separated yourself from me. That's a spiritual death. So sin, just like leprosy, leads to a certain death. Leprosy leads to a physical death. Sin leads to a spiritual death. But there's a parallel there. And in this story, Naaman is healed, but we should think about it as salvation. Naaman seeks salvation. And to be healed for his salvation, he had to accept the word of God and be obedient and humble himself and go dip in a river that didn't make any sense. For us to receive salvation, spiritual healing from God, we place our faith in what Jesus did on the cross for us. And in some ways, sometimes it doesn't make much sense. But we accept that free gift from Jesus. As we move through the Christian life and we understand salvation is, yes, an event when we place our faith in Christ, but it's also this ongoing process that the Bible calls sanctification, which just means becoming more like God in character. And that to be sanctified, to become more like God in character, it's every day this decision to trust on God rather than ourselves. It's every day to trust in God's way rather than our way. It's every day to trust in his lordship rather than our lordship. It's the same decision that Naaman had to make every day as we seek this salvation, as we fight off sin. And so what we see in the story of Naaman and what makes it relevant to us is that the physical healing of leprosy is a picture of our spiritual healing from sin. The physical healing of leprosy is a picture of our spiritual healing from sin. It works the same way. Naaman needed salvation for a disease that would lead to certain death. We need salvation from a disease that will lead to certain spiritual death or eternal separation from God. And what's interesting to me about this and where the rubber really meets the road in this story is, if I were to take you back to Damascus, back to Syria, when Naaman contracted leprosy, and he were to ask you, I need to be healed, what do you think my biggest obstacles are between health and unhealth? What do you think are the biggest things I need to overcome to be healed and to live? We would probably look at external factors, wouldn't we? We would look at the distance between he and Elisha. We would look at the cost. We would look at the probability of it actually working. We would look at all these other external factors. But what we see when we look at the story of Naaman is that Naaman's biggest obstacles for healing were his ego and his expectations. They were internal factors. His biggest obstacles to being healed, to salvation, were his ego and his expectations. He wanted to compensate. He wanted it to be a one-for-one exchange. He wanted to be able to look at Elisha and say, you are going to give me this, and I'm going to give you this. I earned this. I deserve this. It makes sense for you to heal me. We're going to both benefit from this exchange. His ego said that he needed to be able to contribute to it. And isn't that how we work too? I've been in church long enough to hear a line several times talking to people who are considering coming to faith. And they'll say something like, I do think that I want to become a Christian. I do think I want to get back into the church thing, but I just got some stuff I need to clean up first. Or I'll talk to somebody who wants to be baptized. We're going to do a baptism service in September, by the way, so start thinking about whether or not you might want to be a part of that. I've talked with so many people who are thinking about being baptized, but they'll say, yeah, I want to do that, but I've got some things that I need to get in order before I do that. When we say that, what are we doing? Our egos are saying, yeah, I'm going to take that step, but when I do, I'm going to deserve it. When I come to Jesus, it's going to be on my terms. When I come to Jesus, it's going to be because I'm worthy of it. It's going to be because I've gotten through white-knuckle discipline myself in line enough that I feel like I can approach him with a pure heart. When I get baptized, I'm going to earn the right to be baptized. I'm going to bring something to that exchange. It's going to feel like I deserve this gift from God of salvation. When we know that we bring nothing to that exchange. We don't pay God for it. We don't compensate him for his son. We just get our ego out of the way and we accept it. See, to get healed of leprosy, you have to first admit that you have it and that you desperately need to be healed. To get rid of the sin that's in our life, to be aligned with our Creator, to experience salvation, we have to first come to a place where we admit, I'm broken and I need healing. And that's a really hard thing for some of us. We have to come to a place where we admit, my lordship in my life is not working. I need your lordship. It's a hard place for some of us to get to. And what we see from the story of Naaman as we think about it in ourselves is that humility is a prerequisite for salvation. I would be willing to bet, and I don't know everybody enough to say this to you, and I'm sorry if this is too far, but I would be willing to bet that there are those of us who have kept kind of Christianity at arm's length for a while. We've considered it, it's there, and maybe we even think one day I will. Or maybe we think, I know that I should take it more seriously, but one day I will. I wonder if that obstacle between you and just a full bore faith is an ego. Is an, I want to do this on my terms. I'm not ready to accept that lordship all the way. I still think that I'm a pretty good authority in my life. And as long as that exists, as long as we think our rivers back home are good enough, we can't take the steps that God wants us to take. Humility, coming to him humbly, is a prerequisite for salvation. The other thing that got in Naaman's way were his expectations. He said, you're not going to come out and talk to me? You want me to go dip in the river? That's it? You're not going to wave your hand? There's not going to be this big thing and this huge ceremony. I expect that I'd at least get a good prayer out of this. None of that's going to happen. And so often we bring our own expectations to God, and then when he doesn't meet the expectations that we've created in our own heads, we push him off because he's not the God who he said he is, when he never said he would do any of that stuff. Naaman wasn't given those expectations by other prophets who said, listen, when you get to Israel, this is how healings work. That's just what he conjured up. And so when it didn't go according to his plan that he created in his own head, he rejected the plan that God presented him with because it didn't meet his expectations. But if you examine them, he had no right to those expectations. And so often I think we push God away because he doesn't meet the expectations that we created. And here's how this works. We have a tendency, if you think about it, and you think about who God is, we have a tendency to remake God in our own image. For most of us, God is simply the best possible version of us. I think about the things that I value in me, and we assume that God must be those things. And we never do it intentionally. No one would admit to this. No one would be like, oh yeah, totally, I do that. But if you think about who you think God is and how you think he should respond to different situations, what you picture God as is the best possible version of you. It's this version of you that you'll probably never attain, but God is probably that. So then when stuff happens in our life, we think, how would the best possible version of me respond to this? Well, it would respond this way, and that's not how God is responding, so he's not fair. When the God in heaven said, hey, I never gave you those expectations. I never promised you that. When we enter into a season of pain and suffering, when something happens in our life that we feel like isn't fair. And we say a loving God would never let this happen. He let it happen to person after person after person in the Bible. He let it happen to his own son. He let David's infant son die. We can go through story after story after story in the Bible where people who loved God and served him well had to deal with incredible pain. So where are we getting the expectation that when I go to God, everything is going to be good? We made that up. When I go to God, everything is going to go well for me. I'm going to close the sale. I'm going to do the business. My kids are going to finally behave because I'm raising them according to the right standards. Who gave you that expectation? Where are we getting that? Now, the expectation that God gives us is that all things work out in eternity. And that one day when we meet him, everything will make sense. I am confident there are things that are happening even now that I do not understand and I can't pretend to explain. But here's what I trust. One day I'll get to look God in the eye and if I even still care about all the stuff that happened here, if I were to ask him, God, why'd you let this stuff happen? If he would explain it to me in my heavenly form, I would go, okay, that makes sense. Can I get back to worshiping you now? I think so often our expectations that we generate, that God never signed up for, keep us from going to him and knowing him fully. Even expectations on the other end of the pendulum. Sometimes our expectations are, I've done so little. I've known better and not responded to it properly for so long that there's no way that God could accept me. And we let those expectations of God's response keep us away from him when that's not at all what he says. It says in Luke 15 that he's the father that runs to us and waits for us to come back to him. So in the story of Naaman, we see a person like us who was in need of salvation. We see a person like us and like me who very often keeps his ego and his expectations as an obstacle between him and the God that he desperately needs. And my prayer for you, even this morning, even as I was kneeling and praying before I would come preach, is that God would give you the courage and the honesty to see where your ego and your expectations in your life, and in my life, this is a me too thing, are keeping us from knowing God the way he wants to be known. Help us to identify those. Give us the courage to move past those. And if we do that, what will be the result? Look at what Naaman did. I believe. I'm in. Take all my stuff. I don't need it anyways. Naaman's response after humility and receiving the salvation was a joyful and generous love. The result of humble acceptance is a joyful and generous love. It's a love so big and so generous that I have grace for you as I watch you struggle through life. I have grace for you as I see clearly that your ego is keeping you from knowing everything about God that you could know. You have grace for me as you see my wrong expectations keeping me from knowing God well because you know that you've been met there with grace too. We have this contagious joy when we accept love in that way. Scripture tells us, Jesus tells us in Matthew that we are to honor God, that we are to love people in such a way that others will see our good works and so glorify our Father who is in heaven. That without us ever telling them about our faith, they will see our faith lived out and go, there's something different about them and I want it. Paul says in 2 Corinthians that we are led in a procession by Christ and that through us, one of my favorite phrases in the Bible, spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. This thing that just wafts into the lives of others passively as we move through their life and they look at us and they see something that's different. You know what's supposed to be different? A joyful and generous love. You know how we come by that love? By humbling ourselves before God and freely receiving his salvation and his love and his affirmation every day. And then we move through life like Naaman did after he got healed. So my prayer for you is that if there are places in your life where either your ego or your expectations are keeping you from knowing God, from submitting to him, that you would have the courage to see those things. And then ultimately, my prayer for us is that we would move through life like Naaman did at the end of this story with a joyful and generous love of God and love for others. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We are so grateful for you. We thank you for your word, for the Bible, for how rich it is, for everything that we can learn from it and see in it. God, I pray that you would help us to go and to read it on our own and to see the pages come to life and to, God, really study and invest in it. God, speak to us through your word even this week as we read it in the quiet of our own houses and offices. Father, I just pray that you would give us the courage, the clarity, the conviction to see where our ego, our expectations may be keeping us from you. If we see those, God, give us further courage to get them out of the way. And finally, Lord, let us love people with a generosity and a joy that can come only from you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. Here we are again. I'm so glad to be able to share this with you. Before I jump into the sermon, I just wanted to let you know that we are opening up elder nominations right now through the end of April, through April 30. So you have a month to go online to graceralee.org slash elders and fill out a nomination form if there's something you think would make a great elder of the church. Our church is elder-led. The elder board is hugely important to me. At the end of this year, two of our elders, Andrea Hounchell and Burt Banks, will have completed six years serving the church in that capacity, and it will be time for them to roll off. At the end of last year, another elder, Bill Reith, rolled off, and so that means that going into 2021, we can add up to three elders if we wanted to. I will also tell you that we are really hoping to add some women to the elder board. Andrea, like I said, is rolling off at the end of this year, and that will leave us with one woman, Allie Snyder, on the elder board. So we would love to add some ladies to the board and get that good and helpful perspective as we continue on as a church. So if you have someone that you think would make a great elder, please go online to that website, to graceralee.org slash elders, and get that nomination in to us. We would really appreciate that. Now, as I launch into the sermon, last week we took a break from our series, Storyteller, where we are talking about the parables that Jesus, one of the greatest storytellers to ever live, we're talking about the parables that he told. And again, a parable is a short fictional story that makes a moral point. This week, we're jumping into a parable found in Luke chapter 7. So if you have a Bible there with you at home, I hope you'll open it up and look at verse 36. That's where this story starts. This week is going to be a parable embedded in a story. I've been doing vocational ministry now for 20 years. Just recently, I turned 39, and so it's depressing to know that when I was 19 years old, I took my first job in ministry with a ministry called Young Life. So for 20 years, I've been doing ministry vocationally. And during those 20 years, I've seen a lot of things change. I've seen a lot of examples of how to do ministry in some ways not to do ministry. But one of the constants that I've seen is the zeal of a fresh convert, the zeal and the passion for Jesus of someone who's coming to know him for the first time. There's a similar zeal for someone who has grown up in church or grown up considering themselves a Christian, but maybe wandered away or ventured away from the faith. And there's some sort of event that brings them back to Jesus and they have this fresh passion and this fresh zeal for him. For a lot of us, maybe that's our story, that we grew up as believers, and at some point in our life, we wandered away, and then we came back, and we were filled with that zeal and that passion again. And for me, I've been a believer. I've claimed a faith for literally as long as my memory goes back. I accepted Christ at a very young age and don't have much of a memory of what it was like to be in life without faith. And for some of you, that's your story too. And if that's your story, then you can probably relate to me that when I see the zeal and the passion of a fresh convert or someone who's coming back to the faith after a long time away, I'm often jealous of that zeal. I want some of that, you know? I want that passion for Jesus. I want that passion for the Father. I want to be as excited about the faith as they are. And often I'm not just jealous, but I'm convicted. And I wonder, why don't I have that zeal? Why don't I have that passion? It seems like after years or decades of walking with Jesus, of growing closer to the Father, of being guided by the Spirit, that we would have a more natural, deep passion and exuberance for God. It seems like that should grow over time rather than diminish. And if you can relate to that, if you've felt a diminishing in your own life of zeal for Jesus, then I think it would be great to look at the parable that we find in Luke chapter 7 and learn from Jesus what it means to be passionate for Him and try to identify what it is that fuels that passion. In Luke chapter 7, Jesus is invited over to a Pharisee's house. The Pharisee is a guy named Simon. He's invited over for dinner, and you can look in your Bible there in verse 36. He's invited over for dinner, and we pick up the story. He's reclining at the table. The tables back in the day were low, and so you would kind of lay on them with your shoulders towards the table and your feet behind you. And so Jesus was reclining at the table. He's talking to Simon, and as he's talking to Simon, a woman shows up. Scriptures say that it was a woman of the city, which is a nice way of saying that she was a prostitute. So in the middle of this dinner, a prostitute shows up, and she kneels down behind Jesus at his feet. And she begins to weep and cover his feet with her tears. She pulls out expensive perfume, alabaster, and dumps that on his feet. And she wipes his feet with her hair and she kisses his feet. And I can only imagine how awkward that would have been for Simon and Jesus and any of the other guests that were there to watch this woman do this for a prostitute, just to come sweeping into a dinner party and begin to act in that way towards one of the guests. Can you imagine how awkward it would be if you were at someone's house for dinner and in the middle of dinner, a prostitute walked in, a woman of ill repute came into the room and knelt down at the feet of someone and began to cry at their feet and wash them and kiss them? It would be super weird. But that's what's happening at this party with Jesus, at this dinner gathering with Jesus and Simon the Pharisee. And Scripture tells us that Simon muttered to himself, if he knew, if he were really a prophet, speaking of Jesus, then he would know who this woman was and what she did, and he would not allow this to be happening. And it's at this point that I think, before we continue with the story, that it's valuable to try to identify and empathize with what's going on in the hearts and the minds of the people in the story. I think for the prostitute, it's really clear. We don't have to do a lot of work to try to figure out what's going on in her heart and what's going on in her mind and her life. Can you imagine the gall that it would take to go into a house party like that and fall down at the feet of one of the guests and begin to weep and kiss his feet? I've never in my life cared so little what other people thought of me that I would be able to do that. She had to totally brush aside any sense of dignity that she had. She had to be willing and know that the Pharisees, which we'll learn in a second, were the upper crust, the high society. She had to know that those people were going to judge her, that those people were going to think that she was crazy. And she had to make a calculated decision to not care because this is Jesus, the Savior of the world. This is the one that's going to save me from my sins. And so it didn't matter to her, and she threw herself at his feet with reckless abandon. And you juxtapose that with the mindset of the Pharisee. The Pharisees were the religious leaders of the day. They were the church people. They were the pastors and the elders and the deacons of the day. They were the leaders. To become a Pharisee, you had to know the law incredibly well. A Pharisee was like a senator, except in a religious senate. And so they had most of the Old Testament memorized. They knew it backwards and forwards. They were the ones that were entrusted by God to lead his people. They were the ones that were responsible for understanding scripture, for teaching scripture, for imparting knowledge on people. They were the ones in charge of leading Israel, God's chosen people. And what I think is worth acknowledging about Simon is that he likely thought that he was being magnanimous and generous in spirit to even have Jesus over to his house to begin with. We only see, to my knowledge, one other Pharisee dealing with Jesus on a personal level, and it's Nicodemus in John chapter 3, maybe the most famous of the Pharisees. And Nicodemus, even as open and as willing as he was to have a conversation with Jesus, he would only do it by himself under the cover of night. Yet here Simon is inviting in this radical teacher, this rebellious revolutionary into his home to hear what he has to say. Jesus's message ran counter to the Pharisees. It ran counter to what was accepted in that culture. It was a big, bold move for Simon to have Jesus over to begin with. Which is why, again, I think that it's very likely that Simon felt he was being generous in spirit. Almost a sense of, look at me, look at how open I am, look at how progressive I am, look at how open-minded and generous I can be that I would invite in this rebellious revolutionary to come in and peddle his teachings to my friends. There was probably some piety and some pride there. He allowed Jesus to come into his life, but not so much that he reacted like the prostitute and fell all over himself and fawned all over Jesus, but in a dignified way, in a way that he was in control and Jesus was his guest. And even though it was a big, generous thing for him to do to allow Jesus to come, he probably felt like he was doing Jesus a favor, like he was lending some credibility to Jesus's movement, that this was an echelon of society that Jesus had not been welcomed into yet. And we see even amidst that pride, a bit of skepticism from the Pharisee. We see in the passage that he mutters to himself that if this man were really a prophet, so he didn't even understand Jesus to be the son of God. He didn't accept him as a good teacher. He thought maybe he was a prophet, but now he even had his doubts about that. So he very skeptically allows Jesus to kind of come into this portion of his life and feels, I would argue, that he is being generous in spirit to do so. And it's at this point that I think it's worth asking, to which person do you most relate? The Pharisee or the prostitute? To which person in this story so far do you most relate? If you were to be at a party and Jesus were to show up, when Jesus does show up in your life, when you have an opportunity to praise him or to respond to him, to which response do you most relate? Do you respond to Jesus more like the Pharisee or more like the prostitute? Do we fall at his feet with reckless abandon, not caring at all who is around us and what they think? That prostitute only cared what Jesus thought of her and no one else. Is that how we respond to Jesus? Or do we respond like the Pharisee, feeling a sense of generosity and magnanimity of spirit that we allow him into our lives? Look how open-minded I am. Look how good I am. Look at, even in the face of all the different worldviews, I continue to stay staunch in the faith. Look at how good of a person I must be. Are we sometimes skeptical of Jesus, preferring to maintain our dignity in front of the other people that might be with us rather than fall at his feet and only care what he thinks? I know it's a difficult comparison to make. I know it's a convicting question to ask. But I also know that for me in my life, I relate far more to the Pharisee than I do to the prostitute. And my responses to Jesus and the way that I live out my faith, I relate far more to the Pharisee, caring what the people around me think, puffing my own self up with the sense of generosity that I would allow Jesus into my life, accepting him with some decorum and opening up my door so that he can come in, but not fawning all over him, not falling all over myself, not caring what anyone else thinks. And this story so far, if I'm being honest, I relate far more to the Pharisee than I do the prostitute. And I don't know where you are on that spectrum. I would imagine all of us are in the middle somewhere. Very few of us respond to Jesus like the prostitute, just fawning all over him the instant we encounter him. And very few of us are as cold as the Pharisee. Maybe we're a little bit warmer than that, but on the pendulum, on the spectrum of responses, I'm far closer to the Pharisee than the woman. And I wonder where you are. It's important to answer that question because of the way that Jesus responds to the muttering of Simon. When Simon says, yeah, when Simon is muttering and says, if he were really who he says he is, he would not be responding this way. And if I put myself in that moment, I would probably be turned off by what was happening too. I would probably be looking at that woman and judging her. Get yourself together. Come on, this is not the place. This is not the time. Have some dignity. Have some pride. I feel like I would agree with the Pharisee more than I would empathize with the prostitute. But look at what Jesus' response is to the Pharisee as he mutters these things to himself. And maybe what his response is to us as we side with the Pharisee in the story. This is when Jesus tells the parable, starting verse 40, and Jesus answering to him said, Simon, I have something to say to you. And he answered, say it, teacher. A certain money lender had two debtors.. One owed $500, the other owed 50, and the debt collector canceled both debts. Which one was more grateful? Which one loved him more? And clearly the answer is the one who was forgiven of the $500. And Jesus says, yeah, that's correct. And then he says this, this is great. Then turning towards the woman, he said to Simon, do you see this woman? I entered your house. You gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in, she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little loves little. I love this passage. The prostitute responds to Jesus with the zeal of a recent convert, with the zeal of someone who is very aware of their sin, who feels the weight and the shame that she carries every day and looks to Jesus as the relief of that shame, looks to Jesus as the one who can forgive her of that shame, where the Pharisee goes through his life and he's a pretty righteous guy. He feels like he's a pretty good guy. He owes God a little bit, but it's more like $50 and less like $500. And so when his debt is forgiven, he feels almost this sense of entitlement that he deserves it. And what we realize is that this woman, the point that Jesus is making is she is reacting this way because she is aware of the depth of her sin. And you are reacting to me that way because you're not. And then he compares them. He said, when I came into your house, you wouldn't even give me the most basic of greetings. You're supposed to wash my feet. You didn't do that. She is crying on my feet. You could anoint my head with oil. You chose to not do that. She's anointing my feet with perfume. You could have greeted me with a holy kiss like you're supposed to, like it's customary, but you didn't do that. You wanted to hold me at arm's length. She is kissing my feet. What we see from this parable is that our passion for Jesus operates in direct proportion to our awareness of our need for him. Our passion for Jesus, that zeal that we talked about at the beginning of the service, at the beginning of the sermon, why is it that recent converts and people coming back to Christ seem to have a greater zeal than those of us who've been walking with him for a long time? Well, the answer is that our passion for Jesus operates in direct proportion to our awareness of our need for him. That prostitute was very aware of her sin. She was very aware, acutely aware of the condition of her heart and her capacity for evil and that her life had offended the creator God. That Pharisee thought he was squared away. He thought he was pretty good. He was what I think of. He fell victim. He fell into the trap that many longtime church people and believers fall into. He fell into the trap of pretty good. He fell into the trap of going, listen, I've got my things. I deal with some pride. I've got some ego stuff. Sometimes I lose my temper and I've got these quiet sins in the corner of my life. But on the whole, I'm a pretty good guy. And once you start to believe that, you start to think that somehow you're not as sinful as someone like a prostitute. Like somehow your sins aren't as great as theirs. Like, yeah, I'm sinful, but the volume of her sins is so much greater that she deserves, she is going to require a greater forgiveness than I do. We almost have this sense of entitlement that God owes us a forgiveness or that because we're pretty good, because we don't have any glaring weaknesses or glaring sin that people can point to, that we must be pretty squared away. And it's when we fall into that trap of pretty good that our passion for Jesus begins to wane because we forget our capacity for sin. And the point that Jesus is making in this parable, this is very important, the point that he's making in this parable is not, she has sinned so much more than you, Simon the Pharisee. This prostitute has committed so many more sins than you, so she's going to respond to me like this all the time. And you just can't because you're a pretty good guy and you'll never understand the depth of sin that she does. That's not what he's saying. What he's trying to get Simon to see, and I think what he is trying to get us to see, is that the difference between the Pharisee and the prostitute was not the volume of their sin, but rather his awareness of it. The difference between the Pharisee and the prostitute was not their capacity to sin. It was not their history of sin. It was not their total offenses against God, but rather it was simply their awareness of their sin. The sin of the prostitute is obvious. It takes five seconds of reflection to identify why she would feel like she wasn't worthy of God, to identify the shame that she walked around with, and to see the volume of her sin and understand her awareness of it. But it doesn't take much longer to identify the capacity and the volume of the Pharisee's sin either. I don't know about Simon in the Bible. He may have been a nice guy. He may have actually been generous of spirit. And it's possible that I'm being unfair to him. But the Pharisees on the whole were a disappointing lot to God. If you read through the gospels, you don't see Jesus be mean to anyone except for the Pharisees. And then sometimes he gets exasperated with the disciples, but he is hard on the Pharisees. He calls them a brood of vipers. At another time, he calls them whitewashed tombs, meaning you look good on the outside, but you're rotting away and dead on the inside. He actually tells some parables to the Pharisees to help them understand that they were the ones that were left entrusted with God's people, and they have run them into the ground. They have done a terrible job of leading God's people, and they have misrepresented the God that they are supposed to represent to his people. The Pharisees did a terrible job with the responsibilities that were entrusted to them. And so if you think about the life of an individual Pharisee, someone who on the outside looks like they have it all together and seems like they're doing pretty good, no major egregious sins, I would wonder how many people had their piety damaged? How many people had a Pharisee turned off to a God that he was supposed to represent because he portrayed through his actions and through his judgment, he portrayed God as someone who was in heaven looking down on people as kind of this cosmic cop making sure that you didn't get out of the lines and exacting revenge on the ones that disappointed him. Because of the model of faith that the Pharisees lived out, how many people had they turned away from the faith? Because of the way that they judged others and they held themselves in higher regard and esteem than anyone else, how many people did they make feel terrible just for having humanity in their life? If you were a Pharisee and you showed a sliver of humanity, you showed weakness, the people around you show weakness or the propensity to sin, they were ostracized. They were cast out. They could not be in the high society, the upper echelon of people. They had to put on airs. And how many, how much damage did that version of faith do, that legalism and that prideful faith that they lived out? How much damage did it do over the years? What we see in this story with this parable embedded inside it is that Jesus is gently, in that miraculous way that only Jesus can do, helping Simon see, Simon, you are every bit as capable of sin as this prostitute is. Your heart is just as unhealthy, is just as dirty, and is just as capable of the most egregious sin as hers is. The only difference between you and her is not how much you've sinned, it's simply your awareness of your sin. And through the centuries, this parable speaks to us too. And it serves as a reminder that maybe some of us have fallen victim of pretty good. Maybe some of us know how to present a pretty good front and make it seem like we have it all together. Maybe some of us have very neatly tucked away the secret sins and our private struggles so that we can put forward a front of this is a version of Christianity that everyone ought to live up to. And maybe we've been doing it long enough that we've even had the audacity to forget our capacity to sin. But Jesus reminds us that all of our hearts are just as capable of sin as anyone else's. That the most egregious evil is two or three bad weeks away from all of us. So, if you relate to me at the beginning and are jealous of this passion and this zeal that new converts seem to have for Jesus, and we wonder, is it possible to recapture that? I would say to you, yes, it is. And that if we want our passion for Jesus to increase, that we need to understand that it operates in direct proportion to our awareness of our need for him, of our need for his salvation and our gratitude for his forgiveness and the sense of delivery when he takes away our shame and that when we fall into the trap of pretty good, we forget that we need those things. And when we're told that we're saved and when we're told that Jesus loves us and when we're told that we're God's children, sometimes that falls on deaf ears because we feel in some ways entitled to those things. But this parable reminds us, no, no, no, the difference between us and the recent convert, the difference between those of us with muted passion and those with exuberant passion is not the volume of our sin or our capacity to sin. It's our awareness of our own sin and our own need and condition before the Father. So if we'd like a heightened passion for God, if we want to move through 2020 and everything that it holds with this undying passion and zeal for Jesus and who He is and what He's doing, then I would say it begins with a simple prayer that I would encourage us to pray on our own every day this week. Jesus, make me more aware of my need for you. It's a bold prayer. It's a courageous prayer. It's a bold thing to do to say, God, I want to see my ugliness so that I appreciate what you've delivered me from. God, I want to see my capacity. I want to understand who I am. I don't want to turn a blind eye to the capacity of sin in my life. I want to see it and understand so that I am more grateful for who you are and the salvation that you offer. I hope that you'll do that. I hope that if you came into this service this week and you would have agreed 30 minutes ago, yeah, I just don't feel the passion for Jesus that I'd like to. Reclaim that passion. Listen to the point of this parable and pray that God would make you increasingly aware of your need for him. And as he does that, I promise you will feel forgiven of more and more and your passion will increase and increase. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you. We are so grateful for you. Lord, I pray that you would make us ever aware of our need for you. That none of us would fall into the trap of pretty good. That none of us would feel a sense of entitlement that we somehow deserve your forgiveness, but that we would marvel that you offer it. God, may none of us ever walk in the pride that we are so squared away, that we are so good, that we follow the rules so well, and that we live for you so faithfully that we forget who we are and what you've done for us. Father, as we go throughout our weeks this week, make us increasingly aware of our need for you so that we might have a burning passion and desire for you. It's in your son's name we pray these things. Amen.

Good morning, Grace. Here we are again. I'm so glad to be able to share this with you. Before I jump into the sermon, I just wanted to let you know that we are opening up elder nominations right now through the end of April, through April 30. So you have a month to go online to graceralee.org slash elders and fill out a nomination form if there's something you think would make a great elder of the church. Our church is elder-led. The elder board is hugely important to me. At the end of this year, two of our elders, Andrea Hounchell and Burt Banks, will have completed six years serving the church in that capacity, and it will be time for them to roll off. At the end of last year, another elder, Bill Reith, rolled off, and so that means that going into 2021, we can add up to three elders if we wanted to. I will also tell you that we are really hoping to add some women to the elder board. Andrea, like I said, is rolling off at the end of this year, and that will leave us with one woman, Allie Snyder, on the elder board. So we would love to add some ladies to the board and get that good and helpful perspective as we continue on as a church. So if you have someone that you think would make a great elder, please go online to that website, to graceralee.org slash elders, and get that nomination in to us. We would really appreciate that. Now, as I launch into the sermon, last week we took a break from our series, Storyteller, where we are talking about the parables that Jesus, one of the greatest storytellers to ever live, we're talking about the parables that he told. And again, a parable is a short fictional story that makes a moral point. This week, we're jumping into a parable found in Luke chapter 7. So if you have a Bible there with you at home, I hope you'll open it up and look at verse 36. That's where this story starts. This week is going to be a parable embedded in a story. I've been doing vocational ministry now for 20 years. Just recently, I turned 39, and so it's depressing to know that when I was 19 years old, I took my first job in ministry with a ministry called Young Life. So for 20 years, I've been doing ministry vocationally. And during those 20 years, I've seen a lot of things change. I've seen a lot of examples of how to do ministry in some ways not to do ministry. But one of the constants that I've seen is the zeal of a fresh convert, the zeal and the passion for Jesus of someone who's coming to know him for the first time. There's a similar zeal for someone who has grown up in church or grown up considering themselves a Christian, but maybe wandered away or ventured away from the faith. And there's some sort of event that brings them back to Jesus and they have this fresh passion and this fresh zeal for him. For a lot of us, maybe that's our story, that we grew up as believers, and at some point in our life, we wandered away, and then we came back, and we were filled with that zeal and that passion again. And for me, I've been a believer. I've claimed a faith for literally as long as my memory goes back. I accepted Christ at a very young age and don't have much of a memory of what it was like to be in life without faith. And for some of you, that's your story too. And if that's your story, then you can probably relate to me that when I see the zeal and the passion of a fresh convert or someone who's coming back to the faith after a long time away, I'm often jealous of that zeal. I want some of that, you know? I want that passion for Jesus. I want that passion for the Father. I want to be as excited about the faith as they are. And often I'm not just jealous, but I'm convicted. And I wonder, why don't I have that zeal? Why don't I have that passion? It seems like after years or decades of walking with Jesus, of growing closer to the Father, of being guided by the Spirit, that we would have a more natural, deep passion and exuberance for God. It seems like that should grow over time rather than diminish. And if you can relate to that, if you've felt a diminishing in your own life of zeal for Jesus, then I think it would be great to look at the parable that we find in Luke chapter 7 and learn from Jesus what it means to be passionate for Him and try to identify what it is that fuels that passion. In Luke chapter 7, Jesus is invited over to a Pharisee's house. The Pharisee is a guy named Simon. He's invited over for dinner, and you can look in your Bible there in verse 36. He's invited over for dinner, and we pick up the story. He's reclining at the table. The tables back in the day were low, and so you would kind of lay on them with your shoulders towards the table and your feet behind you. And so Jesus was reclining at the table. He's talking to Simon, and as he's talking to Simon, a woman shows up. Scriptures say that it was a woman of the city, which is a nice way of saying that she was a prostitute. So in the middle of this dinner, a prostitute shows up, and she kneels down behind Jesus at his feet. And she begins to weep and cover his feet with her tears. She pulls out expensive perfume, alabaster, and dumps that on his feet. And she wipes his feet with her hair and she kisses his feet. And I can only imagine how awkward that would have been for Simon and Jesus and any of the other guests that were there to watch this woman do this for a prostitute, just to come sweeping into a dinner party and begin to act in that way towards one of the guests. Can you imagine how awkward it would be if you were at someone's house for dinner and in the middle of dinner, a prostitute walked in, a woman of ill repute came into the room and knelt down at the feet of someone and began to cry at their feet and wash them and kiss them? It would be super weird. But that's what's happening at this party with Jesus, at this dinner gathering with Jesus and Simon the Pharisee. And Scripture tells us that Simon muttered to himself, if he knew, if he were really a prophet, speaking of Jesus, then he would know who this woman was and what she did, and he would not allow this to be happening. And it's at this point that I think, before we continue with the story, that it's valuable to try to identify and empathize with what's going on in the hearts and the minds of the people in the story. I think for the prostitute, it's really clear. We don't have to do a lot of work to try to figure out what's going on in her heart and what's going on in her mind and her life. Can you imagine the gall that it would take to go into a house party like that and fall down at the feet of one of the guests and begin to weep and kiss his feet? I've never in my life cared so little what other people thought of me that I would be able to do that. She had to totally brush aside any sense of dignity that she had. She had to be willing and know that the Pharisees, which we'll learn in a second, were the upper crust, the high society. She had to know that those people were going to judge her, that those people were going to think that she was crazy. And she had to make a calculated decision to not care because this is Jesus, the Savior of the world. This is the one that's going to save me from my sins. And so it didn't matter to her, and she threw herself at his feet with reckless abandon. And you juxtapose that with the mindset of the Pharisee. The Pharisees were the religious leaders of the day. They were the church people. They were the pastors and the elders and the deacons of the day. They were the leaders. To become a Pharisee, you had to know the law incredibly well. A Pharisee was like a senator, except in a religious senate. And so they had most of the Old Testament memorized. They knew it backwards and forwards. They were the ones that were entrusted by God to lead his people. They were the ones that were responsible for understanding scripture, for teaching scripture, for imparting knowledge on people. They were the ones in charge of leading Israel, God's chosen people. And what I think is worth acknowledging about Simon is that he likely thought that he was being magnanimous and generous in spirit to even have Jesus over to his house to begin with. We only see, to my knowledge, one other Pharisee dealing with Jesus on a personal level, and it's Nicodemus in John chapter 3, maybe the most famous of the Pharisees. And Nicodemus, even as open and as willing as he was to have a conversation with Jesus, he would only do it by himself under the cover of night. Yet here Simon is inviting in this radical teacher, this rebellious revolutionary into his home to hear what he has to say. Jesus's message ran counter to the Pharisees. It ran counter to what was accepted in that culture. It was a big, bold move for Simon to have Jesus over to begin with. Which is why, again, I think that it's very likely that Simon felt he was being generous in spirit. Almost a sense of, look at me, look at how open I am, look at how progressive I am, look at how open-minded and generous I can be that I would invite in this rebellious revolutionary to come in and peddle his teachings to my friends. There was probably some piety and some pride there. He allowed Jesus to come into his life, but not so much that he reacted like the prostitute and fell all over himself and fawned all over Jesus, but in a dignified way, in a way that he was in control and Jesus was his guest. And even though it was a big, generous thing for him to do to allow Jesus to come, he probably felt like he was doing Jesus a favor, like he was lending some credibility to Jesus's movement, that this was an echelon of society that Jesus had not been welcomed into yet. And we see even amidst that pride, a bit of skepticism from the Pharisee. We see in the passage that he mutters to himself that if this man were really a prophet, so he didn't even understand Jesus to be the son of God. He didn't accept him as a good teacher. He thought maybe he was a prophet, but now he even had his doubts about that. So he very skeptically allows Jesus to kind of come into this portion of his life and feels, I would argue, that he is being generous in spirit to do so. And it's at this point that I think it's worth asking, to which person do you most relate? The Pharisee or the prostitute? To which person in this story so far do you most relate? If you were to be at a party and Jesus were to show up, when Jesus does show up in your life, when you have an opportunity to praise him or to respond to him, to which response do you most relate? Do you respond to Jesus more like the Pharisee or more like the prostitute? Do we fall at his feet with reckless abandon, not caring at all who is around us and what they think? That prostitute only cared what Jesus thought of her and no one else. Is that how we respond to Jesus? Or do we respond like the Pharisee, feeling a sense of generosity and magnanimity of spirit that we allow him into our lives? Look how open-minded I am. Look how good I am. Look at, even in the face of all the different worldviews, I continue to stay staunch in the faith. Look at how good of a person I must be. Are we sometimes skeptical of Jesus, preferring to maintain our dignity in front of the other people that might be with us rather than fall at his feet and only care what he thinks? I know it's a difficult comparison to make. I know it's a convicting question to ask. But I also know that for me in my life, I relate far more to the Pharisee than I do to the prostitute. And my responses to Jesus and the way that I live out my faith, I relate far more to the Pharisee, caring what the people around me think, puffing my own self up with the sense of generosity that I would allow Jesus into my life, accepting him with some decorum and opening up my door so that he can come in, but not fawning all over him, not falling all over myself, not caring what anyone else thinks. And this story so far, if I'm being honest, I relate far more to the Pharisee than I do the prostitute. And I don't know where you are on that spectrum. I would imagine all of us are in the middle somewhere. Very few of us respond to Jesus like the prostitute, just fawning all over him the instant we encounter him. And very few of us are as cold as the Pharisee. Maybe we're a little bit warmer than that, but on the pendulum, on the spectrum of responses, I'm far closer to the Pharisee than the woman. And I wonder where you are. It's important to answer that question because of the way that Jesus responds to the muttering of Simon. When Simon says, yeah, when Simon is muttering and says, if he were really who he says he is, he would not be responding this way. And if I put myself in that moment, I would probably be turned off by what was happening too. I would probably be looking at that woman and judging her. Get yourself together. Come on, this is not the place. This is not the time. Have some dignity. Have some pride. I feel like I would agree with the Pharisee more than I would empathize with the prostitute. But look at what Jesus' response is to the Pharisee as he mutters these things to himself. And maybe what his response is to us as we side with the Pharisee in the story. This is when Jesus tells the parable, starting verse 40, and Jesus answering to him said, Simon, I have something to say to you. And he answered, say it, teacher. A certain money lender had two debtors.. One owed $500, the other owed 50, and the debt collector canceled both debts. Which one was more grateful? Which one loved him more? And clearly the answer is the one who was forgiven of the $500. And Jesus says, yeah, that's correct. And then he says this, this is great. Then turning towards the woman, he said to Simon, do you see this woman? I entered your house. You gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in, she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little loves little. I love this passage. The prostitute responds to Jesus with the zeal of a recent convert, with the zeal of someone who is very aware of their sin, who feels the weight and the shame that she carries every day and looks to Jesus as the relief of that shame, looks to Jesus as the one who can forgive her of that shame, where the Pharisee goes through his life and he's a pretty righteous guy. He feels like he's a pretty good guy. He owes God a little bit, but it's more like $50 and less like $500. And so when his debt is forgiven, he feels almost this sense of entitlement that he deserves it. And what we realize is that this woman, the point that Jesus is making is she is reacting this way because she is aware of the depth of her sin. And you are reacting to me that way because you're not. And then he compares them. He said, when I came into your house, you wouldn't even give me the most basic of greetings. You're supposed to wash my feet. You didn't do that. She is crying on my feet. You could anoint my head with oil. You chose to not do that. She's anointing my feet with perfume. You could have greeted me with a holy kiss like you're supposed to, like it's customary, but you didn't do that. You wanted to hold me at arm's length. She is kissing my feet. What we see from this parable is that our passion for Jesus operates in direct proportion to our awareness of our need for him. Our passion for Jesus, that zeal that we talked about at the beginning of the service, at the beginning of the sermon, why is it that recent converts and people coming back to Christ seem to have a greater zeal than those of us who've been walking with him for a long time? Well, the answer is that our passion for Jesus operates in direct proportion to our awareness of our need for him. That prostitute was very aware of her sin. She was very aware, acutely aware of the condition of her heart and her capacity for evil and that her life had offended the creator God. That Pharisee thought he was squared away. He thought he was pretty good. He was what I think of. He fell victim. He fell into the trap that many longtime church people and believers fall into. He fell into the trap of pretty good. He fell into the trap of going, listen, I've got my things. I deal with some pride. I've got some ego stuff. Sometimes I lose my temper and I've got these quiet sins in the corner of my life. But on the whole, I'm a pretty good guy. And once you start to believe that, you start to think that somehow you're not as sinful as someone like a prostitute. Like somehow your sins aren't as great as theirs. Like, yeah, I'm sinful, but the volume of her sins is so much greater that she deserves, she is going to require a greater forgiveness than I do. We almost have this sense of entitlement that God owes us a forgiveness or that because we're pretty good, because we don't have any glaring weaknesses or glaring sin that people can point to, that we must be pretty squared away. And it's when we fall into that trap of pretty good that our passion for Jesus begins to wane because we forget our capacity for sin. And the point that Jesus is making in this parable, this is very important, the point that he's making in this parable is not, she has sinned so much more than you, Simon the Pharisee. This prostitute has committed so many more sins than you, so she's going to respond to me like this all the time. And you just can't because you're a pretty good guy and you'll never understand the depth of sin that she does. That's not what he's saying. What he's trying to get Simon to see, and I think what he is trying to get us to see, is that the difference between the Pharisee and the prostitute was not the volume of their sin, but rather his awareness of it. The difference between the Pharisee and the prostitute was not their capacity to sin. It was not their history of sin. It was not their total offenses against God, but rather it was simply their awareness of their sin. The sin of the prostitute is obvious. It takes five seconds of reflection to identify why she would feel like she wasn't worthy of God, to identify the shame that she walked around with, and to see the volume of her sin and understand her awareness of it. But it doesn't take much longer to identify the capacity and the volume of the Pharisee's sin either. I don't know about Simon in the Bible. He may have been a nice guy. He may have actually been generous of spirit. And it's possible that I'm being unfair to him. But the Pharisees on the whole were a disappointing lot to God. If you read through the gospels, you don't see Jesus be mean to anyone except for the Pharisees. And then sometimes he gets exasperated with the disciples, but he is hard on the Pharisees. He calls them a brood of vipers. At another time, he calls them whitewashed tombs, meaning you look good on the outside, but you're rotting away and dead on the inside. He actually tells some parables to the Pharisees to help them understand that they were the ones that were left entrusted with God's people, and they have run them into the ground. They have done a terrible job of leading God's people, and they have misrepresented the God that they are supposed to represent to his people. The Pharisees did a terrible job with the responsibilities that were entrusted to them. And so if you think about the life of an individual Pharisee, someone who on the outside looks like they have it all together and seems like they're doing pretty good, no major egregious sins, I would wonder how many people had their piety damaged? How many people had a Pharisee turned off to a God that he was supposed to represent because he portrayed through his actions and through his judgment, he portrayed God as someone who was in heaven looking down on people as kind of this cosmic cop making sure that you didn't get out of the lines and exacting revenge on the ones that disappointed him. Because of the model of faith that the Pharisees lived out, how many people had they turned away from the faith? Because of the way that they judged others and they held themselves in higher regard and esteem than anyone else, how many people did they make feel terrible just for having humanity in their life? If you were a Pharisee and you showed a sliver of humanity, you showed weakness, the people around you show weakness or the propensity to sin, they were ostracized. They were cast out. They could not be in the high society, the upper echelon of people. They had to put on airs. And how many, how much damage did that version of faith do, that legalism and that prideful faith that they lived out? How much damage did it do over the years? What we see in this story with this parable embedded inside it is that Jesus is gently, in that miraculous way that only Jesus can do, helping Simon see, Simon, you are every bit as capable of sin as this prostitute is. Your heart is just as unhealthy, is just as dirty, and is just as capable of the most egregious sin as hers is. The only difference between you and her is not how much you've sinned, it's simply your awareness of your sin. And through the centuries, this parable speaks to us too. And it serves as a reminder that maybe some of us have fallen victim of pretty good. Maybe some of us know how to present a pretty good front and make it seem like we have it all together. Maybe some of us have very neatly tucked away the secret sins and our private struggles so that we can put forward a front of this is a version of Christianity that everyone ought to live up to. And maybe we've been doing it long enough that we've even had the audacity to forget our capacity to sin. But Jesus reminds us that all of our hearts are just as capable of sin as anyone else's. That the most egregious evil is two or three bad weeks away from all of us. So, if you relate to me at the beginning and are jealous of this passion and this zeal that new converts seem to have for Jesus, and we wonder, is it possible to recapture that? I would say to you, yes, it is. And that if we want our passion for Jesus to increase, that we need to understand that it operates in direct proportion to our awareness of our need for him, of our need for his salvation and our gratitude for his forgiveness and the sense of delivery when he takes away our shame and that when we fall into the trap of pretty good, we forget that we need those things. And when we're told that we're saved and when we're told that Jesus loves us and when we're told that we're God's children, sometimes that falls on deaf ears because we feel in some ways entitled to those things. But this parable reminds us, no, no, no, the difference between us and the recent convert, the difference between those of us with muted passion and those with exuberant passion is not the volume of our sin or our capacity to sin. It's our awareness of our own sin and our own need and condition before the Father. So if we'd like a heightened passion for God, if we want to move through 2020 and everything that it holds with this undying passion and zeal for Jesus and who He is and what He's doing, then I would say it begins with a simple prayer that I would encourage us to pray on our own every day this week. Jesus, make me more aware of my need for you. It's a bold prayer. It's a courageous prayer. It's a bold thing to do to say, God, I want to see my ugliness so that I appreciate what you've delivered me from. God, I want to see my capacity. I want to understand who I am. I don't want to turn a blind eye to the capacity of sin in my life. I want to see it and understand so that I am more grateful for who you are and the salvation that you offer. I hope that you'll do that. I hope that if you came into this service this week and you would have agreed 30 minutes ago, yeah, I just don't feel the passion for Jesus that I'd like to. Reclaim that passion. Listen to the point of this parable and pray that God would make you increasingly aware of your need for him. And as he does that, I promise you will feel forgiven of more and more and your passion will increase and increase. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you. We are so grateful for you. Lord, I pray that you would make us ever aware of our need for you. That none of us would fall into the trap of pretty good. That none of us would feel a sense of entitlement that we somehow deserve your forgiveness, but that we would marvel that you offer it. God, may none of us ever walk in the pride that we are so squared away, that we are so good, that we follow the rules so well, and that we live for you so faithfully that we forget who we are and what you've done for us. Father, as we go throughout our weeks this week, make us increasingly aware of our need for you so that we might have a burning passion and desire for you. It's in your son's name we pray these things. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see everybody. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby immediately following the service. If you're watching online, especially if you're doing that habitually, we love that you are, and that is fantastic that you're following along. But I'm just going to tell you as a friend, you're missing the best part of the service. Because the best part of the service is when we all get to worship together. We're just putting up with me in between more songs is all we're doing here. Because that was really great. Thank you, band, for leading us into God's presence in that way. This is our big spring series. This is the series that we have been planning since the fall when we kind of sit around and try to plan in advance what we're going to do. And what we always want to do with the series in the spring as we come out of February, we move into March, is we kind of want to take at least six weeks and point our collective attention towards Easter to prepare our hearts and to prepare our minds for the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus, for the victory of victories, for what I believe is the greatest holiday in our calendar. It's the greatest day of the year when we get to celebrate that we are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song. And so the point of the spring series is always to kind of drive us to Easter and to prepare our hearts as a body for that celebration. And so that's absolutely the point of what we're doing this spring as well through a series called The Table. And we've got a couple things I'm going to, we've got a challenge we're going to issue for you. We've got something for you to take home. I'm going to tell you what this is. But the other thing I just want to put on your radar screen is we're going to have a Good Friday service this year for the first time since I've been one of the pastors. Yes, thank you. That's great. Okay, so if you clapped, you have to come. That's part of the deal. You can't be like, oh, I got plans. No, I'm telling you right now. Good Friday service, and for those that don't know, I'm not making a joke here. I'm just being kind. It's the Friday right before Easter. So you can go ahead and mark that off in your calendar. We've got that written and ready to go. We've been thinking about that already, and so we are looking forward to that. And the whole purpose of that service is really and truly to take some time on the Friday of Jesus's crucifixion, that remembers Jesus's crucifixion, and really ask the Lord to prepare our hearts for Easter so that the impact and the weight of it can fully rest on us. And so I hope that you'll be a part of that. This Sunday is intended to be kind of a setup for the rest of the series. So this Sunday, we're just kind of looking at the broad brush of it, why we've landed here, why we are doing this series called The Table. One of my favorite parts about this series is that we have a lady, Carly Buchanan, who is our part-time graphics department, among other things, right? She sings sometimes. Right now, she's over there watching my son and his peers in the hallway. And she gives a lot to the church. This series is her idea. When we sat around pitching things, I had my own idea for what we should do for series. And then she mentioned this, and everybody just immediately latched on to it. And it's a great way for me to highlight to you that you have a really great staff that works for you, that serves your kids, that serves your students, that serves us here. They're really, really great folks who are fun to work with. And almost none of the good ideas that we do are mine. I'm just leeching off of their good ideas. And so she brought this to us and we immediately loved it. And I immediately recognized that this series would resonate with grace. And I should have known that something like this would resonate with grace back when I started here. It was April of 2017 was my first Sunday at grace. It was the Sunday before Easter. And so prior to that, I think somewhere in late February, early March, they offered me the job and I ignorantly accepted it. And then they flew me up one Sunday in the middle of March to introduce me to the church right here in this room. And I should have known that meals were going to be a big deal to grace people because I landed Saturday evening around dinner time. And at the time, the moderator of the board was a guy, a good buddy of mine named Burt Banks and his wife, Terry. Now Terry is one of the elders. And so it's nice to get the good banks on the elder board. Now they picked me up at the airport and we were planning to go out to dinner and they said, hey, is it okay? We made reservations for dinner. I said, that's great, I'm hungry. And they said, we've also invited some other folks from Grace to meet us there that they wanna have a chance to meet you. Is that all right? And I'm like, yeah, sure. I mean, I'm the new pastor. I need to want to meet the people that I'll be working with, going to church with, that kind of thing. So absolutely. So we headed straight from the airport, straight to Winston's, straight to this back room. There was three other couples there, plus the Banks's and myself. And we just sat down and we had a time. And we talked for, it must have been two, two and a half hours. They were peppering me with questions. I was peppering them with questions. We just wanted to get to know each other, and so we sat down over a meal, and we did it. And then a couple weeks later, we moved the family up here. We rented a house off of Teal Briar over in Northridge, and that first week that we were here, I will never forget it. It had to be at least five of the seven nights we were going to somebody's house for dinner. You guys were just, you were peppering us with dinner invites. And over that first month, we went to dinner at more people's houses than I could count because people just wanted to get to know the new pastor and we wanted to get to know the new people. And that's what we did is we got together over meals, right? And when you think about grace culture, who we are as a church, one of our biggest events of the year, Hootenanny in September, what do we do? Well, we sit outside and we eat. You know, grace is big night out. What do we do? We stand around tables. We talk and we drink. That's what we do. This is what we like. We are a communing church. This is who we are, which is why I think that Luke is going to become our new favorite gospel. As we dove into this series, Carly had the idea based on a book, and we're going to see a quote from that book here in a second, based on a book called A Meal with Jesus. And so that book is based out of the Gospel of Luke. And I began to do research for the series. I was listening to that book on Audible. I like to listen to books so I can do other stuff while I'm reading. And the book really is based in the Gospel of Luke. And what I began to learn about Luke is meals are incredibly prevalent in this particular gospel. For those that may not be able to recall right off the top of their head, there's four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are what's called synoptic gospels where they kind of tell the story of Jesus from start to finish. They follow the same chronology. And then John kind of stands independently as its own gospel with its own style and makes its own points and things like that. And so Luke is one of the synoptic Gospels, which means a lot of the stories that it tells are very similar to Matthew and Mark, to the two preceding Gospels. But what we don't necessarily see, or what I've never learned before, and I'm embarrassed to admit it, because I've read Luke dozens of times in my life. I've led Bible studies through it. I've taken classes specifically on the book of Luke. Like, I should know this, and I just never did. And maybe you guys did, because you pay closer attention to Scripture than I do. But Luke is actually called, in in Scripture the hospitality gospel. I didn't know this, but in Luke, there are 10 different instances of Jesus sitting down to a meal with other people. Only three of those meals are recorded in the other gospels, which means in Luke, we have seven completely unique stories of Jesus sitting down to a meal with others. Meals are so prevalent in the book of Luke that the author of A Meal with Jesus, a guy, Tim Chester, said this, in Luke's gospel, Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal. That's how prevalent it is in the book of Luke. And so I just thought, frankly, what a grace series to focus on that, the power and the efficacy of meals. And then the author brings up this verse that, again, I had read plenty of times before, but I've never just considered it in an isolated way. It's never jumped off the page like it did to me this time. But if I were to say to you, complete this sentence, the Son of Man came to, how would you complete that sentence? The Son of Man came to what? For me, as I was listening to this and processing it, I would complete that sentence, the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. That's what I've always heard. That's what I understand. And that's what Jesus said, and he did. But in Luke, he also says this in chapter 7, verse 34, the Son of Man has come eating and drinking. And you say, look at him, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors've carried myself in my arrival. The Son of Man has come eating and drinking. Now, I want to provide you some context so we understand what's going on there. Jesus is speaking to people from his hometown who have rejected him, who do not believe that he is a Messiah, who do not affirm his teachings. And they've kind of turned him away and said, he's a glutton and a drunkard. He can't be trusted because of who he's carousing with, because of how he behaves, because of what he's doing. And so Jesus says to them in the verses preceding, you guys, you had John the Baptist. He fasts. He lives in the wilderness in complete piety and austerity. He abstains from everything. He lives this very aesthetic, like this very minimalistic life, and you rejected him as the devil. Then the Son of Man comes eating and drinking, doing the exact opposite of that, and you reject me too. You guys got to pick a side. You have to pick a lane. That's the frustration that Jesus is expressing in this verse, and he gets accused of being a glutton and a drunkard because of the company that he's keeping. And so as we move through the series, we're going to see why Jesus chose to keep that company. But I also think it's powerful that Jesus does say this. Even out of context, I do think it's a powerful statement, the Son of Man comes eating and drinking. The Son of Man understands the power of a meal, of what happens around a table, of how memorable it can be. And we're going to continue to unpack that as we go through the series. But we know meals are powerful because we've experienced that too. I remember, I think it was 2008. It was the year, or maybe it was 2007, the year after Jen and I got married in 2006, we went to Rome with her family. And we went with her family, and then we went with another lady and her two adult sons. There was eight of us total, and we went to Rome. And when we went to Rome, we were there for seven or eight days. We got to see a lot of really cool stuff. We got to see the Parthenon and something called the wedding cake that the people in Rome really don't like very much. We got to see St. Peter's Basilica and St. Peter's Square. And I got to go on Christmas Day to the papal address. He came out and he addressed the throngs of people gathered in St. Peter's Square, and Pope Benedict gave me a plenary indulgence for 2008, which was great. 2008 was the best year of my life. Thank you, Pope Benedict. But the thing that I remember the most from Rome, and I think everybody who went on that trip would agree, is the Christmas Day meal that we had. Somebody in our party got a tip from one of their friends that this is the place you need to go in Rome for a good meal. And we're like, all right, let's go. I had no idea where we were going, what we were doing. So we're walking to this address. We end up on some completely nondescript street in Rome. Gray cobblestones, and it looked like residential. It wasn't rough residential, it was just residential, like row homes or townhomes or something like that, just kind of all together, and we didn't know where to go or what to do. And we're just kind of standing around, looking at the map, like did we come to the right address, what's going on? And then out of this door to my left burst an Italian chef from Central Casting. I'm telling you, he was short, he was rotund, he was thinning on top, but he had his hair knocked back. He was yelling Italian things. He was like a volcano of Italian joy, right? Like just, I'm not going to try to make any Italian noises because A, I think I would sound stupid. And B, I think that might be somehow racist in 2023. I don't know. I don't want to get in any trouble. But he was saying a bunch of Italian things very loudly and very joyfully. And he just comes bolting right up to me and he grabs my hand. He grabs my wrist. He didn't even grab my hand. He wanted me to not be able to resist at all. And he grabs my wrist and he yanks me into the building. He just starts pulling me towards the restaurant. And I'm looking at the other seven, like, don't leave me behind. Like, you got to come too. And he's just spouting off things and making motions. And he pulls me into what I think is going to be a house. And we walk in, and it's a restaurant, and there's tables, and there's people eating. And he just continues to be an Italian volcano of joy. And then we just plunge right into the kitchen. And I'm like, what's going on here? And again, it's like from a movie. There's stainless steel and steam and fire and chopping and Italian words. And I'm like, this is all happening too fast. And then he bursts out of the kitchen into this private dining room, and he points at the table gleefully. We all get around it. And then he grabs my mother-in-law and kisses her square on the lips and sits us down. And nobody was mad. We were a little offended. He didn't kiss the rest of us. Like it was just, he just sat us down. And as soon as he sat us down, somebody else comes out of the kitchen with whatever the first course was, probably prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella and whatever. And they set it down, and he says his stuff, and he asks what kind of wine we want. He's got a great wine pairing, and nobody else there drank wine. And I'm sitting there. It's my first year in marriage. I'm with a teetotaling family, and quietly I'm like, well, this is stupid. I mean, can I get a little bit of wine? But no, no deal. But they kept just bringing the food, right? The first course is done. He comes and he joyfully sweeps it away. Someone comes out of the kitchen with the next course. And this must have happened seven or eight times. I don't know what we had. I don't know what we ate. I know it was the best meal I've ever had in my life. I know that I will never forget it. When you ask me what's the best meal you've ever had, I will always say that meal in Rome. That's what I remember more than anything. And one of the things that sticks out to me is his joy in hospitality and that infectious joy that spread around the table. And that that's a memory as a family that no one can ever touch, that you can never take away. There was power in that afternoon. And the Italians do it right. When you have a meal over there, you're not going anywhere for like three hours. And you better plan for a nap afterwards. He just keeps bringing stuff. And it was so good and so wonderful and clearly so memorable. And you guys know that meals are powerful too. That's why they occupy such an important space in our culture. When someone gets married, biggest day of their life so far, what do we do? Immediately following someone's wedding ceremony, we go eat together. What do we do the night before someone's wedding ceremony? We have a meal with our closest friends so that we can talk more intimately than when we have to invite all the acquaintances and pay for their meals at the big one the next day. When we have a funeral, what do we do at a funeral? While the family is at the graveside service, someone who loves them is back at their house collecting meals from everybody else so that when the family gets there, they can sit down and they eat. When someone comes over to the house, what's the first thing you say if you're a decent human at all? What can I get you? You hungry? You thirsty? When someone comes in town to visit, what do we do? What are we going to eat? What do you guys want? See, whether we realize it or not, meals hold a sacred place in all of our lives. They're special. They're important. The table is an image that all of us know, that all of us share, that all of us gather around. And those moments around those tables are sacred. And Jesus knew this too. And it's why I think on bright display in the Gospel of Luke is Jesus' commitment to sitting down and having meals with people. But he's not simply eating and drinking. That's not all he came to do. As a matter of fact, that's not even at all what he came to do. He came to eat and drink with people because around the table, conversations happen. Stories are shared. Laughter is exchanged. If it's a really good meal, really good meal. We'll tear up together. We'll learn something about the people we're sitting with. It forces us in the busyness of our lives to stop and focus on what we're doing and who we're with. And Jesus understood the power of a meal. And so over the course of this series, as we prepare for Easter, we're going to look at how Jesus uses his meals in the Gospel of Luke. We're going to look at what he uses the table for. Because Jesus used meals as ministry. He uses the table to symbolize provision. He uses the table to include those who feel ostracized. He uses the table to try to convert those who may be lost and wondering. He uses the table to build community. He uses the table near his death to symbolize what he's about to do. He uses the table to help us always remember what he did. And then most powerfully, I think, he uses the table as a shadow of the reality that is to come in eternity when we are promised in Revelation 18 and 19 that we will sit down one day at the greatest banquet of all time, the marriage supper of the Lamb, where we celebrate the bride of Christ, the church being swept up into heaven to exist with God in perfect peace for all eternity. The marriage supper of the Lamb and the truth of it and the existence of it and the hope for it is the hope to which we all cling. And every meal we have is a shadow of what is to come in heaven. And that's what we're going to talk about on Easter. But what we're going to see as we move through this series is Jesus using meals as ministry. And it's going to cause us to ask, kind of that prompt that we left in the video, it's going to cause us to ask, what would happen if we began to think about our meals the way Jesus did? What would happen if we began to look at lunch and dinner, I mean, not breakfast, like nobody does anything for breakfast, okay, so we don't have to worry about that. But what would happen if we looked at lunch and dinner as opportunities for ministry? To bridge gaps with people. To build relationships with people. Even just to solidify things within our own family and have good spiritual conversations. What would happen if just for this season, for these six weeks, we allowed ourselves to think about our meals the way that Jesus thought about his meals. To that end, we have some things to help you do that as we move through this series. The first is this. This is a booklet of conversation prompts, and you can fold it and it sets up like a triangle, like one of those calendars. And so these are all sitting on the information table out there. And what we're encouraging everyone to do, one per family, please, because we didn't print out enough for all you guys to be greedy. What we're encouraging you to do, if it makes sense at all in your universe, and I know that for some this is not going to make sense, and I don't mean to exclude anyone, and I'm sorry about that, but if it makes sense in your family, grab one of these. Every week, there's a couple of verses that tie in with the sermon that you or your kids can read at the beginning of the week so everybody has the right context what we're talking about. And then every day is just a different conversational prompt. It's just one. It's not a list of small group questions. It's very low bar, very attainable. It's just one conversational prompt that has to do with the sermon from that week. It's an opportunity for you guys as families to use your meals with some purpose, to have meaningful, important conversations around your table. And so I would encourage you to take this, set it up, put it on your kitchen table for this Lenten period for the next six weeks or so. Carly did a great job. It's going to fit in with your decor, Okay, it's going to look nice. Don't worry about that. Just go and put it on your table. And then every time you have a meal at that table, I know that it's not realistic to assume that five or six nights a week, we're all going to sit as families around a table. Maybe you do, and that's wonderful. But I know that a lot of us struggle for that. So if you miss days, don't beat yourself up about it. Nobody cares. But when you're sitting at that table as a family, grab it, flip to the day, and ask the prompt, and make everyone around the table answer. Sometimes this won't go anywhere. It'll be two minutes of awkward, and your kids will be mad at you, and then you'll move on to other things. That's okay. But maybe two or three times it'll spark a really important conversation in your house. And if it does, isn't it worth it being awkward a couple of nights? So I think we've got an opportunity to begin to use our dinner tables as families to have some meaningful conversations as we move through this series together. So I would really encourage you to take one of these. The other thing we want you to do in the next six weeks leading up to Easter is what I'm calling the dinner table challenge. Here's the challenge. We would love for you, if you're a grace person, if you feel comfortable doing this, if you're new here this morning, you're like, bro, I did not sign up for this. Okay, I understand. You're adults. Do this if you want. But here's the challenge, okay? Sometime over the next six weeks, we would love for you to invite someone to your table from grace who's never been around your table before. That's simple. Now, you're going to start giving out invites to people who have never been over to your house before. And they're going to go, are you inviting us over because of the challenge? And then you go, yeah, but like, you know, do you like hamburgers? Let's go. Nobody cares. Let's just zoom right through that and have people over to the house from grace that we've never had over before. And I bet we'll start making new friends and new connections. And I bet different parts of the church will start getting connected with other parts of the church, and I bet this can be a very positive thing. The second part of the challenge is have someone around your table who's not from grace, who's never been around your table before. And I know that this is going to look different for different folks. If the idea of having someone around your table is terrifying because you're an awful cook or you're a hoarder and you don't want them to see your shame, like whatever it is, go out to dinner with some people. Make some reservations and go and talk with some folks from grace that you've never done that with, with some folks not from grace that you've never done that with. But I do think, and we're going to talk more about this next week, I do think that there is a power and an efficacy to having people over to the house, to preparing the meal, to going through those things to show hospitality. But however that makes the most sense in your context, that's the dinner table challenge here in the next six weeks. Have someone around your table from grace who's never been there. Have someone around your table not from grace who's never been there. And I'm just telling you, I really think God's going to do some cool stuff with that if we'll walk in it. I really think God is going to spark some good conversations. I really think he's going to make some good connections. And this isn't at all the reason why I'm doing this, but I think it's going to bring some people to grace. And if it doesn't bring them to grace, but it brings them to a church, great. Great. You guys know me. I'm not trying to get more people. We don't have enough room for all your friends anyways, and I'm not going to two services until the fall. Because Aaron Winston would quit. Just today, he would quit. But man, what if you invite somebody from your neighborhood who hasn't prioritized Jesus in a while, but because they interact with you, because they interact with your family, because you express friendship and hospitality to them, they decide that they want to re-engage with their Savior. Isn't that great? And who cares what church they go to after that? So that's the dinner table challenge. That's what we want you to do, and we want you to grab one of these and use that for the next six weeks. This is also probably a good time to mention something that I've been thinking about for a long while. I guess it was maybe the summer where Carly came to me and she said, hey, can I change the logo? And I'm like, what's wrong with the logo? That's grace, you know? It's fancy. And she's like, what? I don't like it. And then I looked at it. I don't know if you guys can see this. I'll show it to you afterwards if you can't. Yeah, but it looks better here, all right? Jeez. It is on the screen, and that is helpful. So you see it on the screen, and here it's all silver. So when it's one color, it looks like a helmet for Mickey Mouse. That's what it looks like. It looks like we stand for Sir Mickey Duke of Raleigh. And here it's in silver, so it's really pronounced. And once you see that, you just, you can't not see it. And here's the thing about the logo is like, what does it mean? Nothing, nothing. Well, there's hexagons. Yep. What do those mean? We don't know. There's a cross. We know what the cross means, and that's good. Pro-cross. But it doesn't really have any significance to it. And so the more I thought about it, the more I was like, I mean, yeah, sure. If there's something better that you can come up with, let's try it. And so with that kind of on the back burner, I also had this other thought about grace. And I think that we can marry the two and the logo. I don't have a logo to unveil for you this morning. I'm not like building to that, so don't get excited. We're working on it, all right? I just realized the anticipation I was building. No, that's not, mm-mm. I don't have anything yet. I can hand-draw you one. But there's a lot of different ways to think about a church. And after walking with you guys for almost seven years, I think I really know how we think about the church and how I think about the church. In Christendom, in church world, you can come across churches that kind of present themselves as almost this weight room, like this machismo, I'm going to just man up and be a good Christian and be a warrior for Jesus. And whether you're a woman or a man, you need to man up and you need to be tough for Jesus. And okay, in some contexts, that's effective and useful for the kingdom, and that's great. But that's not me, and that's not us. I grew up hearing this analogy to help us think about church, that church isn't a cruise ship, it's a battleship, right? Church isn't just this good time gang where you just have the best time possible and you just cruise along trying to have fun and get through life and just enjoying things. It's a battleship where we fight the enemy and we attack and we move forward and we're on mission and we press. And that has a lot of stuff that resonates with me. The problem is, when you think of the church as a battleship, we often get confused about who the enemy is, and we start to shoot at people that we don't have any business shooting at. So I don't really love thinking about the church as a battleship. So as I think about the church, and I think particularly about grace, I think grace is a banquet table, and everyone is invited. I think of grace as just this big party where we're celebrating our Savior, where we sit around a table every week, and we gather to share about our Savior. Where we sit around a table every week and we gather to share about our weeks and to hear what Jesus is doing and where he's taking us. I think about grace as this banquet table where everyone is welcome. If you want to bring your friends, bring them. If we fill up this room too much, I'll just walk around the room going to people who I know who have been going here for a long time and say, go stay in the lobby. Somebody needs your seat. We're fine with that. Everyone is invited to this table. There is not a head to this table. It's round. We're all equals. We're all together just trying to cling to the hope of the promises that we see in Scripture, knowing that one day we will sit around the great banquet table. Grace is a table where if you're sad, you can come here and you can grieve and you can mourn. Grace is a table if you're joyful, you can come here and celebrate and not allow that joy to terminate and the experience that's making you joyful, but turn in reflection to the God who is the author of that joy and share it with the people who love you most and best. Grace is a place for weary pilgrims to come and rest, for wanderers to settle. Grace is a table where the wounded can come and they can heal, where the weary can come and they can rest. It is a place where people who feel lonely, who need community, can come and find it. It is a place for those of us who have community to turn and offer that to other people who need it as well. Grace is a place where everyone is invited to come and celebrate in the majesty of our Savior. It is a place to come where we are loved and we allow ourselves to love others. And we do that in celebration of the God who loves us most and first and best. And so I think this series is most appropriate for who we are and for how God has shaped our faith, for how God has brought us to understand what it means to live the Christian life. And so more and more, I want us to see grace as a table that we bring everybody around to be refreshed and revived, then go back out. And I want us, as we go back out, to think of our meals more purposefully for the next six weeks and ask ourselves the question, how can we use our meals as Jesus did? And as we come back over now five more weeks, we're going to look at how Jesus used meals for ministry every one of those weeks. It'll culminate in that Good Friday service, and then hopefully we'll have the best Easter that we've ever had. But now I'm going to pray, and Aaron of the band is going to come up, and I don't know if we'll have lyrics for it or not, but if we don't, it's no big deal. Just listen for them. And they're going to sing over us a song that I think is thematic, not just for this series, but for Grace as well, and I'm excited for you guys to learn it and experience it. Let's pray. Father, thank you for who you are. Thank you for how you love us. Thank you for the gospel of Luke and all the truth that we find in it. Lord, thank you for opening my eyes to the way that your son used meals in that book in his life. I pray that we would use them in the same way, that we would see meals as sacred spaces, that we would invite others into those, that you would use those of us with gifts of hospitality, with gifts of conversation, that you would break some of us out of our shells and help us to make the connections that honestly our souls need so desperately. God, I pray over this series and what's happening at Grace. I feel like I can see you moving powerfully here, and so I pray that you would continue to do that and that nothing that we would do would get in the way of what you want to do. May we be sensitive to your guiding, sensitive to the Spirit in this season. Even as we consider who to invite, God, that you would move us in the direction of the connections that you want us to make. Lord, use this series in a powerful way, not for the sake of grace, but for the sake of the families and the individuals that comprise this place. We thank you for giving us a table here that we can all gather around. We pray that we would always be grateful to you for that. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see everybody. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby immediately following the service. If you're watching online, especially if you're doing that habitually, we love that you are, and that is fantastic that you're following along. But I'm just going to tell you as a friend, you're missing the best part of the service. Because the best part of the service is when we all get to worship together. We're just putting up with me in between more songs is all we're doing here. Because that was really great. Thank you, band, for leading us into God's presence in that way. This is our big spring series. This is the series that we have been planning since the fall when we kind of sit around and try to plan in advance what we're going to do. And what we always want to do with the series in the spring as we come out of February, we move into March, is we kind of want to take at least six weeks and point our collective attention towards Easter to prepare our hearts and to prepare our minds for the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus, for the victory of victories, for what I believe is the greatest holiday in our calendar. It's the greatest day of the year when we get to celebrate that we are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song. And so the point of the spring series is always to kind of drive us to Easter and to prepare our hearts as a body for that celebration. And so that's absolutely the point of what we're doing this spring as well through a series called The Table. And we've got a couple things I'm going to, we've got a challenge we're going to issue for you. We've got something for you to take home. I'm going to tell you what this is. But the other thing I just want to put on your radar screen is we're going to have a Good Friday service this year for the first time since I've been one of the pastors. Yes, thank you. That's great. Okay, so if you clapped, you have to come. That's part of the deal. You can't be like, oh, I got plans. No, I'm telling you right now. Good Friday service, and for those that don't know, I'm not making a joke here. I'm just being kind. It's the Friday right before Easter. So you can go ahead and mark that off in your calendar. We've got that written and ready to go. We've been thinking about that already, and so we are looking forward to that. And the whole purpose of that service is really and truly to take some time on the Friday of Jesus's crucifixion, that remembers Jesus's crucifixion, and really ask the Lord to prepare our hearts for Easter so that the impact and the weight of it can fully rest on us. And so I hope that you'll be a part of that. This Sunday is intended to be kind of a setup for the rest of the series. So this Sunday, we're just kind of looking at the broad brush of it, why we've landed here, why we are doing this series called The Table. One of my favorite parts about this series is that we have a lady, Carly Buchanan, who is our part-time graphics department, among other things, right? She sings sometimes. Right now, she's over there watching my son and his peers in the hallway. And she gives a lot to the church. This series is her idea. When we sat around pitching things, I had my own idea for what we should do for series. And then she mentioned this, and everybody just immediately latched on to it. And it's a great way for me to highlight to you that you have a really great staff that works for you, that serves your kids, that serves your students, that serves us here. They're really, really great folks who are fun to work with. And almost none of the good ideas that we do are mine. I'm just leeching off of their good ideas. And so she brought this to us and we immediately loved it. And I immediately recognized that this series would resonate with grace. And I should have known that something like this would resonate with grace back when I started here. It was April of 2017 was my first Sunday at grace. It was the Sunday before Easter. And so prior to that, I think somewhere in late February, early March, they offered me the job and I ignorantly accepted it. And then they flew me up one Sunday in the middle of March to introduce me to the church right here in this room. And I should have known that meals were going to be a big deal to grace people because I landed Saturday evening around dinner time. And at the time, the moderator of the board was a guy, a good buddy of mine named Burt Banks and his wife, Terry. Now Terry is one of the elders. And so it's nice to get the good banks on the elder board. Now they picked me up at the airport and we were planning to go out to dinner and they said, hey, is it okay? We made reservations for dinner. I said, that's great, I'm hungry. And they said, we've also invited some other folks from Grace to meet us there that they wanna have a chance to meet you. Is that all right? And I'm like, yeah, sure. I mean, I'm the new pastor. I need to want to meet the people that I'll be working with, going to church with, that kind of thing. So absolutely. So we headed straight from the airport, straight to Winston's, straight to this back room. There was three other couples there, plus the Banks's and myself. And we just sat down and we had a time. And we talked for, it must have been two, two and a half hours. They were peppering me with questions. I was peppering them with questions. We just wanted to get to know each other, and so we sat down over a meal, and we did it. And then a couple weeks later, we moved the family up here. We rented a house off of Teal Briar over in Northridge, and that first week that we were here, I will never forget it. It had to be at least five of the seven nights we were going to somebody's house for dinner. You guys were just, you were peppering us with dinner invites. And over that first month, we went to dinner at more people's houses than I could count because people just wanted to get to know the new pastor and we wanted to get to know the new people. And that's what we did is we got together over meals, right? And when you think about grace culture, who we are as a church, one of our biggest events of the year, Hootenanny in September, what do we do? Well, we sit outside and we eat. You know, grace is big night out. What do we do? We stand around tables. We talk and we drink. That's what we do. This is what we like. We are a communing church. This is who we are, which is why I think that Luke is going to become our new favorite gospel. As we dove into this series, Carly had the idea based on a book, and we're going to see a quote from that book here in a second, based on a book called A Meal with Jesus. And so that book is based out of the Gospel of Luke. And I began to do research for the series. I was listening to that book on Audible. I like to listen to books so I can do other stuff while I'm reading. And the book really is based in the Gospel of Luke. And what I began to learn about Luke is meals are incredibly prevalent in this particular gospel. For those that may not be able to recall right off the top of their head, there's four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are what's called synoptic gospels where they kind of tell the story of Jesus from start to finish. They follow the same chronology. And then John kind of stands independently as its own gospel with its own style and makes its own points and things like that. And so Luke is one of the synoptic Gospels, which means a lot of the stories that it tells are very similar to Matthew and Mark, to the two preceding Gospels. But what we don't necessarily see, or what I've never learned before, and I'm embarrassed to admit it, because I've read Luke dozens of times in my life. I've led Bible studies through it. I've taken classes specifically on the book of Luke. Like, I should know this, and I just never did. And maybe you guys did, because you pay closer attention to Scripture than I do. But Luke is actually called, in in Scripture the hospitality gospel. I didn't know this, but in Luke, there are 10 different instances of Jesus sitting down to a meal with other people. Only three of those meals are recorded in the other gospels, which means in Luke, we have seven completely unique stories of Jesus sitting down to a meal with others. Meals are so prevalent in the book of Luke that the author of A Meal with Jesus, a guy, Tim Chester, said this, in Luke's gospel, Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal. That's how prevalent it is in the book of Luke. And so I just thought, frankly, what a grace series to focus on that, the power and the efficacy of meals. And then the author brings up this verse that, again, I had read plenty of times before, but I've never just considered it in an isolated way. It's never jumped off the page like it did to me this time. But if I were to say to you, complete this sentence, the Son of Man came to, how would you complete that sentence? The Son of Man came to what? For me, as I was listening to this and processing it, I would complete that sentence, the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. That's what I've always heard. That's what I understand. And that's what Jesus said, and he did. But in Luke, he also says this in chapter 7, verse 34, the Son of Man has come eating and drinking. And you say, look at him, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors've carried myself in my arrival. The Son of Man has come eating and drinking. Now, I want to provide you some context so we understand what's going on there. Jesus is speaking to people from his hometown who have rejected him, who do not believe that he is a Messiah, who do not affirm his teachings. And they've kind of turned him away and said, he's a glutton and a drunkard. He can't be trusted because of who he's carousing with, because of how he behaves, because of what he's doing. And so Jesus says to them in the verses preceding, you guys, you had John the Baptist. He fasts. He lives in the wilderness in complete piety and austerity. He abstains from everything. He lives this very aesthetic, like this very minimalistic life, and you rejected him as the devil. Then the Son of Man comes eating and drinking, doing the exact opposite of that, and you reject me too. You guys got to pick a side. You have to pick a lane. That's the frustration that Jesus is expressing in this verse, and he gets accused of being a glutton and a drunkard because of the company that he's keeping. And so as we move through the series, we're going to see why Jesus chose to keep that company. But I also think it's powerful that Jesus does say this. Even out of context, I do think it's a powerful statement, the Son of Man comes eating and drinking. The Son of Man understands the power of a meal, of what happens around a table, of how memorable it can be. And we're going to continue to unpack that as we go through the series. But we know meals are powerful because we've experienced that too. I remember, I think it was 2008. It was the year, or maybe it was 2007, the year after Jen and I got married in 2006, we went to Rome with her family. And we went with her family, and then we went with another lady and her two adult sons. There was eight of us total, and we went to Rome. And when we went to Rome, we were there for seven or eight days. We got to see a lot of really cool stuff. We got to see the Parthenon and something called the wedding cake that the people in Rome really don't like very much. We got to see St. Peter's Basilica and St. Peter's Square. And I got to go on Christmas Day to the papal address. He came out and he addressed the throngs of people gathered in St. Peter's Square, and Pope Benedict gave me a plenary indulgence for 2008, which was great. 2008 was the best year of my life. Thank you, Pope Benedict. But the thing that I remember the most from Rome, and I think everybody who went on that trip would agree, is the Christmas Day meal that we had. Somebody in our party got a tip from one of their friends that this is the place you need to go in Rome for a good meal. And we're like, all right, let's go. I had no idea where we were going, what we were doing. So we're walking to this address. We end up on some completely nondescript street in Rome. Gray cobblestones, and it looked like residential. It wasn't rough residential, it was just residential, like row homes or townhomes or something like that, just kind of all together, and we didn't know where to go or what to do. And we're just kind of standing around, looking at the map, like did we come to the right address, what's going on? And then out of this door to my left burst an Italian chef from Central Casting. I'm telling you, he was short, he was rotund, he was thinning on top, but he had his hair knocked back. He was yelling Italian things. He was like a volcano of Italian joy, right? Like just, I'm not going to try to make any Italian noises because A, I think I would sound stupid. And B, I think that might be somehow racist in 2023. I don't know. I don't want to get in any trouble. But he was saying a bunch of Italian things very loudly and very joyfully. And he just comes bolting right up to me and he grabs my hand. He grabs my wrist. He didn't even grab my hand. He wanted me to not be able to resist at all. And he grabs my wrist and he yanks me into the building. He just starts pulling me towards the restaurant. And I'm looking at the other seven, like, don't leave me behind. Like, you got to come too. And he's just spouting off things and making motions. And he pulls me into what I think is going to be a house. And we walk in, and it's a restaurant, and there's tables, and there's people eating. And he just continues to be an Italian volcano of joy. And then we just plunge right into the kitchen. And I'm like, what's going on here? And again, it's like from a movie. There's stainless steel and steam and fire and chopping and Italian words. And I'm like, this is all happening too fast. And then he bursts out of the kitchen into this private dining room, and he points at the table gleefully. We all get around it. And then he grabs my mother-in-law and kisses her square on the lips and sits us down. And nobody was mad. We were a little offended. He didn't kiss the rest of us. Like it was just, he just sat us down. And as soon as he sat us down, somebody else comes out of the kitchen with whatever the first course was, probably prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella and whatever. And they set it down, and he says his stuff, and he asks what kind of wine we want. He's got a great wine pairing, and nobody else there drank wine. And I'm sitting there. It's my first year in marriage. I'm with a teetotaling family, and quietly I'm like, well, this is stupid. I mean, can I get a little bit of wine? But no, no deal. But they kept just bringing the food, right? The first course is done. He comes and he joyfully sweeps it away. Someone comes out of the kitchen with the next course. And this must have happened seven or eight times. I don't know what we had. I don't know what we ate. I know it was the best meal I've ever had in my life. I know that I will never forget it. When you ask me what's the best meal you've ever had, I will always say that meal in Rome. That's what I remember more than anything. And one of the things that sticks out to me is his joy in hospitality and that infectious joy that spread around the table. And that that's a memory as a family that no one can ever touch, that you can never take away. There was power in that afternoon. And the Italians do it right. When you have a meal over there, you're not going anywhere for like three hours. And you better plan for a nap afterwards. He just keeps bringing stuff. And it was so good and so wonderful and clearly so memorable. And you guys know that meals are powerful too. That's why they occupy such an important space in our culture. When someone gets married, biggest day of their life so far, what do we do? Immediately following someone's wedding ceremony, we go eat together. What do we do the night before someone's wedding ceremony? We have a meal with our closest friends so that we can talk more intimately than when we have to invite all the acquaintances and pay for their meals at the big one the next day. When we have a funeral, what do we do at a funeral? While the family is at the graveside service, someone who loves them is back at their house collecting meals from everybody else so that when the family gets there, they can sit down and they eat. When someone comes over to the house, what's the first thing you say if you're a decent human at all? What can I get you? You hungry? You thirsty? When someone comes in town to visit, what do we do? What are we going to eat? What do you guys want? See, whether we realize it or not, meals hold a sacred place in all of our lives. They're special. They're important. The table is an image that all of us know, that all of us share, that all of us gather around. And those moments around those tables are sacred. And Jesus knew this too. And it's why I think on bright display in the Gospel of Luke is Jesus' commitment to sitting down and having meals with people. But he's not simply eating and drinking. That's not all he came to do. As a matter of fact, that's not even at all what he came to do. He came to eat and drink with people because around the table, conversations happen. Stories are shared. Laughter is exchanged. If it's a really good meal, really good meal. We'll tear up together. We'll learn something about the people we're sitting with. It forces us in the busyness of our lives to stop and focus on what we're doing and who we're with. And Jesus understood the power of a meal. And so over the course of this series, as we prepare for Easter, we're going to look at how Jesus uses his meals in the Gospel of Luke. We're going to look at what he uses the table for. Because Jesus used meals as ministry. He uses the table to symbolize provision. He uses the table to include those who feel ostracized. He uses the table to try to convert those who may be lost and wondering. He uses the table to build community. He uses the table near his death to symbolize what he's about to do. He uses the table to help us always remember what he did. And then most powerfully, I think, he uses the table as a shadow of the reality that is to come in eternity when we are promised in Revelation 18 and 19 that we will sit down one day at the greatest banquet of all time, the marriage supper of the Lamb, where we celebrate the bride of Christ, the church being swept up into heaven to exist with God in perfect peace for all eternity. The marriage supper of the Lamb and the truth of it and the existence of it and the hope for it is the hope to which we all cling. And every meal we have is a shadow of what is to come in heaven. And that's what we're going to talk about on Easter. But what we're going to see as we move through this series is Jesus using meals as ministry. And it's going to cause us to ask, kind of that prompt that we left in the video, it's going to cause us to ask, what would happen if we began to think about our meals the way Jesus did? What would happen if we began to look at lunch and dinner, I mean, not breakfast, like nobody does anything for breakfast, okay, so we don't have to worry about that. But what would happen if we looked at lunch and dinner as opportunities for ministry? To bridge gaps with people. To build relationships with people. Even just to solidify things within our own family and have good spiritual conversations. What would happen if just for this season, for these six weeks, we allowed ourselves to think about our meals the way that Jesus thought about his meals. To that end, we have some things to help you do that as we move through this series. The first is this. This is a booklet of conversation prompts, and you can fold it and it sets up like a triangle, like one of those calendars. And so these are all sitting on the information table out there. And what we're encouraging everyone to do, one per family, please, because we didn't print out enough for all you guys to be greedy. What we're encouraging you to do, if it makes sense at all in your universe, and I know that for some this is not going to make sense, and I don't mean to exclude anyone, and I'm sorry about that, but if it makes sense in your family, grab one of these. Every week, there's a couple of verses that tie in with the sermon that you or your kids can read at the beginning of the week so everybody has the right context what we're talking about. And then every day is just a different conversational prompt. It's just one. It's not a list of small group questions. It's very low bar, very attainable. It's just one conversational prompt that has to do with the sermon from that week. It's an opportunity for you guys as families to use your meals with some purpose, to have meaningful, important conversations around your table. And so I would encourage you to take this, set it up, put it on your kitchen table for this Lenten period for the next six weeks or so. Carly did a great job. It's going to fit in with your decor, Okay, it's going to look nice. Don't worry about that. Just go and put it on your table. And then every time you have a meal at that table, I know that it's not realistic to assume that five or six nights a week, we're all going to sit as families around a table. Maybe you do, and that's wonderful. But I know that a lot of us struggle for that. So if you miss days, don't beat yourself up about it. Nobody cares. But when you're sitting at that table as a family, grab it, flip to the day, and ask the prompt, and make everyone around the table answer. Sometimes this won't go anywhere. It'll be two minutes of awkward, and your kids will be mad at you, and then you'll move on to other things. That's okay. But maybe two or three times it'll spark a really important conversation in your house. And if it does, isn't it worth it being awkward a couple of nights? So I think we've got an opportunity to begin to use our dinner tables as families to have some meaningful conversations as we move through this series together. So I would really encourage you to take one of these. The other thing we want you to do in the next six weeks leading up to Easter is what I'm calling the dinner table challenge. Here's the challenge. We would love for you, if you're a grace person, if you feel comfortable doing this, if you're new here this morning, you're like, bro, I did not sign up for this. Okay, I understand. You're adults. Do this if you want. But here's the challenge, okay? Sometime over the next six weeks, we would love for you to invite someone to your table from grace who's never been around your table before. That's simple. Now, you're going to start giving out invites to people who have never been over to your house before. And they're going to go, are you inviting us over because of the challenge? And then you go, yeah, but like, you know, do you like hamburgers? Let's go. Nobody cares. Let's just zoom right through that and have people over to the house from grace that we've never had over before. And I bet we'll start making new friends and new connections. And I bet different parts of the church will start getting connected with other parts of the church, and I bet this can be a very positive thing. The second part of the challenge is have someone around your table who's not from grace, who's never been around your table before. And I know that this is going to look different for different folks. If the idea of having someone around your table is terrifying because you're an awful cook or you're a hoarder and you don't want them to see your shame, like whatever it is, go out to dinner with some people. Make some reservations and go and talk with some folks from grace that you've never done that with, with some folks not from grace that you've never done that with. But I do think, and we're going to talk more about this next week, I do think that there is a power and an efficacy to having people over to the house, to preparing the meal, to going through those things to show hospitality. But however that makes the most sense in your context, that's the dinner table challenge here in the next six weeks. Have someone around your table from grace who's never been there. Have someone around your table not from grace who's never been there. And I'm just telling you, I really think God's going to do some cool stuff with that if we'll walk in it. I really think God is going to spark some good conversations. I really think he's going to make some good connections. And this isn't at all the reason why I'm doing this, but I think it's going to bring some people to grace. And if it doesn't bring them to grace, but it brings them to a church, great. Great. You guys know me. I'm not trying to get more people. We don't have enough room for all your friends anyways, and I'm not going to two services until the fall. Because Aaron Winston would quit. Just today, he would quit. But man, what if you invite somebody from your neighborhood who hasn't prioritized Jesus in a while, but because they interact with you, because they interact with your family, because you express friendship and hospitality to them, they decide that they want to re-engage with their Savior. Isn't that great? And who cares what church they go to after that? So that's the dinner table challenge. That's what we want you to do, and we want you to grab one of these and use that for the next six weeks. This is also probably a good time to mention something that I've been thinking about for a long while. I guess it was maybe the summer where Carly came to me and she said, hey, can I change the logo? And I'm like, what's wrong with the logo? That's grace, you know? It's fancy. And she's like, what? I don't like it. And then I looked at it. I don't know if you guys can see this. I'll show it to you afterwards if you can't. Yeah, but it looks better here, all right? Jeez. It is on the screen, and that is helpful. So you see it on the screen, and here it's all silver. So when it's one color, it looks like a helmet for Mickey Mouse. That's what it looks like. It looks like we stand for Sir Mickey Duke of Raleigh. And here it's in silver, so it's really pronounced. And once you see that, you just, you can't not see it. And here's the thing about the logo is like, what does it mean? Nothing, nothing. Well, there's hexagons. Yep. What do those mean? We don't know. There's a cross. We know what the cross means, and that's good. Pro-cross. But it doesn't really have any significance to it. And so the more I thought about it, the more I was like, I mean, yeah, sure. If there's something better that you can come up with, let's try it. And so with that kind of on the back burner, I also had this other thought about grace. And I think that we can marry the two and the logo. I don't have a logo to unveil for you this morning. I'm not like building to that, so don't get excited. We're working on it, all right? I just realized the anticipation I was building. No, that's not, mm-mm. I don't have anything yet. I can hand-draw you one. But there's a lot of different ways to think about a church. And after walking with you guys for almost seven years, I think I really know how we think about the church and how I think about the church. In Christendom, in church world, you can come across churches that kind of present themselves as almost this weight room, like this machismo, I'm going to just man up and be a good Christian and be a warrior for Jesus. And whether you're a woman or a man, you need to man up and you need to be tough for Jesus. And okay, in some contexts, that's effective and useful for the kingdom, and that's great. But that's not me, and that's not us. I grew up hearing this analogy to help us think about church, that church isn't a cruise ship, it's a battleship, right? Church isn't just this good time gang where you just have the best time possible and you just cruise along trying to have fun and get through life and just enjoying things. It's a battleship where we fight the enemy and we attack and we move forward and we're on mission and we press. And that has a lot of stuff that resonates with me. The problem is, when you think of the church as a battleship, we often get confused about who the enemy is, and we start to shoot at people that we don't have any business shooting at. So I don't really love thinking about the church as a battleship. So as I think about the church, and I think particularly about grace, I think grace is a banquet table, and everyone is invited. I think of grace as just this big party where we're celebrating our Savior, where we sit around a table every week, and we gather to share about our Savior. Where we sit around a table every week and we gather to share about our weeks and to hear what Jesus is doing and where he's taking us. I think about grace as this banquet table where everyone is welcome. If you want to bring your friends, bring them. If we fill up this room too much, I'll just walk around the room going to people who I know who have been going here for a long time and say, go stay in the lobby. Somebody needs your seat. We're fine with that. Everyone is invited to this table. There is not a head to this table. It's round. We're all equals. We're all together just trying to cling to the hope of the promises that we see in Scripture, knowing that one day we will sit around the great banquet table. Grace is a table where if you're sad, you can come here and you can grieve and you can mourn. Grace is a table if you're joyful, you can come here and celebrate and not allow that joy to terminate and the experience that's making you joyful, but turn in reflection to the God who is the author of that joy and share it with the people who love you most and best. Grace is a place for weary pilgrims to come and rest, for wanderers to settle. Grace is a table where the wounded can come and they can heal, where the weary can come and they can rest. It is a place where people who feel lonely, who need community, can come and find it. It is a place for those of us who have community to turn and offer that to other people who need it as well. Grace is a place where everyone is invited to come and celebrate in the majesty of our Savior. It is a place to come where we are loved and we allow ourselves to love others. And we do that in celebration of the God who loves us most and first and best. And so I think this series is most appropriate for who we are and for how God has shaped our faith, for how God has brought us to understand what it means to live the Christian life. And so more and more, I want us to see grace as a table that we bring everybody around to be refreshed and revived, then go back out. And I want us, as we go back out, to think of our meals more purposefully for the next six weeks and ask ourselves the question, how can we use our meals as Jesus did? And as we come back over now five more weeks, we're going to look at how Jesus used meals for ministry every one of those weeks. It'll culminate in that Good Friday service, and then hopefully we'll have the best Easter that we've ever had. But now I'm going to pray, and Aaron of the band is going to come up, and I don't know if we'll have lyrics for it or not, but if we don't, it's no big deal. Just listen for them. And they're going to sing over us a song that I think is thematic, not just for this series, but for Grace as well, and I'm excited for you guys to learn it and experience it. Let's pray. Father, thank you for who you are. Thank you for how you love us. Thank you for the gospel of Luke and all the truth that we find in it. Lord, thank you for opening my eyes to the way that your son used meals in that book in his life. I pray that we would use them in the same way, that we would see meals as sacred spaces, that we would invite others into those, that you would use those of us with gifts of hospitality, with gifts of conversation, that you would break some of us out of our shells and help us to make the connections that honestly our souls need so desperately. God, I pray over this series and what's happening at Grace. I feel like I can see you moving powerfully here, and so I pray that you would continue to do that and that nothing that we would do would get in the way of what you want to do. May we be sensitive to your guiding, sensitive to the Spirit in this season. Even as we consider who to invite, God, that you would move us in the direction of the connections that you want us to make. Lord, use this series in a powerful way, not for the sake of grace, but for the sake of the families and the individuals that comprise this place. We thank you for giving us a table here that we can all gather around. We pray that we would always be grateful to you for that. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This morning is a little different. We're in the 10th part of our series going through the Gospel of John. And we arrived this morning at the story of the crucifixion. And as I thought and prayed over how best to cover this, my conclusion was that the best possible thing to do, the best possible way to honor the text and to honor our God and to honor you is to simply tell the story and to let that be enough. And so this morning feels a little different. I don't have any jokes or stories for you this morning. We're not going to turn the lights on because there's no notes. There's not going to be any scriptures up on the screen. What I'm going to tell you is an amalgamation or a synthesis of the account of the crucifixion from all four gospels, beginning in the Garden of Gethsemane. At the end of Jesus' life, he celebrated the Passover with the disciples. He was 33 years old. He had been with them for three years, and it was the night that he was going to be arrested and tried and crucified. The disciples didn't know that, but he did. And so after the Passover, after their celebration, it's getting towards the evening, think 10 or 11 o'clock at night. Jesus grabs his three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, and he says, would you come and pray with me? And they go to a place called the Garden of Gethsemane. If you're in Jerusalem and you go directly east, there's a valley, there's the temple mount, and then a little valley, and then on the other side of that valley is a hill. That hill is the Garden of Gethsemane, and that's where they are. And so Jesus takes his three disciples with him, Peter, James, and John, his closest confidants, and he says, would you come with me while I pray? And he leaves them in an area of the garden, and he goes, the Bible says, about a stone's throw from them. And he says, will you stay here, and will you pray for me and pray for yourself? And Jesus goes, and he prays. And in the Garden of Gethsemane, the night that he was going to be arrested, knees and he begins to pray that the Father would take this cup from him. Father, this is going to be difficult. This is going to be painful. If there's any other way to do this, Father, you're capable of all things. Let there be another way to do this. Please don't make me drink this cup. Please don't make me have to walk through what I'm about to have to walk through in the crucifixion. After praying for a while, he comes back to check on his three disciples, and he finds them sleeping. It's late at night. It's after dinner. They've had a lot of food. They've had wine, and their eyes are heavy. And it's here where we can already begin to see the isolation of Jesus as he goes through these next several hours. His closest people, his closest friends in his whole life can't even stay awake to pray for him because they don't understand what he's about to do. So he wakes them up and he says, this time I want you to pray for yourself that you wouldn't fall into temptation. And he goes back and he begins to pray again. And this time he begins to pray more fervently. I think we picture Jesus, if we ever picture him, we picture him on his knees in the garden praying quietly, maybe passively or submissively. But I think the text indicates that he was at this point crying out. I saw a pastor talk about this one time and he laid prostrate on his face and screamed. And what we know about these prayers is that he uses this word that we don't see Jesus use before this time. He's calling out to God and he says, Abba, Father, please don't make me do this. Abba, Father, please don't make me drink of this cup. Please don't make me walk through this pain. And he uses that word Abba, and we only see that in Romans when Paul is using it as a way to refer to God intimately, when he tells us that because of what Jesus is about to walk through, we have the right to call God what Jesus calls him, that nobody else calls him. It's daddy or papa. And he's crying out to God the Father, please don't make me do this, Abba. If you have a child, can you imagine the anguish of the father hearing his son cry out to him, calling him Abba, Daddy, saying, please don't make me do this, knowing that you have the power to stop it, knowing that he doesn't have to do this and and you don't have to watch this, but sitting in heaven being willing to say, no, I'm sorry, son, this is a thing you're going to have to do. And so Jesus continues to pray. He prays so fervently that Luke tells us that his sweat began to fall like blood, and there is debate on whether or not that means he was just sweating profusely, which is intense enough, or if he was actually undergoing a medical condition called hemohidrosis, where capillaries in the blood vessels rupture due to extreme stress or fear, and actually blood mixes with the sweat. We don't know for sure which one it was, but we do know that Jesus was at the height of stress and he was at the height of anxiety and he's crying out to his father in a way that we don't see him do in any other place in scripture. Please don't make me do this. He's already a sweaty mess. The disciples have fallen asleep again and the isolation begins to set in. He finishes praying and he walks and so they had a king named Herod, but he was really impotent. The real power in Israel lie in the Sanhedrin, which was essentially a religious senate. And the head of this senate was the high priest, a man at the time named Caiaphas. And Caiaphas had sent his guards with Judas to arrest Jesus. And so Judas betrays him with a kiss. They ask Jesus, are you Jesus of Nazareth? And he says, I am he. And when he says that, they step back and they fall down because he's using the words of the great I am from Exodus 3 when God introduces himself for the first time. And they get back up and they go to arrest Jesus. And Peter, of course, Peter is the one who does this. He takes the sword and he goes to try to kill one of the guards. He misses and takes off his ear. We know that it was a guard named Malchus. And so Jesus tells him to stop it. He heals Malchus and he tells Peter, don't you know that if I didn't want to do this, that my father could send 12 legions of angels right now to save me and to protect me. And just so we're clear, 12 legions of angels is enough to handle any army in the history of history. He says, Peter, it's not the time. Because the prophecy said he needed to go silently like a lamb to the slaughter. And so he's arrested and he's taken to Caiaphas' house. At this point, the disciples follow at a distance and eventually scatter. He's held in the courtyard of Caiaphas' house with Peter on the perimeter and one unnamed disciple inside, and that's all he has for support. Caiaphas begins the ceremony, begins the hearings by inviting people to hurl false accusations against Jesus. They're unclaimed, they're unsubstantiated, and they're unfair. This is the Savior of the world, the Son of God who loves us so much that he condescended to be one of us and take on our frailty, who is sweaty and perhaps lightly bloody as he's cried out to his Father, please don't make me do this, and now he knows he's going to have to do it, and there's no one there with him. He is the person who has least deserved this treatment in the history of the world, and he is there, and they are hurling false accusations against a man who could not be kinder, and who could not be more gracious, and who could not be more loving, and who even as these people hurl these accusations, he is looking at them knowing that he is going to die for them, hoping that through this death that they will come to believe in the person that they are mocking. And it's a kangaroo court. And eventually, they ask Jesus, are you the son of God? And he says, I am who you say I am. And Caiaphas in this show, I think of this disgusting show of false abhorrence, tears his garments and yells and says, what more do we need to hear? He's just an old guy protecting his power. It's disgusting. And the temple guards put a blindfold on Jesus and they begin to punch him and slap him and say, you're a prophet. Why don't you prophesy who hit you, Jesus? It's at this point the Jewish tradition would say that he had his beard ripped out of his face. His face is bloody. It's likely swollen. They're spitting on him, and they are mocking him, and everyone around him is making a show of him. And they're saying, you're a prophet. You're so smart. Tell us who hit you. And the thing is, he knew who hit him. He knew his name. He knew his wife. He knew his kids. And he loved him. And he sat there, and he took it. And when they had had their fun, and they had finished beating our Jesus, they took him to most likely an isolation chamber. In the basement of Caiaphas' house, I was there back in 2013. Underneath his house in Jerusalem is a dungeon. And there's these columns and a wall that's concave. And you can see the brass rings where they would string up people or where they would chain them to the wall. And you think that this is where Jesus was, but then they walk you around the corner, and there's actually this hole in the ground. It's literally about this wide. There's no stairs at the time. There were no stairs that led to it. And they would tie a rope underneath your arms, and they would lower you into the hole where it was totally black and totally dark and totally isolated. If you need a sense of what it was like for Jesus to be there, read Psalm 88. When we went there, we stood in that cell and it was read to us. And it's one of the most moving things I've ever experienced. Who knows what's in that pitch black cell as Jesus sits there in his isolation, knowing the death that he is facing the next day. In the morning, they get him and they take him to Pilate. Pilate was the governor assigned by Rome to the area, to the province of Israel. He was the man who was actually in charge. You could not crucify anybody. You could not administer the death penalty in Israel without Roman permission. They had to actually administer it. And so they take Jesus to Pilate. They tell Pilate what he's done, and they say that we want to kill him. And Pilate talks to Jesus. And some of the most interesting conversations in the Bible to me are the exchanges between Pilate and Jesus. He asks him, he says, they say you're a king. Are you a king? And he says, well, I'm not the kind of king you think I am. If I were, my servants would be here to defend me, but my kingdom is not of this world. And Pilate is pressing him for answers, but Jesus really won't give them. And Pilate actually finds him innocent. His wife had a dream about him the night before, and she told him, you're going to meet this guy. Jesus don't have anything to do with him. He's innocent. And a lot of people think that Pilate actually believed his story. And so he goes to the Hebrew people who are outside. They're in the Fortress Antonia, which is connected to the Temple Mount. And he goes outside, and he looks at what I presume are gates, and there's throngs of people outside of them. And Pilate tells them, it's Passover, it's your tradition that I would let a prisoner go at Passover who's due the death penalty. Why don't I just let Jesus go? Why don't I return him to you? He doesn't seem guilty. And the crowd says, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a man who was guilty of insurrection, He was guilty of murder. He was guilty of thievery. He deserved the death penalty. He was a known criminal in Israel. And they say, give us Barabbas. Let Jesus die. And Pilate ceremonially washes his hands and says, his blood is not on me. And the Jewish people say, that's fine. His blood is on us and on our children. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And so Pilate bends to the will of the people and he orders Jesus crucified. And the first step of this crucifixion is a scourging or a flogging. And what we know about this is that it was standard Roman procedure. The crucifixion was standard procedure under Roman rule. It was a death penalty that had been designed and refined over decades, if not centuries. And the men who administered it were sadistic and sick, and I am convinced, evil. They were men who this is all they did. All they did is administer the death penalty. All they did is torture people. All they did is take you to within an inch of your life and back off. And that's what the scourging was. It was done with what's called a cat of nine tails, which is a handle with nine straps of leather that come out of it. And into the straps of leather are woven glass and shards of bone and metal and sometimes metal balls intended to bruise. And I've been where they did this. It's a place called the Stone Pavement in the Bible. The entire battalion that was there at the far-flung province of Israel with nothing better to do gathered to watch this man who claimed he was God be beaten. There's a square cement thing that comes out of the ground. It's about this tall. And you can see that somebody gets on their knees in front of it and is bent over it with their arms strapped around it. And they take the cat of nine tails and they hit Jesus with it. And when they hit him, they don't hit him dead on. They stand off to the side and hit him so that it hits here and wraps around and digs in. And then they don't pull it off. They rip it off so that when they rip it off, it takes with its skin and chunks. And they do this 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 every time. The idea was the person administering it, who is just pure evil, knew exactly how far he could go before the man was about to die and then he would stop. And by the time he finished, Jesus' back is totally exposed, spine exposed, and it was from the shoulders to all the way down the back of the legs to the top of the knees. Then they take him, and as entertainment for the whole battalion, they begin to mock him. And they get a robe and they put it on his wounds. And they take a crown of thorns, not briars, thorns. And they shove it into his skull. And they make him a king. And they begin to mock him as they fake worship him. And these Roman soldiers, not Hebrew temple guards, Roman trained soldiers begin to punch him in the face over and over again, mocking him, saying you're the king, fake bowing down to him as entertainment. And Jesus is utterly isolated and alone. When they had had their fill, they take the cross beam of the cross and they put it on his back. They redress him in his own tattered clothes. They put that wooden cross on his back and they tell him to walk to Golgotha, the place of the skull, where he's going to be crucified. On the way there, he falters and he can't make it. There's a man named Siren of Cyrene that they grab and ask him to carry the rest of the way. They get to Golgotha and they place Jesus on the cross, first laying on the ground, and they take the nails and they drive them into his hands. Some of us know this, but just so we're clear, when we think of the nails going into the hands of Jesus, we usually think of them going here, but really those nails had to be weight bearing. And so to put them there means that he would fall off the cross because there's not enough to hold him there. So where they would put the nails, the Hebrew word for hand is actually elbow to fingertip. And so where they would put the nail is actually right here. If you've seen an x-ray, you know that there's two bones in the forearm that meet at the wrist. And where they meet is a bundle of nerves. When you were in elementary school, you probably found this and know it as a pressure point. It's incredibly sensitive. And they would take the nail and they would drive it through the wrist there where those bones meet and where the nerves are. And when I say nail, don't think nail. Think more like something that you would drive into a railroad tie. And they drive his hand into the wood. And then they take him and they stretch him as far as he can go. They pull him against that nail because it's important that they spread out his chest and they drive one in the other hand. Then they take his feet and they put his feet over top of one another and they drive the nail through his feet. And we usually, when we see a picture of people on the cross, we see them with their legs extended, but more likely they were tucked up underneath him like this and his feet driven in together. Because once you hung up on the cross, I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but you don't die by pain or blood loss. You die from suffocating. Because when you're hanging like that and your legs are bent and your arms are outstretched, he cannot bring in air. There's no more room left in his lungs. The only way when you're hanging on the cross dying to breathe is to push up on the nails in your feet and to pull on the nails in your hand and take in a breath at the top and then sink back down and hope that lasts longer than the last one. Can you imagine the futility of hanging on the cross, trying to decide whether or not to push yourself up and take one more futile breath? Can you imagine watching someone you love go through these things? Which is why it's remarkable that Jesus says anything at all on the cross. He pushes up and he takes a breath and he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's the final isolation. It's the first time in eternity he's been separated from the presence of God the Father as the sins of the world, my sins and yours and everyone who's ever lived is heaped on Jesus in that moment. He's separated from the Father as he bears the penalty for our sin. He pushes up again and he tells the prisoner next to him, today you'll be with me in paradise because that prisoner had faith. He pushes up again and he looks at John and he says, take care of my mom. And then at about three o'clock in the afternoon, he pushes up one last time and he takes a breath and he says, to tell us thy, it is finished. It is finished. That word means it is finished. It also means the debt is paid in full. It's an incredibly appropriate word. Jesus is saying in that moment, everything that I've come to do has been done. He came to live a perfect life. He did that. He came to train the disciples and launch the church, his kingdom here on earth, And he did that. He came to suffer for us. And he did that. He came to fulfill prophecy in Isaiah 53, where it says, by his stripes, we will be healed. And he did that. And now it was time for him to die. And so he says, to Telestai, it's finished. And he sinks back down and he breathes his last. And when he does, the skies go black and the temple veil is torn in two. And the Roman centurions around him say, surely this must be the Son of God. And a man named Joseph of Arimathea takes his body and embalms it and buries him. And that's the story of the crucifixion. The only thing that I have for you after we tell that story is to just make the point that he did that for you. He did all of that for you. He lived the life. He put up with being misunderstood. He endured mockery. He had people spit in his face. He had people punch him. He had people fake worship him. He had people mock him. He sat around while an entire battalion took joy in his pain. He took 39 lashes. He had himself nailed to the cross, the person who's least deserved this ever. And he hung up there and he suffocated for you because he loves you. Because at the beginning of time when they created us, they made the decision that we're doing this because we want them to be with us for all of eternity. And since we sinned and broke that relationship, it made it necessary for Jesus to go and be broken for us. And so he went and he did that for you. And he knew how many times you would sin. He knew how many times you would tell him that you believe him and that you trust him and then you would walk away from him. He knew how many times you would walk back with your head in your hands and ask him to forgive you again. And he knew how many times he was gonna have to offer that forgiveness. He died knowing the spiritual condition that I was gonna be in when I preached this message. He died knowing all the things that we were gonna mess up. He died knowing that by our actions, we will spit on that. We will disrespect that. We will not appreciate that. He died for you knowing everything there is to know about you. Because he loves you. And the only reason he came here is to rescue you. And so the question this morning becomes, how do we respond to that truth? How do we respond to what Jesus did on the cross? We might respond with disbelief. I don't believe that story and we shove it away. We might respond with skepticism. Keep it at arm's length. Maybe because of the type of response it would elicit if it's true. But if we believe that story, if we think that Jesus was real and he was who he said he was and that that's what he did for us. The only proper response is humble gratitude. It's a deep and abiding and reverent sense of gratitude that he would do that for us. And so in a minute, we're going to take communion and have a chance to respond in gratitude together. I hope that that's the response of your heart, marveling at God the Son who would do that for us, marveling at God the Father who would watch and allow his Son to do that for us and that we would respond with humble gratitude at the story of the crucifixion. I'm gonna pray and invite up the band and the ushers or the elders. Father, my goodness, we don't know what to say. We can't believe that you allowed your son to do that for us. Jesus, we can't believe that you did that for us. Knowing all the things that you could possibly know, knowing all the ways that we would feel that we disappoint and let you down and dishonor. You did it anyways. God, I am so grateful for you, for your patience, the way that you love us. I'm so grateful for your son who died for us. God, I pray that we would respond collectively with a humble gratitude and awe at what you gave and at what was won for us on the cross. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This morning is a little different. We're in the 10th part of our series going through the Gospel of John. And we arrived this morning at the story of the crucifixion. And as I thought and prayed over how best to cover this, my conclusion was that the best possible thing to do, the best possible way to honor the text and to honor our God and to honor you is to simply tell the story and to let that be enough. And so this morning feels a little different. I don't have any jokes or stories for you this morning. We're not going to turn the lights on because there's no notes. There's not going to be any scriptures up on the screen. What I'm going to tell you is an amalgamation or a synthesis of the account of the crucifixion from all four gospels, beginning in the Garden of Gethsemane. At the end of Jesus' life, he celebrated the Passover with the disciples. He was 33 years old. He had been with them for three years, and it was the night that he was going to be arrested and tried and crucified. The disciples didn't know that, but he did. And so after the Passover, after their celebration, it's getting towards the evening, think 10 or 11 o'clock at night. Jesus grabs his three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, and he says, would you come and pray with me? And they go to a place called the Garden of Gethsemane. If you're in Jerusalem and you go directly east, there's a valley, there's the temple mount, and then a little valley, and then on the other side of that valley is a hill. That hill is the Garden of Gethsemane, and that's where they are. And so Jesus takes his three disciples with him, Peter, James, and John, his closest confidants, and he says, would you come with me while I pray? And he leaves them in an area of the garden, and he goes, the Bible says, about a stone's throw from them. And he says, will you stay here, and will you pray for me and pray for yourself? And Jesus goes, and he prays. And in the Garden of Gethsemane, the night that he was going to be arrested, knees and he begins to pray that the Father would take this cup from him. Father, this is going to be difficult. This is going to be painful. If there's any other way to do this, Father, you're capable of all things. Let there be another way to do this. Please don't make me drink this cup. Please don't make me have to walk through what I'm about to have to walk through in the crucifixion. After praying for a while, he comes back to check on his three disciples, and he finds them sleeping. It's late at night. It's after dinner. They've had a lot of food. They've had wine, and their eyes are heavy. And it's here where we can already begin to see the isolation of Jesus as he goes through these next several hours. His closest people, his closest friends in his whole life can't even stay awake to pray for him because they don't understand what he's about to do. So he wakes them up and he says, this time I want you to pray for yourself that you wouldn't fall into temptation. And he goes back and he begins to pray again. And this time he begins to pray more fervently. I think we picture Jesus, if we ever picture him, we picture him on his knees in the garden praying quietly, maybe passively or submissively. But I think the text indicates that he was at this point crying out. I saw a pastor talk about this one time and he laid prostrate on his face and screamed. And what we know about these prayers is that he uses this word that we don't see Jesus use before this time. He's calling out to God and he says, Abba, Father, please don't make me do this. Abba, Father, please don't make me drink of this cup. Please don't make me walk through this pain. And he uses that word Abba, and we only see that in Romans when Paul is using it as a way to refer to God intimately, when he tells us that because of what Jesus is about to walk through, we have the right to call God what Jesus calls him, that nobody else calls him. It's daddy or papa. And he's crying out to God the Father, please don't make me do this, Abba. If you have a child, can you imagine the anguish of the father hearing his son cry out to him, calling him Abba, Daddy, saying, please don't make me do this, knowing that you have the power to stop it, knowing that he doesn't have to do this and and you don't have to watch this, but sitting in heaven being willing to say, no, I'm sorry, son, this is a thing you're going to have to do. And so Jesus continues to pray. He prays so fervently that Luke tells us that his sweat began to fall like blood, and there is debate on whether or not that means he was just sweating profusely, which is intense enough, or if he was actually undergoing a medical condition called hemohidrosis, where capillaries in the blood vessels rupture due to extreme stress or fear, and actually blood mixes with the sweat. We don't know for sure which one it was, but we do know that Jesus was at the height of stress and he was at the height of anxiety and he's crying out to his father in a way that we don't see him do in any other place in scripture. Please don't make me do this. He's already a sweaty mess. The disciples have fallen asleep again and the isolation begins to set in. He finishes praying and he walks and so they had a king named Herod, but he was really impotent. The real power in Israel lie in the Sanhedrin, which was essentially a religious senate. And the head of this senate was the high priest, a man at the time named Caiaphas. And Caiaphas had sent his guards with Judas to arrest Jesus. And so Judas betrays him with a kiss. They ask Jesus, are you Jesus of Nazareth? And he says, I am he. And when he says that, they step back and they fall down because he's using the words of the great I am from Exodus 3 when God introduces himself for the first time. And they get back up and they go to arrest Jesus. And Peter, of course, Peter is the one who does this. He takes the sword and he goes to try to kill one of the guards. He misses and takes off his ear. We know that it was a guard named Malchus. And so Jesus tells him to stop it. He heals Malchus and he tells Peter, don't you know that if I didn't want to do this, that my father could send 12 legions of angels right now to save me and to protect me. And just so we're clear, 12 legions of angels is enough to handle any army in the history of history. He says, Peter, it's not the time. Because the prophecy said he needed to go silently like a lamb to the slaughter. And so he's arrested and he's taken to Caiaphas' house. At this point, the disciples follow at a distance and eventually scatter. He's held in the courtyard of Caiaphas' house with Peter on the perimeter and one unnamed disciple inside, and that's all he has for support. Caiaphas begins the ceremony, begins the hearings by inviting people to hurl false accusations against Jesus. They're unclaimed, they're unsubstantiated, and they're unfair. This is the Savior of the world, the Son of God who loves us so much that he condescended to be one of us and take on our frailty, who is sweaty and perhaps lightly bloody as he's cried out to his Father, please don't make me do this, and now he knows he's going to have to do it, and there's no one there with him. He is the person who has least deserved this treatment in the history of the world, and he is there, and they are hurling false accusations against a man who could not be kinder, and who could not be more gracious, and who could not be more loving, and who even as these people hurl these accusations, he is looking at them knowing that he is going to die for them, hoping that through this death that they will come to believe in the person that they are mocking. And it's a kangaroo court. And eventually, they ask Jesus, are you the son of God? And he says, I am who you say I am. And Caiaphas in this show, I think of this disgusting show of false abhorrence, tears his garments and yells and says, what more do we need to hear? He's just an old guy protecting his power. It's disgusting. And the temple guards put a blindfold on Jesus and they begin to punch him and slap him and say, you're a prophet. Why don't you prophesy who hit you, Jesus? It's at this point the Jewish tradition would say that he had his beard ripped out of his face. His face is bloody. It's likely swollen. They're spitting on him, and they are mocking him, and everyone around him is making a show of him. And they're saying, you're a prophet. You're so smart. Tell us who hit you. And the thing is, he knew who hit him. He knew his name. He knew his wife. He knew his kids. And he loved him. And he sat there, and he took it. And when they had had their fun, and they had finished beating our Jesus, they took him to most likely an isolation chamber. In the basement of Caiaphas' house, I was there back in 2013. Underneath his house in Jerusalem is a dungeon. And there's these columns and a wall that's concave. And you can see the brass rings where they would string up people or where they would chain them to the wall. And you think that this is where Jesus was, but then they walk you around the corner, and there's actually this hole in the ground. It's literally about this wide. There's no stairs at the time. There were no stairs that led to it. And they would tie a rope underneath your arms, and they would lower you into the hole where it was totally black and totally dark and totally isolated. If you need a sense of what it was like for Jesus to be there, read Psalm 88. When we went there, we stood in that cell and it was read to us. And it's one of the most moving things I've ever experienced. Who knows what's in that pitch black cell as Jesus sits there in his isolation, knowing the death that he is facing the next day. In the morning, they get him and they take him to Pilate. Pilate was the governor assigned by Rome to the area, to the province of Israel. He was the man who was actually in charge. You could not crucify anybody. You could not administer the death penalty in Israel without Roman permission. They had to actually administer it. And so they take Jesus to Pilate. They tell Pilate what he's done, and they say that we want to kill him. And Pilate talks to Jesus. And some of the most interesting conversations in the Bible to me are the exchanges between Pilate and Jesus. He asks him, he says, they say you're a king. Are you a king? And he says, well, I'm not the kind of king you think I am. If I were, my servants would be here to defend me, but my kingdom is not of this world. And Pilate is pressing him for answers, but Jesus really won't give them. And Pilate actually finds him innocent. His wife had a dream about him the night before, and she told him, you're going to meet this guy. Jesus don't have anything to do with him. He's innocent. And a lot of people think that Pilate actually believed his story. And so he goes to the Hebrew people who are outside. They're in the Fortress Antonia, which is connected to the Temple Mount. And he goes outside, and he looks at what I presume are gates, and there's throngs of people outside of them. And Pilate tells them, it's Passover, it's your tradition that I would let a prisoner go at Passover who's due the death penalty. Why don't I just let Jesus go? Why don't I return him to you? He doesn't seem guilty. And the crowd says, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a man who was guilty of insurrection, He was guilty of murder. He was guilty of thievery. He deserved the death penalty. He was a known criminal in Israel. And they say, give us Barabbas. Let Jesus die. And Pilate ceremonially washes his hands and says, his blood is not on me. And the Jewish people say, that's fine. His blood is on us and on our children. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And so Pilate bends to the will of the people and he orders Jesus crucified. And the first step of this crucifixion is a scourging or a flogging. And what we know about this is that it was standard Roman procedure. The crucifixion was standard procedure under Roman rule. It was a death penalty that had been designed and refined over decades, if not centuries. And the men who administered it were sadistic and sick, and I am convinced, evil. They were men who this is all they did. All they did is administer the death penalty. All they did is torture people. All they did is take you to within an inch of your life and back off. And that's what the scourging was. It was done with what's called a cat of nine tails, which is a handle with nine straps of leather that come out of it. And into the straps of leather are woven glass and shards of bone and metal and sometimes metal balls intended to bruise. And I've been where they did this. It's a place called the Stone Pavement in the Bible. The entire battalion that was there at the far-flung province of Israel with nothing better to do gathered to watch this man who claimed he was God be beaten. There's a square cement thing that comes out of the ground. It's about this tall. And you can see that somebody gets on their knees in front of it and is bent over it with their arms strapped around it. And they take the cat of nine tails and they hit Jesus with it. And when they hit him, they don't hit him dead on. They stand off to the side and hit him so that it hits here and wraps around and digs in. And then they don't pull it off. They rip it off so that when they rip it off, it takes with its skin and chunks. And they do this 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 every time. The idea was the person administering it, who is just pure evil, knew exactly how far he could go before the man was about to die and then he would stop. And by the time he finished, Jesus' back is totally exposed, spine exposed, and it was from the shoulders to all the way down the back of the legs to the top of the knees. Then they take him, and as entertainment for the whole battalion, they begin to mock him. And they get a robe and they put it on his wounds. And they take a crown of thorns, not briars, thorns. And they shove it into his skull. And they make him a king. And they begin to mock him as they fake worship him. And these Roman soldiers, not Hebrew temple guards, Roman trained soldiers begin to punch him in the face over and over again, mocking him, saying you're the king, fake bowing down to him as entertainment. And Jesus is utterly isolated and alone. When they had had their fill, they take the cross beam of the cross and they put it on his back. They redress him in his own tattered clothes. They put that wooden cross on his back and they tell him to walk to Golgotha, the place of the skull, where he's going to be crucified. On the way there, he falters and he can't make it. There's a man named Siren of Cyrene that they grab and ask him to carry the rest of the way. They get to Golgotha and they place Jesus on the cross, first laying on the ground, and they take the nails and they drive them into his hands. Some of us know this, but just so we're clear, when we think of the nails going into the hands of Jesus, we usually think of them going here, but really those nails had to be weight bearing. And so to put them there means that he would fall off the cross because there's not enough to hold him there. So where they would put the nails, the Hebrew word for hand is actually elbow to fingertip. And so where they would put the nail is actually right here. If you've seen an x-ray, you know that there's two bones in the forearm that meet at the wrist. And where they meet is a bundle of nerves. When you were in elementary school, you probably found this and know it as a pressure point. It's incredibly sensitive. And they would take the nail and they would drive it through the wrist there where those bones meet and where the nerves are. And when I say nail, don't think nail. Think more like something that you would drive into a railroad tie. And they drive his hand into the wood. And then they take him and they stretch him as far as he can go. They pull him against that nail because it's important that they spread out his chest and they drive one in the other hand. Then they take his feet and they put his feet over top of one another and they drive the nail through his feet. And we usually, when we see a picture of people on the cross, we see them with their legs extended, but more likely they were tucked up underneath him like this and his feet driven in together. Because once you hung up on the cross, I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but you don't die by pain or blood loss. You die from suffocating. Because when you're hanging like that and your legs are bent and your arms are outstretched, he cannot bring in air. There's no more room left in his lungs. The only way when you're hanging on the cross dying to breathe is to push up on the nails in your feet and to pull on the nails in your hand and take in a breath at the top and then sink back down and hope that lasts longer than the last one. Can you imagine the futility of hanging on the cross, trying to decide whether or not to push yourself up and take one more futile breath? Can you imagine watching someone you love go through these things? Which is why it's remarkable that Jesus says anything at all on the cross. He pushes up and he takes a breath and he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's the final isolation. It's the first time in eternity he's been separated from the presence of God the Father as the sins of the world, my sins and yours and everyone who's ever lived is heaped on Jesus in that moment. He's separated from the Father as he bears the penalty for our sin. He pushes up again and he tells the prisoner next to him, today you'll be with me in paradise because that prisoner had faith. He pushes up again and he looks at John and he says, take care of my mom. And then at about three o'clock in the afternoon, he pushes up one last time and he takes a breath and he says, to tell us thy, it is finished. It is finished. That word means it is finished. It also means the debt is paid in full. It's an incredibly appropriate word. Jesus is saying in that moment, everything that I've come to do has been done. He came to live a perfect life. He did that. He came to train the disciples and launch the church, his kingdom here on earth, And he did that. He came to suffer for us. And he did that. He came to fulfill prophecy in Isaiah 53, where it says, by his stripes, we will be healed. And he did that. And now it was time for him to die. And so he says, to Telestai, it's finished. And he sinks back down and he breathes his last. And when he does, the skies go black and the temple veil is torn in two. And the Roman centurions around him say, surely this must be the Son of God. And a man named Joseph of Arimathea takes his body and embalms it and buries him. And that's the story of the crucifixion. The only thing that I have for you after we tell that story is to just make the point that he did that for you. He did all of that for you. He lived the life. He put up with being misunderstood. He endured mockery. He had people spit in his face. He had people punch him. He had people fake worship him. He had people mock him. He sat around while an entire battalion took joy in his pain. He took 39 lashes. He had himself nailed to the cross, the person who's least deserved this ever. And he hung up there and he suffocated for you because he loves you. Because at the beginning of time when they created us, they made the decision that we're doing this because we want them to be with us for all of eternity. And since we sinned and broke that relationship, it made it necessary for Jesus to go and be broken for us. And so he went and he did that for you. And he knew how many times you would sin. He knew how many times you would tell him that you believe him and that you trust him and then you would walk away from him. He knew how many times you would walk back with your head in your hands and ask him to forgive you again. And he knew how many times he was gonna have to offer that forgiveness. He died knowing the spiritual condition that I was gonna be in when I preached this message. He died knowing all the things that we were gonna mess up. He died knowing that by our actions, we will spit on that. We will disrespect that. We will not appreciate that. He died for you knowing everything there is to know about you. Because he loves you. And the only reason he came here is to rescue you. And so the question this morning becomes, how do we respond to that truth? How do we respond to what Jesus did on the cross? We might respond with disbelief. I don't believe that story and we shove it away. We might respond with skepticism. Keep it at arm's length. Maybe because of the type of response it would elicit if it's true. But if we believe that story, if we think that Jesus was real and he was who he said he was and that that's what he did for us. The only proper response is humble gratitude. It's a deep and abiding and reverent sense of gratitude that he would do that for us. And so in a minute, we're going to take communion and have a chance to respond in gratitude together. I hope that that's the response of your heart, marveling at God the Son who would do that for us, marveling at God the Father who would watch and allow his Son to do that for us and that we would respond with humble gratitude at the story of the crucifixion. I'm gonna pray and invite up the band and the ushers or the elders. Father, my goodness, we don't know what to say. We can't believe that you allowed your son to do that for us. Jesus, we can't believe that you did that for us. Knowing all the things that you could possibly know, knowing all the ways that we would feel that we disappoint and let you down and dishonor. You did it anyways. God, I am so grateful for you, for your patience, the way that you love us. I'm so grateful for your son who died for us. God, I pray that we would respond collectively with a humble gratitude and awe at what you gave and at what was won for us on the cross. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. This morning is a little different. We're in the 10th part of our series going through the Gospel of John. And we arrived this morning at the story of the crucifixion. And as I thought and prayed over how best to cover this, my conclusion was that the best possible thing to do, the best possible way to honor the text and to honor our God and to honor you is to simply tell the story and to let that be enough. And so this morning feels a little different. I don't have any jokes or stories for you this morning. We're not going to turn the lights on because there's no notes. There's not going to be any scriptures up on the screen. What I'm going to tell you is an amalgamation or a synthesis of the account of the crucifixion from all four gospels, beginning in the Garden of Gethsemane. At the end of Jesus' life, he celebrated the Passover with the disciples. He was 33 years old. He had been with them for three years, and it was the night that he was going to be arrested and tried and crucified. The disciples didn't know that, but he did. And so after the Passover, after their celebration, it's getting towards the evening, think 10 or 11 o'clock at night. Jesus grabs his three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, and he says, would you come and pray with me? And they go to a place called the Garden of Gethsemane. If you're in Jerusalem and you go directly east, there's a valley, there's the temple mount, and then a little valley, and then on the other side of that valley is a hill. That hill is the Garden of Gethsemane, and that's where they are. And so Jesus takes his three disciples with him, Peter, James, and John, his closest confidants, and he says, would you come with me while I pray? And he leaves them in an area of the garden, and he goes, the Bible says, about a stone's throw from them. And he says, will you stay here, and will you pray for me and pray for yourself? And Jesus goes, and he prays. And in the Garden of Gethsemane, the night that he was going to be arrested, knees and he begins to pray that the Father would take this cup from him. Father, this is going to be difficult. This is going to be painful. If there's any other way to do this, Father, you're capable of all things. Let there be another way to do this. Please don't make me drink this cup. Please don't make me have to walk through what I'm about to have to walk through in the crucifixion. After praying for a while, he comes back to check on his three disciples, and he finds them sleeping. It's late at night. It's after dinner. They've had a lot of food. They've had wine, and their eyes are heavy. And it's here where we can already begin to see the isolation of Jesus as he goes through these next several hours. His closest people, his closest friends in his whole life can't even stay awake to pray for him because they don't understand what he's about to do. So he wakes them up and he says, this time I want you to pray for yourself that you wouldn't fall into temptation. And he goes back and he begins to pray again. And this time he begins to pray more fervently. I think we picture Jesus, if we ever picture him, we picture him on his knees in the garden praying quietly, maybe passively or submissively. But I think the text indicates that he was at this point crying out. I saw a pastor talk about this one time and he laid prostrate on his face and screamed. And what we know about these prayers is that he uses this word that we don't see Jesus use before this time. He's calling out to God and he says, Abba, Father, please don't make me do this. Abba, Father, please don't make me drink of this cup. Please don't make me walk through this pain. And he uses that word Abba, and we only see that in Romans when Paul is using it as a way to refer to God intimately, when he tells us that because of what Jesus is about to walk through, we have the right to call God what Jesus calls him, that nobody else calls him. It's daddy or papa. And he's crying out to God the Father, please don't make me do this, Abba. If you have a child, can you imagine the anguish of the father hearing his son cry out to him, calling him Abba, Daddy, saying, please don't make me do this, knowing that you have the power to stop it, knowing that he doesn't have to do this and and you don't have to watch this, but sitting in heaven being willing to say, no, I'm sorry, son, this is a thing you're going to have to do. And so Jesus continues to pray. He prays so fervently that Luke tells us that his sweat began to fall like blood, and there is debate on whether or not that means he was just sweating profusely, which is intense enough, or if he was actually undergoing a medical condition called hemohidrosis, where capillaries in the blood vessels rupture due to extreme stress or fear, and actually blood mixes with the sweat. We don't know for sure which one it was, but we do know that Jesus was at the height of stress and he was at the height of anxiety and he's crying out to his father in a way that we don't see him do in any other place in scripture. Please don't make me do this. He's already a sweaty mess. The disciples have fallen asleep again and the isolation begins to set in. He finishes praying and he walks and so they had a king named Herod, but he was really impotent. The real power in Israel lie in the Sanhedrin, which was essentially a religious senate. And the head of this senate was the high priest, a man at the time named Caiaphas. And Caiaphas had sent his guards with Judas to arrest Jesus. And so Judas betrays him with a kiss. They ask Jesus, are you Jesus of Nazareth? And he says, I am he. And when he says that, they step back and they fall down because he's using the words of the great I am from Exodus 3 when God introduces himself for the first time. And they get back up and they go to arrest Jesus. And Peter, of course, Peter is the one who does this. He takes the sword and he goes to try to kill one of the guards. He misses and takes off his ear. We know that it was a guard named Malchus. And so Jesus tells him to stop it. He heals Malchus and he tells Peter, don't you know that if I didn't want to do this, that my father could send 12 legions of angels right now to save me and to protect me. And just so we're clear, 12 legions of angels is enough to handle any army in the history of history. He says, Peter, it's not the time. Because the prophecy said he needed to go silently like a lamb to the slaughter. And so he's arrested and he's taken to Caiaphas' house. At this point, the disciples follow at a distance and eventually scatter. He's held in the courtyard of Caiaphas' house with Peter on the perimeter and one unnamed disciple inside, and that's all he has for support. Caiaphas begins the ceremony, begins the hearings by inviting people to hurl false accusations against Jesus. They're unclaimed, they're unsubstantiated, and they're unfair. This is the Savior of the world, the Son of God who loves us so much that he condescended to be one of us and take on our frailty, who is sweaty and perhaps lightly bloody as he's cried out to his Father, please don't make me do this, and now he knows he's going to have to do it, and there's no one there with him. He is the person who has least deserved this treatment in the history of the world, and he is there, and they are hurling false accusations against a man who could not be kinder, and who could not be more gracious, and who could not be more loving, and who even as these people hurl these accusations, he is looking at them knowing that he is going to die for them, hoping that through this death that they will come to believe in the person that they are mocking. And it's a kangaroo court. And eventually, they ask Jesus, are you the son of God? And he says, I am who you say I am. And Caiaphas in this show, I think of this disgusting show of false abhorrence, tears his garments and yells and says, what more do we need to hear? He's just an old guy protecting his power. It's disgusting. And the temple guards put a blindfold on Jesus and they begin to punch him and slap him and say, you're a prophet. Why don't you prophesy who hit you, Jesus? It's at this point the Jewish tradition would say that he had his beard ripped out of his face. His face is bloody. It's likely swollen. They're spitting on him, and they are mocking him, and everyone around him is making a show of him. And they're saying, you're a prophet. You're so smart. Tell us who hit you. And the thing is, he knew who hit him. He knew his name. He knew his wife. He knew his kids. And he loved him. And he sat there, and he took it. And when they had had their fun, and they had finished beating our Jesus, they took him to most likely an isolation chamber. In the basement of Caiaphas' house, I was there back in 2013. Underneath his house in Jerusalem is a dungeon. And there's these columns and a wall that's concave. And you can see the brass rings where they would string up people or where they would chain them to the wall. And you think that this is where Jesus was, but then they walk you around the corner, and there's actually this hole in the ground. It's literally about this wide. There's no stairs at the time. There were no stairs that led to it. And they would tie a rope underneath your arms, and they would lower you into the hole where it was totally black and totally dark and totally isolated. If you need a sense of what it was like for Jesus to be there, read Psalm 88. When we went there, we stood in that cell and it was read to us. And it's one of the most moving things I've ever experienced. Who knows what's in that pitch black cell as Jesus sits there in his isolation, knowing the death that he is facing the next day. In the morning, they get him and they take him to Pilate. Pilate was the governor assigned by Rome to the area, to the province of Israel. He was the man who was actually in charge. You could not crucify anybody. You could not administer the death penalty in Israel without Roman permission. They had to actually administer it. And so they take Jesus to Pilate. They tell Pilate what he's done, and they say that we want to kill him. And Pilate talks to Jesus. And some of the most interesting conversations in the Bible to me are the exchanges between Pilate and Jesus. He asks him, he says, they say you're a king. Are you a king? And he says, well, I'm not the kind of king you think I am. If I were, my servants would be here to defend me, but my kingdom is not of this world. And Pilate is pressing him for answers, but Jesus really won't give them. And Pilate actually finds him innocent. His wife had a dream about him the night before, and she told him, you're going to meet this guy. Jesus don't have anything to do with him. He's innocent. And a lot of people think that Pilate actually believed his story. And so he goes to the Hebrew people who are outside. They're in the Fortress Antonia, which is connected to the Temple Mount. And he goes outside, and he looks at what I presume are gates, and there's throngs of people outside of them. And Pilate tells them, it's Passover, it's your tradition that I would let a prisoner go at Passover who's due the death penalty. Why don't I just let Jesus go? Why don't I return him to you? He doesn't seem guilty. And the crowd says, no, give us Barabbas. Barabbas was a man who was guilty of insurrection, He was guilty of murder. He was guilty of thievery. He deserved the death penalty. He was a known criminal in Israel. And they say, give us Barabbas. Let Jesus die. And Pilate ceremonially washes his hands and says, his blood is not on me. And the Jewish people say, that's fine. His blood is on us and on our children. Give us Barabbas and crucify Jesus. And so Pilate bends to the will of the people and he orders Jesus crucified. And the first step of this crucifixion is a scourging or a flogging. And what we know about this is that it was standard Roman procedure. The crucifixion was standard procedure under Roman rule. It was a death penalty that had been designed and refined over decades, if not centuries. And the men who administered it were sadistic and sick, and I am convinced, evil. They were men who this is all they did. All they did is administer the death penalty. All they did is torture people. All they did is take you to within an inch of your life and back off. And that's what the scourging was. It was done with what's called a cat of nine tails, which is a handle with nine straps of leather that come out of it. And into the straps of leather are woven glass and shards of bone and metal and sometimes metal balls intended to bruise. And I've been where they did this. It's a place called the Stone Pavement in the Bible. The entire battalion that was there at the far-flung province of Israel with nothing better to do gathered to watch this man who claimed he was God be beaten. There's a square cement thing that comes out of the ground. It's about this tall. And you can see that somebody gets on their knees in front of it and is bent over it with their arms strapped around it. And they take the cat of nine tails and they hit Jesus with it. And when they hit him, they don't hit him dead on. They stand off to the side and hit him so that it hits here and wraps around and digs in. And then they don't pull it off. They rip it off so that when they rip it off, it takes with its skin and chunks. And they do this 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 times. 39 times because the understanding was that 40 lashes would kill a man. And it wasn't exactly 39 every time. The idea was the person administering it, who is just pure evil, knew exactly how far he could go before the man was about to die and then he would stop. And by the time he finished, Jesus' back is totally exposed, spine exposed, and it was from the shoulders to all the way down the back of the legs to the top of the knees. Then they take him, and as entertainment for the whole battalion, they begin to mock him. And they get a robe and they put it on his wounds. And they take a crown of thorns, not briars, thorns. And they shove it into his skull. And they make him a king. And they begin to mock him as they fake worship him. And these Roman soldiers, not Hebrew temple guards, Roman trained soldiers begin to punch him in the face over and over again, mocking him, saying you're the king, fake bowing down to him as entertainment. And Jesus is utterly isolated and alone. When they had had their fill, they take the cross beam of the cross and they put it on his back. They redress him in his own tattered clothes. They put that wooden cross on his back and they tell him to walk to Golgotha, the place of the skull, where he's going to be crucified. On the way there, he falters and he can't make it. There's a man named Siren of Cyrene that they grab and ask him to carry the rest of the way. They get to Golgotha and they place Jesus on the cross, first laying on the ground, and they take the nails and they drive them into his hands. Some of us know this, but just so we're clear, when we think of the nails going into the hands of Jesus, we usually think of them going here, but really those nails had to be weight bearing. And so to put them there means that he would fall off the cross because there's not enough to hold him there. So where they would put the nails, the Hebrew word for hand is actually elbow to fingertip. And so where they would put the nail is actually right here. If you've seen an x-ray, you know that there's two bones in the forearm that meet at the wrist. And where they meet is a bundle of nerves. When you were in elementary school, you probably found this and know it as a pressure point. It's incredibly sensitive. And they would take the nail and they would drive it through the wrist there where those bones meet and where the nerves are. And when I say nail, don't think nail. Think more like something that you would drive into a railroad tie. And they drive his hand into the wood. And then they take him and they stretch him as far as he can go. They pull him against that nail because it's important that they spread out his chest and they drive one in the other hand. Then they take his feet and they put his feet over top of one another and they drive the nail through his feet. And we usually, when we see a picture of people on the cross, we see them with their legs extended, but more likely they were tucked up underneath him like this and his feet driven in together. Because once you hung up on the cross, I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but you don't die by pain or blood loss. You die from suffocating. Because when you're hanging like that and your legs are bent and your arms are outstretched, he cannot bring in air. There's no more room left in his lungs. The only way when you're hanging on the cross dying to breathe is to push up on the nails in your feet and to pull on the nails in your hand and take in a breath at the top and then sink back down and hope that lasts longer than the last one. Can you imagine the futility of hanging on the cross, trying to decide whether or not to push yourself up and take one more futile breath? Can you imagine watching someone you love go through these things? Which is why it's remarkable that Jesus says anything at all on the cross. He pushes up and he takes a breath and he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's the final isolation. It's the first time in eternity he's been separated from the presence of God the Father as the sins of the world, my sins and yours and everyone who's ever lived is heaped on Jesus in that moment. He's separated from the Father as he bears the penalty for our sin. He pushes up again and he tells the prisoner next to him, today you'll be with me in paradise because that prisoner had faith. He pushes up again and he looks at John and he says, take care of my mom. And then at about three o'clock in the afternoon, he pushes up one last time and he takes a breath and he says, to tell us thy, it is finished. It is finished. That word means it is finished. It also means the debt is paid in full. It's an incredibly appropriate word. Jesus is saying in that moment, everything that I've come to do has been done. He came to live a perfect life. He did that. He came to train the disciples and launch the church, his kingdom here on earth, And he did that. He came to suffer for us. And he did that. He came to fulfill prophecy in Isaiah 53, where it says, by his stripes, we will be healed. And he did that. And now it was time for him to die. And so he says, to Telestai, it's finished. And he sinks back down and he breathes his last. And when he does, the skies go black and the temple veil is torn in two. And the Roman centurions around him say, surely this must be the Son of God. And a man named Joseph of Arimathea takes his body and embalms it and buries him. And that's the story of the crucifixion. The only thing that I have for you after we tell that story is to just make the point that he did that for you. He did all of that for you. He lived the life. He put up with being misunderstood. He endured mockery. He had people spit in his face. He had people punch him. He had people fake worship him. He had people mock him. He sat around while an entire battalion took joy in his pain. He took 39 lashes. He had himself nailed to the cross, the person who's least deserved this ever. And he hung up there and he suffocated for you because he loves you. Because at the beginning of time when they created us, they made the decision that we're doing this because we want them to be with us for all of eternity. And since we sinned and broke that relationship, it made it necessary for Jesus to go and be broken for us. And so he went and he did that for you. And he knew how many times you would sin. He knew how many times you would tell him that you believe him and that you trust him and then you would walk away from him. He knew how many times you would walk back with your head in your hands and ask him to forgive you again. And he knew how many times he was gonna have to offer that forgiveness. He died knowing the spiritual condition that I was gonna be in when I preached this message. He died knowing all the things that we were gonna mess up. He died knowing that by our actions, we will spit on that. We will disrespect that. We will not appreciate that. He died for you knowing everything there is to know about you. Because he loves you. And the only reason he came here is to rescue you. And so the question this morning becomes, how do we respond to that truth? How do we respond to what Jesus did on the cross? We might respond with disbelief. I don't believe that story and we shove it away. We might respond with skepticism. Keep it at arm's length. Maybe because of the type of response it would elicit if it's true. But if we believe that story, if we think that Jesus was real and he was who he said he was and that that's what he did for us. The only proper response is humble gratitude. It's a deep and abiding and reverent sense of gratitude that he would do that for us. And so in a minute, we're going to take communion and have a chance to respond in gratitude together. I hope that that's the response of your heart, marveling at God the Son who would do that for us, marveling at God the Father who would watch and allow his Son to do that for us and that we would respond with humble gratitude at the story of the crucifixion. I'm gonna pray and invite up the band and the ushers or the elders. Father, my goodness, we don't know what to say. We can't believe that you allowed your son to do that for us. Jesus, we can't believe that you did that for us. Knowing all the things that you could possibly know, knowing all the ways that we would feel that we disappoint and let you down and dishonor. You did it anyways. God, I am so grateful for you, for your patience, the way that you love us. I'm so grateful for your son who died for us. God, I pray that we would respond collectively with a humble gratitude and awe at what you gave and at what was won for us on the cross. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.