Mark

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. I missed you last week. People were asking where I was. I was in the mountains of North Georgia taking naps is where I was, and it was a lot of fun. And in my stead, Kyle, our student pastor, gave his first sermon at Grace, and it was a great job. He did phenomenally. But one of the things as I listened back and I heard the story of how the weekend went without me that I was so happy to hear really and truly was that both services, when he got up to give his first sermon ever, you guys cheered for him. Which, first of all, that hurts a little bit. But second, what a cool place. What a great thing that says about us as a church that we're so excited for this guy that we're going to applaud him before he even says anything. There can't be a more supportive place to do ministry than Grace. So it just made me so proud of my church to be a part of this place. I just thought it was really, really great and evident of your heart. The other thing I want to say before I get started, and I never do this, I don't think sermons are times for announcements, but this is such an important announcement to me that I wanted it to go out online on our podcast and on the video and things like that so that people catching up during the week can catch this too. This Friday night, March the 15th, is Grace's big night out, okay? It's two hours at Compass Rose Brewery from 6.30 to 8.30. There's gonna be childcare here for kids five and younger. Everybody else is welcome at Compass Rose. There's games for the kids. There's going to be a food truck. You can bring your own food if you want to. Steve and the band are going to do some live music. It's going to be a super fun time to just hang out, and I really want it to be awesome. So that's up there with my number because we have a graphic that's a square that I can just send to you, and then you can text that out to your friends because we're hoping that you'll invite your friends. This is an easy invite. I think a lot of us have friends that maybe we'd love to see get more involved in church, but maybe they kind of don't want to be involved with church right now. Maybe there's a little stink on it for them or whatever, but maybe if they come hang out with us on Friday and just get to talk and laugh and meet people, they'll realize that we're not a bunch of weirdies, and they'll join us later, okay? So if you want that graphic to use to invite your friends, text me and I'll get it out to you or text one of the elders. They have it too. Okay, but we hope that you'll join us on Friday and that you'll bring some folks. It's going to be a really good time. I hope this is something we get to do repetitively. Okay, this is part five of our series in John. We're going to go through John until the week after Easter. I've been really loving getting to dive into the book of John with you. And if you haven't noticed, we're missing a lot of things. We didn't even do the most famous verse in John, John 3.16. We just skipped right over it because I'm probably a terrible pastor. But there's a reading plan, so hopefully you guys have grabbed that and you're reading along with us again so that you're getting your perspective and your eyes and your mind and your heart on Jesus and not just getting my perspective as we move through the Gospel of John. This week we arrive at what is probably the most famous or one of the most famous miracles in the Bible. It's in all four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and it's one that all of you have heard of. Even if you're here and you're not a believer, this is your first time in church in a long time or ever, I bet you've heard of this miracle, the feeding of the 5,000, right? We know this miracle. And really, that's an erroneous title because Scripture tells us that there was 5,000 men, which means there were women and children in addition to those 5,000. We don't know how many. You can do the math on your own. I'm not going to chance a guest on stage as a pastor and be eternally responsible for that. So I'll let you make irresponsible guesses in your head. But there was more than 5,000 people there. And what's going on when this happens is ancient Israel in the time of Christ was what we would really think of as a third world country. And Jesus is up in northern Israel around the Sea of Galilee. Jerusalem was in southern Israel and northern Israel is really at this point like the countryside. It's rural Israel. So in the sticks of a country that is poor, Jesus is going through his day. He's going through his ministry there. And there are thousands of people following him. Again, we don't know exactly how many, but there are thousands of people following Jesus. In the beginning of John chapter 6, if you have a Bible, you can turn there. The beginning of John chapter 6 tells us that they were following him. The throngs were following Jesus because of the miraculous things that he was doing, because he was casting demons out of people, because he was healing folks, and they wanted to go see. Either they had something that they needed Jesus to take care of, or they just wanted to see this person that many people were beginning to call the Messiah. And so thousands of people had flocked to Jesus. And it says that Jesus looked on the crowds with compassion. He was moved by them and for them. Because here are 5,000 men in the middle of the day with their families, in a culture and in a time where these people woke up and they genuinely did not know where their next meal was coming from. They were very poor, more poor than any of us can imagine. And so Jesus is moved with compassion at the crowds of people and he decides that he's going to feed them. And so there's a young boy walking by who's got five small fish and three loaves of bread and he gets the disciples to ask for the meal from the boy and Jesus starts to break the bread and the fish and he starts to put it in these baskets. And the disciples carry the baskets to the different groups of people and they hand it out to whoever needs. It was an ancient all-you-can-eat buffet. It's like the first version of the Golden Corral. And they're just going around handing things out to people. Until at the end, there was baskets left over. Jesus just kept making fish and bread until everyone had what they needed, right? And then at the end of that, the people did this thing that everybody was trying to do to Jesus his whole life. We don't really think about this or notice this, but it's a drum I'm trying to beat as we go through the gospel of John. They clamored to him to make him king. They wanted to take him down south to Jerusalem and put him on the throne. They wanted to form a revolution around Jesus because the prophecies in ancient Israel, the prophecies in the Old Testament say that when the Messiah arrives, he will be the king of kings and the lord of lords and the prince of peace, and that he will sit on the throne of David and that he will rule forever. And now we know, with the benefit of hindsight, that Jesus did not come to establish a physical earthly kingdom. We know that he came to establish an eternal heavenly kingdom. But they didn't know that. They thought that he came to literally establish a kingdom that he was going to, at the time, overthrow Roman rule, rise Israel up to prominence, that they were going to be the world superpower, and Jesus was going to be the king, and they were going to be his followers. And so they said, this is the guy, look what he's doing. And they clamored to him to go make him king. And Jesus, knowing that wasn't the point, knowing that it wasn't yet time to put the wheels in motion of his crucifixion, fades away and goes into the mountains. And we see Jesus do this a lot in his ministry. There's a big event, a big thing that he does, something that exhausts him, and then he goes and he fades away and he goes to pray and spend some time with the Father to get away from the crowds. It makes me wonder on a human level if Jesus wasn't an introvert who just needed a little bit of a break after he dealt with everybody. But another thing you'll notice about Jesus, if you'll read through the Gospels on your own, is he had this unfailing patience with people. Can you imagine what it would be to be Jesus, to feed 5,000 people and then still have people like, hey, can you do this? Can you do this? Can you do this? And you're like, did you see the miracle I did? Can a dude not take a nap? Like, how tired did he have to be? How stressed did he have to be? How fatigued did he have to be? Yet he continued to unfailingly love people. Over and over again, he offers them grace through the Gospels. And that's one of, to me, that's one of the pieces of Jesus that we see when we pay attention. It's just his unfailing love for others. So he goes up to the mountainside to pray, and he tells the disciples, y'all go ahead and go across the Sea of Galilee to a city called Capernaum and I'll meet you there, okay? I'm gonna come out there too. Y'all go ahead and go across. So the disciples, the 12 of them, get on a boat and they begin to go across the Sea of Galilee, which wasn't really a sea, it's a lake, but you can't see across it, so it's called the Sea of Galilee. I don't know why that's the policy, but that's what it is. And so they're going across. And in the middle of the night, Jesus walks on water where we have this other really famous miracle. And the other gospels record it and give us a little bit more detail about it and the interaction with Peter. And he was like a ghost. And at first they were afraid. But John in his old age, as he's writing his gospel, he doesn't do that. It's just a couple of verses. He's just like, we were going across the water and then we looked and Jesus was walking. And then he got in boat with us, and then we were there. It's like John was like, it was just, you know, just Jesus stuff. It was just classic Jesus, you know, just walking across the water and getting in the boat, and then they're there, right? So the next morning, the people, the crowds, wake up. They had camped out wherever they were going to camp out there on the hillside. They wake up, and they look around, and they don't see Jesus. And then they notice that there's a boat gone and none of his disciples are there. So they put two and two together and it says they go across the water. And I don't think that all the, however many thousands of people there were there, all got in their boats at once and went across the Sea of Galilee like some Greek fleet assaulting Troy. Like I don't think it was all of them. I think it was probably a portion of them. So a portion of them get in the boats and they follow Jesus across the water. And it makes me wonder, for us, who here thinks that if they were in those crowds, that they would have been one of the ones to get in the boat and cross the water? Who here would call yourself a follower of Jesus? My guess is, because you're church people, and you know the right answer is, oh, I'd definitely get in the boat, then that's probably your answer. There might be some, a few, who are here just kind of checking things out with the bravery to be like, I don't know if I'm getting in the boat yet. And I really applaud the intellectual honesty of that answer. But most of us are probably going to say that we're in the boat. I'm going to get in the boat and I'm going to go across. I'm going to follow Jesus. I'm not going to let him get away. And so that's what they do. They get in the boat and they go across and they were Jesus followers. They follow him across the Sea of Galilee. And then they go and they find him and they ask him, what are you doing? Where'd you go? Look, this is what it says in the text. John chapter 6, verse 25, it says, When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, Rabbi, when did you come here? They said, Jesus, what are you doing? Where did you go? Like, we're trying to keep up with you. We're trying to follow you. Where did you go? What's the deal? Why are you disappearing? And Jesus' response to me is searingly convicting. And it stands as a conviction not only to those people then, but to us now and all Jesus followers throughout all time. Anybody who would ever consider themselves a follower of Jesus, his response to me is incredibly convicting. He says this, Jesus answered them when they said, where'd you go? What are you doing? We're trying to follow you and you're hiding from us. Where are you? Jesus says this, truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the son of man will give you. For on morning they wake up. Jesus isn't around. They follow him. They track him down. They go to him and they go, Rabbi, which means teacher, which means we're acknowledging you as an authority. Where'd you go? We're trying to follow you. You're running away from us. We're trying to keep up. We want to follow you, Jesus. Why'd you do that? And Jesus looks at a poor and downtrodden people who, listen to me, they need bread, okay? They need the physical bread that he provided. They're not like us. Any of us in this room can go to any restaurant we want to right after church. You can get the meat sweats within the next two hours. We all have the means to do this, okay? I ate out two times yesterday because I'm fabulously wealthy. We can all do this, right? We don't know what it is to be hungry, none of us. They knew. They knew what hunger was. And Jesus knew that they were hungry. And they are the exact type of people that we would look at our Jesus and expect them to do something about feeding them. Expect him to be moved with compassion and give them more bread because that's what they need. But instead of doing that, instead of giving them what they really do genuinely need, he looks at him and he says, you're only here because I gave you bread. You followed me across the water for the wrong reasons. You shouldn't labor for the things that are temporary. You should labor for the things that are eternal. That's quite the statement by Jesus. You're following me for the wrong reasons. Your motives are impure. And it makes me wonder, if you are somebody who would say that you would get in the boat and you would follow Jesus across the water, yes, I am a Jesus follower. I want to be where he is. When Jesus says this, that you're following me for the wrong reasons, it makes me wonder, what are the reasons that you are following Jesus? Are we following Jesus for the right reasons? Or is it possible that our motives are mixed? As I thought about it for me, and I thought about it for the people that I've known through the years, I think that it's entirely possible that we get some mixed motives for following our Savior. I think it's one thing to come to Him for certain reasons, but our relationship with Him cannot exist motivated by those same things. And I think that as I thought about it, I think a lot of the reasons that we sometimes follow Jesus that maybe are for the wrong reasons can be summed up in this way, that often we follow Jesus for control or for status or for gain. I think it's entirely possible, church people, that we have followed Jesus in our life for some sense of control, for some sense of status, or in hopes of some sort of gain. Here's what I mean. Sometimes we go to Jesus because the world seems just completely out of sorts. These things are happening that we cannot control, that we do not understand, and to be able to see them through a framework of God's sovereignty brings a sense of peace and understanding to us that makes us feel comfortable. And so it's how we process the world because we're trying to bring a sense of control to the uncontrollable in a more pernicious way. I think that we have what I think of as a proverbial faith. In the book of Proverbs, it was a book of wisdom written by Solomon. It basically is summed up by saying, if you do things like this, then you are wise and things will go well for you. And if you do things like this, then you are foolish and things will not go well for you. And so sometimes we approach the Bible as this self-help book that says, if I do these kinds of things, even if I don't fully believe, then life is going to go better for me. And it's a way that we try to exert control over the uncontrollable. Do you see? The problem with this is the book of Job exists as a contrast to Proverbs that tells us even when we're doing all the right things, sometimes it's still going to go bad. But when we follow Jesus for control, it's that kind of proverbial faith where we try to, by following all the rules and doing all the right things, bring about outcomes in our life that are uncontrollable, that are favorable, right? Or sometimes we follow Jesus for status. Listen to me, church people. We are guilty of this. I, this is not hyperbole, more than anyone. Those of you who have been in church for a while, for any number of years, has there ever been a season of your life where you followed Jesus, where you've put on the mask of Christianity, where you've played the game of faith because of the status that it brought you? Just me? Has anyone ever studied harder for a Bible study and done the work in a Bible study because when you got there, you wanted to have the best answers, not because you were really interested in the content? Have any of you ever been guilty when you're asked to pray in front of other people of suddenly using a different voice with a different vocabulary? Because these and nows and saying God over and over again is somehow holy? Oh God, if you would just have mercy on us, God, in your favor, God, I just lift this person up to you, God. Don't talk like that. When we hear ourselves starting to pray like that, that's Christianity for status. That's Christianity because of what it gives us in the community, because it offers us opportunities of respect in the church, because when we act that way and we live out this faith, sometimes people will ask us to do things that are honorable requests. Have you ever walked through a season of life where your faith was more about the status that it brought you than it was about Jesus? Where your main reason for not walking away from the faith is a relational fallout that it would cost you? That's faith for status. Or we follow Jesus for gain. This is what's commonly referred to as a health and wealth gospel. It is a gospel or the prosperity gospel. I hate it. It's a lie from Satan and it's evil. And what it tells us is if we go to Jesus, that Jesus wants to bless us. He wants us to have this incredible life. He wants us to be happy now in the material. And so he will make you healthy and he will make you wealthy. And if you don't have health and if you don't have wealth and you just don't have strong enough faith and you need to have better faith. And there are whole churches built on this model, on the promise that if you really are living Christianity out the right way, then you will be blessed and you will be healthy and you will be wealthy. And I don't know if you ever paid attention to it, but churches that teach this model don't tend to be filled with wealthy people because it preys on the poor and on the unhealthy and promises them things that are not true. And Jesus knows that these reasons, these temporary reasons for following him, whether they be control or gain or status, are not the right reasons and that eventually they will wreck our faith. That's why he gives the warning there. Don't labor for the temporary, labor for the eternal because when we follow Jesus for the wrong reasons, eventually it wrecks our faith. Eventually it shipwrecks the faith that we have. I'll tell you how I know this is true. Several years ago, I had a meeting with a couple at my old church named Alan and Sonny. I love Alan and Sonny. They went on after this meeting that I had with them, not because of me, because of the Holy Spirit work in them. I didn't tell them anything useful, I don't think. But they went on, they became small group leaders. They were wonderful in the church. They launched other small group leaders. They're still there leading people to faith. They're just phenomenal warriors for God. But I got an email one day, and it was from them, and they said, hey, you know, we've been coming to the church for a little bit. We accepted Christ as our Savior about four months ago, and there's just some stuff happening in our life. We just have some questions. We'd like to talk to a pastor. I said, all right, sure. You get to talk to 29-year-old Nate. Congratulations. I'm going to answer all the questions for you. And so I meet with them. And they said, hey, you know, they started telling me about their life. And they had had a hard life. He was a handyman. She helped them out. They were workaday people. They were really, really great and wonderful folks. But it was their second marriage. They both had adult children and grandchildren, and then they had their own children together. And they had all the craziness that that brings about, plus a life that was lived before that without faith and the remnants of that that are going on in their life. And so Alan and Sonny had a really hard life. And what they said was, you know, before we got saved, we came to God to experience peace. And after we got saved, we've been praying about these situations in our life. We've been hoping for them. We've been lifting them up for God. We've been trying to do the right things. But man, I got to tell you, those situations aren't really getting much better. And some of them are getting worse. And we just need to know, did we do it wrong? Like, are we actually saved? Did we not pray the prayer right? Is there something that I need to believe that I don't believe? Is there some sin that I don't know about that I need to figure out? Because this isn't really working the way that we thought it would work. Do you hear the lie there? Somewhere along the way, they became convinced that to follow Jesus meant that there was going to be a relief from the trials in their life, that they were going to be what we would call blessed, and that those things would begin to go away because now I'm following Jesus, and now I'm following the rules, and God is going to do these things for me. He's going to make these situations better. And I had to sit them down and be like, guys, no one promised that to you. You didn't do it right. You did it wrong. You did it exactly right. The problem is your expectations of God because he doesn't promise Christians that we won't experience trials. In fact, in the New Testament, do you know what we're promised? We're promised suffering and persecution. So buckle up, pal. That's what we're promised. It's going to be hard, and you're going to have to endure. But in the midst of that, and I can go through character after character in the Bible, Christian after Christian throughout history, that with loving God with all their heart and suffering mightily. Because God doesn't promise us a relief to our circumstances. He doesn't promise us health or wealth or status or control or any of those things. What he promises us is his presence, that he will be with us, that he will walk through our trials with us, that we never have to experience those alone, that our life is never hopeless, that our life is never lonely, because God is an ever-present force that is there with us, loving us and affirming us. And now, as you go through trials, it's not that you don't have to go through them, it's that you have the peace of Christ as you do, and you have the hope of heaven, so that Paul can say that even though we endure suffering for what he calls a little while on this earth, we look forward to a new day where there is no suffering. That's the promise of faith and of Christianity. But when we let people believe that that promise comes now and that prosperity comes now, then after we get saved, we begin to look around and go, did I do this wrong? And eventually we either feel like we messed it up or our God is letting us down, but either way, I don't want anything to do with this faith. And it shipwrecks our faith. When we follow God for control, for a sense of control and sense of our universe, and then things happen that feel like they are out of our control, we feel like either we've done it wrong or God is weak. When we follow God for status, when we eventually get the status that we want, when we fake it enough so that everyone around us believes that we're this Christian that we try to pretend to be, then what we realize is we're living our life in a prison of expectations and hypocrisy that we can't get out of until we allow our entire identity to crumble because it was never authentic to begin with. When we follow Jesus for the wrong reasons, it wrecks our faith. So that begs the question that hopefully you're asking and that they asked. Okay, what are the right reasons? What's the right reason to follow Jesus? And this is what they ask in verse 28. They said to him, what must we do to be doing the works of God? Okay, what's the right reason? What do we have to do to work for the eternal things, not the temporary? What do we have to do? And Jesus' answer is great. Jesus answered them, this is the work of God that you believe in him who he has sent. Do you remember back, those of you who were here to the first week of the series? And we look at the way that John introduces Jesus. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. And we said that the fundamental question in life is, was Jesus real? And do you believe that He is who He says He is? It's a fundamental question in life. That question makes all the difference in the world. Do we believe that Jesus was who he says he was? And then they say, what's the right reason to follow you? What's the right motive? How do we labor for the eternal? And Jesus says, trust me that I am who I say I am. Believe that I actually am the one that God sent. You want to know the right reason to follow Jesus? Jesus. You want to know what should properly motivate you to get in those boats and go across the sea and find him? Him. It should literally be that we get in the boats and we cross the sea and we go to Jesus and we go, Jesus, where'd you go? And he goes, you're only here for my bread. And we go, no, I don't care about the bread. I just want you. You're only here for the status and what I do. No, I don't care about the status. Make me low. Make me do something silly. Make me an usher, the least of all church volunteers. Make me do that. And I will still follow you. You're only here for the control. No, let stuff happen. Let the world spin out of control around me. I'm here for you, Jesus. That should be the motive. Jesus is the only reason to follow Jesus. And this isn't just in this passage. It's all throughout the New Testament. If you continue in the book of John, what you see in John chapter 15 is that there's an instruction from Jesus to abide in him, abide in me and I in you, and you will bear much fruit. And we're going to spend some time on this, but there's a relational aspect to that abiding. There's this idea of knowing Jesus, of pursuing him relationally, of being acquainted intimately with our Savior. In John 17, Jesus prays for you. He prays for all people that would hear of the word through the disciples, which is you. And what he prays for you is that you would be one with him as he and the Father are one, that you would know him, that there is a relational aspect to this. Paul, throughout all of his letters, prays for the church over and over again that they would know God. The author of Hebrews says that if we're going to run the race that we're supposed to run, then we need to do it with our eyes focused on the founder of our faith, which is Jesus. All throughout the New Testament, it tells us that God's desire for us is that we would know him, and that the proper motivation to follow him is simply to know Jesus. That's it. That we would pursue him, that we would love him, that we would want more of Jesus in our life, that when we get across the Sea of Galilee and he says, why'd you come over here? I'm not gonna give you more bread. We go, I don't care, I don't need more bread, I just need you. That's why we follow Jesus. And with that in mind, to help you as you assess, because hopefully if you're paying attention, you're sitting here going, okay, well, am I doing it right? Am I following Jesus for the right reasons? What are my motives? How mixed are they? And all of us have mixed motives. I've got like a two-question diagnostic for you so that you can try to suss out in yourself and in your own heart, how are we doing with keeping pure motives as we follow Jesus? Okay, so two sneaky questions that are gonna make you feel terrible about yourself, but they're really good questions. The first one is this. When you pray for yourself and others, for what do you pray? What do you pray for yourself and others? When you pray for yourself, what do you pray for? If you're a person who prays and you get down on your knees and you say, God, I need this, what is it that you pray for? Do you pray that you would close the sale? Do you pray that you would pass the test? Do you pray that you would get the job? Do you pray that you would execute the thing? Do you pray that you would be given the right words in this situation? Do you pray for temporary things? When you pray for people that you love, your kids, your spouse, for your parents, for your friends? What do you pray for them? Do you pray for temporary things? Help them in this situation, heal them of this, rescue them in this, give them wisdom in this. Do you pray for temporary things? Or when you pray for yourself and you pray for others, do you pray that they would simply know God? God, whatever's happening in their life, and this is how Paul prays, whatever's happening in their life, whatever's happening in the church, I pray that it would all conspire to bring them to a knowledge of you. If you look at the prayers in the New Testament, he doesn't pray for circumstances. He doesn't pray for health. He doesn't pray for church growth. All he prays for is that we would know God. So when you pray for other people, do you pray for their circumstances or do you pray that they would know God? Every night we put Lily to bed and every night we try to pray with her. When the elders don't make me meet, then I can be at home with my child. And when I pray for them, when I pray for Lily, Jen and I pray every night, God, help her to know you soon and to love you well. I don't want her to experience a lot of her life without knowing God. Help her to know you soon and love you well. And when I pray for her on my own, I try not to pray for her circumstances. I try not even so much to pray for her health because I know God cares about that. I pray that all the situations, all the things, all the events, all the scarring that I give her will somehow conspire to bring her to a place where she knows God on a level that's more intimate than I've ever known him. When you pray for other people, do you pray for the things that are temporary or do you pray for the eternal, that all the temporary things would conspire that they would know God? That tells us where our motives are in following Jesus. The other one is this. If you're a Christian, one of the things you think about hopefully regularly is heaven. We anticipate heaven. We look forward to heaven. We should be rightly excited about heaven. But I would ask you what most excites you when you think about getting to heaven. That will tell you a lot about why you're following Jesus. Some people are excited to get to heaven because we're curious. I want to see what the pearly gates are. Is that even a thing? Did we make that up? Are there really pearly gates? What do the streets of gold look like? What's the sea of glass? Is St. Peter there greeting me? Or is that only in far sideide cartoons? Like, we want to see these things, right? We're curious about heaven. For many of us, most of us, there's probably a loved one that we can't wait to see. I can't wait to see my Pawpaw again. He's my favorite human that's ever lived. I haven't seen him since I was 19. Pawpaw's never seen me as a pastor. I can't wait to get to heaven and talk to him about it. If I have any gift for teaching or telling a good story, it's from him. He could captivate a room. He's never met Jen. I wish he would have. He hasn't seen Lily. I can't wait to see Papa again. You have your people too. But we ought to be most excited about finally getting to look our Savior in the eyes. What should excite us most about heaven is that we finally get to meet our Heavenly Father and see what He looks like and hear what He sounds like and feel the power of his presence. That should most excite us about heaven. We finally get to look our savior in the eye and we get to hug him and hopefully we get to hear well done, good and faithful servant. That should be the thing that we are most hopeful about with heaven. The rest of the things are good. That's what gives us hope. That's why death has no sting and that hope is good and we should be excited to see our loved ones in heaven one day. We should be excited to explore this place that God created for us, but the thing we should be most excited about is finally getting to see our Jesus and finally getting to meet our God. What would it look like to live a life so devoted to God, so in love with Jesus, that heaven was like the greatest reunion ever? Because we finally got to meet him. That's how we should live our life. People who are excited about that are people who look at Jesus and go, I don't care about your bread. I'm just here for you, man. I hope that you will have the courage to pray and ask God to suss out your motives, to show them to yourself. And then we cannot go about the work of changing our motives on our own. All we can do is offer them up to God and say, God, I know that my motives for following you are impure. I pray that you would purify them. Give me a heart for you. And if you want to pursue this more, I don't do this a lot, but there's a book I would highly recommend to you. It's called With by a guy named Sky Jethani, who's a pastor somewhere in the United States. I forget where. This is, to me, the best book written in the last 10 years. I love it, and I don't really read new books. I think that a book should be in print for like 25 or 30 years before it's worth reading. So I don't really read a lot of new books, but this is a new one that I read, and I love this book. I've never read a book that caused me to stop and put it down and pray and go, God, I'm really sorry for this, more than that book. So if you're a reader, if you're into that kind of thing, I would highly recommend you get this book, and that will help you follow up with making sure that we're following Jesus for the right reasons. For all of us, if you consider yourself a Jesus follower, I hope that you'll have the courage to ask him to purify your motives. And when you do, what you'll find is it works out that all things work out too. Our relationship with Jesus works a little bit like a marriage. In a marriage, there's a bunch of different aspects of a marriage, right? I'm married to Jen, I lucked out, and there's different aspects to our marriage. And we could say, you know what, the most important thing to us is to just be able to have fun together and laugh together. And so we could prioritize that over everything else. And while we're having fun and laughing about everything, we're probably putting some other things off that need some work. And so eventually our marriage is going to get unhealthy. We could prioritize intimacy between one another and say, if we have this, then we'll be healthy, but that will come at the expense of other things. We can prioritize Lily and maybe future kiddos and who knows, but one day everyone's going to be out of the house and we're going to have to look at each other and be like, do we still like each other? Or we could prioritize one another above and beyond everything else in our relationship. And as we grow together, all of those other things will fall into place. If we will prize Jesus above and beyond everything else, all the accoutrements of Christianity, then what we'll find is all those other things, the status and the control and any gain that we might need, Jesus will take care of if we'll just follow him. So let us be a church of people who follow Jesus with a pure heart. Let us be a church of people who get in the boats and follow him across the lake for the right reasons. And let's see what Jesus does with a group of people like that. Let's pray, and then we'll take communion together. Father, we do love you. We do thank you for your son, for sending him for us. God, we thank you that he unites us with you. Lord, I would ask that you would make us courageous. Help us to see the places in our hearts and in our lives and in our walks with you where we are pursuing you for the wrong reasons, for things that really are temporary and not eternal. God, make yourself the prize of our hearts and of our minds and of our lives. Unite us with you. God, I pray that you would work even now to reveal and to begin to purify our motives as we follow you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. I missed you last week. People were asking where I was. I was in the mountains of North Georgia taking naps is where I was, and it was a lot of fun. And in my stead, Kyle, our student pastor, gave his first sermon at Grace, and it was a great job. He did phenomenally. But one of the things as I listened back and I heard the story of how the weekend went without me that I was so happy to hear really and truly was that both services, when he got up to give his first sermon ever, you guys cheered for him. Which, first of all, that hurts a little bit. But second, what a cool place. What a great thing that says about us as a church that we're so excited for this guy that we're going to applaud him before he even says anything. There can't be a more supportive place to do ministry than Grace. So it just made me so proud of my church to be a part of this place. I just thought it was really, really great and evident of your heart. The other thing I want to say before I get started, and I never do this, I don't think sermons are times for announcements, but this is such an important announcement to me that I wanted it to go out online on our podcast and on the video and things like that so that people catching up during the week can catch this too. This Friday night, March the 15th, is Grace's big night out, okay? It's two hours at Compass Rose Brewery from 6.30 to 8.30. There's gonna be childcare here for kids five and younger. Everybody else is welcome at Compass Rose. There's games for the kids. There's going to be a food truck. You can bring your own food if you want to. Steve and the band are going to do some live music. It's going to be a super fun time to just hang out, and I really want it to be awesome. So that's up there with my number because we have a graphic that's a square that I can just send to you, and then you can text that out to your friends because we're hoping that you'll invite your friends. This is an easy invite. I think a lot of us have friends that maybe we'd love to see get more involved in church, but maybe they kind of don't want to be involved with church right now. Maybe there's a little stink on it for them or whatever, but maybe if they come hang out with us on Friday and just get to talk and laugh and meet people, they'll realize that we're not a bunch of weirdies, and they'll join us later, okay? So if you want that graphic to use to invite your friends, text me and I'll get it out to you or text one of the elders. They have it too. Okay, but we hope that you'll join us on Friday and that you'll bring some folks. It's going to be a really good time. I hope this is something we get to do repetitively. Okay, this is part five of our series in John. We're going to go through John until the week after Easter. I've been really loving getting to dive into the book of John with you. And if you haven't noticed, we're missing a lot of things. We didn't even do the most famous verse in John, John 3.16. We just skipped right over it because I'm probably a terrible pastor. But there's a reading plan, so hopefully you guys have grabbed that and you're reading along with us again so that you're getting your perspective and your eyes and your mind and your heart on Jesus and not just getting my perspective as we move through the Gospel of John. This week we arrive at what is probably the most famous or one of the most famous miracles in the Bible. It's in all four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and it's one that all of you have heard of. Even if you're here and you're not a believer, this is your first time in church in a long time or ever, I bet you've heard of this miracle, the feeding of the 5,000, right? We know this miracle. And really, that's an erroneous title because Scripture tells us that there was 5,000 men, which means there were women and children in addition to those 5,000. We don't know how many. You can do the math on your own. I'm not going to chance a guest on stage as a pastor and be eternally responsible for that. So I'll let you make irresponsible guesses in your head. But there was more than 5,000 people there. And what's going on when this happens is ancient Israel in the time of Christ was what we would really think of as a third world country. And Jesus is up in northern Israel around the Sea of Galilee. Jerusalem was in southern Israel and northern Israel is really at this point like the countryside. It's rural Israel. So in the sticks of a country that is poor, Jesus is going through his day. He's going through his ministry there. And there are thousands of people following him. Again, we don't know exactly how many, but there are thousands of people following Jesus. In the beginning of John chapter 6, if you have a Bible, you can turn there. The beginning of John chapter 6 tells us that they were following him. The throngs were following Jesus because of the miraculous things that he was doing, because he was casting demons out of people, because he was healing folks, and they wanted to go see. Either they had something that they needed Jesus to take care of, or they just wanted to see this person that many people were beginning to call the Messiah. And so thousands of people had flocked to Jesus. And it says that Jesus looked on the crowds with compassion. He was moved by them and for them. Because here are 5,000 men in the middle of the day with their families, in a culture and in a time where these people woke up and they genuinely did not know where their next meal was coming from. They were very poor, more poor than any of us can imagine. And so Jesus is moved with compassion at the crowds of people and he decides that he's going to feed them. And so there's a young boy walking by who's got five small fish and three loaves of bread and he gets the disciples to ask for the meal from the boy and Jesus starts to break the bread and the fish and he starts to put it in these baskets. And the disciples carry the baskets to the different groups of people and they hand it out to whoever needs. It was an ancient all-you-can-eat buffet. It's like the first version of the Golden Corral. And they're just going around handing things out to people. Until at the end, there was baskets left over. Jesus just kept making fish and bread until everyone had what they needed, right? And then at the end of that, the people did this thing that everybody was trying to do to Jesus his whole life. We don't really think about this or notice this, but it's a drum I'm trying to beat as we go through the gospel of John. They clamored to him to make him king. They wanted to take him down south to Jerusalem and put him on the throne. They wanted to form a revolution around Jesus because the prophecies in ancient Israel, the prophecies in the Old Testament say that when the Messiah arrives, he will be the king of kings and the lord of lords and the prince of peace, and that he will sit on the throne of David and that he will rule forever. And now we know, with the benefit of hindsight, that Jesus did not come to establish a physical earthly kingdom. We know that he came to establish an eternal heavenly kingdom. But they didn't know that. They thought that he came to literally establish a kingdom that he was going to, at the time, overthrow Roman rule, rise Israel up to prominence, that they were going to be the world superpower, and Jesus was going to be the king, and they were going to be his followers. And so they said, this is the guy, look what he's doing. And they clamored to him to go make him king. And Jesus, knowing that wasn't the point, knowing that it wasn't yet time to put the wheels in motion of his crucifixion, fades away and goes into the mountains. And we see Jesus do this a lot in his ministry. There's a big event, a big thing that he does, something that exhausts him, and then he goes and he fades away and he goes to pray and spend some time with the Father to get away from the crowds. It makes me wonder on a human level if Jesus wasn't an introvert who just needed a little bit of a break after he dealt with everybody. But another thing you'll notice about Jesus, if you'll read through the Gospels on your own, is he had this unfailing patience with people. Can you imagine what it would be to be Jesus, to feed 5,000 people and then still have people like, hey, can you do this? Can you do this? Can you do this? And you're like, did you see the miracle I did? Can a dude not take a nap? Like, how tired did he have to be? How stressed did he have to be? How fatigued did he have to be? Yet he continued to unfailingly love people. Over and over again, he offers them grace through the Gospels. And that's one of, to me, that's one of the pieces of Jesus that we see when we pay attention. It's just his unfailing love for others. So he goes up to the mountainside to pray, and he tells the disciples, y'all go ahead and go across the Sea of Galilee to a city called Capernaum and I'll meet you there, okay? I'm gonna come out there too. Y'all go ahead and go across. So the disciples, the 12 of them, get on a boat and they begin to go across the Sea of Galilee, which wasn't really a sea, it's a lake, but you can't see across it, so it's called the Sea of Galilee. I don't know why that's the policy, but that's what it is. And so they're going across. And in the middle of the night, Jesus walks on water where we have this other really famous miracle. And the other gospels record it and give us a little bit more detail about it and the interaction with Peter. And he was like a ghost. And at first they were afraid. But John in his old age, as he's writing his gospel, he doesn't do that. It's just a couple of verses. He's just like, we were going across the water and then we looked and Jesus was walking. And then he got in boat with us, and then we were there. It's like John was like, it was just, you know, just Jesus stuff. It was just classic Jesus, you know, just walking across the water and getting in the boat, and then they're there, right? So the next morning, the people, the crowds, wake up. They had camped out wherever they were going to camp out there on the hillside. They wake up, and they look around, and they don't see Jesus. And then they notice that there's a boat gone and none of his disciples are there. So they put two and two together and it says they go across the water. And I don't think that all the, however many thousands of people there were there, all got in their boats at once and went across the Sea of Galilee like some Greek fleet assaulting Troy. Like I don't think it was all of them. I think it was probably a portion of them. So a portion of them get in the boats and they follow Jesus across the water. And it makes me wonder, for us, who here thinks that if they were in those crowds, that they would have been one of the ones to get in the boat and cross the water? Who here would call yourself a follower of Jesus? My guess is, because you're church people, and you know the right answer is, oh, I'd definitely get in the boat, then that's probably your answer. There might be some, a few, who are here just kind of checking things out with the bravery to be like, I don't know if I'm getting in the boat yet. And I really applaud the intellectual honesty of that answer. But most of us are probably going to say that we're in the boat. I'm going to get in the boat and I'm going to go across. I'm going to follow Jesus. I'm not going to let him get away. And so that's what they do. They get in the boat and they go across and they were Jesus followers. They follow him across the Sea of Galilee. And then they go and they find him and they ask him, what are you doing? Where'd you go? Look, this is what it says in the text. John chapter 6, verse 25, it says, When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, Rabbi, when did you come here? They said, Jesus, what are you doing? Where did you go? Like, we're trying to keep up with you. We're trying to follow you. Where did you go? What's the deal? Why are you disappearing? And Jesus' response to me is searingly convicting. And it stands as a conviction not only to those people then, but to us now and all Jesus followers throughout all time. Anybody who would ever consider themselves a follower of Jesus, his response to me is incredibly convicting. He says this, Jesus answered them when they said, where'd you go? What are you doing? We're trying to follow you and you're hiding from us. Where are you? Jesus says this, truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the son of man will give you. For on morning they wake up. Jesus isn't around. They follow him. They track him down. They go to him and they go, Rabbi, which means teacher, which means we're acknowledging you as an authority. Where'd you go? We're trying to follow you. You're running away from us. We're trying to keep up. We want to follow you, Jesus. Why'd you do that? And Jesus looks at a poor and downtrodden people who, listen to me, they need bread, okay? They need the physical bread that he provided. They're not like us. Any of us in this room can go to any restaurant we want to right after church. You can get the meat sweats within the next two hours. We all have the means to do this, okay? I ate out two times yesterday because I'm fabulously wealthy. We can all do this, right? We don't know what it is to be hungry, none of us. They knew. They knew what hunger was. And Jesus knew that they were hungry. And they are the exact type of people that we would look at our Jesus and expect them to do something about feeding them. Expect him to be moved with compassion and give them more bread because that's what they need. But instead of doing that, instead of giving them what they really do genuinely need, he looks at him and he says, you're only here because I gave you bread. You followed me across the water for the wrong reasons. You shouldn't labor for the things that are temporary. You should labor for the things that are eternal. That's quite the statement by Jesus. You're following me for the wrong reasons. Your motives are impure. And it makes me wonder, if you are somebody who would say that you would get in the boat and you would follow Jesus across the water, yes, I am a Jesus follower. I want to be where he is. When Jesus says this, that you're following me for the wrong reasons, it makes me wonder, what are the reasons that you are following Jesus? Are we following Jesus for the right reasons? Or is it possible that our motives are mixed? As I thought about it for me, and I thought about it for the people that I've known through the years, I think that it's entirely possible that we get some mixed motives for following our Savior. I think it's one thing to come to Him for certain reasons, but our relationship with Him cannot exist motivated by those same things. And I think that as I thought about it, I think a lot of the reasons that we sometimes follow Jesus that maybe are for the wrong reasons can be summed up in this way, that often we follow Jesus for control or for status or for gain. I think it's entirely possible, church people, that we have followed Jesus in our life for some sense of control, for some sense of status, or in hopes of some sort of gain. Here's what I mean. Sometimes we go to Jesus because the world seems just completely out of sorts. These things are happening that we cannot control, that we do not understand, and to be able to see them through a framework of God's sovereignty brings a sense of peace and understanding to us that makes us feel comfortable. And so it's how we process the world because we're trying to bring a sense of control to the uncontrollable in a more pernicious way. I think that we have what I think of as a proverbial faith. In the book of Proverbs, it was a book of wisdom written by Solomon. It basically is summed up by saying, if you do things like this, then you are wise and things will go well for you. And if you do things like this, then you are foolish and things will not go well for you. And so sometimes we approach the Bible as this self-help book that says, if I do these kinds of things, even if I don't fully believe, then life is going to go better for me. And it's a way that we try to exert control over the uncontrollable. Do you see? The problem with this is the book of Job exists as a contrast to Proverbs that tells us even when we're doing all the right things, sometimes it's still going to go bad. But when we follow Jesus for control, it's that kind of proverbial faith where we try to, by following all the rules and doing all the right things, bring about outcomes in our life that are uncontrollable, that are favorable, right? Or sometimes we follow Jesus for status. Listen to me, church people. We are guilty of this. I, this is not hyperbole, more than anyone. Those of you who have been in church for a while, for any number of years, has there ever been a season of your life where you followed Jesus, where you've put on the mask of Christianity, where you've played the game of faith because of the status that it brought you? Just me? Has anyone ever studied harder for a Bible study and done the work in a Bible study because when you got there, you wanted to have the best answers, not because you were really interested in the content? Have any of you ever been guilty when you're asked to pray in front of other people of suddenly using a different voice with a different vocabulary? Because these and nows and saying God over and over again is somehow holy? Oh God, if you would just have mercy on us, God, in your favor, God, I just lift this person up to you, God. Don't talk like that. When we hear ourselves starting to pray like that, that's Christianity for status. That's Christianity because of what it gives us in the community, because it offers us opportunities of respect in the church, because when we act that way and we live out this faith, sometimes people will ask us to do things that are honorable requests. Have you ever walked through a season of life where your faith was more about the status that it brought you than it was about Jesus? Where your main reason for not walking away from the faith is a relational fallout that it would cost you? That's faith for status. Or we follow Jesus for gain. This is what's commonly referred to as a health and wealth gospel. It is a gospel or the prosperity gospel. I hate it. It's a lie from Satan and it's evil. And what it tells us is if we go to Jesus, that Jesus wants to bless us. He wants us to have this incredible life. He wants us to be happy now in the material. And so he will make you healthy and he will make you wealthy. And if you don't have health and if you don't have wealth and you just don't have strong enough faith and you need to have better faith. And there are whole churches built on this model, on the promise that if you really are living Christianity out the right way, then you will be blessed and you will be healthy and you will be wealthy. And I don't know if you ever paid attention to it, but churches that teach this model don't tend to be filled with wealthy people because it preys on the poor and on the unhealthy and promises them things that are not true. And Jesus knows that these reasons, these temporary reasons for following him, whether they be control or gain or status, are not the right reasons and that eventually they will wreck our faith. That's why he gives the warning there. Don't labor for the temporary, labor for the eternal because when we follow Jesus for the wrong reasons, eventually it wrecks our faith. Eventually it shipwrecks the faith that we have. I'll tell you how I know this is true. Several years ago, I had a meeting with a couple at my old church named Alan and Sonny. I love Alan and Sonny. They went on after this meeting that I had with them, not because of me, because of the Holy Spirit work in them. I didn't tell them anything useful, I don't think. But they went on, they became small group leaders. They were wonderful in the church. They launched other small group leaders. They're still there leading people to faith. They're just phenomenal warriors for God. But I got an email one day, and it was from them, and they said, hey, you know, we've been coming to the church for a little bit. We accepted Christ as our Savior about four months ago, and there's just some stuff happening in our life. We just have some questions. We'd like to talk to a pastor. I said, all right, sure. You get to talk to 29-year-old Nate. Congratulations. I'm going to answer all the questions for you. And so I meet with them. And they said, hey, you know, they started telling me about their life. And they had had a hard life. He was a handyman. She helped them out. They were workaday people. They were really, really great and wonderful folks. But it was their second marriage. They both had adult children and grandchildren, and then they had their own children together. And they had all the craziness that that brings about, plus a life that was lived before that without faith and the remnants of that that are going on in their life. And so Alan and Sonny had a really hard life. And what they said was, you know, before we got saved, we came to God to experience peace. And after we got saved, we've been praying about these situations in our life. We've been hoping for them. We've been lifting them up for God. We've been trying to do the right things. But man, I got to tell you, those situations aren't really getting much better. And some of them are getting worse. And we just need to know, did we do it wrong? Like, are we actually saved? Did we not pray the prayer right? Is there something that I need to believe that I don't believe? Is there some sin that I don't know about that I need to figure out? Because this isn't really working the way that we thought it would work. Do you hear the lie there? Somewhere along the way, they became convinced that to follow Jesus meant that there was going to be a relief from the trials in their life, that they were going to be what we would call blessed, and that those things would begin to go away because now I'm following Jesus, and now I'm following the rules, and God is going to do these things for me. He's going to make these situations better. And I had to sit them down and be like, guys, no one promised that to you. You didn't do it right. You did it wrong. You did it exactly right. The problem is your expectations of God because he doesn't promise Christians that we won't experience trials. In fact, in the New Testament, do you know what we're promised? We're promised suffering and persecution. So buckle up, pal. That's what we're promised. It's going to be hard, and you're going to have to endure. But in the midst of that, and I can go through character after character in the Bible, Christian after Christian throughout history, that with loving God with all their heart and suffering mightily. Because God doesn't promise us a relief to our circumstances. He doesn't promise us health or wealth or status or control or any of those things. What he promises us is his presence, that he will be with us, that he will walk through our trials with us, that we never have to experience those alone, that our life is never hopeless, that our life is never lonely, because God is an ever-present force that is there with us, loving us and affirming us. And now, as you go through trials, it's not that you don't have to go through them, it's that you have the peace of Christ as you do, and you have the hope of heaven, so that Paul can say that even though we endure suffering for what he calls a little while on this earth, we look forward to a new day where there is no suffering. That's the promise of faith and of Christianity. But when we let people believe that that promise comes now and that prosperity comes now, then after we get saved, we begin to look around and go, did I do this wrong? And eventually we either feel like we messed it up or our God is letting us down, but either way, I don't want anything to do with this faith. And it shipwrecks our faith. When we follow God for control, for a sense of control and sense of our universe, and then things happen that feel like they are out of our control, we feel like either we've done it wrong or God is weak. When we follow God for status, when we eventually get the status that we want, when we fake it enough so that everyone around us believes that we're this Christian that we try to pretend to be, then what we realize is we're living our life in a prison of expectations and hypocrisy that we can't get out of until we allow our entire identity to crumble because it was never authentic to begin with. When we follow Jesus for the wrong reasons, it wrecks our faith. So that begs the question that hopefully you're asking and that they asked. Okay, what are the right reasons? What's the right reason to follow Jesus? And this is what they ask in verse 28. They said to him, what must we do to be doing the works of God? Okay, what's the right reason? What do we have to do to work for the eternal things, not the temporary? What do we have to do? And Jesus' answer is great. Jesus answered them, this is the work of God that you believe in him who he has sent. Do you remember back, those of you who were here to the first week of the series? And we look at the way that John introduces Jesus. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. And we said that the fundamental question in life is, was Jesus real? And do you believe that He is who He says He is? It's a fundamental question in life. That question makes all the difference in the world. Do we believe that Jesus was who he says he was? And then they say, what's the right reason to follow you? What's the right motive? How do we labor for the eternal? And Jesus says, trust me that I am who I say I am. Believe that I actually am the one that God sent. You want to know the right reason to follow Jesus? Jesus. You want to know what should properly motivate you to get in those boats and go across the sea and find him? Him. It should literally be that we get in the boats and we cross the sea and we go to Jesus and we go, Jesus, where'd you go? And he goes, you're only here for my bread. And we go, no, I don't care about the bread. I just want you. You're only here for the status and what I do. No, I don't care about the status. Make me low. Make me do something silly. Make me an usher, the least of all church volunteers. Make me do that. And I will still follow you. You're only here for the control. No, let stuff happen. Let the world spin out of control around me. I'm here for you, Jesus. That should be the motive. Jesus is the only reason to follow Jesus. And this isn't just in this passage. It's all throughout the New Testament. If you continue in the book of John, what you see in John chapter 15 is that there's an instruction from Jesus to abide in him, abide in me and I in you, and you will bear much fruit. And we're going to spend some time on this, but there's a relational aspect to that abiding. There's this idea of knowing Jesus, of pursuing him relationally, of being acquainted intimately with our Savior. In John 17, Jesus prays for you. He prays for all people that would hear of the word through the disciples, which is you. And what he prays for you is that you would be one with him as he and the Father are one, that you would know him, that there is a relational aspect to this. Paul, throughout all of his letters, prays for the church over and over again that they would know God. The author of Hebrews says that if we're going to run the race that we're supposed to run, then we need to do it with our eyes focused on the founder of our faith, which is Jesus. All throughout the New Testament, it tells us that God's desire for us is that we would know him, and that the proper motivation to follow him is simply to know Jesus. That's it. That we would pursue him, that we would love him, that we would want more of Jesus in our life, that when we get across the Sea of Galilee and he says, why'd you come over here? I'm not gonna give you more bread. We go, I don't care, I don't need more bread, I just need you. That's why we follow Jesus. And with that in mind, to help you as you assess, because hopefully if you're paying attention, you're sitting here going, okay, well, am I doing it right? Am I following Jesus for the right reasons? What are my motives? How mixed are they? And all of us have mixed motives. I've got like a two-question diagnostic for you so that you can try to suss out in yourself and in your own heart, how are we doing with keeping pure motives as we follow Jesus? Okay, so two sneaky questions that are gonna make you feel terrible about yourself, but they're really good questions. The first one is this. When you pray for yourself and others, for what do you pray? What do you pray for yourself and others? When you pray for yourself, what do you pray for? If you're a person who prays and you get down on your knees and you say, God, I need this, what is it that you pray for? Do you pray that you would close the sale? Do you pray that you would pass the test? Do you pray that you would get the job? Do you pray that you would execute the thing? Do you pray that you would be given the right words in this situation? Do you pray for temporary things? When you pray for people that you love, your kids, your spouse, for your parents, for your friends? What do you pray for them? Do you pray for temporary things? Help them in this situation, heal them of this, rescue them in this, give them wisdom in this. Do you pray for temporary things? Or when you pray for yourself and you pray for others, do you pray that they would simply know God? God, whatever's happening in their life, and this is how Paul prays, whatever's happening in their life, whatever's happening in the church, I pray that it would all conspire to bring them to a knowledge of you. If you look at the prayers in the New Testament, he doesn't pray for circumstances. He doesn't pray for health. He doesn't pray for church growth. All he prays for is that we would know God. So when you pray for other people, do you pray for their circumstances or do you pray that they would know God? Every night we put Lily to bed and every night we try to pray with her. When the elders don't make me meet, then I can be at home with my child. And when I pray for them, when I pray for Lily, Jen and I pray every night, God, help her to know you soon and to love you well. I don't want her to experience a lot of her life without knowing God. Help her to know you soon and love you well. And when I pray for her on my own, I try not to pray for her circumstances. I try not even so much to pray for her health because I know God cares about that. I pray that all the situations, all the things, all the events, all the scarring that I give her will somehow conspire to bring her to a place where she knows God on a level that's more intimate than I've ever known him. When you pray for other people, do you pray for the things that are temporary or do you pray for the eternal, that all the temporary things would conspire that they would know God? That tells us where our motives are in following Jesus. The other one is this. If you're a Christian, one of the things you think about hopefully regularly is heaven. We anticipate heaven. We look forward to heaven. We should be rightly excited about heaven. But I would ask you what most excites you when you think about getting to heaven. That will tell you a lot about why you're following Jesus. Some people are excited to get to heaven because we're curious. I want to see what the pearly gates are. Is that even a thing? Did we make that up? Are there really pearly gates? What do the streets of gold look like? What's the sea of glass? Is St. Peter there greeting me? Or is that only in far sideide cartoons? Like, we want to see these things, right? We're curious about heaven. For many of us, most of us, there's probably a loved one that we can't wait to see. I can't wait to see my Pawpaw again. He's my favorite human that's ever lived. I haven't seen him since I was 19. Pawpaw's never seen me as a pastor. I can't wait to get to heaven and talk to him about it. If I have any gift for teaching or telling a good story, it's from him. He could captivate a room. He's never met Jen. I wish he would have. He hasn't seen Lily. I can't wait to see Papa again. You have your people too. But we ought to be most excited about finally getting to look our Savior in the eyes. What should excite us most about heaven is that we finally get to meet our Heavenly Father and see what He looks like and hear what He sounds like and feel the power of his presence. That should most excite us about heaven. We finally get to look our savior in the eye and we get to hug him and hopefully we get to hear well done, good and faithful servant. That should be the thing that we are most hopeful about with heaven. The rest of the things are good. That's what gives us hope. That's why death has no sting and that hope is good and we should be excited to see our loved ones in heaven one day. We should be excited to explore this place that God created for us, but the thing we should be most excited about is finally getting to see our Jesus and finally getting to meet our God. What would it look like to live a life so devoted to God, so in love with Jesus, that heaven was like the greatest reunion ever? Because we finally got to meet him. That's how we should live our life. People who are excited about that are people who look at Jesus and go, I don't care about your bread. I'm just here for you, man. I hope that you will have the courage to pray and ask God to suss out your motives, to show them to yourself. And then we cannot go about the work of changing our motives on our own. All we can do is offer them up to God and say, God, I know that my motives for following you are impure. I pray that you would purify them. Give me a heart for you. And if you want to pursue this more, I don't do this a lot, but there's a book I would highly recommend to you. It's called With by a guy named Sky Jethani, who's a pastor somewhere in the United States. I forget where. This is, to me, the best book written in the last 10 years. I love it, and I don't really read new books. I think that a book should be in print for like 25 or 30 years before it's worth reading. So I don't really read a lot of new books, but this is a new one that I read, and I love this book. I've never read a book that caused me to stop and put it down and pray and go, God, I'm really sorry for this, more than that book. So if you're a reader, if you're into that kind of thing, I would highly recommend you get this book, and that will help you follow up with making sure that we're following Jesus for the right reasons. For all of us, if you consider yourself a Jesus follower, I hope that you'll have the courage to ask him to purify your motives. And when you do, what you'll find is it works out that all things work out too. Our relationship with Jesus works a little bit like a marriage. In a marriage, there's a bunch of different aspects of a marriage, right? I'm married to Jen, I lucked out, and there's different aspects to our marriage. And we could say, you know what, the most important thing to us is to just be able to have fun together and laugh together. And so we could prioritize that over everything else. And while we're having fun and laughing about everything, we're probably putting some other things off that need some work. And so eventually our marriage is going to get unhealthy. We could prioritize intimacy between one another and say, if we have this, then we'll be healthy, but that will come at the expense of other things. We can prioritize Lily and maybe future kiddos and who knows, but one day everyone's going to be out of the house and we're going to have to look at each other and be like, do we still like each other? Or we could prioritize one another above and beyond everything else in our relationship. And as we grow together, all of those other things will fall into place. If we will prize Jesus above and beyond everything else, all the accoutrements of Christianity, then what we'll find is all those other things, the status and the control and any gain that we might need, Jesus will take care of if we'll just follow him. So let us be a church of people who follow Jesus with a pure heart. Let us be a church of people who get in the boats and follow him across the lake for the right reasons. And let's see what Jesus does with a group of people like that. Let's pray, and then we'll take communion together. Father, we do love you. We do thank you for your son, for sending him for us. God, we thank you that he unites us with you. Lord, I would ask that you would make us courageous. Help us to see the places in our hearts and in our lives and in our walks with you where we are pursuing you for the wrong reasons, for things that really are temporary and not eternal. God, make yourself the prize of our hearts and of our minds and of our lives. Unite us with you. God, I pray that you would work even now to reveal and to begin to purify our motives as we follow you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. I missed you last week. People were asking where I was. I was in the mountains of North Georgia taking naps is where I was, and it was a lot of fun. And in my stead, Kyle, our student pastor, gave his first sermon at Grace, and it was a great job. He did phenomenally. But one of the things as I listened back and I heard the story of how the weekend went without me that I was so happy to hear really and truly was that both services, when he got up to give his first sermon ever, you guys cheered for him. Which, first of all, that hurts a little bit. But second, what a cool place. What a great thing that says about us as a church that we're so excited for this guy that we're going to applaud him before he even says anything. There can't be a more supportive place to do ministry than Grace. So it just made me so proud of my church to be a part of this place. I just thought it was really, really great and evident of your heart. The other thing I want to say before I get started, and I never do this, I don't think sermons are times for announcements, but this is such an important announcement to me that I wanted it to go out online on our podcast and on the video and things like that so that people catching up during the week can catch this too. This Friday night, March the 15th, is Grace's big night out, okay? It's two hours at Compass Rose Brewery from 6.30 to 8.30. There's gonna be childcare here for kids five and younger. Everybody else is welcome at Compass Rose. There's games for the kids. There's going to be a food truck. You can bring your own food if you want to. Steve and the band are going to do some live music. It's going to be a super fun time to just hang out, and I really want it to be awesome. So that's up there with my number because we have a graphic that's a square that I can just send to you, and then you can text that out to your friends because we're hoping that you'll invite your friends. This is an easy invite. I think a lot of us have friends that maybe we'd love to see get more involved in church, but maybe they kind of don't want to be involved with church right now. Maybe there's a little stink on it for them or whatever, but maybe if they come hang out with us on Friday and just get to talk and laugh and meet people, they'll realize that we're not a bunch of weirdies, and they'll join us later, okay? So if you want that graphic to use to invite your friends, text me and I'll get it out to you or text one of the elders. They have it too. Okay, but we hope that you'll join us on Friday and that you'll bring some folks. It's going to be a really good time. I hope this is something we get to do repetitively. Okay, this is part five of our series in John. We're going to go through John until the week after Easter. I've been really loving getting to dive into the book of John with you. And if you haven't noticed, we're missing a lot of things. We didn't even do the most famous verse in John, John 3.16. We just skipped right over it because I'm probably a terrible pastor. But there's a reading plan, so hopefully you guys have grabbed that and you're reading along with us again so that you're getting your perspective and your eyes and your mind and your heart on Jesus and not just getting my perspective as we move through the Gospel of John. This week we arrive at what is probably the most famous or one of the most famous miracles in the Bible. It's in all four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and it's one that all of you have heard of. Even if you're here and you're not a believer, this is your first time in church in a long time or ever, I bet you've heard of this miracle, the feeding of the 5,000, right? We know this miracle. And really, that's an erroneous title because Scripture tells us that there was 5,000 men, which means there were women and children in addition to those 5,000. We don't know how many. You can do the math on your own. I'm not going to chance a guest on stage as a pastor and be eternally responsible for that. So I'll let you make irresponsible guesses in your head. But there was more than 5,000 people there. And what's going on when this happens is ancient Israel in the time of Christ was what we would really think of as a third world country. And Jesus is up in northern Israel around the Sea of Galilee. Jerusalem was in southern Israel and northern Israel is really at this point like the countryside. It's rural Israel. So in the sticks of a country that is poor, Jesus is going through his day. He's going through his ministry there. And there are thousands of people following him. Again, we don't know exactly how many, but there are thousands of people following Jesus. In the beginning of John chapter 6, if you have a Bible, you can turn there. The beginning of John chapter 6 tells us that they were following him. The throngs were following Jesus because of the miraculous things that he was doing, because he was casting demons out of people, because he was healing folks, and they wanted to go see. Either they had something that they needed Jesus to take care of, or they just wanted to see this person that many people were beginning to call the Messiah. And so thousands of people had flocked to Jesus. And it says that Jesus looked on the crowds with compassion. He was moved by them and for them. Because here are 5,000 men in the middle of the day with their families, in a culture and in a time where these people woke up and they genuinely did not know where their next meal was coming from. They were very poor, more poor than any of us can imagine. And so Jesus is moved with compassion at the crowds of people and he decides that he's going to feed them. And so there's a young boy walking by who's got five small fish and three loaves of bread and he gets the disciples to ask for the meal from the boy and Jesus starts to break the bread and the fish and he starts to put it in these baskets. And the disciples carry the baskets to the different groups of people and they hand it out to whoever needs. It was an ancient all-you-can-eat buffet. It's like the first version of the Golden Corral. And they're just going around handing things out to people. Until at the end, there was baskets left over. Jesus just kept making fish and bread until everyone had what they needed, right? And then at the end of that, the people did this thing that everybody was trying to do to Jesus his whole life. We don't really think about this or notice this, but it's a drum I'm trying to beat as we go through the gospel of John. They clamored to him to make him king. They wanted to take him down south to Jerusalem and put him on the throne. They wanted to form a revolution around Jesus because the prophecies in ancient Israel, the prophecies in the Old Testament say that when the Messiah arrives, he will be the king of kings and the lord of lords and the prince of peace, and that he will sit on the throne of David and that he will rule forever. And now we know, with the benefit of hindsight, that Jesus did not come to establish a physical earthly kingdom. We know that he came to establish an eternal heavenly kingdom. But they didn't know that. They thought that he came to literally establish a kingdom that he was going to, at the time, overthrow Roman rule, rise Israel up to prominence, that they were going to be the world superpower, and Jesus was going to be the king, and they were going to be his followers. And so they said, this is the guy, look what he's doing. And they clamored to him to go make him king. And Jesus, knowing that wasn't the point, knowing that it wasn't yet time to put the wheels in motion of his crucifixion, fades away and goes into the mountains. And we see Jesus do this a lot in his ministry. There's a big event, a big thing that he does, something that exhausts him, and then he goes and he fades away and he goes to pray and spend some time with the Father to get away from the crowds. It makes me wonder on a human level if Jesus wasn't an introvert who just needed a little bit of a break after he dealt with everybody. But another thing you'll notice about Jesus, if you'll read through the Gospels on your own, is he had this unfailing patience with people. Can you imagine what it would be to be Jesus, to feed 5,000 people and then still have people like, hey, can you do this? Can you do this? Can you do this? And you're like, did you see the miracle I did? Can a dude not take a nap? Like, how tired did he have to be? How stressed did he have to be? How fatigued did he have to be? Yet he continued to unfailingly love people. Over and over again, he offers them grace through the Gospels. And that's one of, to me, that's one of the pieces of Jesus that we see when we pay attention. It's just his unfailing love for others. So he goes up to the mountainside to pray, and he tells the disciples, y'all go ahead and go across the Sea of Galilee to a city called Capernaum and I'll meet you there, okay? I'm gonna come out there too. Y'all go ahead and go across. So the disciples, the 12 of them, get on a boat and they begin to go across the Sea of Galilee, which wasn't really a sea, it's a lake, but you can't see across it, so it's called the Sea of Galilee. I don't know why that's the policy, but that's what it is. And so they're going across. And in the middle of the night, Jesus walks on water where we have this other really famous miracle. And the other gospels record it and give us a little bit more detail about it and the interaction with Peter. And he was like a ghost. And at first they were afraid. But John in his old age, as he's writing his gospel, he doesn't do that. It's just a couple of verses. He's just like, we were going across the water and then we looked and Jesus was walking. And then he got in boat with us, and then we were there. It's like John was like, it was just, you know, just Jesus stuff. It was just classic Jesus, you know, just walking across the water and getting in the boat, and then they're there, right? So the next morning, the people, the crowds, wake up. They had camped out wherever they were going to camp out there on the hillside. They wake up, and they look around, and they don't see Jesus. And then they notice that there's a boat gone and none of his disciples are there. So they put two and two together and it says they go across the water. And I don't think that all the, however many thousands of people there were there, all got in their boats at once and went across the Sea of Galilee like some Greek fleet assaulting Troy. Like I don't think it was all of them. I think it was probably a portion of them. So a portion of them get in the boats and they follow Jesus across the water. And it makes me wonder, for us, who here thinks that if they were in those crowds, that they would have been one of the ones to get in the boat and cross the water? Who here would call yourself a follower of Jesus? My guess is, because you're church people, and you know the right answer is, oh, I'd definitely get in the boat, then that's probably your answer. There might be some, a few, who are here just kind of checking things out with the bravery to be like, I don't know if I'm getting in the boat yet. And I really applaud the intellectual honesty of that answer. But most of us are probably going to say that we're in the boat. I'm going to get in the boat and I'm going to go across. I'm going to follow Jesus. I'm not going to let him get away. And so that's what they do. They get in the boat and they go across and they were Jesus followers. They follow him across the Sea of Galilee. And then they go and they find him and they ask him, what are you doing? Where'd you go? Look, this is what it says in the text. John chapter 6, verse 25, it says, When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, Rabbi, when did you come here? They said, Jesus, what are you doing? Where did you go? Like, we're trying to keep up with you. We're trying to follow you. Where did you go? What's the deal? Why are you disappearing? And Jesus' response to me is searingly convicting. And it stands as a conviction not only to those people then, but to us now and all Jesus followers throughout all time. Anybody who would ever consider themselves a follower of Jesus, his response to me is incredibly convicting. He says this, Jesus answered them when they said, where'd you go? What are you doing? We're trying to follow you and you're hiding from us. Where are you? Jesus says this, truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the son of man will give you. For on morning they wake up. Jesus isn't around. They follow him. They track him down. They go to him and they go, Rabbi, which means teacher, which means we're acknowledging you as an authority. Where'd you go? We're trying to follow you. You're running away from us. We're trying to keep up. We want to follow you, Jesus. Why'd you do that? And Jesus looks at a poor and downtrodden people who, listen to me, they need bread, okay? They need the physical bread that he provided. They're not like us. Any of us in this room can go to any restaurant we want to right after church. You can get the meat sweats within the next two hours. We all have the means to do this, okay? I ate out two times yesterday because I'm fabulously wealthy. We can all do this, right? We don't know what it is to be hungry, none of us. They knew. They knew what hunger was. And Jesus knew that they were hungry. And they are the exact type of people that we would look at our Jesus and expect them to do something about feeding them. Expect him to be moved with compassion and give them more bread because that's what they need. But instead of doing that, instead of giving them what they really do genuinely need, he looks at him and he says, you're only here because I gave you bread. You followed me across the water for the wrong reasons. You shouldn't labor for the things that are temporary. You should labor for the things that are eternal. That's quite the statement by Jesus. You're following me for the wrong reasons. Your motives are impure. And it makes me wonder, if you are somebody who would say that you would get in the boat and you would follow Jesus across the water, yes, I am a Jesus follower. I want to be where he is. When Jesus says this, that you're following me for the wrong reasons, it makes me wonder, what are the reasons that you are following Jesus? Are we following Jesus for the right reasons? Or is it possible that our motives are mixed? As I thought about it for me, and I thought about it for the people that I've known through the years, I think that it's entirely possible that we get some mixed motives for following our Savior. I think it's one thing to come to Him for certain reasons, but our relationship with Him cannot exist motivated by those same things. And I think that as I thought about it, I think a lot of the reasons that we sometimes follow Jesus that maybe are for the wrong reasons can be summed up in this way, that often we follow Jesus for control or for status or for gain. I think it's entirely possible, church people, that we have followed Jesus in our life for some sense of control, for some sense of status, or in hopes of some sort of gain. Here's what I mean. Sometimes we go to Jesus because the world seems just completely out of sorts. These things are happening that we cannot control, that we do not understand, and to be able to see them through a framework of God's sovereignty brings a sense of peace and understanding to us that makes us feel comfortable. And so it's how we process the world because we're trying to bring a sense of control to the uncontrollable in a more pernicious way. I think that we have what I think of as a proverbial faith. In the book of Proverbs, it was a book of wisdom written by Solomon. It basically is summed up by saying, if you do things like this, then you are wise and things will go well for you. And if you do things like this, then you are foolish and things will not go well for you. And so sometimes we approach the Bible as this self-help book that says, if I do these kinds of things, even if I don't fully believe, then life is going to go better for me. And it's a way that we try to exert control over the uncontrollable. Do you see? The problem with this is the book of Job exists as a contrast to Proverbs that tells us even when we're doing all the right things, sometimes it's still going to go bad. But when we follow Jesus for control, it's that kind of proverbial faith where we try to, by following all the rules and doing all the right things, bring about outcomes in our life that are uncontrollable, that are favorable, right? Or sometimes we follow Jesus for status. Listen to me, church people. We are guilty of this. I, this is not hyperbole, more than anyone. Those of you who have been in church for a while, for any number of years, has there ever been a season of your life where you followed Jesus, where you've put on the mask of Christianity, where you've played the game of faith because of the status that it brought you? Just me? Has anyone ever studied harder for a Bible study and done the work in a Bible study because when you got there, you wanted to have the best answers, not because you were really interested in the content? Have any of you ever been guilty when you're asked to pray in front of other people of suddenly using a different voice with a different vocabulary? Because these and nows and saying God over and over again is somehow holy? Oh God, if you would just have mercy on us, God, in your favor, God, I just lift this person up to you, God. Don't talk like that. When we hear ourselves starting to pray like that, that's Christianity for status. That's Christianity because of what it gives us in the community, because it offers us opportunities of respect in the church, because when we act that way and we live out this faith, sometimes people will ask us to do things that are honorable requests. Have you ever walked through a season of life where your faith was more about the status that it brought you than it was about Jesus? Where your main reason for not walking away from the faith is a relational fallout that it would cost you? That's faith for status. Or we follow Jesus for gain. This is what's commonly referred to as a health and wealth gospel. It is a gospel or the prosperity gospel. I hate it. It's a lie from Satan and it's evil. And what it tells us is if we go to Jesus, that Jesus wants to bless us. He wants us to have this incredible life. He wants us to be happy now in the material. And so he will make you healthy and he will make you wealthy. And if you don't have health and if you don't have wealth and you just don't have strong enough faith and you need to have better faith. And there are whole churches built on this model, on the promise that if you really are living Christianity out the right way, then you will be blessed and you will be healthy and you will be wealthy. And I don't know if you ever paid attention to it, but churches that teach this model don't tend to be filled with wealthy people because it preys on the poor and on the unhealthy and promises them things that are not true. And Jesus knows that these reasons, these temporary reasons for following him, whether they be control or gain or status, are not the right reasons and that eventually they will wreck our faith. That's why he gives the warning there. Don't labor for the temporary, labor for the eternal because when we follow Jesus for the wrong reasons, eventually it wrecks our faith. Eventually it shipwrecks the faith that we have. I'll tell you how I know this is true. Several years ago, I had a meeting with a couple at my old church named Alan and Sonny. I love Alan and Sonny. They went on after this meeting that I had with them, not because of me, because of the Holy Spirit work in them. I didn't tell them anything useful, I don't think. But they went on, they became small group leaders. They were wonderful in the church. They launched other small group leaders. They're still there leading people to faith. They're just phenomenal warriors for God. But I got an email one day, and it was from them, and they said, hey, you know, we've been coming to the church for a little bit. We accepted Christ as our Savior about four months ago, and there's just some stuff happening in our life. We just have some questions. We'd like to talk to a pastor. I said, all right, sure. You get to talk to 29-year-old Nate. Congratulations. I'm going to answer all the questions for you. And so I meet with them. And they said, hey, you know, they started telling me about their life. And they had had a hard life. He was a handyman. She helped them out. They were workaday people. They were really, really great and wonderful folks. But it was their second marriage. They both had adult children and grandchildren, and then they had their own children together. And they had all the craziness that that brings about, plus a life that was lived before that without faith and the remnants of that that are going on in their life. And so Alan and Sonny had a really hard life. And what they said was, you know, before we got saved, we came to God to experience peace. And after we got saved, we've been praying about these situations in our life. We've been hoping for them. We've been lifting them up for God. We've been trying to do the right things. But man, I got to tell you, those situations aren't really getting much better. And some of them are getting worse. And we just need to know, did we do it wrong? Like, are we actually saved? Did we not pray the prayer right? Is there something that I need to believe that I don't believe? Is there some sin that I don't know about that I need to figure out? Because this isn't really working the way that we thought it would work. Do you hear the lie there? Somewhere along the way, they became convinced that to follow Jesus meant that there was going to be a relief from the trials in their life, that they were going to be what we would call blessed, and that those things would begin to go away because now I'm following Jesus, and now I'm following the rules, and God is going to do these things for me. He's going to make these situations better. And I had to sit them down and be like, guys, no one promised that to you. You didn't do it right. You did it wrong. You did it exactly right. The problem is your expectations of God because he doesn't promise Christians that we won't experience trials. In fact, in the New Testament, do you know what we're promised? We're promised suffering and persecution. So buckle up, pal. That's what we're promised. It's going to be hard, and you're going to have to endure. But in the midst of that, and I can go through character after character in the Bible, Christian after Christian throughout history, that with loving God with all their heart and suffering mightily. Because God doesn't promise us a relief to our circumstances. He doesn't promise us health or wealth or status or control or any of those things. What he promises us is his presence, that he will be with us, that he will walk through our trials with us, that we never have to experience those alone, that our life is never hopeless, that our life is never lonely, because God is an ever-present force that is there with us, loving us and affirming us. And now, as you go through trials, it's not that you don't have to go through them, it's that you have the peace of Christ as you do, and you have the hope of heaven, so that Paul can say that even though we endure suffering for what he calls a little while on this earth, we look forward to a new day where there is no suffering. That's the promise of faith and of Christianity. But when we let people believe that that promise comes now and that prosperity comes now, then after we get saved, we begin to look around and go, did I do this wrong? And eventually we either feel like we messed it up or our God is letting us down, but either way, I don't want anything to do with this faith. And it shipwrecks our faith. When we follow God for control, for a sense of control and sense of our universe, and then things happen that feel like they are out of our control, we feel like either we've done it wrong or God is weak. When we follow God for status, when we eventually get the status that we want, when we fake it enough so that everyone around us believes that we're this Christian that we try to pretend to be, then what we realize is we're living our life in a prison of expectations and hypocrisy that we can't get out of until we allow our entire identity to crumble because it was never authentic to begin with. When we follow Jesus for the wrong reasons, it wrecks our faith. So that begs the question that hopefully you're asking and that they asked. Okay, what are the right reasons? What's the right reason to follow Jesus? And this is what they ask in verse 28. They said to him, what must we do to be doing the works of God? Okay, what's the right reason? What do we have to do to work for the eternal things, not the temporary? What do we have to do? And Jesus' answer is great. Jesus answered them, this is the work of God that you believe in him who he has sent. Do you remember back, those of you who were here to the first week of the series? And we look at the way that John introduces Jesus. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. And we said that the fundamental question in life is, was Jesus real? And do you believe that He is who He says He is? It's a fundamental question in life. That question makes all the difference in the world. Do we believe that Jesus was who he says he was? And then they say, what's the right reason to follow you? What's the right motive? How do we labor for the eternal? And Jesus says, trust me that I am who I say I am. Believe that I actually am the one that God sent. You want to know the right reason to follow Jesus? Jesus. You want to know what should properly motivate you to get in those boats and go across the sea and find him? Him. It should literally be that we get in the boats and we cross the sea and we go to Jesus and we go, Jesus, where'd you go? And he goes, you're only here for my bread. And we go, no, I don't care about the bread. I just want you. You're only here for the status and what I do. No, I don't care about the status. Make me low. Make me do something silly. Make me an usher, the least of all church volunteers. Make me do that. And I will still follow you. You're only here for the control. No, let stuff happen. Let the world spin out of control around me. I'm here for you, Jesus. That should be the motive. Jesus is the only reason to follow Jesus. And this isn't just in this passage. It's all throughout the New Testament. If you continue in the book of John, what you see in John chapter 15 is that there's an instruction from Jesus to abide in him, abide in me and I in you, and you will bear much fruit. And we're going to spend some time on this, but there's a relational aspect to that abiding. There's this idea of knowing Jesus, of pursuing him relationally, of being acquainted intimately with our Savior. In John 17, Jesus prays for you. He prays for all people that would hear of the word through the disciples, which is you. And what he prays for you is that you would be one with him as he and the Father are one, that you would know him, that there is a relational aspect to this. Paul, throughout all of his letters, prays for the church over and over again that they would know God. The author of Hebrews says that if we're going to run the race that we're supposed to run, then we need to do it with our eyes focused on the founder of our faith, which is Jesus. All throughout the New Testament, it tells us that God's desire for us is that we would know him, and that the proper motivation to follow him is simply to know Jesus. That's it. That we would pursue him, that we would love him, that we would want more of Jesus in our life, that when we get across the Sea of Galilee and he says, why'd you come over here? I'm not gonna give you more bread. We go, I don't care, I don't need more bread, I just need you. That's why we follow Jesus. And with that in mind, to help you as you assess, because hopefully if you're paying attention, you're sitting here going, okay, well, am I doing it right? Am I following Jesus for the right reasons? What are my motives? How mixed are they? And all of us have mixed motives. I've got like a two-question diagnostic for you so that you can try to suss out in yourself and in your own heart, how are we doing with keeping pure motives as we follow Jesus? Okay, so two sneaky questions that are gonna make you feel terrible about yourself, but they're really good questions. The first one is this. When you pray for yourself and others, for what do you pray? What do you pray for yourself and others? When you pray for yourself, what do you pray for? If you're a person who prays and you get down on your knees and you say, God, I need this, what is it that you pray for? Do you pray that you would close the sale? Do you pray that you would pass the test? Do you pray that you would get the job? Do you pray that you would execute the thing? Do you pray that you would be given the right words in this situation? Do you pray for temporary things? When you pray for people that you love, your kids, your spouse, for your parents, for your friends? What do you pray for them? Do you pray for temporary things? Help them in this situation, heal them of this, rescue them in this, give them wisdom in this. Do you pray for temporary things? Or when you pray for yourself and you pray for others, do you pray that they would simply know God? God, whatever's happening in their life, and this is how Paul prays, whatever's happening in their life, whatever's happening in the church, I pray that it would all conspire to bring them to a knowledge of you. If you look at the prayers in the New Testament, he doesn't pray for circumstances. He doesn't pray for health. He doesn't pray for church growth. All he prays for is that we would know God. So when you pray for other people, do you pray for their circumstances or do you pray that they would know God? Every night we put Lily to bed and every night we try to pray with her. When the elders don't make me meet, then I can be at home with my child. And when I pray for them, when I pray for Lily, Jen and I pray every night, God, help her to know you soon and to love you well. I don't want her to experience a lot of her life without knowing God. Help her to know you soon and love you well. And when I pray for her on my own, I try not to pray for her circumstances. I try not even so much to pray for her health because I know God cares about that. I pray that all the situations, all the things, all the events, all the scarring that I give her will somehow conspire to bring her to a place where she knows God on a level that's more intimate than I've ever known him. When you pray for other people, do you pray for the things that are temporary or do you pray for the eternal, that all the temporary things would conspire that they would know God? That tells us where our motives are in following Jesus. The other one is this. If you're a Christian, one of the things you think about hopefully regularly is heaven. We anticipate heaven. We look forward to heaven. We should be rightly excited about heaven. But I would ask you what most excites you when you think about getting to heaven. That will tell you a lot about why you're following Jesus. Some people are excited to get to heaven because we're curious. I want to see what the pearly gates are. Is that even a thing? Did we make that up? Are there really pearly gates? What do the streets of gold look like? What's the sea of glass? Is St. Peter there greeting me? Or is that only in far sideide cartoons? Like, we want to see these things, right? We're curious about heaven. For many of us, most of us, there's probably a loved one that we can't wait to see. I can't wait to see my Pawpaw again. He's my favorite human that's ever lived. I haven't seen him since I was 19. Pawpaw's never seen me as a pastor. I can't wait to get to heaven and talk to him about it. If I have any gift for teaching or telling a good story, it's from him. He could captivate a room. He's never met Jen. I wish he would have. He hasn't seen Lily. I can't wait to see Papa again. You have your people too. But we ought to be most excited about finally getting to look our Savior in the eyes. What should excite us most about heaven is that we finally get to meet our Heavenly Father and see what He looks like and hear what He sounds like and feel the power of his presence. That should most excite us about heaven. We finally get to look our savior in the eye and we get to hug him and hopefully we get to hear well done, good and faithful servant. That should be the thing that we are most hopeful about with heaven. The rest of the things are good. That's what gives us hope. That's why death has no sting and that hope is good and we should be excited to see our loved ones in heaven one day. We should be excited to explore this place that God created for us, but the thing we should be most excited about is finally getting to see our Jesus and finally getting to meet our God. What would it look like to live a life so devoted to God, so in love with Jesus, that heaven was like the greatest reunion ever? Because we finally got to meet him. That's how we should live our life. People who are excited about that are people who look at Jesus and go, I don't care about your bread. I'm just here for you, man. I hope that you will have the courage to pray and ask God to suss out your motives, to show them to yourself. And then we cannot go about the work of changing our motives on our own. All we can do is offer them up to God and say, God, I know that my motives for following you are impure. I pray that you would purify them. Give me a heart for you. And if you want to pursue this more, I don't do this a lot, but there's a book I would highly recommend to you. It's called With by a guy named Sky Jethani, who's a pastor somewhere in the United States. I forget where. This is, to me, the best book written in the last 10 years. I love it, and I don't really read new books. I think that a book should be in print for like 25 or 30 years before it's worth reading. So I don't really read a lot of new books, but this is a new one that I read, and I love this book. I've never read a book that caused me to stop and put it down and pray and go, God, I'm really sorry for this, more than that book. So if you're a reader, if you're into that kind of thing, I would highly recommend you get this book, and that will help you follow up with making sure that we're following Jesus for the right reasons. For all of us, if you consider yourself a Jesus follower, I hope that you'll have the courage to ask him to purify your motives. And when you do, what you'll find is it works out that all things work out too. Our relationship with Jesus works a little bit like a marriage. In a marriage, there's a bunch of different aspects of a marriage, right? I'm married to Jen, I lucked out, and there's different aspects to our marriage. And we could say, you know what, the most important thing to us is to just be able to have fun together and laugh together. And so we could prioritize that over everything else. And while we're having fun and laughing about everything, we're probably putting some other things off that need some work. And so eventually our marriage is going to get unhealthy. We could prioritize intimacy between one another and say, if we have this, then we'll be healthy, but that will come at the expense of other things. We can prioritize Lily and maybe future kiddos and who knows, but one day everyone's going to be out of the house and we're going to have to look at each other and be like, do we still like each other? Or we could prioritize one another above and beyond everything else in our relationship. And as we grow together, all of those other things will fall into place. If we will prize Jesus above and beyond everything else, all the accoutrements of Christianity, then what we'll find is all those other things, the status and the control and any gain that we might need, Jesus will take care of if we'll just follow him. So let us be a church of people who follow Jesus with a pure heart. Let us be a church of people who get in the boats and follow him across the lake for the right reasons. And let's see what Jesus does with a group of people like that. Let's pray, and then we'll take communion together. Father, we do love you. We do thank you for your son, for sending him for us. God, we thank you that he unites us with you. Lord, I would ask that you would make us courageous. Help us to see the places in our hearts and in our lives and in our walks with you where we are pursuing you for the wrong reasons, for things that really are temporary and not eternal. God, make yourself the prize of our hearts and of our minds and of our lives. Unite us with you. God, I pray that you would work even now to reveal and to begin to purify our motives as we follow you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. I missed you last week. People were asking where I was. I was in the mountains of North Georgia taking naps is where I was, and it was a lot of fun. And in my stead, Kyle, our student pastor, gave his first sermon at Grace, and it was a great job. He did phenomenally. But one of the things as I listened back and I heard the story of how the weekend went without me that I was so happy to hear really and truly was that both services, when he got up to give his first sermon ever, you guys cheered for him. Which, first of all, that hurts a little bit. But second, what a cool place. What a great thing that says about us as a church that we're so excited for this guy that we're going to applaud him before he even says anything. There can't be a more supportive place to do ministry than Grace. So it just made me so proud of my church to be a part of this place. I just thought it was really, really great and evident of your heart. The other thing I want to say before I get started, and I never do this, I don't think sermons are times for announcements, but this is such an important announcement to me that I wanted it to go out online on our podcast and on the video and things like that so that people catching up during the week can catch this too. This Friday night, March the 15th, is Grace's big night out, okay? It's two hours at Compass Rose Brewery from 6.30 to 8.30. There's gonna be childcare here for kids five and younger. Everybody else is welcome at Compass Rose. There's games for the kids. There's going to be a food truck. You can bring your own food if you want to. Steve and the band are going to do some live music. It's going to be a super fun time to just hang out, and I really want it to be awesome. So that's up there with my number because we have a graphic that's a square that I can just send to you, and then you can text that out to your friends because we're hoping that you'll invite your friends. This is an easy invite. I think a lot of us have friends that maybe we'd love to see get more involved in church, but maybe they kind of don't want to be involved with church right now. Maybe there's a little stink on it for them or whatever, but maybe if they come hang out with us on Friday and just get to talk and laugh and meet people, they'll realize that we're not a bunch of weirdies, and they'll join us later, okay? So if you want that graphic to use to invite your friends, text me and I'll get it out to you or text one of the elders. They have it too. Okay, but we hope that you'll join us on Friday and that you'll bring some folks. It's going to be a really good time. I hope this is something we get to do repetitively. Okay, this is part five of our series in John. We're going to go through John until the week after Easter. I've been really loving getting to dive into the book of John with you. And if you haven't noticed, we're missing a lot of things. We didn't even do the most famous verse in John, John 3.16. We just skipped right over it because I'm probably a terrible pastor. But there's a reading plan, so hopefully you guys have grabbed that and you're reading along with us again so that you're getting your perspective and your eyes and your mind and your heart on Jesus and not just getting my perspective as we move through the Gospel of John. This week we arrive at what is probably the most famous or one of the most famous miracles in the Bible. It's in all four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and it's one that all of you have heard of. Even if you're here and you're not a believer, this is your first time in church in a long time or ever, I bet you've heard of this miracle, the feeding of the 5,000, right? We know this miracle. And really, that's an erroneous title because Scripture tells us that there was 5,000 men, which means there were women and children in addition to those 5,000. We don't know how many. You can do the math on your own. I'm not going to chance a guest on stage as a pastor and be eternally responsible for that. So I'll let you make irresponsible guesses in your head. But there was more than 5,000 people there. And what's going on when this happens is ancient Israel in the time of Christ was what we would really think of as a third world country. And Jesus is up in northern Israel around the Sea of Galilee. Jerusalem was in southern Israel and northern Israel is really at this point like the countryside. It's rural Israel. So in the sticks of a country that is poor, Jesus is going through his day. He's going through his ministry there. And there are thousands of people following him. Again, we don't know exactly how many, but there are thousands of people following Jesus. In the beginning of John chapter 6, if you have a Bible, you can turn there. The beginning of John chapter 6 tells us that they were following him. The throngs were following Jesus because of the miraculous things that he was doing, because he was casting demons out of people, because he was healing folks, and they wanted to go see. Either they had something that they needed Jesus to take care of, or they just wanted to see this person that many people were beginning to call the Messiah. And so thousands of people had flocked to Jesus. And it says that Jesus looked on the crowds with compassion. He was moved by them and for them. Because here are 5,000 men in the middle of the day with their families, in a culture and in a time where these people woke up and they genuinely did not know where their next meal was coming from. They were very poor, more poor than any of us can imagine. And so Jesus is moved with compassion at the crowds of people and he decides that he's going to feed them. And so there's a young boy walking by who's got five small fish and three loaves of bread and he gets the disciples to ask for the meal from the boy and Jesus starts to break the bread and the fish and he starts to put it in these baskets. And the disciples carry the baskets to the different groups of people and they hand it out to whoever needs. It was an ancient all-you-can-eat buffet. It's like the first version of the Golden Corral. And they're just going around handing things out to people. Until at the end, there was baskets left over. Jesus just kept making fish and bread until everyone had what they needed, right? And then at the end of that, the people did this thing that everybody was trying to do to Jesus his whole life. We don't really think about this or notice this, but it's a drum I'm trying to beat as we go through the gospel of John. They clamored to him to make him king. They wanted to take him down south to Jerusalem and put him on the throne. They wanted to form a revolution around Jesus because the prophecies in ancient Israel, the prophecies in the Old Testament say that when the Messiah arrives, he will be the king of kings and the lord of lords and the prince of peace, and that he will sit on the throne of David and that he will rule forever. And now we know, with the benefit of hindsight, that Jesus did not come to establish a physical earthly kingdom. We know that he came to establish an eternal heavenly kingdom. But they didn't know that. They thought that he came to literally establish a kingdom that he was going to, at the time, overthrow Roman rule, rise Israel up to prominence, that they were going to be the world superpower, and Jesus was going to be the king, and they were going to be his followers. And so they said, this is the guy, look what he's doing. And they clamored to him to go make him king. And Jesus, knowing that wasn't the point, knowing that it wasn't yet time to put the wheels in motion of his crucifixion, fades away and goes into the mountains. And we see Jesus do this a lot in his ministry. There's a big event, a big thing that he does, something that exhausts him, and then he goes and he fades away and he goes to pray and spend some time with the Father to get away from the crowds. It makes me wonder on a human level if Jesus wasn't an introvert who just needed a little bit of a break after he dealt with everybody. But another thing you'll notice about Jesus, if you'll read through the Gospels on your own, is he had this unfailing patience with people. Can you imagine what it would be to be Jesus, to feed 5,000 people and then still have people like, hey, can you do this? Can you do this? Can you do this? And you're like, did you see the miracle I did? Can a dude not take a nap? Like, how tired did he have to be? How stressed did he have to be? How fatigued did he have to be? Yet he continued to unfailingly love people. Over and over again, he offers them grace through the Gospels. And that's one of, to me, that's one of the pieces of Jesus that we see when we pay attention. It's just his unfailing love for others. So he goes up to the mountainside to pray, and he tells the disciples, y'all go ahead and go across the Sea of Galilee to a city called Capernaum and I'll meet you there, okay? I'm gonna come out there too. Y'all go ahead and go across. So the disciples, the 12 of them, get on a boat and they begin to go across the Sea of Galilee, which wasn't really a sea, it's a lake, but you can't see across it, so it's called the Sea of Galilee. I don't know why that's the policy, but that's what it is. And so they're going across. And in the middle of the night, Jesus walks on water where we have this other really famous miracle. And the other gospels record it and give us a little bit more detail about it and the interaction with Peter. And he was like a ghost. And at first they were afraid. But John in his old age, as he's writing his gospel, he doesn't do that. It's just a couple of verses. He's just like, we were going across the water and then we looked and Jesus was walking. And then he got in boat with us, and then we were there. It's like John was like, it was just, you know, just Jesus stuff. It was just classic Jesus, you know, just walking across the water and getting in the boat, and then they're there, right? So the next morning, the people, the crowds, wake up. They had camped out wherever they were going to camp out there on the hillside. They wake up, and they look around, and they don't see Jesus. And then they notice that there's a boat gone and none of his disciples are there. So they put two and two together and it says they go across the water. And I don't think that all the, however many thousands of people there were there, all got in their boats at once and went across the Sea of Galilee like some Greek fleet assaulting Troy. Like I don't think it was all of them. I think it was probably a portion of them. So a portion of them get in the boats and they follow Jesus across the water. And it makes me wonder, for us, who here thinks that if they were in those crowds, that they would have been one of the ones to get in the boat and cross the water? Who here would call yourself a follower of Jesus? My guess is, because you're church people, and you know the right answer is, oh, I'd definitely get in the boat, then that's probably your answer. There might be some, a few, who are here just kind of checking things out with the bravery to be like, I don't know if I'm getting in the boat yet. And I really applaud the intellectual honesty of that answer. But most of us are probably going to say that we're in the boat. I'm going to get in the boat and I'm going to go across. I'm going to follow Jesus. I'm not going to let him get away. And so that's what they do. They get in the boat and they go across and they were Jesus followers. They follow him across the Sea of Galilee. And then they go and they find him and they ask him, what are you doing? Where'd you go? Look, this is what it says in the text. John chapter 6, verse 25, it says, When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, Rabbi, when did you come here? They said, Jesus, what are you doing? Where did you go? Like, we're trying to keep up with you. We're trying to follow you. Where did you go? What's the deal? Why are you disappearing? And Jesus' response to me is searingly convicting. And it stands as a conviction not only to those people then, but to us now and all Jesus followers throughout all time. Anybody who would ever consider themselves a follower of Jesus, his response to me is incredibly convicting. He says this, Jesus answered them when they said, where'd you go? What are you doing? We're trying to follow you and you're hiding from us. Where are you? Jesus says this, truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the son of man will give you. For on morning they wake up. Jesus isn't around. They follow him. They track him down. They go to him and they go, Rabbi, which means teacher, which means we're acknowledging you as an authority. Where'd you go? We're trying to follow you. You're running away from us. We're trying to keep up. We want to follow you, Jesus. Why'd you do that? And Jesus looks at a poor and downtrodden people who, listen to me, they need bread, okay? They need the physical bread that he provided. They're not like us. Any of us in this room can go to any restaurant we want to right after church. You can get the meat sweats within the next two hours. We all have the means to do this, okay? I ate out two times yesterday because I'm fabulously wealthy. We can all do this, right? We don't know what it is to be hungry, none of us. They knew. They knew what hunger was. And Jesus knew that they were hungry. And they are the exact type of people that we would look at our Jesus and expect them to do something about feeding them. Expect him to be moved with compassion and give them more bread because that's what they need. But instead of doing that, instead of giving them what they really do genuinely need, he looks at him and he says, you're only here because I gave you bread. You followed me across the water for the wrong reasons. You shouldn't labor for the things that are temporary. You should labor for the things that are eternal. That's quite the statement by Jesus. You're following me for the wrong reasons. Your motives are impure. And it makes me wonder, if you are somebody who would say that you would get in the boat and you would follow Jesus across the water, yes, I am a Jesus follower. I want to be where he is. When Jesus says this, that you're following me for the wrong reasons, it makes me wonder, what are the reasons that you are following Jesus? Are we following Jesus for the right reasons? Or is it possible that our motives are mixed? As I thought about it for me, and I thought about it for the people that I've known through the years, I think that it's entirely possible that we get some mixed motives for following our Savior. I think it's one thing to come to Him for certain reasons, but our relationship with Him cannot exist motivated by those same things. And I think that as I thought about it, I think a lot of the reasons that we sometimes follow Jesus that maybe are for the wrong reasons can be summed up in this way, that often we follow Jesus for control or for status or for gain. I think it's entirely possible, church people, that we have followed Jesus in our life for some sense of control, for some sense of status, or in hopes of some sort of gain. Here's what I mean. Sometimes we go to Jesus because the world seems just completely out of sorts. These things are happening that we cannot control, that we do not understand, and to be able to see them through a framework of God's sovereignty brings a sense of peace and understanding to us that makes us feel comfortable. And so it's how we process the world because we're trying to bring a sense of control to the uncontrollable in a more pernicious way. I think that we have what I think of as a proverbial faith. In the book of Proverbs, it was a book of wisdom written by Solomon. It basically is summed up by saying, if you do things like this, then you are wise and things will go well for you. And if you do things like this, then you are foolish and things will not go well for you. And so sometimes we approach the Bible as this self-help book that says, if I do these kinds of things, even if I don't fully believe, then life is going to go better for me. And it's a way that we try to exert control over the uncontrollable. Do you see? The problem with this is the book of Job exists as a contrast to Proverbs that tells us even when we're doing all the right things, sometimes it's still going to go bad. But when we follow Jesus for control, it's that kind of proverbial faith where we try to, by following all the rules and doing all the right things, bring about outcomes in our life that are uncontrollable, that are favorable, right? Or sometimes we follow Jesus for status. Listen to me, church people. We are guilty of this. I, this is not hyperbole, more than anyone. Those of you who have been in church for a while, for any number of years, has there ever been a season of your life where you followed Jesus, where you've put on the mask of Christianity, where you've played the game of faith because of the status that it brought you? Just me? Has anyone ever studied harder for a Bible study and done the work in a Bible study because when you got there, you wanted to have the best answers, not because you were really interested in the content? Have any of you ever been guilty when you're asked to pray in front of other people of suddenly using a different voice with a different vocabulary? Because these and nows and saying God over and over again is somehow holy? Oh God, if you would just have mercy on us, God, in your favor, God, I just lift this person up to you, God. Don't talk like that. When we hear ourselves starting to pray like that, that's Christianity for status. That's Christianity because of what it gives us in the community, because it offers us opportunities of respect in the church, because when we act that way and we live out this faith, sometimes people will ask us to do things that are honorable requests. Have you ever walked through a season of life where your faith was more about the status that it brought you than it was about Jesus? Where your main reason for not walking away from the faith is a relational fallout that it would cost you? That's faith for status. Or we follow Jesus for gain. This is what's commonly referred to as a health and wealth gospel. It is a gospel or the prosperity gospel. I hate it. It's a lie from Satan and it's evil. And what it tells us is if we go to Jesus, that Jesus wants to bless us. He wants us to have this incredible life. He wants us to be happy now in the material. And so he will make you healthy and he will make you wealthy. And if you don't have health and if you don't have wealth and you just don't have strong enough faith and you need to have better faith. And there are whole churches built on this model, on the promise that if you really are living Christianity out the right way, then you will be blessed and you will be healthy and you will be wealthy. And I don't know if you ever paid attention to it, but churches that teach this model don't tend to be filled with wealthy people because it preys on the poor and on the unhealthy and promises them things that are not true. And Jesus knows that these reasons, these temporary reasons for following him, whether they be control or gain or status, are not the right reasons and that eventually they will wreck our faith. That's why he gives the warning there. Don't labor for the temporary, labor for the eternal because when we follow Jesus for the wrong reasons, eventually it wrecks our faith. Eventually it shipwrecks the faith that we have. I'll tell you how I know this is true. Several years ago, I had a meeting with a couple at my old church named Alan and Sonny. I love Alan and Sonny. They went on after this meeting that I had with them, not because of me, because of the Holy Spirit work in them. I didn't tell them anything useful, I don't think. But they went on, they became small group leaders. They were wonderful in the church. They launched other small group leaders. They're still there leading people to faith. They're just phenomenal warriors for God. But I got an email one day, and it was from them, and they said, hey, you know, we've been coming to the church for a little bit. We accepted Christ as our Savior about four months ago, and there's just some stuff happening in our life. We just have some questions. We'd like to talk to a pastor. I said, all right, sure. You get to talk to 29-year-old Nate. Congratulations. I'm going to answer all the questions for you. And so I meet with them. And they said, hey, you know, they started telling me about their life. And they had had a hard life. He was a handyman. She helped them out. They were workaday people. They were really, really great and wonderful folks. But it was their second marriage. They both had adult children and grandchildren, and then they had their own children together. And they had all the craziness that that brings about, plus a life that was lived before that without faith and the remnants of that that are going on in their life. And so Alan and Sonny had a really hard life. And what they said was, you know, before we got saved, we came to God to experience peace. And after we got saved, we've been praying about these situations in our life. We've been hoping for them. We've been lifting them up for God. We've been trying to do the right things. But man, I got to tell you, those situations aren't really getting much better. And some of them are getting worse. And we just need to know, did we do it wrong? Like, are we actually saved? Did we not pray the prayer right? Is there something that I need to believe that I don't believe? Is there some sin that I don't know about that I need to figure out? Because this isn't really working the way that we thought it would work. Do you hear the lie there? Somewhere along the way, they became convinced that to follow Jesus meant that there was going to be a relief from the trials in their life, that they were going to be what we would call blessed, and that those things would begin to go away because now I'm following Jesus, and now I'm following the rules, and God is going to do these things for me. He's going to make these situations better. And I had to sit them down and be like, guys, no one promised that to you. You didn't do it right. You did it wrong. You did it exactly right. The problem is your expectations of God because he doesn't promise Christians that we won't experience trials. In fact, in the New Testament, do you know what we're promised? We're promised suffering and persecution. So buckle up, pal. That's what we're promised. It's going to be hard, and you're going to have to endure. But in the midst of that, and I can go through character after character in the Bible, Christian after Christian throughout history, that with loving God with all their heart and suffering mightily. Because God doesn't promise us a relief to our circumstances. He doesn't promise us health or wealth or status or control or any of those things. What he promises us is his presence, that he will be with us, that he will walk through our trials with us, that we never have to experience those alone, that our life is never hopeless, that our life is never lonely, because God is an ever-present force that is there with us, loving us and affirming us. And now, as you go through trials, it's not that you don't have to go through them, it's that you have the peace of Christ as you do, and you have the hope of heaven, so that Paul can say that even though we endure suffering for what he calls a little while on this earth, we look forward to a new day where there is no suffering. That's the promise of faith and of Christianity. But when we let people believe that that promise comes now and that prosperity comes now, then after we get saved, we begin to look around and go, did I do this wrong? And eventually we either feel like we messed it up or our God is letting us down, but either way, I don't want anything to do with this faith. And it shipwrecks our faith. When we follow God for control, for a sense of control and sense of our universe, and then things happen that feel like they are out of our control, we feel like either we've done it wrong or God is weak. When we follow God for status, when we eventually get the status that we want, when we fake it enough so that everyone around us believes that we're this Christian that we try to pretend to be, then what we realize is we're living our life in a prison of expectations and hypocrisy that we can't get out of until we allow our entire identity to crumble because it was never authentic to begin with. When we follow Jesus for the wrong reasons, it wrecks our faith. So that begs the question that hopefully you're asking and that they asked. Okay, what are the right reasons? What's the right reason to follow Jesus? And this is what they ask in verse 28. They said to him, what must we do to be doing the works of God? Okay, what's the right reason? What do we have to do to work for the eternal things, not the temporary? What do we have to do? And Jesus' answer is great. Jesus answered them, this is the work of God that you believe in him who he has sent. Do you remember back, those of you who were here to the first week of the series? And we look at the way that John introduces Jesus. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. And we said that the fundamental question in life is, was Jesus real? And do you believe that He is who He says He is? It's a fundamental question in life. That question makes all the difference in the world. Do we believe that Jesus was who he says he was? And then they say, what's the right reason to follow you? What's the right motive? How do we labor for the eternal? And Jesus says, trust me that I am who I say I am. Believe that I actually am the one that God sent. You want to know the right reason to follow Jesus? Jesus. You want to know what should properly motivate you to get in those boats and go across the sea and find him? Him. It should literally be that we get in the boats and we cross the sea and we go to Jesus and we go, Jesus, where'd you go? And he goes, you're only here for my bread. And we go, no, I don't care about the bread. I just want you. You're only here for the status and what I do. No, I don't care about the status. Make me low. Make me do something silly. Make me an usher, the least of all church volunteers. Make me do that. And I will still follow you. You're only here for the control. No, let stuff happen. Let the world spin out of control around me. I'm here for you, Jesus. That should be the motive. Jesus is the only reason to follow Jesus. And this isn't just in this passage. It's all throughout the New Testament. If you continue in the book of John, what you see in John chapter 15 is that there's an instruction from Jesus to abide in him, abide in me and I in you, and you will bear much fruit. And we're going to spend some time on this, but there's a relational aspect to that abiding. There's this idea of knowing Jesus, of pursuing him relationally, of being acquainted intimately with our Savior. In John 17, Jesus prays for you. He prays for all people that would hear of the word through the disciples, which is you. And what he prays for you is that you would be one with him as he and the Father are one, that you would know him, that there is a relational aspect to this. Paul, throughout all of his letters, prays for the church over and over again that they would know God. The author of Hebrews says that if we're going to run the race that we're supposed to run, then we need to do it with our eyes focused on the founder of our faith, which is Jesus. All throughout the New Testament, it tells us that God's desire for us is that we would know him, and that the proper motivation to follow him is simply to know Jesus. That's it. That we would pursue him, that we would love him, that we would want more of Jesus in our life, that when we get across the Sea of Galilee and he says, why'd you come over here? I'm not gonna give you more bread. We go, I don't care, I don't need more bread, I just need you. That's why we follow Jesus. And with that in mind, to help you as you assess, because hopefully if you're paying attention, you're sitting here going, okay, well, am I doing it right? Am I following Jesus for the right reasons? What are my motives? How mixed are they? And all of us have mixed motives. I've got like a two-question diagnostic for you so that you can try to suss out in yourself and in your own heart, how are we doing with keeping pure motives as we follow Jesus? Okay, so two sneaky questions that are gonna make you feel terrible about yourself, but they're really good questions. The first one is this. When you pray for yourself and others, for what do you pray? What do you pray for yourself and others? When you pray for yourself, what do you pray for? If you're a person who prays and you get down on your knees and you say, God, I need this, what is it that you pray for? Do you pray that you would close the sale? Do you pray that you would pass the test? Do you pray that you would get the job? Do you pray that you would execute the thing? Do you pray that you would be given the right words in this situation? Do you pray for temporary things? When you pray for people that you love, your kids, your spouse, for your parents, for your friends? What do you pray for them? Do you pray for temporary things? Help them in this situation, heal them of this, rescue them in this, give them wisdom in this. Do you pray for temporary things? Or when you pray for yourself and you pray for others, do you pray that they would simply know God? God, whatever's happening in their life, and this is how Paul prays, whatever's happening in their life, whatever's happening in the church, I pray that it would all conspire to bring them to a knowledge of you. If you look at the prayers in the New Testament, he doesn't pray for circumstances. He doesn't pray for health. He doesn't pray for church growth. All he prays for is that we would know God. So when you pray for other people, do you pray for their circumstances or do you pray that they would know God? Every night we put Lily to bed and every night we try to pray with her. When the elders don't make me meet, then I can be at home with my child. And when I pray for them, when I pray for Lily, Jen and I pray every night, God, help her to know you soon and to love you well. I don't want her to experience a lot of her life without knowing God. Help her to know you soon and love you well. And when I pray for her on my own, I try not to pray for her circumstances. I try not even so much to pray for her health because I know God cares about that. I pray that all the situations, all the things, all the events, all the scarring that I give her will somehow conspire to bring her to a place where she knows God on a level that's more intimate than I've ever known him. When you pray for other people, do you pray for the things that are temporary or do you pray for the eternal, that all the temporary things would conspire that they would know God? That tells us where our motives are in following Jesus. The other one is this. If you're a Christian, one of the things you think about hopefully regularly is heaven. We anticipate heaven. We look forward to heaven. We should be rightly excited about heaven. But I would ask you what most excites you when you think about getting to heaven. That will tell you a lot about why you're following Jesus. Some people are excited to get to heaven because we're curious. I want to see what the pearly gates are. Is that even a thing? Did we make that up? Are there really pearly gates? What do the streets of gold look like? What's the sea of glass? Is St. Peter there greeting me? Or is that only in far sideide cartoons? Like, we want to see these things, right? We're curious about heaven. For many of us, most of us, there's probably a loved one that we can't wait to see. I can't wait to see my Pawpaw again. He's my favorite human that's ever lived. I haven't seen him since I was 19. Pawpaw's never seen me as a pastor. I can't wait to get to heaven and talk to him about it. If I have any gift for teaching or telling a good story, it's from him. He could captivate a room. He's never met Jen. I wish he would have. He hasn't seen Lily. I can't wait to see Papa again. You have your people too. But we ought to be most excited about finally getting to look our Savior in the eyes. What should excite us most about heaven is that we finally get to meet our Heavenly Father and see what He looks like and hear what He sounds like and feel the power of his presence. That should most excite us about heaven. We finally get to look our savior in the eye and we get to hug him and hopefully we get to hear well done, good and faithful servant. That should be the thing that we are most hopeful about with heaven. The rest of the things are good. That's what gives us hope. That's why death has no sting and that hope is good and we should be excited to see our loved ones in heaven one day. We should be excited to explore this place that God created for us, but the thing we should be most excited about is finally getting to see our Jesus and finally getting to meet our God. What would it look like to live a life so devoted to God, so in love with Jesus, that heaven was like the greatest reunion ever? Because we finally got to meet him. That's how we should live our life. People who are excited about that are people who look at Jesus and go, I don't care about your bread. I'm just here for you, man. I hope that you will have the courage to pray and ask God to suss out your motives, to show them to yourself. And then we cannot go about the work of changing our motives on our own. All we can do is offer them up to God and say, God, I know that my motives for following you are impure. I pray that you would purify them. Give me a heart for you. And if you want to pursue this more, I don't do this a lot, but there's a book I would highly recommend to you. It's called With by a guy named Sky Jethani, who's a pastor somewhere in the United States. I forget where. This is, to me, the best book written in the last 10 years. I love it, and I don't really read new books. I think that a book should be in print for like 25 or 30 years before it's worth reading. So I don't really read a lot of new books, but this is a new one that I read, and I love this book. I've never read a book that caused me to stop and put it down and pray and go, God, I'm really sorry for this, more than that book. So if you're a reader, if you're into that kind of thing, I would highly recommend you get this book, and that will help you follow up with making sure that we're following Jesus for the right reasons. For all of us, if you consider yourself a Jesus follower, I hope that you'll have the courage to ask him to purify your motives. And when you do, what you'll find is it works out that all things work out too. Our relationship with Jesus works a little bit like a marriage. In a marriage, there's a bunch of different aspects of a marriage, right? I'm married to Jen, I lucked out, and there's different aspects to our marriage. And we could say, you know what, the most important thing to us is to just be able to have fun together and laugh together. And so we could prioritize that over everything else. And while we're having fun and laughing about everything, we're probably putting some other things off that need some work. And so eventually our marriage is going to get unhealthy. We could prioritize intimacy between one another and say, if we have this, then we'll be healthy, but that will come at the expense of other things. We can prioritize Lily and maybe future kiddos and who knows, but one day everyone's going to be out of the house and we're going to have to look at each other and be like, do we still like each other? Or we could prioritize one another above and beyond everything else in our relationship. And as we grow together, all of those other things will fall into place. If we will prize Jesus above and beyond everything else, all the accoutrements of Christianity, then what we'll find is all those other things, the status and the control and any gain that we might need, Jesus will take care of if we'll just follow him. So let us be a church of people who follow Jesus with a pure heart. Let us be a church of people who get in the boats and follow him across the lake for the right reasons. And let's see what Jesus does with a group of people like that. Let's pray, and then we'll take communion together. Father, we do love you. We do thank you for your son, for sending him for us. God, we thank you that he unites us with you. Lord, I would ask that you would make us courageous. Help us to see the places in our hearts and in our lives and in our walks with you where we are pursuing you for the wrong reasons, for things that really are temporary and not eternal. God, make yourself the prize of our hearts and of our minds and of our lives. Unite us with you. God, I pray that you would work even now to reveal and to begin to purify our motives as we follow you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. I missed you last week. People were asking where I was. I was in the mountains of North Georgia taking naps is where I was, and it was a lot of fun. And in my stead, Kyle, our student pastor, gave his first sermon at Grace, and it was a great job. He did phenomenally. But one of the things as I listened back and I heard the story of how the weekend went without me that I was so happy to hear really and truly was that both services, when he got up to give his first sermon ever, you guys cheered for him. Which, first of all, that hurts a little bit. But second, what a cool place. What a great thing that says about us as a church that we're so excited for this guy that we're going to applaud him before he even says anything. There can't be a more supportive place to do ministry than Grace. So it just made me so proud of my church to be a part of this place. I just thought it was really, really great and evident of your heart. The other thing I want to say before I get started, and I never do this, I don't think sermons are times for announcements, but this is such an important announcement to me that I wanted it to go out online on our podcast and on the video and things like that so that people catching up during the week can catch this too. This Friday night, March the 15th, is Grace's big night out, okay? It's two hours at Compass Rose Brewery from 6.30 to 8.30. There's gonna be childcare here for kids five and younger. Everybody else is welcome at Compass Rose. There's games for the kids. There's going to be a food truck. You can bring your own food if you want to. Steve and the band are going to do some live music. It's going to be a super fun time to just hang out, and I really want it to be awesome. So that's up there with my number because we have a graphic that's a square that I can just send to you, and then you can text that out to your friends because we're hoping that you'll invite your friends. This is an easy invite. I think a lot of us have friends that maybe we'd love to see get more involved in church, but maybe they kind of don't want to be involved with church right now. Maybe there's a little stink on it for them or whatever, but maybe if they come hang out with us on Friday and just get to talk and laugh and meet people, they'll realize that we're not a bunch of weirdies, and they'll join us later, okay? So if you want that graphic to use to invite your friends, text me and I'll get it out to you or text one of the elders. They have it too. Okay, but we hope that you'll join us on Friday and that you'll bring some folks. It's going to be a really good time. I hope this is something we get to do repetitively. Okay, this is part five of our series in John. We're going to go through John until the week after Easter. I've been really loving getting to dive into the book of John with you. And if you haven't noticed, we're missing a lot of things. We didn't even do the most famous verse in John, John 3.16. We just skipped right over it because I'm probably a terrible pastor. But there's a reading plan, so hopefully you guys have grabbed that and you're reading along with us again so that you're getting your perspective and your eyes and your mind and your heart on Jesus and not just getting my perspective as we move through the Gospel of John. This week we arrive at what is probably the most famous or one of the most famous miracles in the Bible. It's in all four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and it's one that all of you have heard of. Even if you're here and you're not a believer, this is your first time in church in a long time or ever, I bet you've heard of this miracle, the feeding of the 5,000, right? We know this miracle. And really, that's an erroneous title because Scripture tells us that there was 5,000 men, which means there were women and children in addition to those 5,000. We don't know how many. You can do the math on your own. I'm not going to chance a guest on stage as a pastor and be eternally responsible for that. So I'll let you make irresponsible guesses in your head. But there was more than 5,000 people there. And what's going on when this happens is ancient Israel in the time of Christ was what we would really think of as a third world country. And Jesus is up in northern Israel around the Sea of Galilee. Jerusalem was in southern Israel and northern Israel is really at this point like the countryside. It's rural Israel. So in the sticks of a country that is poor, Jesus is going through his day. He's going through his ministry there. And there are thousands of people following him. Again, we don't know exactly how many, but there are thousands of people following Jesus. In the beginning of John chapter 6, if you have a Bible, you can turn there. The beginning of John chapter 6 tells us that they were following him. The throngs were following Jesus because of the miraculous things that he was doing, because he was casting demons out of people, because he was healing folks, and they wanted to go see. Either they had something that they needed Jesus to take care of, or they just wanted to see this person that many people were beginning to call the Messiah. And so thousands of people had flocked to Jesus. And it says that Jesus looked on the crowds with compassion. He was moved by them and for them. Because here are 5,000 men in the middle of the day with their families, in a culture and in a time where these people woke up and they genuinely did not know where their next meal was coming from. They were very poor, more poor than any of us can imagine. And so Jesus is moved with compassion at the crowds of people and he decides that he's going to feed them. And so there's a young boy walking by who's got five small fish and three loaves of bread and he gets the disciples to ask for the meal from the boy and Jesus starts to break the bread and the fish and he starts to put it in these baskets. And the disciples carry the baskets to the different groups of people and they hand it out to whoever needs. It was an ancient all-you-can-eat buffet. It's like the first version of the Golden Corral. And they're just going around handing things out to people. Until at the end, there was baskets left over. Jesus just kept making fish and bread until everyone had what they needed, right? And then at the end of that, the people did this thing that everybody was trying to do to Jesus his whole life. We don't really think about this or notice this, but it's a drum I'm trying to beat as we go through the gospel of John. They clamored to him to make him king. They wanted to take him down south to Jerusalem and put him on the throne. They wanted to form a revolution around Jesus because the prophecies in ancient Israel, the prophecies in the Old Testament say that when the Messiah arrives, he will be the king of kings and the lord of lords and the prince of peace, and that he will sit on the throne of David and that he will rule forever. And now we know, with the benefit of hindsight, that Jesus did not come to establish a physical earthly kingdom. We know that he came to establish an eternal heavenly kingdom. But they didn't know that. They thought that he came to literally establish a kingdom that he was going to, at the time, overthrow Roman rule, rise Israel up to prominence, that they were going to be the world superpower, and Jesus was going to be the king, and they were going to be his followers. And so they said, this is the guy, look what he's doing. And they clamored to him to go make him king. And Jesus, knowing that wasn't the point, knowing that it wasn't yet time to put the wheels in motion of his crucifixion, fades away and goes into the mountains. And we see Jesus do this a lot in his ministry. There's a big event, a big thing that he does, something that exhausts him, and then he goes and he fades away and he goes to pray and spend some time with the Father to get away from the crowds. It makes me wonder on a human level if Jesus wasn't an introvert who just needed a little bit of a break after he dealt with everybody. But another thing you'll notice about Jesus, if you'll read through the Gospels on your own, is he had this unfailing patience with people. Can you imagine what it would be to be Jesus, to feed 5,000 people and then still have people like, hey, can you do this? Can you do this? Can you do this? And you're like, did you see the miracle I did? Can a dude not take a nap? Like, how tired did he have to be? How stressed did he have to be? How fatigued did he have to be? Yet he continued to unfailingly love people. Over and over again, he offers them grace through the Gospels. And that's one of, to me, that's one of the pieces of Jesus that we see when we pay attention. It's just his unfailing love for others. So he goes up to the mountainside to pray, and he tells the disciples, y'all go ahead and go across the Sea of Galilee to a city called Capernaum and I'll meet you there, okay? I'm gonna come out there too. Y'all go ahead and go across. So the disciples, the 12 of them, get on a boat and they begin to go across the Sea of Galilee, which wasn't really a sea, it's a lake, but you can't see across it, so it's called the Sea of Galilee. I don't know why that's the policy, but that's what it is. And so they're going across. And in the middle of the night, Jesus walks on water where we have this other really famous miracle. And the other gospels record it and give us a little bit more detail about it and the interaction with Peter. And he was like a ghost. And at first they were afraid. But John in his old age, as he's writing his gospel, he doesn't do that. It's just a couple of verses. He's just like, we were going across the water and then we looked and Jesus was walking. And then he got in boat with us, and then we were there. It's like John was like, it was just, you know, just Jesus stuff. It was just classic Jesus, you know, just walking across the water and getting in the boat, and then they're there, right? So the next morning, the people, the crowds, wake up. They had camped out wherever they were going to camp out there on the hillside. They wake up, and they look around, and they don't see Jesus. And then they notice that there's a boat gone and none of his disciples are there. So they put two and two together and it says they go across the water. And I don't think that all the, however many thousands of people there were there, all got in their boats at once and went across the Sea of Galilee like some Greek fleet assaulting Troy. Like I don't think it was all of them. I think it was probably a portion of them. So a portion of them get in the boats and they follow Jesus across the water. And it makes me wonder, for us, who here thinks that if they were in those crowds, that they would have been one of the ones to get in the boat and cross the water? Who here would call yourself a follower of Jesus? My guess is, because you're church people, and you know the right answer is, oh, I'd definitely get in the boat, then that's probably your answer. There might be some, a few, who are here just kind of checking things out with the bravery to be like, I don't know if I'm getting in the boat yet. And I really applaud the intellectual honesty of that answer. But most of us are probably going to say that we're in the boat. I'm going to get in the boat and I'm going to go across. I'm going to follow Jesus. I'm not going to let him get away. And so that's what they do. They get in the boat and they go across and they were Jesus followers. They follow him across the Sea of Galilee. And then they go and they find him and they ask him, what are you doing? Where'd you go? Look, this is what it says in the text. John chapter 6, verse 25, it says, When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, Rabbi, when did you come here? They said, Jesus, what are you doing? Where did you go? Like, we're trying to keep up with you. We're trying to follow you. Where did you go? What's the deal? Why are you disappearing? And Jesus' response to me is searingly convicting. And it stands as a conviction not only to those people then, but to us now and all Jesus followers throughout all time. Anybody who would ever consider themselves a follower of Jesus, his response to me is incredibly convicting. He says this, Jesus answered them when they said, where'd you go? What are you doing? We're trying to follow you and you're hiding from us. Where are you? Jesus says this, truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the son of man will give you. For on morning they wake up. Jesus isn't around. They follow him. They track him down. They go to him and they go, Rabbi, which means teacher, which means we're acknowledging you as an authority. Where'd you go? We're trying to follow you. You're running away from us. We're trying to keep up. We want to follow you, Jesus. Why'd you do that? And Jesus looks at a poor and downtrodden people who, listen to me, they need bread, okay? They need the physical bread that he provided. They're not like us. Any of us in this room can go to any restaurant we want to right after church. You can get the meat sweats within the next two hours. We all have the means to do this, okay? I ate out two times yesterday because I'm fabulously wealthy. We can all do this, right? We don't know what it is to be hungry, none of us. They knew. They knew what hunger was. And Jesus knew that they were hungry. And they are the exact type of people that we would look at our Jesus and expect them to do something about feeding them. Expect him to be moved with compassion and give them more bread because that's what they need. But instead of doing that, instead of giving them what they really do genuinely need, he looks at him and he says, you're only here because I gave you bread. You followed me across the water for the wrong reasons. You shouldn't labor for the things that are temporary. You should labor for the things that are eternal. That's quite the statement by Jesus. You're following me for the wrong reasons. Your motives are impure. And it makes me wonder, if you are somebody who would say that you would get in the boat and you would follow Jesus across the water, yes, I am a Jesus follower. I want to be where he is. When Jesus says this, that you're following me for the wrong reasons, it makes me wonder, what are the reasons that you are following Jesus? Are we following Jesus for the right reasons? Or is it possible that our motives are mixed? As I thought about it for me, and I thought about it for the people that I've known through the years, I think that it's entirely possible that we get some mixed motives for following our Savior. I think it's one thing to come to Him for certain reasons, but our relationship with Him cannot exist motivated by those same things. And I think that as I thought about it, I think a lot of the reasons that we sometimes follow Jesus that maybe are for the wrong reasons can be summed up in this way, that often we follow Jesus for control or for status or for gain. I think it's entirely possible, church people, that we have followed Jesus in our life for some sense of control, for some sense of status, or in hopes of some sort of gain. Here's what I mean. Sometimes we go to Jesus because the world seems just completely out of sorts. These things are happening that we cannot control, that we do not understand, and to be able to see them through a framework of God's sovereignty brings a sense of peace and understanding to us that makes us feel comfortable. And so it's how we process the world because we're trying to bring a sense of control to the uncontrollable in a more pernicious way. I think that we have what I think of as a proverbial faith. In the book of Proverbs, it was a book of wisdom written by Solomon. It basically is summed up by saying, if you do things like this, then you are wise and things will go well for you. And if you do things like this, then you are foolish and things will not go well for you. And so sometimes we approach the Bible as this self-help book that says, if I do these kinds of things, even if I don't fully believe, then life is going to go better for me. And it's a way that we try to exert control over the uncontrollable. Do you see? The problem with this is the book of Job exists as a contrast to Proverbs that tells us even when we're doing all the right things, sometimes it's still going to go bad. But when we follow Jesus for control, it's that kind of proverbial faith where we try to, by following all the rules and doing all the right things, bring about outcomes in our life that are uncontrollable, that are favorable, right? Or sometimes we follow Jesus for status. Listen to me, church people. We are guilty of this. I, this is not hyperbole, more than anyone. Those of you who have been in church for a while, for any number of years, has there ever been a season of your life where you followed Jesus, where you've put on the mask of Christianity, where you've played the game of faith because of the status that it brought you? Just me? Has anyone ever studied harder for a Bible study and done the work in a Bible study because when you got there, you wanted to have the best answers, not because you were really interested in the content? Have any of you ever been guilty when you're asked to pray in front of other people of suddenly using a different voice with a different vocabulary? Because these and nows and saying God over and over again is somehow holy? Oh God, if you would just have mercy on us, God, in your favor, God, I just lift this person up to you, God. Don't talk like that. When we hear ourselves starting to pray like that, that's Christianity for status. That's Christianity because of what it gives us in the community, because it offers us opportunities of respect in the church, because when we act that way and we live out this faith, sometimes people will ask us to do things that are honorable requests. Have you ever walked through a season of life where your faith was more about the status that it brought you than it was about Jesus? Where your main reason for not walking away from the faith is a relational fallout that it would cost you? That's faith for status. Or we follow Jesus for gain. This is what's commonly referred to as a health and wealth gospel. It is a gospel or the prosperity gospel. I hate it. It's a lie from Satan and it's evil. And what it tells us is if we go to Jesus, that Jesus wants to bless us. He wants us to have this incredible life. He wants us to be happy now in the material. And so he will make you healthy and he will make you wealthy. And if you don't have health and if you don't have wealth and you just don't have strong enough faith and you need to have better faith. And there are whole churches built on this model, on the promise that if you really are living Christianity out the right way, then you will be blessed and you will be healthy and you will be wealthy. And I don't know if you ever paid attention to it, but churches that teach this model don't tend to be filled with wealthy people because it preys on the poor and on the unhealthy and promises them things that are not true. And Jesus knows that these reasons, these temporary reasons for following him, whether they be control or gain or status, are not the right reasons and that eventually they will wreck our faith. That's why he gives the warning there. Don't labor for the temporary, labor for the eternal because when we follow Jesus for the wrong reasons, eventually it wrecks our faith. Eventually it shipwrecks the faith that we have. I'll tell you how I know this is true. Several years ago, I had a meeting with a couple at my old church named Alan and Sonny. I love Alan and Sonny. They went on after this meeting that I had with them, not because of me, because of the Holy Spirit work in them. I didn't tell them anything useful, I don't think. But they went on, they became small group leaders. They were wonderful in the church. They launched other small group leaders. They're still there leading people to faith. They're just phenomenal warriors for God. But I got an email one day, and it was from them, and they said, hey, you know, we've been coming to the church for a little bit. We accepted Christ as our Savior about four months ago, and there's just some stuff happening in our life. We just have some questions. We'd like to talk to a pastor. I said, all right, sure. You get to talk to 29-year-old Nate. Congratulations. I'm going to answer all the questions for you. And so I meet with them. And they said, hey, you know, they started telling me about their life. And they had had a hard life. He was a handyman. She helped them out. They were workaday people. They were really, really great and wonderful folks. But it was their second marriage. They both had adult children and grandchildren, and then they had their own children together. And they had all the craziness that that brings about, plus a life that was lived before that without faith and the remnants of that that are going on in their life. And so Alan and Sonny had a really hard life. And what they said was, you know, before we got saved, we came to God to experience peace. And after we got saved, we've been praying about these situations in our life. We've been hoping for them. We've been lifting them up for God. We've been trying to do the right things. But man, I got to tell you, those situations aren't really getting much better. And some of them are getting worse. And we just need to know, did we do it wrong? Like, are we actually saved? Did we not pray the prayer right? Is there something that I need to believe that I don't believe? Is there some sin that I don't know about that I need to figure out? Because this isn't really working the way that we thought it would work. Do you hear the lie there? Somewhere along the way, they became convinced that to follow Jesus meant that there was going to be a relief from the trials in their life, that they were going to be what we would call blessed, and that those things would begin to go away because now I'm following Jesus, and now I'm following the rules, and God is going to do these things for me. He's going to make these situations better. And I had to sit them down and be like, guys, no one promised that to you. You didn't do it right. You did it wrong. You did it exactly right. The problem is your expectations of God because he doesn't promise Christians that we won't experience trials. In fact, in the New Testament, do you know what we're promised? We're promised suffering and persecution. So buckle up, pal. That's what we're promised. It's going to be hard, and you're going to have to endure. But in the midst of that, and I can go through character after character in the Bible, Christian after Christian throughout history, that with loving God with all their heart and suffering mightily. Because God doesn't promise us a relief to our circumstances. He doesn't promise us health or wealth or status or control or any of those things. What he promises us is his presence, that he will be with us, that he will walk through our trials with us, that we never have to experience those alone, that our life is never hopeless, that our life is never lonely, because God is an ever-present force that is there with us, loving us and affirming us. And now, as you go through trials, it's not that you don't have to go through them, it's that you have the peace of Christ as you do, and you have the hope of heaven, so that Paul can say that even though we endure suffering for what he calls a little while on this earth, we look forward to a new day where there is no suffering. That's the promise of faith and of Christianity. But when we let people believe that that promise comes now and that prosperity comes now, then after we get saved, we begin to look around and go, did I do this wrong? And eventually we either feel like we messed it up or our God is letting us down, but either way, I don't want anything to do with this faith. And it shipwrecks our faith. When we follow God for control, for a sense of control and sense of our universe, and then things happen that feel like they are out of our control, we feel like either we've done it wrong or God is weak. When we follow God for status, when we eventually get the status that we want, when we fake it enough so that everyone around us believes that we're this Christian that we try to pretend to be, then what we realize is we're living our life in a prison of expectations and hypocrisy that we can't get out of until we allow our entire identity to crumble because it was never authentic to begin with. When we follow Jesus for the wrong reasons, it wrecks our faith. So that begs the question that hopefully you're asking and that they asked. Okay, what are the right reasons? What's the right reason to follow Jesus? And this is what they ask in verse 28. They said to him, what must we do to be doing the works of God? Okay, what's the right reason? What do we have to do to work for the eternal things, not the temporary? What do we have to do? And Jesus' answer is great. Jesus answered them, this is the work of God that you believe in him who he has sent. Do you remember back, those of you who were here to the first week of the series? And we look at the way that John introduces Jesus. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. And we said that the fundamental question in life is, was Jesus real? And do you believe that He is who He says He is? It's a fundamental question in life. That question makes all the difference in the world. Do we believe that Jesus was who he says he was? And then they say, what's the right reason to follow you? What's the right motive? How do we labor for the eternal? And Jesus says, trust me that I am who I say I am. Believe that I actually am the one that God sent. You want to know the right reason to follow Jesus? Jesus. You want to know what should properly motivate you to get in those boats and go across the sea and find him? Him. It should literally be that we get in the boats and we cross the sea and we go to Jesus and we go, Jesus, where'd you go? And he goes, you're only here for my bread. And we go, no, I don't care about the bread. I just want you. You're only here for the status and what I do. No, I don't care about the status. Make me low. Make me do something silly. Make me an usher, the least of all church volunteers. Make me do that. And I will still follow you. You're only here for the control. No, let stuff happen. Let the world spin out of control around me. I'm here for you, Jesus. That should be the motive. Jesus is the only reason to follow Jesus. And this isn't just in this passage. It's all throughout the New Testament. If you continue in the book of John, what you see in John chapter 15 is that there's an instruction from Jesus to abide in him, abide in me and I in you, and you will bear much fruit. And we're going to spend some time on this, but there's a relational aspect to that abiding. There's this idea of knowing Jesus, of pursuing him relationally, of being acquainted intimately with our Savior. In John 17, Jesus prays for you. He prays for all people that would hear of the word through the disciples, which is you. And what he prays for you is that you would be one with him as he and the Father are one, that you would know him, that there is a relational aspect to this. Paul, throughout all of his letters, prays for the church over and over again that they would know God. The author of Hebrews says that if we're going to run the race that we're supposed to run, then we need to do it with our eyes focused on the founder of our faith, which is Jesus. All throughout the New Testament, it tells us that God's desire for us is that we would know him, and that the proper motivation to follow him is simply to know Jesus. That's it. That we would pursue him, that we would love him, that we would want more of Jesus in our life, that when we get across the Sea of Galilee and he says, why'd you come over here? I'm not gonna give you more bread. We go, I don't care, I don't need more bread, I just need you. That's why we follow Jesus. And with that in mind, to help you as you assess, because hopefully if you're paying attention, you're sitting here going, okay, well, am I doing it right? Am I following Jesus for the right reasons? What are my motives? How mixed are they? And all of us have mixed motives. I've got like a two-question diagnostic for you so that you can try to suss out in yourself and in your own heart, how are we doing with keeping pure motives as we follow Jesus? Okay, so two sneaky questions that are gonna make you feel terrible about yourself, but they're really good questions. The first one is this. When you pray for yourself and others, for what do you pray? What do you pray for yourself and others? When you pray for yourself, what do you pray for? If you're a person who prays and you get down on your knees and you say, God, I need this, what is it that you pray for? Do you pray that you would close the sale? Do you pray that you would pass the test? Do you pray that you would get the job? Do you pray that you would execute the thing? Do you pray that you would be given the right words in this situation? Do you pray for temporary things? When you pray for people that you love, your kids, your spouse, for your parents, for your friends? What do you pray for them? Do you pray for temporary things? Help them in this situation, heal them of this, rescue them in this, give them wisdom in this. Do you pray for temporary things? Or when you pray for yourself and you pray for others, do you pray that they would simply know God? God, whatever's happening in their life, and this is how Paul prays, whatever's happening in their life, whatever's happening in the church, I pray that it would all conspire to bring them to a knowledge of you. If you look at the prayers in the New Testament, he doesn't pray for circumstances. He doesn't pray for health. He doesn't pray for church growth. All he prays for is that we would know God. So when you pray for other people, do you pray for their circumstances or do you pray that they would know God? Every night we put Lily to bed and every night we try to pray with her. When the elders don't make me meet, then I can be at home with my child. And when I pray for them, when I pray for Lily, Jen and I pray every night, God, help her to know you soon and to love you well. I don't want her to experience a lot of her life without knowing God. Help her to know you soon and love you well. And when I pray for her on my own, I try not to pray for her circumstances. I try not even so much to pray for her health because I know God cares about that. I pray that all the situations, all the things, all the events, all the scarring that I give her will somehow conspire to bring her to a place where she knows God on a level that's more intimate than I've ever known him. When you pray for other people, do you pray for the things that are temporary or do you pray for the eternal, that all the temporary things would conspire that they would know God? That tells us where our motives are in following Jesus. The other one is this. If you're a Christian, one of the things you think about hopefully regularly is heaven. We anticipate heaven. We look forward to heaven. We should be rightly excited about heaven. But I would ask you what most excites you when you think about getting to heaven. That will tell you a lot about why you're following Jesus. Some people are excited to get to heaven because we're curious. I want to see what the pearly gates are. Is that even a thing? Did we make that up? Are there really pearly gates? What do the streets of gold look like? What's the sea of glass? Is St. Peter there greeting me? Or is that only in far sideide cartoons? Like, we want to see these things, right? We're curious about heaven. For many of us, most of us, there's probably a loved one that we can't wait to see. I can't wait to see my Pawpaw again. He's my favorite human that's ever lived. I haven't seen him since I was 19. Pawpaw's never seen me as a pastor. I can't wait to get to heaven and talk to him about it. If I have any gift for teaching or telling a good story, it's from him. He could captivate a room. He's never met Jen. I wish he would have. He hasn't seen Lily. I can't wait to see Papa again. You have your people too. But we ought to be most excited about finally getting to look our Savior in the eyes. What should excite us most about heaven is that we finally get to meet our Heavenly Father and see what He looks like and hear what He sounds like and feel the power of his presence. That should most excite us about heaven. We finally get to look our savior in the eye and we get to hug him and hopefully we get to hear well done, good and faithful servant. That should be the thing that we are most hopeful about with heaven. The rest of the things are good. That's what gives us hope. That's why death has no sting and that hope is good and we should be excited to see our loved ones in heaven one day. We should be excited to explore this place that God created for us, but the thing we should be most excited about is finally getting to see our Jesus and finally getting to meet our God. What would it look like to live a life so devoted to God, so in love with Jesus, that heaven was like the greatest reunion ever? Because we finally got to meet him. That's how we should live our life. People who are excited about that are people who look at Jesus and go, I don't care about your bread. I'm just here for you, man. I hope that you will have the courage to pray and ask God to suss out your motives, to show them to yourself. And then we cannot go about the work of changing our motives on our own. All we can do is offer them up to God and say, God, I know that my motives for following you are impure. I pray that you would purify them. Give me a heart for you. And if you want to pursue this more, I don't do this a lot, but there's a book I would highly recommend to you. It's called With by a guy named Sky Jethani, who's a pastor somewhere in the United States. I forget where. This is, to me, the best book written in the last 10 years. I love it, and I don't really read new books. I think that a book should be in print for like 25 or 30 years before it's worth reading. So I don't really read a lot of new books, but this is a new one that I read, and I love this book. I've never read a book that caused me to stop and put it down and pray and go, God, I'm really sorry for this, more than that book. So if you're a reader, if you're into that kind of thing, I would highly recommend you get this book, and that will help you follow up with making sure that we're following Jesus for the right reasons. For all of us, if you consider yourself a Jesus follower, I hope that you'll have the courage to ask him to purify your motives. And when you do, what you'll find is it works out that all things work out too. Our relationship with Jesus works a little bit like a marriage. In a marriage, there's a bunch of different aspects of a marriage, right? I'm married to Jen, I lucked out, and there's different aspects to our marriage. And we could say, you know what, the most important thing to us is to just be able to have fun together and laugh together. And so we could prioritize that over everything else. And while we're having fun and laughing about everything, we're probably putting some other things off that need some work. And so eventually our marriage is going to get unhealthy. We could prioritize intimacy between one another and say, if we have this, then we'll be healthy, but that will come at the expense of other things. We can prioritize Lily and maybe future kiddos and who knows, but one day everyone's going to be out of the house and we're going to have to look at each other and be like, do we still like each other? Or we could prioritize one another above and beyond everything else in our relationship. And as we grow together, all of those other things will fall into place. If we will prize Jesus above and beyond everything else, all the accoutrements of Christianity, then what we'll find is all those other things, the status and the control and any gain that we might need, Jesus will take care of if we'll just follow him. So let us be a church of people who follow Jesus with a pure heart. Let us be a church of people who get in the boats and follow him across the lake for the right reasons. And let's see what Jesus does with a group of people like that. Let's pray, and then we'll take communion together. Father, we do love you. We do thank you for your son, for sending him for us. God, we thank you that he unites us with you. Lord, I would ask that you would make us courageous. Help us to see the places in our hearts and in our lives and in our walks with you where we are pursuing you for the wrong reasons, for things that really are temporary and not eternal. God, make yourself the prize of our hearts and of our minds and of our lives. Unite us with you. God, I pray that you would work even now to reveal and to begin to purify our motives as we follow you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

All right. Thank you, band. Good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Before I just launch into the sermon and the rest of the service, I do want to acknowledge it is Memorial Day weekend, and for many it's the start of summer. And I'll tell you why Memorial Day weekend is a special Sunday here for me at Grace every year, but it's also special because it remembers the men and women who have died for our freedoms, namely, as it's relevant to us, our freedom to gather and worship and do this openly. So if you have someone in your family who has given the ultimate sacrifice and died in the armed services fighting for us, we are to you and grateful to them and so we remember them and acknowledge that this morning as it pertains to grace Memorial Day has always been a very special day for me in the life of our church Memorial Day in church world for those who may not be familiar with church world and how pastors think about Sundays, Memorial Day is a throwaway Sunday. I know that we shouldn't say things like that, but it almost doesn't count, right? Because summer has started. Everyone's leaving. They're at the beach. It's a long holiday weekend. School's almost out. And so Memorial Day, that's when you kind of mail it in. You just do whatever. But the very first Memorial Day I was here in May of 2017, and if you want to hear the story, I'll tell you in the lobby afterwards. God just provided for grace in such a way that it felt like him putting his hand on us and saying, hey, I care about this place, and I'm going to take care of this place. And I could tell you more stories about things that have happened on Memorial Day. And so to be here on a Memorial Day baptizing three of our kids, one of them is mine, is a pretty special way for God to just remind us of his provision and his goodness and his hand on us. So it's a special morning this morning because it is a special morning and we're focused on baptisms this morning. And because this Sunday falls between series, we just wrapped up our series, the treasury of Isaiah. Next week, we're going to start a series called idols where we're kind of loosely looking at a book written by Tim Keller called Counterfeit Gods that kind of walks through the sin of idolatry and how that sneaks into our life. And I've got the books ordered. They're going to be here next week. And so maybe you want to pick one of those up as we kind of move through that series together. So we're going to do that series for a little bit starting next week. And we think that's going to be good. Then we're going to roll into the summer and do a 27 and look at the books of the new Testament. But right now today, because I knew we were going to be doing baptisms, I thought, let's just pause as a church and let's talk about the two ordinances of the church, baptism and communion. Let's just take a Sunday and focus on those and talk about what they are and what they mean. So that's what we're going to do today. As we think about that, I want to kind of introduce our thought process of baptism and communion in this way with this idea. For centuries, rituals have existed to teach us and remind us of essential truths. For centuries, rituals, systematic things, traditions, have taken place in different cultures and religions to teach, to remind the current generation and to teach the next generation of truths that that value system holds essential. And I really want you to think about this and the power of ritual. I know I talk about history sometimes and you guys make fun of me, but just to understand this, that when we live in America in 2024, the idea of literacy and printed word being ubiquitous, that is not the case for a vast majority of human history. For the vast majority of time that humans have been around, the populace was illiterate, and there was, in most cases, no written words. In some cases, very few documented written things that only a few had access to and that even fewer could actually read. So they had to pass things down word of mouth. Each generation had to teach the next generation and in that teaching, remind themselves of these truths. And for the things that they deemed, that the different cultures deemed particularly important, we don't want to get this one wrong. We've got to communicate this to ourselves and to the next generation. They would form rituals around those things. We think of them as traditions, but it's really pretty interchangeable. We have traditions in America. Fourth of July, we set off fireworks. Why do we do that? I would presume to simulate the bombs bursting in air by Francis Scott Key. I don't know why Chinese people set off fireworks. I don't know what it means to them. But to us, it's Star-Spangled Banner. It's the United States. That's great. That's a tradition that we have. Fine. If you think about different religions, they have traditions. The religion that became Christianity, Judaism, has a ritual Passover. When they gather around, they have a meal, and that meal helps them to remember that their ancestors were enslaved in Egypt and that God got them out of slavery. There are specific things that they're supposed to eat. It's very detailed and regimented. It's a ritual to teach the next generation and remind the current generation of truths that we deem essential. And Christians have rituals too. Now different denominations, different portions of the church have different traditions. But no matter what part of the church you're from or in, the two most important rituals are communion and baptism. The two most important rituals in all of Christendom are communion and baptism. And there's a couple reasons why. First of all, what I think is pretty neat about communion and baptism is that Jesus himself is the one who started these. Jesus initiated, excuse me, communion. Jesus modeled baptism and what it is and then taught it, taught us to be baptized in the spirit. Jesus started these himself. And if they, and if he started these things himself, they must be pretty important. The other thing that I find hugely interesting about communion and baptism as it relates to their import within the church. A few weeks ago on March 21st, some of y'all were here, 24th rather. It would have been weird to give a sermon on like a Thursday. But on March 24th, I preached on unity in the body of Christ. And I pulled up a whiteboard. Some of y'all will remember it. And I drew a big circle. And then in that circle, we made a pie chart of all the different sections of Christendom. We had a Catholic section, an Orthodoxy, Protestants. And then we divided those up into the different slivers of the different beliefs within all of those subsections, right? And then we populated the pie chart with all these different slivers of all these different versions of church all throughout the world. And we said that there's beauty to be found in each one of them. And each one of them has their own different set of traditions and rituals and things that they do. But do you know what two rituals, every single sliver of the pie chart of Christendom has in common. I've never known a church that claims to be Christian that does not in some way observe baptism. Now, we have different modes of it. When I say when it comes to baptism, the question that Christians ask about baptism is who's it for and how wet should they get? Is it for babies or believers and should they get all the way wet or just a little bit wet? Those are the questions with baptism. And different people settle that in different ways. And we don't have universal agreement here. We don't even have universal agreement on the elder board. And that's fine. But every church I've ever heard of honors baptism in some way. Every church I've ever heard of honors communion in some way. Some call it the Eucharist, but it's the same thing. And we have different beliefs around it and what it means, but every church that's ever existed celebrates those things. Now here's what's cool about that. Those rituals come tumbling down to us through the centuries to remind us and to teach us of essential truths for our faith. And God himself started those rituals. And those rituals, this tradition of baptism that we're going to do in a few minutes, the tradition of communion that we'll do right after that, those rituals, do you realize this? They tether us, this little non-denominational church floating in complete anonymity, they tether us to our Baptist brothers and sisters down the road, to our Catholic brothers and sisters down the road, even to our Presbyterian brothers and sisters down the road, even to them and the Pentecostals too. It tethers us together. It tethers us to the ancient church that we see in the beginning of Acts and we follow through Paul's missionary journeys in the rest of the Bible. It tethers us to the church outside of Masapumaleli that I got to visit one time in Cape Town, South Africa, and to the churches that I've been to in Siguatopeque, Honduras. It tethers us to those places as we honor these rituals that spill down through the centuries to us. It holds us together as a church and they unify us no matter what our divergent beliefs are about other things. So because Jesus himself started these, because they're ubiquitous amongst any Christian church in history, and because these things tie us all together and tether us as one body. It's worth saying, okay, what do they represent and what do they mean? Why are these two things so important to our God? Why did he only give us these two rituals on which we all agree? So first, we'll answer that question by looking at communion. Communion, the story of communion, the Last Supper, is in all four Gospels. But the texts that we use where Jesus instructs communion are found in the three synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. I'm going to look at the passage in Mark, and we'll read it together, and then we'll talk about what that means. Verse 22, while they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it. And he gave it to his disciples, saying, take it, this is my body. Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, and they drank it from him. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many, he said to them. So this is Jesus starting communion at the Last Supper. Jesus and the disciples are gathered in an upper room. Most of you, if not all of you, know the story. And they're celebrating Passover. They're celebrating this ancient Jewish ritual to remind them of essential truths. And it's not lost on me, and I think that this is pretty cool, it's not lost on me the symmetry of Jesus choosing to place communion and the Last Supper over top of the ritual of Passover. Because Passover reminded God's children. Passover reminded the children of God that they had been freed from slavery. And communion reminds the children of God that we have been freed from the slavery of the soul. It reminds us that we are free from sin. We are free from a more pernicious eternal slavery. And I said that Christianity is a continuation of Judaism because I believe that. And so Jesus doesn't replace Passover. He just fulfills it. And he shows us what it really means by freeing us from a different kind of slavery that is eternal. And the synchronicity and the symmetry of that are not lost on me and they shouldn't be lost on you. And then Jesus continues with the imagery. For us, most of us in the room are Christians. We know the story. We understand the symbolism. Jesus says, this is my body. It's broken for you. This is my blood that's spilled out for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And we know that that is a reference to Jesus on the cross, to what's about to happen. The disciples did not yet know that. So this was a little bit mysterious to them, but for us, they knew, or we knew rather, and we know what that is. So I will not belabor the imagery of communion other than to say, every time it happens, every time it comes back around to us. We are. We are right and good. And the thing that we should do. Is to focus our eyes on Christ. The founder and perfecter of our faith. Remember the cross and what happened there. Be grateful for the sacrifice of God. Understanding that that death. In part because we need the rest of the story. For it to matter ultimately, but that that death purchased our eternity in heaven. And so when we take communion, that's what we remember. That Christ died for my sins so that I could be free of them. So that I don't have to fear sin and death and shame. That's what communion reminds us of. It's very clear imagery. I'm not going to say too much more there because one of our elders, Jordan Shaw, is going to come and lead us in communion later, and I don't want to steal any of her thunder. Then there's baptism. Now, baptism is a little bit less clear in its imagery if you just watch it and think about it. But there's two layers. There's multi-layered imagery happening there with baptism that I think is really neat. And I want you guys to understand it. And Kaysen and Lily and Drew, I want you guys to understand this too. So I know this is a sermon and you're bored, Lily. I know you're super bored. But pay attention to this part. This part is important. We find, I believe, the best description of baptism in Romans chapter 6, where Paul talks about baptism like life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with. That we should no longer be slaves to sin. Because anyone who has died has been set free from sin. So we have a lot going on there. In explaining the picture that baptism is. And what this ritual is supposed to communicate to us and to our children. What we see here is that the physical act of being baptized, going under the water and then coming back up out of the water, is a picture of the burial and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It simulates and emulates that of the burial and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It simulates and emulates that, of the burial and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And then not only that, but we are told that when we are baptized, that the picture of what's happening there is that our old self is being put away. Our old self that is a slave to sin, that can't help but sin, that has no choice. The Bible teaches that if you are not a believer, if you do not believe that Jesus is who he says he is and did what he said he did, then you are a slave to sin. You have no choice but to sin. As soon as we get a cap on one sin, that sin nature is going to squirt out in some other sin and we're going to have to manage that over there. But that when we are Christians and we are raised to walk in newness of life with Jesus, we are a new creature and we are no longer a slave to sin and we no longer have to fear death. We have been released from our bondage and from our slavery. And so the imagery and the picture of baptism is to put to death the old self that has no choice but to sin and raise to life the new self that is alive in Christ. Just as he resurrected, we are alive again. We go from dead, not having any life and not having any hope to going to hope in Christ in this newness of life. Which is why when I baptize them, I will quote this passage and I will baptize them and I will say, buried with him in death and raised to walk in newness of life because that's what Romans 6 teaches. So that's the two-fold imagery of baptism. First of all, it is a physical representation and reminder of the burial and resurrection of Jesus. Second of all, it is to remind us as we watch and as we do that if we are Christians, our old self was put away and our new self has risen. We no longer have to be a slave to sin. That's the twofold picture of baptism. That's also why I believe two things about baptism are very important. I know that there's different beliefs about baptism and that's okay. I'm not here to settle it or wrestle it to the ground or to even try to convince you. But for me, when I think about baptism and when I teach baptism, I think immersion is so important. That question earlier, who's it for and how wet should they get? It's for believers, I think. People who have articulated a faith, who have experienced that regeneration of going from death to life. And it's, you should get maximum wet. You should go under the water. You should be immersed. Why? Because it's a picture of the death and the burial and the resurrection of Jesus. It's a reminder of you putting to death your old self, of God putting to death your old self and raising your new self. It's why it's worth it to go. Do you understand how much of a hassle this is? Do you know? It takes up space over there all the time. Kyle Tolbert, our youth pastor, is out of town. It's his responsibility to fill up the baptistry. I volunteered to do that. I forgot. I forgot. I'm sitting over there. Gibson, our worship pastor, and I, we pray every Sunday morning before he comes over here, usually about 7 o'clock. And we're sitting there about to pray, and my eyes got real big. And I go, I did not fill up the bathroom street. And he goes, yes, you did. And I was like, nope. And I bolted over here. We're stringing a hose. We've got to attach a hose to a sink in the kitchen over there. We don't have one hose. We have two. They're janky. We're stretching it as far as it could possibly go. Kyle bought a new hose and he bought, for ease of storage, he bought a stretchy one. So now we're having to play tug of war with this stupid thing so I can get it to reach the sink. And then we fill it up over here and I'm kind of panicking. If this sermon is terrible, it's because I didn't have the time this morning that I wanted to put some extra polish on it. And then we fill it up. And then we heat it. So they're not shivering when they get in there. It would be way easier to just put a little water on their head. Trust me. And if you know me, I'm a man of efficiency and ease. That is what I would prefer. But it's worth it to baptize. To go under the water because of the story it tells, because Jesus started that tradition, and because Jesus wants it to be a story that we remember over and over and over again. And this is why I believe this as well about baptism. It ought to be public. It ought to be in front of your church. When you get baptized, you are carrying the mantle of responsibility to tell that story to your brothers and sisters in Christ. Because communion, we do all the time. Communion you do every week or every month or every quarter, whatever is the pace of your church. Here we do it once a month. We do it all the time. We're constantly reminded, given the visual, as we tear the bread and we dip it in the wine or the grape juice. We don't drink wine in church services. Grape juice. We are reminded of what Jesus did for us on the cross. But you only get baptized once. At least you should. Some of you probably need it twice. Maybe the first one didn't take. But you should only get baptized once. Which means if we only do this once, then it's our one time to experience the imagery of what baptism is. And we don't do it again. So what do we need? We need other people in our family of faith to get baptized in front of us to tell the story with their baptism that Jesus wants them to tell. So it's important that we embrace the full imagery of it by going under and coming back up. And it's important that we do it publicly in front of our Christian brothers and sisters because we are taking on the responsibility of telling that story. These three brave kids this morning are doing us a service by allowing us to peek into this moment in their life because they are stepping up to tell us God's story. Here it comes. Here's the other thing, and then I'll wrap up and we'll get to the good part. These two ordinances, I was thinking about this this week, a couple weeks ago, and I've mentioned this to a couple people in passing. Whenever I mention it, the people that I'm talking to, they go, oh, yeah, yeah, that's right. As if this is common knowledge, and I'm just stumbling upon this like a dummy 20 years into ministry. But maybe I did, and maybe I am a dummy. I'm open to that, and there's a lot of objective evidence to argue for it. But the two ordinances tell two parts of the same story. These two ordinances, they're meant to go together. These two traditions, it's why they tumbled down to us through the centuries. They're meant to go together. They tell two parts of the same story. Communion tells the story of Jesus dying on the cross. Baptism tells the story of Jesus rising from the dead. If you think about it this way, if you put it on the calendar, communion points us to Good Friday at the death of Jesus Christ. Baptism points us to Easter Sunday, the resurrection, the victory that is won. We need the two of these. We need the two of these. We need both sides of the story for either one to matter. Without baptism, communion is irrelevant. And without communion, baptism is impossible. You understand that? Without baptism, communion is just celebrating someone else that was crucified by the Roman Empire. Lost to history. Without baptism, communion is neutered. Without communion, baptism is impossible. If Jesus never dies, we don't need resurrection. If we don't celebrate communion, we don't need to celebrate baptism. They tell two sides of the same story. And here's the thing. Communion and baptism tell the most important story in history. They tell us the story of the saving work of Jesus Christ. If we know nothing else about scripture, if we know nothing else about theology, if we get all the questions on the test wrong, if we can't find the book of Ecclesiastes, if this is the first time we heard that book exists, but we believe in the story that communion and baptism tell us. If we don't understand anything else, but we understand and we believe in the story that we are taught by the rituals, by the ordinances, by the tradition. If we believe the story that we're about to be told in baptism and in communion, then we are in Christ and we are Christians and we are a new thing. We're a new creature. So what we're about to be shown by these children and then what we're about to experience by taking communion is us retelling the story back to God of his saving work on the cross for us. It's us celebrating Jesus' death on the cross, knowing that with that death, he purchased for us an eternity forever in God for which we were created and intended, and we will be there with him forever. And anything that's happened here is a former thing that has passed away. And all the hard stuff is done. It is the hope to which Christians cling. It is the reason that Pope John Paul II said, we do not give way for despair for we are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song. It is the singular hope in this universe that will not put us to shame. The hope that when we hear the story that's told by baptism and communion, that we believe it. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to let these three kids tell us the story of the resurrection of Christ. And we're going to watch them proclaim their faith. And then, as a body, we're going to take communion together, unifying us from wherever we are and wherever we came. And as an added bonus, these families get to take their first communion, get to take these kids' first communion with them while they're still dripping wet, which is pretty neat. So I'm going to pray, and then we're going to get to the good part. Father, we thank you so much for your son, who he is, what he's done. God, as we celebrate our children today, I can't imagine what it would be to choose to sacrifice one of them for the sake of us. And so God, thank you for enduring that pain as a good father. We're grateful to your son for enduring that experience and that separation from you for our sake. We're grateful for these traditions that have been handed down to us by the shoulders that we stand on. May they remind us of how much you love us, of how you provide for us, how good you are to us. And God, I pray for these three kids, for Drew and for Lily and for Kaysen, that this moment would be one that they remember, that they cherish, that they look back on with confidence, that steals them in their moments of doubt and hesitation. God, be with them as they go. Be with them as they walk with you in this newness of life. Be with them as they seek to become who you created them to be. And be with us, their parents. Make us good guides, Father. Thank you for overcoming our shortcomings. Thank you for the stories that these things tell. May it be a special moment for all of us. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Thank you, band. Good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Before I just launch into the sermon and the rest of the service, I do want to acknowledge it is Memorial Day weekend, and for many it's the start of summer. And I'll tell you why Memorial Day weekend is a special Sunday here for me at Grace every year, but it's also special because it remembers the men and women who have died for our freedoms, namely, as it's relevant to us, our freedom to gather and worship and do this openly. So if you have someone in your family who has given the ultimate sacrifice and died in the armed services fighting for us, we are to you and grateful to them and so we remember them and acknowledge that this morning as it pertains to grace Memorial Day has always been a very special day for me in the life of our church Memorial Day in church world for those who may not be familiar with church world and how pastors think about Sundays, Memorial Day is a throwaway Sunday. I know that we shouldn't say things like that, but it almost doesn't count, right? Because summer has started. Everyone's leaving. They're at the beach. It's a long holiday weekend. School's almost out. And so Memorial Day, that's when you kind of mail it in. You just do whatever. But the very first Memorial Day I was here in May of 2017, and if you want to hear the story, I'll tell you in the lobby afterwards. God just provided for grace in such a way that it felt like him putting his hand on us and saying, hey, I care about this place, and I'm going to take care of this place. And I could tell you more stories about things that have happened on Memorial Day. And so to be here on a Memorial Day baptizing three of our kids, one of them is mine, is a pretty special way for God to just remind us of his provision and his goodness and his hand on us. So it's a special morning this morning because it is a special morning and we're focused on baptisms this morning. And because this Sunday falls between series, we just wrapped up our series, the treasury of Isaiah. Next week, we're going to start a series called idols where we're kind of loosely looking at a book written by Tim Keller called Counterfeit Gods that kind of walks through the sin of idolatry and how that sneaks into our life. And I've got the books ordered. They're going to be here next week. And so maybe you want to pick one of those up as we kind of move through that series together. So we're going to do that series for a little bit starting next week. And we think that's going to be good. Then we're going to roll into the summer and do a 27 and look at the books of the new Testament. But right now today, because I knew we were going to be doing baptisms, I thought, let's just pause as a church and let's talk about the two ordinances of the church, baptism and communion. Let's just take a Sunday and focus on those and talk about what they are and what they mean. So that's what we're going to do today. As we think about that, I want to kind of introduce our thought process of baptism and communion in this way with this idea. For centuries, rituals have existed to teach us and remind us of essential truths. For centuries, rituals, systematic things, traditions, have taken place in different cultures and religions to teach, to remind the current generation and to teach the next generation of truths that that value system holds essential. And I really want you to think about this and the power of ritual. I know I talk about history sometimes and you guys make fun of me, but just to understand this, that when we live in America in 2024, the idea of literacy and printed word being ubiquitous, that is not the case for a vast majority of human history. For the vast majority of time that humans have been around, the populace was illiterate, and there was, in most cases, no written words. In some cases, very few documented written things that only a few had access to and that even fewer could actually read. So they had to pass things down word of mouth. Each generation had to teach the next generation and in that teaching, remind themselves of these truths. And for the things that they deemed, that the different cultures deemed particularly important, we don't want to get this one wrong. We've got to communicate this to ourselves and to the next generation. They would form rituals around those things. We think of them as traditions, but it's really pretty interchangeable. We have traditions in America. Fourth of July, we set off fireworks. Why do we do that? I would presume to simulate the bombs bursting in air by Francis Scott Key. I don't know why Chinese people set off fireworks. I don't know what it means to them. But to us, it's Star-Spangled Banner. It's the United States. That's great. That's a tradition that we have. Fine. If you think about different religions, they have traditions. The religion that became Christianity, Judaism, has a ritual Passover. When they gather around, they have a meal, and that meal helps them to remember that their ancestors were enslaved in Egypt and that God got them out of slavery. There are specific things that they're supposed to eat. It's very detailed and regimented. It's a ritual to teach the next generation and remind the current generation of truths that we deem essential. And Christians have rituals too. Now different denominations, different portions of the church have different traditions. But no matter what part of the church you're from or in, the two most important rituals are communion and baptism. The two most important rituals in all of Christendom are communion and baptism. And there's a couple reasons why. First of all, what I think is pretty neat about communion and baptism is that Jesus himself is the one who started these. Jesus initiated, excuse me, communion. Jesus modeled baptism and what it is and then taught it, taught us to be baptized in the spirit. Jesus started these himself. And if they, and if he started these things himself, they must be pretty important. The other thing that I find hugely interesting about communion and baptism as it relates to their import within the church. A few weeks ago on March 21st, some of y'all were here, 24th rather. It would have been weird to give a sermon on like a Thursday. But on March 24th, I preached on unity in the body of Christ. And I pulled up a whiteboard. Some of y'all will remember it. And I drew a big circle. And then in that circle, we made a pie chart of all the different sections of Christendom. We had a Catholic section, an Orthodoxy, Protestants. And then we divided those up into the different slivers of the different beliefs within all of those subsections, right? And then we populated the pie chart with all these different slivers of all these different versions of church all throughout the world. And we said that there's beauty to be found in each one of them. And each one of them has their own different set of traditions and rituals and things that they do. But do you know what two rituals, every single sliver of the pie chart of Christendom has in common. I've never known a church that claims to be Christian that does not in some way observe baptism. Now, we have different modes of it. When I say when it comes to baptism, the question that Christians ask about baptism is who's it for and how wet should they get? Is it for babies or believers and should they get all the way wet or just a little bit wet? Those are the questions with baptism. And different people settle that in different ways. And we don't have universal agreement here. We don't even have universal agreement on the elder board. And that's fine. But every church I've ever heard of honors baptism in some way. Every church I've ever heard of honors communion in some way. Some call it the Eucharist, but it's the same thing. And we have different beliefs around it and what it means, but every church that's ever existed celebrates those things. Now here's what's cool about that. Those rituals come tumbling down to us through the centuries to remind us and to teach us of essential truths for our faith. And God himself started those rituals. And those rituals, this tradition of baptism that we're going to do in a few minutes, the tradition of communion that we'll do right after that, those rituals, do you realize this? They tether us, this little non-denominational church floating in complete anonymity, they tether us to our Baptist brothers and sisters down the road, to our Catholic brothers and sisters down the road, even to our Presbyterian brothers and sisters down the road, even to them and the Pentecostals too. It tethers us together. It tethers us to the ancient church that we see in the beginning of Acts and we follow through Paul's missionary journeys in the rest of the Bible. It tethers us to the church outside of Masapumaleli that I got to visit one time in Cape Town, South Africa, and to the churches that I've been to in Siguatopeque, Honduras. It tethers us to those places as we honor these rituals that spill down through the centuries to us. It holds us together as a church and they unify us no matter what our divergent beliefs are about other things. So because Jesus himself started these, because they're ubiquitous amongst any Christian church in history, and because these things tie us all together and tether us as one body. It's worth saying, okay, what do they represent and what do they mean? Why are these two things so important to our God? Why did he only give us these two rituals on which we all agree? So first, we'll answer that question by looking at communion. Communion, the story of communion, the Last Supper, is in all four Gospels. But the texts that we use where Jesus instructs communion are found in the three synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. I'm going to look at the passage in Mark, and we'll read it together, and then we'll talk about what that means. Verse 22, while they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it. And he gave it to his disciples, saying, take it, this is my body. Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, and they drank it from him. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many, he said to them. So this is Jesus starting communion at the Last Supper. Jesus and the disciples are gathered in an upper room. Most of you, if not all of you, know the story. And they're celebrating Passover. They're celebrating this ancient Jewish ritual to remind them of essential truths. And it's not lost on me, and I think that this is pretty cool, it's not lost on me the symmetry of Jesus choosing to place communion and the Last Supper over top of the ritual of Passover. Because Passover reminded God's children. Passover reminded the children of God that they had been freed from slavery. And communion reminds the children of God that we have been freed from the slavery of the soul. It reminds us that we are free from sin. We are free from a more pernicious eternal slavery. And I said that Christianity is a continuation of Judaism because I believe that. And so Jesus doesn't replace Passover. He just fulfills it. And he shows us what it really means by freeing us from a different kind of slavery that is eternal. And the synchronicity and the symmetry of that are not lost on me and they shouldn't be lost on you. And then Jesus continues with the imagery. For us, most of us in the room are Christians. We know the story. We understand the symbolism. Jesus says, this is my body. It's broken for you. This is my blood that's spilled out for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And we know that that is a reference to Jesus on the cross, to what's about to happen. The disciples did not yet know that. So this was a little bit mysterious to them, but for us, they knew, or we knew rather, and we know what that is. So I will not belabor the imagery of communion other than to say, every time it happens, every time it comes back around to us. We are. We are right and good. And the thing that we should do. Is to focus our eyes on Christ. The founder and perfecter of our faith. Remember the cross and what happened there. Be grateful for the sacrifice of God. Understanding that that death. In part because we need the rest of the story. For it to matter ultimately, but that that death purchased our eternity in heaven. And so when we take communion, that's what we remember. That Christ died for my sins so that I could be free of them. So that I don't have to fear sin and death and shame. That's what communion reminds us of. It's very clear imagery. I'm not going to say too much more there because one of our elders, Jordan Shaw, is going to come and lead us in communion later, and I don't want to steal any of her thunder. Then there's baptism. Now, baptism is a little bit less clear in its imagery if you just watch it and think about it. But there's two layers. There's multi-layered imagery happening there with baptism that I think is really neat. And I want you guys to understand it. And Kaysen and Lily and Drew, I want you guys to understand this too. So I know this is a sermon and you're bored, Lily. I know you're super bored. But pay attention to this part. This part is important. We find, I believe, the best description of baptism in Romans chapter 6, where Paul talks about baptism like life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with. That we should no longer be slaves to sin. Because anyone who has died has been set free from sin. So we have a lot going on there. In explaining the picture that baptism is. And what this ritual is supposed to communicate to us and to our children. What we see here is that the physical act of being baptized, going under the water and then coming back up out of the water, is a picture of the burial and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It simulates and emulates that of the burial and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It simulates and emulates that, of the burial and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And then not only that, but we are told that when we are baptized, that the picture of what's happening there is that our old self is being put away. Our old self that is a slave to sin, that can't help but sin, that has no choice. The Bible teaches that if you are not a believer, if you do not believe that Jesus is who he says he is and did what he said he did, then you are a slave to sin. You have no choice but to sin. As soon as we get a cap on one sin, that sin nature is going to squirt out in some other sin and we're going to have to manage that over there. But that when we are Christians and we are raised to walk in newness of life with Jesus, we are a new creature and we are no longer a slave to sin and we no longer have to fear death. We have been released from our bondage and from our slavery. And so the imagery and the picture of baptism is to put to death the old self that has no choice but to sin and raise to life the new self that is alive in Christ. Just as he resurrected, we are alive again. We go from dead, not having any life and not having any hope to going to hope in Christ in this newness of life. Which is why when I baptize them, I will quote this passage and I will baptize them and I will say, buried with him in death and raised to walk in newness of life because that's what Romans 6 teaches. So that's the two-fold imagery of baptism. First of all, it is a physical representation and reminder of the burial and resurrection of Jesus. Second of all, it is to remind us as we watch and as we do that if we are Christians, our old self was put away and our new self has risen. We no longer have to be a slave to sin. That's the twofold picture of baptism. That's also why I believe two things about baptism are very important. I know that there's different beliefs about baptism and that's okay. I'm not here to settle it or wrestle it to the ground or to even try to convince you. But for me, when I think about baptism and when I teach baptism, I think immersion is so important. That question earlier, who's it for and how wet should they get? It's for believers, I think. People who have articulated a faith, who have experienced that regeneration of going from death to life. And it's, you should get maximum wet. You should go under the water. You should be immersed. Why? Because it's a picture of the death and the burial and the resurrection of Jesus. It's a reminder of you putting to death your old self, of God putting to death your old self and raising your new self. It's why it's worth it to go. Do you understand how much of a hassle this is? Do you know? It takes up space over there all the time. Kyle Tolbert, our youth pastor, is out of town. It's his responsibility to fill up the baptistry. I volunteered to do that. I forgot. I forgot. I'm sitting over there. Gibson, our worship pastor, and I, we pray every Sunday morning before he comes over here, usually about 7 o'clock. And we're sitting there about to pray, and my eyes got real big. And I go, I did not fill up the bathroom street. And he goes, yes, you did. And I was like, nope. And I bolted over here. We're stringing a hose. We've got to attach a hose to a sink in the kitchen over there. We don't have one hose. We have two. They're janky. We're stretching it as far as it could possibly go. Kyle bought a new hose and he bought, for ease of storage, he bought a stretchy one. So now we're having to play tug of war with this stupid thing so I can get it to reach the sink. And then we fill it up over here and I'm kind of panicking. If this sermon is terrible, it's because I didn't have the time this morning that I wanted to put some extra polish on it. And then we fill it up. And then we heat it. So they're not shivering when they get in there. It would be way easier to just put a little water on their head. Trust me. And if you know me, I'm a man of efficiency and ease. That is what I would prefer. But it's worth it to baptize. To go under the water because of the story it tells, because Jesus started that tradition, and because Jesus wants it to be a story that we remember over and over and over again. And this is why I believe this as well about baptism. It ought to be public. It ought to be in front of your church. When you get baptized, you are carrying the mantle of responsibility to tell that story to your brothers and sisters in Christ. Because communion, we do all the time. Communion you do every week or every month or every quarter, whatever is the pace of your church. Here we do it once a month. We do it all the time. We're constantly reminded, given the visual, as we tear the bread and we dip it in the wine or the grape juice. We don't drink wine in church services. Grape juice. We are reminded of what Jesus did for us on the cross. But you only get baptized once. At least you should. Some of you probably need it twice. Maybe the first one didn't take. But you should only get baptized once. Which means if we only do this once, then it's our one time to experience the imagery of what baptism is. And we don't do it again. So what do we need? We need other people in our family of faith to get baptized in front of us to tell the story with their baptism that Jesus wants them to tell. So it's important that we embrace the full imagery of it by going under and coming back up. And it's important that we do it publicly in front of our Christian brothers and sisters because we are taking on the responsibility of telling that story. These three brave kids this morning are doing us a service by allowing us to peek into this moment in their life because they are stepping up to tell us God's story. Here it comes. Here's the other thing, and then I'll wrap up and we'll get to the good part. These two ordinances, I was thinking about this this week, a couple weeks ago, and I've mentioned this to a couple people in passing. Whenever I mention it, the people that I'm talking to, they go, oh, yeah, yeah, that's right. As if this is common knowledge, and I'm just stumbling upon this like a dummy 20 years into ministry. But maybe I did, and maybe I am a dummy. I'm open to that, and there's a lot of objective evidence to argue for it. But the two ordinances tell two parts of the same story. These two ordinances, they're meant to go together. These two traditions, it's why they tumbled down to us through the centuries. They're meant to go together. They tell two parts of the same story. Communion tells the story of Jesus dying on the cross. Baptism tells the story of Jesus rising from the dead. If you think about it this way, if you put it on the calendar, communion points us to Good Friday at the death of Jesus Christ. Baptism points us to Easter Sunday, the resurrection, the victory that is won. We need the two of these. We need the two of these. We need both sides of the story for either one to matter. Without baptism, communion is irrelevant. And without communion, baptism is impossible. You understand that? Without baptism, communion is just celebrating someone else that was crucified by the Roman Empire. Lost to history. Without baptism, communion is neutered. Without communion, baptism is impossible. If Jesus never dies, we don't need resurrection. If we don't celebrate communion, we don't need to celebrate baptism. They tell two sides of the same story. And here's the thing. Communion and baptism tell the most important story in history. They tell us the story of the saving work of Jesus Christ. If we know nothing else about scripture, if we know nothing else about theology, if we get all the questions on the test wrong, if we can't find the book of Ecclesiastes, if this is the first time we heard that book exists, but we believe in the story that communion and baptism tell us. If we don't understand anything else, but we understand and we believe in the story that we are taught by the rituals, by the ordinances, by the tradition. If we believe the story that we're about to be told in baptism and in communion, then we are in Christ and we are Christians and we are a new thing. We're a new creature. So what we're about to be shown by these children and then what we're about to experience by taking communion is us retelling the story back to God of his saving work on the cross for us. It's us celebrating Jesus' death on the cross, knowing that with that death, he purchased for us an eternity forever in God for which we were created and intended, and we will be there with him forever. And anything that's happened here is a former thing that has passed away. And all the hard stuff is done. It is the hope to which Christians cling. It is the reason that Pope John Paul II said, we do not give way for despair for we are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song. It is the singular hope in this universe that will not put us to shame. The hope that when we hear the story that's told by baptism and communion, that we believe it. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to let these three kids tell us the story of the resurrection of Christ. And we're going to watch them proclaim their faith. And then, as a body, we're going to take communion together, unifying us from wherever we are and wherever we came. And as an added bonus, these families get to take their first communion, get to take these kids' first communion with them while they're still dripping wet, which is pretty neat. So I'm going to pray, and then we're going to get to the good part. Father, we thank you so much for your son, who he is, what he's done. God, as we celebrate our children today, I can't imagine what it would be to choose to sacrifice one of them for the sake of us. And so God, thank you for enduring that pain as a good father. We're grateful to your son for enduring that experience and that separation from you for our sake. We're grateful for these traditions that have been handed down to us by the shoulders that we stand on. May they remind us of how much you love us, of how you provide for us, how good you are to us. And God, I pray for these three kids, for Drew and for Lily and for Kaysen, that this moment would be one that they remember, that they cherish, that they look back on with confidence, that steals them in their moments of doubt and hesitation. God, be with them as they go. Be with them as they walk with you in this newness of life. Be with them as they seek to become who you created them to be. And be with us, their parents. Make us good guides, Father. Thank you for overcoming our shortcomings. Thank you for the stories that these things tell. May it be a special moment for all of us. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, good morning, everyone. Happy Palm Sunday. Somebody asked me before the service who's got a Catholic background, they said, do Christians still do Palm Sunday or is that just a Catholic thing? Which I found to be a wonderful question and yeah, Christians do Palm Sunday. Okay, so just so we're all on the same page, it's Holy Week for us too. And we've been doing this whole series through Mark, asking God to prepare our hearts and minds to celebrate Easter and to reflect on and properly value the resurrection. And so this week we prepare to do that. We have our Good Friday service on Friday evening. If you are able to come, I would really encourage you to do that. That is on Friday. We intentionally sit in the heaviness of the crucifixion. We intentionally focus on the cross and on the reality that Friday was believing that when we do that, our hearts are prepared to celebrate the resurrection better on Sunday. So Friday, I will just tell you, is a heavy service. I would not recommend bringing children to it. We are somber and sober on purpose because it helps us appreciate Easter Sunday better. This morning, as we do celebrate Palm Sunday, we will focus on the reality of Jesus on the cross, and we'll finish with having communion at the end of the service. But this is really a continuation of the sermon I preached to you, or I even said that Sunday that it wasn't a sermon, it was me sharing. This is a continuation of what I want to share from Istanbul. Okay. When, when I was sharing about Istanbul and somebody said that they just listened to the sermon, uh, from that morning on the way over, um, which I'm so glad that people are doing that and keeping up. But I shared with you my two takeaways from the experience that I had in Istanbul. And for those of you who maybe this is your first time, this is totally out of context for you. A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to go to Turkey and sit in a room with persecuted Iranian pastors who were being trained by a friend of mine. And it was a really impactful week, such a privilege to be there. And so when I came, I got home on a Saturday and then I had to preach on a Sunday. I didn't even know where I was in space or time, and I thought, I'm just going to share what I took away and hope that that works. And you guys were gracious with me and said that that counted, and I got paid that week. But there was two things. There's two things that I took away. The first was just the chasm of difference in how the persecuted church thinks about church and how the secure church thinks about church. And there may be a series coming on that, which I'm sure you guys will be really thrilled about to come in every week and be made to feel terrible for how we think about church. But that may just be what we need. So I'm thinking about that. The other point that I made was out of this verse in Mark. This is the quintessential Mark verse. If you were to say what verse encapsulates the book of Mark that we've been going through all spring, it is this verse, chapter 9, verse 36. I'm sorry, verse 35. Sitting down, Jesus called the twelve and said, Anyone who wants to be first must be very last and the servant of all. That is the quintessential Marconian verse. That's the gospel of Mark. Whoever wants to be first must be the servant of all. It's a book about service. And I talked with you guys about a man that I met named Yahya who personified this type of service. And I described him as capturing the essence of that Colossians verse, that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession and through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God. That was the sense I got with him. And so the other takeaway was, let's lead and serve like Jesus does. Let's be inspired by the model of Yahya and lead and serve like him. But here's what I wanted to say after that. I wanted to make another point, but as I wrote that point in my notes and I was going through it that Sunday morning, I thought I can't just drop that at the end of a service and not talk about it and not give it adequate space. We need to be able to develop this idea and talk about this idea. That's like a whole separate sermon. And then I went, huh, I'm in charge of the sermons that we preach. I can just do that one later. So this is later. All right. I wanted to talk about what we talked about last week. Last week, I wanted to talk about this on Palm Sunday. I felt like it was more appropriate leading into communion, but this is really part two of that. This is what I wanted to say. When I say we should lead and love and serve like Christ. We should be inspired by the examples of holy people who lead and serve and love well. The point that I wanted to make is this. We cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. I'm going to spend the rest of the day talking about this so that I can make sure we have an adequate understanding of it. But we cannot love others as Jesus loved. That's a quintessential. I said Marconian, so now I will say Johannian. That is a quintessential verse in John to sum up that gospel is when Jesus says, go and love others as I have loved you. That is the gospel of John encapsulated. And so we take the gospel of Mark and we take the gospel of John and we say, yes, Lord, this is what we want to do. is we cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. And here's what I mean when I say that. We all have a sense of identity and value and worth that we get from something somewhere. This is universally true. We all have something that we measure ourselves by that makes us feel valuable or not valuable. We all have a sense of identity. I am blank. I am this. And this identity and our sense of identity and where we get our worth evolves over time, right? I remember when I was a kid in elementary school at Camp Creek Elementary, that my value and worth was based on my knowledge of SportsCenter that morning. Like when I would watch Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann. I would watch Stuart Scott and Scott Van Pelt. I would watch them and be ready with their catchphrases that morning at school. My ability to talk about sports and to argue with you that Georgia Tech was better than Georgia, that's where I grew up. Here, you don't really argue about anything. No one's good at football here at all. So it doesn't really matter. Oh, also I wanted to say this, uh, this is just an aside. This is just me for fun. Uh, I would never, ever use this platform to pray for a sports team or an athlete. But if I were going to, I would invite us to join in prayer for Rory McIlroy today. If you, if you need more reason to root against Bryson DeChambeau today, Alan has money on him. He told me before the service. So let's just double down on Rory today. Yes? Good. But when I was a kid, my ability to do that, to talk about sports, is where I got a sense of value and worth. And how fast you were is how valuable you were. How hard you could kick a ball, how far you could throw it, how good you were at sports. If a dude was better than you at sports, he was a more valuable human than you. That was just the nature of the beast. That was the jungle when I grew up. Then it evolved. In high school, I started learning that I could also get value from making people laugh. Every now and again, I could convince a girl to like me. And that makes you feel valuable. And then in college, it develops. Then I began to get a sense of value and worth out of my ability to be a pastor. And then I got hired as one. And my sense of value and worth came from my job performance. And God, in his goodness, has redeemed this. But anybody who would try to argue with you that they don't get a sense of value and worth from extrinsic things, from things on the outside, isn't being honest with you. And so I think we all have this sense of value that evolves over time. And what I want to press upon you this morning is for the Christian, the natural and right evolution of our identity is to rest in our identity in Christ. For the Christian, the natural and right evolution of that identity, as you progress through the years and you land in a place, is for that place to be rested in Christ. It's for us to find our identity in him. Because the world has all these messages about who we are and what we should do. But Christ does too. And I think one of the hardest things about being a Christian is to listen to that voice of Jesus that tells us who and what we are. Because the world is so loud and it is so convincing and it is so ever-present that you begin to listen to what the world says about you more than you listen to what your creator says about you. And we forget, I think, who we are in Christ. And we start to believe what the world says we are. So this morning, I want to remind you of who you are in Christ. I would encourage you to look, to Google who I am in Jesus. Look up all the verses that proclaim who you are. I don't have enough time to go through even 10% of them this morning. There's so many ways the Bible affirms you and who you are. But I've got four for you that I want to read to you this morning. The first is Romans, I think 15.1 or maybe 5.1. It says, you are accepted. Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We've been justified by Christ. We are accepted. We are accepted by him. And when I say this, I think that we just kind of mentally go, yeah, I know. But think about how hard you struggle for acceptance in your life. Think about how much you want the approval of others. Some of us can readily admit, yeah, the opinion of other people matters to me. Others of us like to say this stupid thing. I don't care what other people think. Yes, you do. You just care what some people think. But you don't care what nobody thinks. All right? Tough guy? I'm talking to me. We all of us struggle to be accepted. And what Jesus tells us is, you are accepted. You're never going to be more accepted than you are. You're never going to be more desired than you are. He tells us that we are chosen. John 15, 16, you did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go bear fruit, fruit that will last. And so that whatever you ask in my name, the Father will give you. This is my command, and I'm including it because I mentioned it earlier. Love each other. That's what Jesus says. You didn't choose me. I chose you. You were accepted by Christ. You are chosen by Christ. We've all had times in our lives when we didn't feel chosen. When we didn't feel picked. When we felt looked over. When we felt passed over. When we felt inadequate. Like maybe we didn't matter. And Jesus says, no, no, no, I accept you. And I choose you. 1 Corinthians 3.23 tells us that you belong to Jesus. Whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours and you are of Christ and Christ is of God. You belong to Jesus. You are of Christ. This is what the Bible says about you, and this is my favorite one. You are safe. Romans 8, 38, 39, the crescendo of the greatest chapter in the Bible. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. You are safe. You are kept. We're doing a series that we just got done planning. The next series coming up is FAQs. And we've sussed out some questions from our small groups to see what kinds of things y'all are thinking about and wondering about. And one of the questions that came up a couple of times is, once you're saved, are you always saved? If you ask that question, read Romans 8, verses 38 and 39. Read it to yourself again and again and again, and know that you are held in God's hand. And know that if Christ has saved you, Christ will keep you. If Christ has chosen you, he will protect you. If he has redeemed you, he will glorify you. Guys, I don't think that we sit in the reality of... I don't think that we sit clearly in the reality of these things, that we are accepted and that we are chosen and that we are loved and that we are safe. I don't think that we do that. I think that we still continue to trust what the world has to say about who we are. And here's the problem. These identities that we've built for ourselves, these ways that we gauge ourselves and our value, when they are not Christ, they will all fail us. They will all fail us. Every identity you build for yourself will eventually fail you. And sometimes it fails you because you've chosen to gauge your worth on a thing you're not good at. I have friends who are not, they're not career driven men and they feel like failures all the time because they get a sense in our society, men have to achieve. We have to do, what do you do for work? What's your next step? Where are you going? How many direct reports do you have? Or are you starting a company? How is that going? We get our sense of value and worth from how we are as professionals. But some of us are not wired to be professionals. And some of us are not wired for success. And we don't want to climb the corporate ladder. And we're very happy to put the thing down at 5 o'clock and go home and be with our family, and that's really what we want. But the world has told us that we are how successful we are, and so we walk through life feeling bad about not meeting a goal that we never wanted to meet. I talked with a mom this week who gets her sense of worth and value from her kids' behavior. And it made me sad because I know some moms, even in this church and in my circles of friends, that have uniquely challenging children. Not because those children are bad and not because they're bad moms. Because they have severe ADHD. Because they have different pressures on them that we don't understand. Because they have sensitivities to things that are hard. And these moms beat themselves up because their kids act out in church or at school or because they're the one to get the phone call. And when that is our sense of worth and value, we just get beat up over and over and over again. When we listen to what the world says we need to be, when what's true about those moms is they're incredible moms. They're wonderful and they love their children very much. But we let the world beat us up and tell us that we're not and that we're not valuable because we forget who we are in Christ. And we let that voice drown us out. But many of us in here don't feel as worthy as we should because we're not listening to Jesus. We're listening to the world and we've allowed the world to put us in a game that we can't win. That's not where we should get our value from. And here's another way that your identity will fail you. Maybe you've been fortunate in your life to move the target of your worth to something that you can actually hit. Maybe you've been fortunate and wise enough to go, you know what? I'm not really going to listen to the world. I'm going to choose my own path, and this is what's going to make me feel valuable. But even when you choose something you're good at, that will fail you too. I pride myself very much on being a good friend. I have told people on my tombstone, I simply wanted to say Nate was a friend. Friendship is so important to me. And I've always placed a high value on my ability to be a good friend. And in the last couple of months, I failed a friend. I was a bad friend to someone I love a lot. And when I realized that, it shook me for weeks. And I realized, my goodness, I've idolized this sense of my value. I haven't been finding it in Christ. I've been finding it in my ability to do this for other people. And this is actually a good thing. It's shaken me and helped me realize that I hold this in a disproportionate way. So even the things that we build in our life that we're good at, eventually that will fail us too. And we'll have to repent of that. But here's what I know is true of you and why we build our identities in this way. Because we, all of us, we all want to be accepted, chosen, safe, and to belong. We all want that. And I'll be honest with you. When I write sermons like this, they're a little touchy-feely. We all want to be safe and chosen. Sometimes I speak to this part of the room because this is where our young families are, and sometimes I talk to parents here. Today, I'm going to talk to that portion of the room, because that's where our stubborn, crusty men sit. And when they hear me talk like this, everyone wants to be chosen and accepted and loved. I always, in the back of my head, I think, how are they processing this? Because they probably think I'm a sissy, right? But even you guys want this. Even you guys struggle for this. Everybody wants to be accepted and chosen and loved and protected. And we have that in Christ. He gives it to you. He tells you through his word. He preaches it to you. He reminds you of it. We sing about it. And yet some of you will go from here and you will walk out those doors and choose to believe what the world says about you instead of what Jesus says about you. So I just want to remind you of it this morning. And we come full circle to what I said at the beginning. And hopefully now it makes sense and carries a weight for you. We cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. Do you have any idea how well you will love other people when you let Jesus love you? You'll be able to celebrate their success. You'll be able to celebrate their rise. You'll have an equanimity and a calmness of demeanor because you know who you are in Jesus. And you wake up every day knowing I am fully loved. I am fully protected. I am fully safe. I am fully chosen. The world can do to me what it wants, but I have Jesus and I have his love and I'm good. Can you imagine walking in that level of help? Walking in such an awareness of the love of Christ that he has for you. That from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace and now God's grace overflows from you onto the people around you. Can you imagine being an agent of that kind of love where you know every day God loves you so much that it literally oozes out of you onto the people around you that they feel God's love because you are present in their life. Can you imagine that? It's only possible when we let Jesus love us first. Grace, Jesus loves you. He died on the cross for you. This week we celebrate Holy Week. This is Palm Sunday, where they laid down the palm branches and the children said, Hosanna. And Jesus knowingly walked to his death for you. So please, when you go out these doors today, do not listen to what the world says you are. Do not listen to what you say you are. Listen to what Jesus says you are, to who he says you are, and how much he loves you, and how he has chosen you. And let's walk in that love and see how God uses us. Can we do that? Let me pray for you, then we're going to celebrate communion. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for how much you love us. Thank you for who you are and how you've provided for us. God, I pray that we would hear you, that we would accept and receive you. I pray that we would love and serve others well because we allow you to love and serve us. Help us to exist in the reality of your overwhelming love, of your acceptance and your affirmation. Father, if there's anyone here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would. If there's anyone here who has not received your love, I pray that they would receive it today. Help us to walk in light of the fact that we are chosen and accepted and safe. Help us to walk in light of your love. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, good morning, everyone. Happy Palm Sunday. Somebody asked me before the service who's got a Catholic background, they said, do Christians still do Palm Sunday or is that just a Catholic thing? Which I found to be a wonderful question and yeah, Christians do Palm Sunday. Okay, so just so we're all on the same page, it's Holy Week for us too. And we've been doing this whole series through Mark, asking God to prepare our hearts and minds to celebrate Easter and to reflect on and properly value the resurrection. And so this week we prepare to do that. We have our Good Friday service on Friday evening. If you are able to come, I would really encourage you to do that. That is on Friday. We intentionally sit in the heaviness of the crucifixion. We intentionally focus on the cross and on the reality that Friday was believing that when we do that, our hearts are prepared to celebrate the resurrection better on Sunday. So Friday, I will just tell you, is a heavy service. I would not recommend bringing children to it. We are somber and sober on purpose because it helps us appreciate Easter Sunday better. This morning, as we do celebrate Palm Sunday, we will focus on the reality of Jesus on the cross, and we'll finish with having communion at the end of the service. But this is really a continuation of the sermon I preached to you, or I even said that Sunday that it wasn't a sermon, it was me sharing. This is a continuation of what I want to share from Istanbul. Okay. When, when I was sharing about Istanbul and somebody said that they just listened to the sermon, uh, from that morning on the way over, um, which I'm so glad that people are doing that and keeping up. But I shared with you my two takeaways from the experience that I had in Istanbul. And for those of you who maybe this is your first time, this is totally out of context for you. A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to go to Turkey and sit in a room with persecuted Iranian pastors who were being trained by a friend of mine. And it was a really impactful week, such a privilege to be there. And so when I came, I got home on a Saturday and then I had to preach on a Sunday. I didn't even know where I was in space or time, and I thought, I'm just going to share what I took away and hope that that works. And you guys were gracious with me and said that that counted, and I got paid that week. But there was two things. There's two things that I took away. The first was just the chasm of difference in how the persecuted church thinks about church and how the secure church thinks about church. And there may be a series coming on that, which I'm sure you guys will be really thrilled about to come in every week and be made to feel terrible for how we think about church. But that may just be what we need. So I'm thinking about that. The other point that I made was out of this verse in Mark. This is the quintessential Mark verse. If you were to say what verse encapsulates the book of Mark that we've been going through all spring, it is this verse, chapter 9, verse 36. I'm sorry, verse 35. Sitting down, Jesus called the twelve and said, Anyone who wants to be first must be very last and the servant of all. That is the quintessential Marconian verse. That's the gospel of Mark. Whoever wants to be first must be the servant of all. It's a book about service. And I talked with you guys about a man that I met named Yahya who personified this type of service. And I described him as capturing the essence of that Colossians verse, that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession and through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God. That was the sense I got with him. And so the other takeaway was, let's lead and serve like Jesus does. Let's be inspired by the model of Yahya and lead and serve like him. But here's what I wanted to say after that. I wanted to make another point, but as I wrote that point in my notes and I was going through it that Sunday morning, I thought I can't just drop that at the end of a service and not talk about it and not give it adequate space. We need to be able to develop this idea and talk about this idea. That's like a whole separate sermon. And then I went, huh, I'm in charge of the sermons that we preach. I can just do that one later. So this is later. All right. I wanted to talk about what we talked about last week. Last week, I wanted to talk about this on Palm Sunday. I felt like it was more appropriate leading into communion, but this is really part two of that. This is what I wanted to say. When I say we should lead and love and serve like Christ. We should be inspired by the examples of holy people who lead and serve and love well. The point that I wanted to make is this. We cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. I'm going to spend the rest of the day talking about this so that I can make sure we have an adequate understanding of it. But we cannot love others as Jesus loved. That's a quintessential. I said Marconian, so now I will say Johannian. That is a quintessential verse in John to sum up that gospel is when Jesus says, go and love others as I have loved you. That is the gospel of John encapsulated. And so we take the gospel of Mark and we take the gospel of John and we say, yes, Lord, this is what we want to do. is we cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. And here's what I mean when I say that. We all have a sense of identity and value and worth that we get from something somewhere. This is universally true. We all have something that we measure ourselves by that makes us feel valuable or not valuable. We all have a sense of identity. I am blank. I am this. And this identity and our sense of identity and where we get our worth evolves over time, right? I remember when I was a kid in elementary school at Camp Creek Elementary, that my value and worth was based on my knowledge of SportsCenter that morning. Like when I would watch Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann. I would watch Stuart Scott and Scott Van Pelt. I would watch them and be ready with their catchphrases that morning at school. My ability to talk about sports and to argue with you that Georgia Tech was better than Georgia, that's where I grew up. Here, you don't really argue about anything. No one's good at football here at all. So it doesn't really matter. Oh, also I wanted to say this, uh, this is just an aside. This is just me for fun. Uh, I would never, ever use this platform to pray for a sports team or an athlete. But if I were going to, I would invite us to join in prayer for Rory McIlroy today. If you, if you need more reason to root against Bryson DeChambeau today, Alan has money on him. He told me before the service. So let's just double down on Rory today. Yes? Good. But when I was a kid, my ability to do that, to talk about sports, is where I got a sense of value and worth. And how fast you were is how valuable you were. How hard you could kick a ball, how far you could throw it, how good you were at sports. If a dude was better than you at sports, he was a more valuable human than you. That was just the nature of the beast. That was the jungle when I grew up. Then it evolved. In high school, I started learning that I could also get value from making people laugh. Every now and again, I could convince a girl to like me. And that makes you feel valuable. And then in college, it develops. Then I began to get a sense of value and worth out of my ability to be a pastor. And then I got hired as one. And my sense of value and worth came from my job performance. And God, in his goodness, has redeemed this. But anybody who would try to argue with you that they don't get a sense of value and worth from extrinsic things, from things on the outside, isn't being honest with you. And so I think we all have this sense of value that evolves over time. And what I want to press upon you this morning is for the Christian, the natural and right evolution of our identity is to rest in our identity in Christ. For the Christian, the natural and right evolution of that identity, as you progress through the years and you land in a place, is for that place to be rested in Christ. It's for us to find our identity in him. Because the world has all these messages about who we are and what we should do. But Christ does too. And I think one of the hardest things about being a Christian is to listen to that voice of Jesus that tells us who and what we are. Because the world is so loud and it is so convincing and it is so ever-present that you begin to listen to what the world says about you more than you listen to what your creator says about you. And we forget, I think, who we are in Christ. And we start to believe what the world says we are. So this morning, I want to remind you of who you are in Christ. I would encourage you to look, to Google who I am in Jesus. Look up all the verses that proclaim who you are. I don't have enough time to go through even 10% of them this morning. There's so many ways the Bible affirms you and who you are. But I've got four for you that I want to read to you this morning. The first is Romans, I think 15.1 or maybe 5.1. It says, you are accepted. Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We've been justified by Christ. We are accepted. We are accepted by him. And when I say this, I think that we just kind of mentally go, yeah, I know. But think about how hard you struggle for acceptance in your life. Think about how much you want the approval of others. Some of us can readily admit, yeah, the opinion of other people matters to me. Others of us like to say this stupid thing. I don't care what other people think. Yes, you do. You just care what some people think. But you don't care what nobody thinks. All right? Tough guy? I'm talking to me. We all of us struggle to be accepted. And what Jesus tells us is, you are accepted. You're never going to be more accepted than you are. You're never going to be more desired than you are. He tells us that we are chosen. John 15, 16, you did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go bear fruit, fruit that will last. And so that whatever you ask in my name, the Father will give you. This is my command, and I'm including it because I mentioned it earlier. Love each other. That's what Jesus says. You didn't choose me. I chose you. You were accepted by Christ. You are chosen by Christ. We've all had times in our lives when we didn't feel chosen. When we didn't feel picked. When we felt looked over. When we felt passed over. When we felt inadequate. Like maybe we didn't matter. And Jesus says, no, no, no, I accept you. And I choose you. 1 Corinthians 3.23 tells us that you belong to Jesus. Whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours and you are of Christ and Christ is of God. You belong to Jesus. You are of Christ. This is what the Bible says about you, and this is my favorite one. You are safe. Romans 8, 38, 39, the crescendo of the greatest chapter in the Bible. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. You are safe. You are kept. We're doing a series that we just got done planning. The next series coming up is FAQs. And we've sussed out some questions from our small groups to see what kinds of things y'all are thinking about and wondering about. And one of the questions that came up a couple of times is, once you're saved, are you always saved? If you ask that question, read Romans 8, verses 38 and 39. Read it to yourself again and again and again, and know that you are held in God's hand. And know that if Christ has saved you, Christ will keep you. If Christ has chosen you, he will protect you. If he has redeemed you, he will glorify you. Guys, I don't think that we sit in the reality of... I don't think that we sit clearly in the reality of these things, that we are accepted and that we are chosen and that we are loved and that we are safe. I don't think that we do that. I think that we still continue to trust what the world has to say about who we are. And here's the problem. These identities that we've built for ourselves, these ways that we gauge ourselves and our value, when they are not Christ, they will all fail us. They will all fail us. Every identity you build for yourself will eventually fail you. And sometimes it fails you because you've chosen to gauge your worth on a thing you're not good at. I have friends who are not, they're not career driven men and they feel like failures all the time because they get a sense in our society, men have to achieve. We have to do, what do you do for work? What's your next step? Where are you going? How many direct reports do you have? Or are you starting a company? How is that going? We get our sense of value and worth from how we are as professionals. But some of us are not wired to be professionals. And some of us are not wired for success. And we don't want to climb the corporate ladder. And we're very happy to put the thing down at 5 o'clock and go home and be with our family, and that's really what we want. But the world has told us that we are how successful we are, and so we walk through life feeling bad about not meeting a goal that we never wanted to meet. I talked with a mom this week who gets her sense of worth and value from her kids' behavior. And it made me sad because I know some moms, even in this church and in my circles of friends, that have uniquely challenging children. Not because those children are bad and not because they're bad moms. Because they have severe ADHD. Because they have different pressures on them that we don't understand. Because they have sensitivities to things that are hard. And these moms beat themselves up because their kids act out in church or at school or because they're the one to get the phone call. And when that is our sense of worth and value, we just get beat up over and over and over again. When we listen to what the world says we need to be, when what's true about those moms is they're incredible moms. They're wonderful and they love their children very much. But we let the world beat us up and tell us that we're not and that we're not valuable because we forget who we are in Christ. And we let that voice drown us out. But many of us in here don't feel as worthy as we should because we're not listening to Jesus. We're listening to the world and we've allowed the world to put us in a game that we can't win. That's not where we should get our value from. And here's another way that your identity will fail you. Maybe you've been fortunate in your life to move the target of your worth to something that you can actually hit. Maybe you've been fortunate and wise enough to go, you know what? I'm not really going to listen to the world. I'm going to choose my own path, and this is what's going to make me feel valuable. But even when you choose something you're good at, that will fail you too. I pride myself very much on being a good friend. I have told people on my tombstone, I simply wanted to say Nate was a friend. Friendship is so important to me. And I've always placed a high value on my ability to be a good friend. And in the last couple of months, I failed a friend. I was a bad friend to someone I love a lot. And when I realized that, it shook me for weeks. And I realized, my goodness, I've idolized this sense of my value. I haven't been finding it in Christ. I've been finding it in my ability to do this for other people. And this is actually a good thing. It's shaken me and helped me realize that I hold this in a disproportionate way. So even the things that we build in our life that we're good at, eventually that will fail us too. And we'll have to repent of that. But here's what I know is true of you and why we build our identities in this way. Because we, all of us, we all want to be accepted, chosen, safe, and to belong. We all want that. And I'll be honest with you. When I write sermons like this, they're a little touchy-feely. We all want to be safe and chosen. Sometimes I speak to this part of the room because this is where our young families are, and sometimes I talk to parents here. Today, I'm going to talk to that portion of the room, because that's where our stubborn, crusty men sit. And when they hear me talk like this, everyone wants to be chosen and accepted and loved. I always, in the back of my head, I think, how are they processing this? Because they probably think I'm a sissy, right? But even you guys want this. Even you guys struggle for this. Everybody wants to be accepted and chosen and loved and protected. And we have that in Christ. He gives it to you. He tells you through his word. He preaches it to you. He reminds you of it. We sing about it. And yet some of you will go from here and you will walk out those doors and choose to believe what the world says about you instead of what Jesus says about you. So I just want to remind you of it this morning. And we come full circle to what I said at the beginning. And hopefully now it makes sense and carries a weight for you. We cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. Do you have any idea how well you will love other people when you let Jesus love you? You'll be able to celebrate their success. You'll be able to celebrate their rise. You'll have an equanimity and a calmness of demeanor because you know who you are in Jesus. And you wake up every day knowing I am fully loved. I am fully protected. I am fully safe. I am fully chosen. The world can do to me what it wants, but I have Jesus and I have his love and I'm good. Can you imagine walking in that level of help? Walking in such an awareness of the love of Christ that he has for you. That from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace and now God's grace overflows from you onto the people around you. Can you imagine being an agent of that kind of love where you know every day God loves you so much that it literally oozes out of you onto the people around you that they feel God's love because you are present in their life. Can you imagine that? It's only possible when we let Jesus love us first. Grace, Jesus loves you. He died on the cross for you. This week we celebrate Holy Week. This is Palm Sunday, where they laid down the palm branches and the children said, Hosanna. And Jesus knowingly walked to his death for you. So please, when you go out these doors today, do not listen to what the world says you are. Do not listen to what you say you are. Listen to what Jesus says you are, to who he says you are, and how much he loves you, and how he has chosen you. And let's walk in that love and see how God uses us. Can we do that? Let me pray for you, then we're going to celebrate communion. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for how much you love us. Thank you for who you are and how you've provided for us. God, I pray that we would hear you, that we would accept and receive you. I pray that we would love and serve others well because we allow you to love and serve us. Help us to exist in the reality of your overwhelming love, of your acceptance and your affirmation. Father, if there's anyone here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would. If there's anyone here who has not received your love, I pray that they would receive it today. Help us to walk in light of the fact that we are chosen and accepted and safe. Help us to walk in light of your love. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, good morning, everyone. Happy Palm Sunday. Somebody asked me before the service who's got a Catholic background, they said, do Christians still do Palm Sunday or is that just a Catholic thing? Which I found to be a wonderful question and yeah, Christians do Palm Sunday. Okay, so just so we're all on the same page, it's Holy Week for us too. And we've been doing this whole series through Mark, asking God to prepare our hearts and minds to celebrate Easter and to reflect on and properly value the resurrection. And so this week we prepare to do that. We have our Good Friday service on Friday evening. If you are able to come, I would really encourage you to do that. That is on Friday. We intentionally sit in the heaviness of the crucifixion. We intentionally focus on the cross and on the reality that Friday was believing that when we do that, our hearts are prepared to celebrate the resurrection better on Sunday. So Friday, I will just tell you, is a heavy service. I would not recommend bringing children to it. We are somber and sober on purpose because it helps us appreciate Easter Sunday better. This morning, as we do celebrate Palm Sunday, we will focus on the reality of Jesus on the cross, and we'll finish with having communion at the end of the service. But this is really a continuation of the sermon I preached to you, or I even said that Sunday that it wasn't a sermon, it was me sharing. This is a continuation of what I want to share from Istanbul. Okay. When, when I was sharing about Istanbul and somebody said that they just listened to the sermon, uh, from that morning on the way over, um, which I'm so glad that people are doing that and keeping up. But I shared with you my two takeaways from the experience that I had in Istanbul. And for those of you who maybe this is your first time, this is totally out of context for you. A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to go to Turkey and sit in a room with persecuted Iranian pastors who were being trained by a friend of mine. And it was a really impactful week, such a privilege to be there. And so when I came, I got home on a Saturday and then I had to preach on a Sunday. I didn't even know where I was in space or time, and I thought, I'm just going to share what I took away and hope that that works. And you guys were gracious with me and said that that counted, and I got paid that week. But there was two things. There's two things that I took away. The first was just the chasm of difference in how the persecuted church thinks about church and how the secure church thinks about church. And there may be a series coming on that, which I'm sure you guys will be really thrilled about to come in every week and be made to feel terrible for how we think about church. But that may just be what we need. So I'm thinking about that. The other point that I made was out of this verse in Mark. This is the quintessential Mark verse. If you were to say what verse encapsulates the book of Mark that we've been going through all spring, it is this verse, chapter 9, verse 36. I'm sorry, verse 35. Sitting down, Jesus called the twelve and said, Anyone who wants to be first must be very last and the servant of all. That is the quintessential Marconian verse. That's the gospel of Mark. Whoever wants to be first must be the servant of all. It's a book about service. And I talked with you guys about a man that I met named Yahya who personified this type of service. And I described him as capturing the essence of that Colossians verse, that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession and through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God. That was the sense I got with him. And so the other takeaway was, let's lead and serve like Jesus does. Let's be inspired by the model of Yahya and lead and serve like him. But here's what I wanted to say after that. I wanted to make another point, but as I wrote that point in my notes and I was going through it that Sunday morning, I thought I can't just drop that at the end of a service and not talk about it and not give it adequate space. We need to be able to develop this idea and talk about this idea. That's like a whole separate sermon. And then I went, huh, I'm in charge of the sermons that we preach. I can just do that one later. So this is later. All right. I wanted to talk about what we talked about last week. Last week, I wanted to talk about this on Palm Sunday. I felt like it was more appropriate leading into communion, but this is really part two of that. This is what I wanted to say. When I say we should lead and love and serve like Christ. We should be inspired by the examples of holy people who lead and serve and love well. The point that I wanted to make is this. We cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. I'm going to spend the rest of the day talking about this so that I can make sure we have an adequate understanding of it. But we cannot love others as Jesus loved. That's a quintessential. I said Marconian, so now I will say Johannian. That is a quintessential verse in John to sum up that gospel is when Jesus says, go and love others as I have loved you. That is the gospel of John encapsulated. And so we take the gospel of Mark and we take the gospel of John and we say, yes, Lord, this is what we want to do. is we cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. And here's what I mean when I say that. We all have a sense of identity and value and worth that we get from something somewhere. This is universally true. We all have something that we measure ourselves by that makes us feel valuable or not valuable. We all have a sense of identity. I am blank. I am this. And this identity and our sense of identity and where we get our worth evolves over time, right? I remember when I was a kid in elementary school at Camp Creek Elementary, that my value and worth was based on my knowledge of SportsCenter that morning. Like when I would watch Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann. I would watch Stuart Scott and Scott Van Pelt. I would watch them and be ready with their catchphrases that morning at school. My ability to talk about sports and to argue with you that Georgia Tech was better than Georgia, that's where I grew up. Here, you don't really argue about anything. No one's good at football here at all. So it doesn't really matter. Oh, also I wanted to say this, uh, this is just an aside. This is just me for fun. Uh, I would never, ever use this platform to pray for a sports team or an athlete. But if I were going to, I would invite us to join in prayer for Rory McIlroy today. If you, if you need more reason to root against Bryson DeChambeau today, Alan has money on him. He told me before the service. So let's just double down on Rory today. Yes? Good. But when I was a kid, my ability to do that, to talk about sports, is where I got a sense of value and worth. And how fast you were is how valuable you were. How hard you could kick a ball, how far you could throw it, how good you were at sports. If a dude was better than you at sports, he was a more valuable human than you. That was just the nature of the beast. That was the jungle when I grew up. Then it evolved. In high school, I started learning that I could also get value from making people laugh. Every now and again, I could convince a girl to like me. And that makes you feel valuable. And then in college, it develops. Then I began to get a sense of value and worth out of my ability to be a pastor. And then I got hired as one. And my sense of value and worth came from my job performance. And God, in his goodness, has redeemed this. But anybody who would try to argue with you that they don't get a sense of value and worth from extrinsic things, from things on the outside, isn't being honest with you. And so I think we all have this sense of value that evolves over time. And what I want to press upon you this morning is for the Christian, the natural and right evolution of our identity is to rest in our identity in Christ. For the Christian, the natural and right evolution of that identity, as you progress through the years and you land in a place, is for that place to be rested in Christ. It's for us to find our identity in him. Because the world has all these messages about who we are and what we should do. But Christ does too. And I think one of the hardest things about being a Christian is to listen to that voice of Jesus that tells us who and what we are. Because the world is so loud and it is so convincing and it is so ever-present that you begin to listen to what the world says about you more than you listen to what your creator says about you. And we forget, I think, who we are in Christ. And we start to believe what the world says we are. So this morning, I want to remind you of who you are in Christ. I would encourage you to look, to Google who I am in Jesus. Look up all the verses that proclaim who you are. I don't have enough time to go through even 10% of them this morning. There's so many ways the Bible affirms you and who you are. But I've got four for you that I want to read to you this morning. The first is Romans, I think 15.1 or maybe 5.1. It says, you are accepted. Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We've been justified by Christ. We are accepted. We are accepted by him. And when I say this, I think that we just kind of mentally go, yeah, I know. But think about how hard you struggle for acceptance in your life. Think about how much you want the approval of others. Some of us can readily admit, yeah, the opinion of other people matters to me. Others of us like to say this stupid thing. I don't care what other people think. Yes, you do. You just care what some people think. But you don't care what nobody thinks. All right? Tough guy? I'm talking to me. We all of us struggle to be accepted. And what Jesus tells us is, you are accepted. You're never going to be more accepted than you are. You're never going to be more desired than you are. He tells us that we are chosen. John 15, 16, you did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go bear fruit, fruit that will last. And so that whatever you ask in my name, the Father will give you. This is my command, and I'm including it because I mentioned it earlier. Love each other. That's what Jesus says. You didn't choose me. I chose you. You were accepted by Christ. You are chosen by Christ. We've all had times in our lives when we didn't feel chosen. When we didn't feel picked. When we felt looked over. When we felt passed over. When we felt inadequate. Like maybe we didn't matter. And Jesus says, no, no, no, I accept you. And I choose you. 1 Corinthians 3.23 tells us that you belong to Jesus. Whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours and you are of Christ and Christ is of God. You belong to Jesus. You are of Christ. This is what the Bible says about you, and this is my favorite one. You are safe. Romans 8, 38, 39, the crescendo of the greatest chapter in the Bible. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. You are safe. You are kept. We're doing a series that we just got done planning. The next series coming up is FAQs. And we've sussed out some questions from our small groups to see what kinds of things y'all are thinking about and wondering about. And one of the questions that came up a couple of times is, once you're saved, are you always saved? If you ask that question, read Romans 8, verses 38 and 39. Read it to yourself again and again and again, and know that you are held in God's hand. And know that if Christ has saved you, Christ will keep you. If Christ has chosen you, he will protect you. If he has redeemed you, he will glorify you. Guys, I don't think that we sit in the reality of... I don't think that we sit clearly in the reality of these things, that we are accepted and that we are chosen and that we are loved and that we are safe. I don't think that we do that. I think that we still continue to trust what the world has to say about who we are. And here's the problem. These identities that we've built for ourselves, these ways that we gauge ourselves and our value, when they are not Christ, they will all fail us. They will all fail us. Every identity you build for yourself will eventually fail you. And sometimes it fails you because you've chosen to gauge your worth on a thing you're not good at. I have friends who are not, they're not career driven men and they feel like failures all the time because they get a sense in our society, men have to achieve. We have to do, what do you do for work? What's your next step? Where are you going? How many direct reports do you have? Or are you starting a company? How is that going? We get our sense of value and worth from how we are as professionals. But some of us are not wired to be professionals. And some of us are not wired for success. And we don't want to climb the corporate ladder. And we're very happy to put the thing down at 5 o'clock and go home and be with our family, and that's really what we want. But the world has told us that we are how successful we are, and so we walk through life feeling bad about not meeting a goal that we never wanted to meet. I talked with a mom this week who gets her sense of worth and value from her kids' behavior. And it made me sad because I know some moms, even in this church and in my circles of friends, that have uniquely challenging children. Not because those children are bad and not because they're bad moms. Because they have severe ADHD. Because they have different pressures on them that we don't understand. Because they have sensitivities to things that are hard. And these moms beat themselves up because their kids act out in church or at school or because they're the one to get the phone call. And when that is our sense of worth and value, we just get beat up over and over and over again. When we listen to what the world says we need to be, when what's true about those moms is they're incredible moms. They're wonderful and they love their children very much. But we let the world beat us up and tell us that we're not and that we're not valuable because we forget who we are in Christ. And we let that voice drown us out. But many of us in here don't feel as worthy as we should because we're not listening to Jesus. We're listening to the world and we've allowed the world to put us in a game that we can't win. That's not where we should get our value from. And here's another way that your identity will fail you. Maybe you've been fortunate in your life to move the target of your worth to something that you can actually hit. Maybe you've been fortunate and wise enough to go, you know what? I'm not really going to listen to the world. I'm going to choose my own path, and this is what's going to make me feel valuable. But even when you choose something you're good at, that will fail you too. I pride myself very much on being a good friend. I have told people on my tombstone, I simply wanted to say Nate was a friend. Friendship is so important to me. And I've always placed a high value on my ability to be a good friend. And in the last couple of months, I failed a friend. I was a bad friend to someone I love a lot. And when I realized that, it shook me for weeks. And I realized, my goodness, I've idolized this sense of my value. I haven't been finding it in Christ. I've been finding it in my ability to do this for other people. And this is actually a good thing. It's shaken me and helped me realize that I hold this in a disproportionate way. So even the things that we build in our life that we're good at, eventually that will fail us too. And we'll have to repent of that. But here's what I know is true of you and why we build our identities in this way. Because we, all of us, we all want to be accepted, chosen, safe, and to belong. We all want that. And I'll be honest with you. When I write sermons like this, they're a little touchy-feely. We all want to be safe and chosen. Sometimes I speak to this part of the room because this is where our young families are, and sometimes I talk to parents here. Today, I'm going to talk to that portion of the room, because that's where our stubborn, crusty men sit. And when they hear me talk like this, everyone wants to be chosen and accepted and loved. I always, in the back of my head, I think, how are they processing this? Because they probably think I'm a sissy, right? But even you guys want this. Even you guys struggle for this. Everybody wants to be accepted and chosen and loved and protected. And we have that in Christ. He gives it to you. He tells you through his word. He preaches it to you. He reminds you of it. We sing about it. And yet some of you will go from here and you will walk out those doors and choose to believe what the world says about you instead of what Jesus says about you. So I just want to remind you of it this morning. And we come full circle to what I said at the beginning. And hopefully now it makes sense and carries a weight for you. We cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. Do you have any idea how well you will love other people when you let Jesus love you? You'll be able to celebrate their success. You'll be able to celebrate their rise. You'll have an equanimity and a calmness of demeanor because you know who you are in Jesus. And you wake up every day knowing I am fully loved. I am fully protected. I am fully safe. I am fully chosen. The world can do to me what it wants, but I have Jesus and I have his love and I'm good. Can you imagine walking in that level of help? Walking in such an awareness of the love of Christ that he has for you. That from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace and now God's grace overflows from you onto the people around you. Can you imagine being an agent of that kind of love where you know every day God loves you so much that it literally oozes out of you onto the people around you that they feel God's love because you are present in their life. Can you imagine that? It's only possible when we let Jesus love us first. Grace, Jesus loves you. He died on the cross for you. This week we celebrate Holy Week. This is Palm Sunday, where they laid down the palm branches and the children said, Hosanna. And Jesus knowingly walked to his death for you. So please, when you go out these doors today, do not listen to what the world says you are. Do not listen to what you say you are. Listen to what Jesus says you are, to who he says you are, and how much he loves you, and how he has chosen you. And let's walk in that love and see how God uses us. Can we do that? Let me pray for you, then we're going to celebrate communion. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for how much you love us. Thank you for who you are and how you've provided for us. God, I pray that we would hear you, that we would accept and receive you. I pray that we would love and serve others well because we allow you to love and serve us. Help us to exist in the reality of your overwhelming love, of your acceptance and your affirmation. Father, if there's anyone here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would. If there's anyone here who has not received your love, I pray that they would receive it today. Help us to walk in light of the fact that we are chosen and accepted and safe. Help us to walk in light of your love. In Jesus' name, amen.