Matthew

We are in the fourth part of our series now called With, where we've been reading through together and then discussing on Sundays the book With by a pastor and author named Sky Jethani. I want to thank Doug Bergeson last week for doing a phenomenal job filling in for me as we learned about life from God. Because I either have less courage or more sense than him, I'm not going to start my sermon by singing to you. I don't think that I could ever do that. If you missed that last week, watch the sermon at least for the song at the beginning that you may have missed. It was really, really great. As we've been moving through this series, we've been looking at different postures that we adopt before God that ultimately become harmful for us. They do more to hurt us than they do to help us. And this week we arrive at what I think is probably the sneakiest and maybe most damaging posture that we can adopt that is wrong. And I think that if you spent any time in the church, if you grew up, especially for those of you who grew up in church, if your memory, as far back as you can remember, when the doors were open, you were there, then I guarantee you this is going to be hitting on some nerves for you. If you've been a part of the church for any number of years, for any length of time, then there are going to be some things in this posture that resonate for you. I told you that when I read this book first in 2013, I've never read another book that caused me to stop, put it down, pray, and repent more than this one did. And this chapter in particular, this dude read my mail. So if it feels like at some point in the service I'm stepping on your toes, just know that that's not condemnation. That's not accusation. That's empathy. This is me. I almost made this sermon just a confessional, to just confess to the church body how I've walked through this posture. But as we approach this posture, this life for God, I wanted to share with you an experience that I had years ago. I think it was 2007, in about April or May of 2007. Jen and I, my wife, we were moving back home. We had lived our first year of marriage in Columbia, South Carolina, where I was going to go to seminary. We decided not to do that, so we moved back home, and I was going to pursue being a teacher, being a Bible teacher at a private high school. I didn't know which one. I was applying and hoping for the best. That's a really difficult job to get. I was really foolhardy in my efforts, but that's what we were trying to do. And there was a position that came open that somebody told me about. I didn't see it on any of the websites. Somebody told me about it, just word of mouth. And so I sent my resume in to them. And I ended up getting hired at this school called Covenant Christian Academy and became the Bible teacher there. At the same time, they were looking for a science teacher. And this is again in April or May. So this is, if you know anything about school world, this is after the hiring process. Hiring starts in February or March for the upcoming year. So this was actually too late in the year. So it was odd for them to even be hiring at this point. And they advertised very low key this Bible position and this science position at the same high school for three weeks. And in three weeks, I wonder how many resumes you think the science teaching position got. Three. I wonder how many resumes you think the Bible teaching position got. 60. In three weeks, barely advertised. And that's always stuck out to me. I thought that was odd. In my process to come here, I was looking for different jobs. This was back in 2017. There was a church in Kingsport, Tennessee, which if you know anything about that area of Tennessee, it's booty. There's nothing there. It is an undesirable area of the country. It just is. Being honest with you. I know somebody from there. They will confirm this. A church there had an open position for a senior pastor and received over 500 resumes from a search firm. Now, why is that the case? Why is it the case that this undesirable, this school that I got hired at, my starting salary was $27,000 a year in 2007. It was podunk out in the country, the far-flung suburbs of Atlanta with a school that had a cafe gym notarium. Like that's how, it was not this glamorous thing. Yeah, we got 60 resumes in three weeks. How's that happening? How is a church in the corner of Tennessee really not around very much at all getting 500 resumes in a year? Why is that happening? I think it's happening because of this life for God posture that we adopt as churches. The life for God posture says this, and I'll explain to you why I'm thinking this way in a minute, but the life for God posture says this, God's love for me, God's value for me is equal to my accomplishments for him. God's value for me, God's affection for me is equal to my accomplishments for him. The more I do for God, the more he values me. The more things I accomplish for God, the more he loves me and approves of me, the more valuable I am in his kingdom. It's this mindset that says, if I want to be a good Christian, then I have to go and do. I have to go and perform. I have to go and be a professional Christian. And this is why I think there's so many resumes when jobs like that open up because there's so many people who grew up in the church, who have been around the church and have been in this vice grip and this pressure cooker of if you're going to be a good Christian, then you need to be a professional one. If you really, really love God, then you'll go make a huge impact for him. If you grew up in the church, you felt this pressure of if someone's a really good Christian, they're going to leave everything and go be a missionary somewhere. They're going to go be a pastor. They're going to go start a ministry or a nonprofit. If you're just kind of a regular okay Christian, go get a business degree, make some money, and tithe so that the good Christians can go do the job. And now listen, I say that, and we chuckle at its absurdity, but you can't tell me that you haven't felt that pressure. You can't tell me that that hasn't felt true, that there's this economy within the church, that the more I do for God, the more valuable I am to him. The more I perform, the more he loves me. The more I do, the bigger the accolades get, the bigger crowd I draw, the bigger Bible study I have, the bigger following I have online, whatever it is, then the more the people around me and my God admire me. And this is a tricky, sneaky, pernicious posture, partly because it preys upon something that is in our very nature. It preys upon our desire to be valuable and to be valued. Every one of us is born with an intrinsic need for approval. Every one of us is born with a need in our hearts and our souls for someone to look at us and say, you're enough. I love you. You're good enough. I value you. We all need that. That's why my four-year-old daughter, Lily, everything she does, Daddy, watch me do this. She can't go down a flight of stairs without making me watch her jump down the last two. Now I watch her pause at three and consider it for a minute and then step to the second one and jump, right? Daddy, watch this. Daddy, look at this. Daddy, look at what I colored. Look at what I did in school. And it's all these little things. None of them are super impressive except that she's my daughter and I love her. But what is that in her except for the need to be approved of, the need to be valued, the need to perform, the need for somebody to look at her and say, yeah, you're good enough and I love you for that. And like, guys, we don't lose that need. We don't lose that desire. As you get older, you don't lose the need to be valuable and enough for somebody. That doesn't go away. We just have more nuanced ways of asking for it, right? We see this in young adolescent boys that brag about everything. All they're doing is begging you to tell them that they're valuable and that they're enough. As we mature past that, we let other people tell us that we're good enough, but we don't solicit it. Or we're really sneaky. In my early years of ministry, I used to ask people for feedback on a sermon or on a talk. And listen, I didn't really want your feedback. Don't be critical of me. Just tell me all the ways you think I did great. That's all I'm looking for. That's just a sneaky way to get you to tell me that I'm valuable and that I'm enough and that I performed. It's intrinsic in us to grope for that value. And this posture says the more I perform, the more valuable that I am. Another reason it's really particularly sneaky is we celebrate it in church. We celebrate the stories. I think of Sarah and Casey Prince who grew into adulthood here at Grace years ago, and then they go to South Africa to do God's work there, and we celebrate that, and we should. That's the problem. We should celebrate that. But what we don't do is celebrate like a faith leverant. I mean, she was the online partner of the week a couple of weeks ago. But that's not really celebrating. That's just a joke that's fun. She's a stay-at-home mom. She crafts lessons for her two boys and for her young daughter every day. She prays over them and pours into them and teaches them the Bible. And we don't celebrate that nearly as much as we celebrate someone leaving everything and growing across the world to preach the gospel, when in reality, both calls are the same. Both calls are equal. Both calls are from God. Timothy tells us that we are all vessels in God's house and he chooses which ones he will place where for noble purposes and for other purposes. We're all a part of the body of Christ. We all have our part to play. Yet some reason, for whatever reason, we value some gifts over others and some ministries over other ministries. And one of the reasons we do this is because it feels biblical, right? Like the Bible tells us to perform. If you know Scripture well, hopefully you've already thought of a few where you'd like to raise your hand and be like, but Nate, we're told to do ministry. We're told to preach the gospel. We're told that we should have an impact. And you're right. Paul tells us this over and over again. At the end of his life, he says, I've run the race. I've kept the faith. He says he's fought the good fight. He tells us to run our race as one who desires to win. That's performance. Jesus, as he leaves, his last instructions to the disciples are go and make disciples. The thing I did with you, now you go and do that. Go do missions. Go and do. He tells us to do that. When he calls the disciples, follow me and I will make you fishers of men. I will give you purpose. So he says in Matthew 4.19. So it seems biblical that we should adopt this posture of life for God. I'm going to follow God so that I can derive my sense of purpose and worth and value from him because he tells me to go and do these things. That's why it's pretty sneaky. And it's similar to the other postures, not life over God. Life over God says, I don't need God in my life. I'm going to be the authority in my life. I'm just going to extract his principles and apply them for maximum efficiency like a self-help guru, but I don't really need his authority in my life. That's a different one. But those other two postures, life under God, I'm going to live my life under his authority. Life from God, I'm going to follow God so that I can get blessings from him. Those seem biblical too. The Bible wants us to live our life under the authority of God. The Bible does say that if we follow him, we will be blessed. Those are in Scripture. But what I want us to see about those three postures, those two and this one this morning, is that these postures are the results of following God, but they serve as terrible reasons to follow him. They're the results of following God. When we follow God, those things happen, but they really serve as terrible reasons to follow him. When I follow Jesus, I'm going to live my life under his authority, life under him. That's okay. That's good. That's a result of giving my life to him. When I give my life to Christ, I'm going to experience blessings from him. That's a result of my walk with him. When I give my life to Christ, I'm going to do things for him. That's a result, but they make terrible reasons. And when these things become the reasons that we follow God, I think three really terrible things happen in our life. The first one is this. I want to walk through a little exercise before I tell you what it is. This exercise really stuck out to me from the book, and I wonder if it's true of us as well. I know it's gonna feel cheesy to do this. I have a very high cheese meter. I hate all things that are cheesy. So just trust me, I wouldn't ask you to do this unless I thought it was particularly effective. But I would like for you to close your eyes. If you're watching at home, close your eyes. If you're here, close your eyes. If I look at you and I see that your eyes aren't closed, I'm gonna shame you by name to everyone watching everywhere. But I want you to do this. Close your eyes and picture that you're in heaven and you're walking before the Father. You're in heaven and you can finally see the face of God. The first time after living the life that you've lived, you can now see his face. What does it look like? What's the primary emotion on the face of God as he looks back at you? What does he feel towards you? All right. You guys can look back up here. I would be willing to bet, just like it talked about in the book, just like I know what my answer is when I do that exercise, I would be willing to bet that a lot of us, if we answer that question honestly, how is God looking at us? We would say that he's disappointed. He's disappointed in me. I should have done more. I should have known better. He gifted me in ways. He gave me opportunities, and I didn't do as much as I could. My Father in heaven has got to be disappointed in me. He does this exercise in the book with a bunch of kids going to Bible college. And their answer was universally, he's disappointed in me. And listen, when we live a life where we feel like God's value for me is equal to my performance and accomplishments for him, I think we have no choice but to walk through life assuming God is disappointed in us. One of the terrible things that happen when we adopt this life for God posture is that we walk through life assuming that our good Father in heaven is disappointed in us and who we are. And sin is no longer this thing that damages our relationship with our Father. It's no longer this thing that necessitated the death of Jesus on our behalf. Sin simply becomes this thing that makes us less effective than we could be. We don't properly think about that either. I wonder if you can relate to that at all, the idea that God is disappointed in you. And listen, I said at the beginning, this chapter eats my lunch. This is me. Even as I sit here and I tell you in the next few minutes God's not disappointed in you, even as I finish talking about God's love for you, I'm just being honest with you. I'm not being hyperbolic. I'm not trying to make a point or be dramatic. I don't feel that. I feel God's stark disappointment in me. And if you're with me there, I wonder what that must do to us. What must that do to our psyches? There's an entire industry of counseling, a vast majority of which is based on helping people get over the fact that they feel like their parents are disappointed in them. We have a whole industry of counseling and psychology that sits down with people and helps them get over the wounds that their parents caused them by never being proud of them, by never telling them that they were enough, by not loving them the way that they needed to be loved. And we as adults have to move through that in our wounding and try to figure that out. There's a whole industry based around it. How much more then must it affect us for us to walk through our life convinced that disappointed in us when we're so sure that he loves everyone around us so much? If I were to ask you, close your eyes and imagine your spouse before God. Close your eyes and imagine anybody in this room or anybody watching online before God. What's God's face to them? You would say it's love. It's joy. It's happiness. So then why do you make his face disappointed at you? What must it do to the way that we think about God, to our heart for him, to just assume that he's disappointed in us? What must it do to the way that we raise our children and teach them about our good God? It's no wonder that maybe some of us have a hard time praying or spending time in the Bible because we think the God that we find there is disappointed in us, like an angry coach on the sideline waiting for us to come off the field. And because of that, because we so often walk through life assuming God is disappointed in who we are and how we've performed, I think it causes a lot of us to kind of give up on being able to earn God's affection that way. And because it does, we begin to look to our peers for affection and approval. And in this way, our service becomes currency for comparison. In this way, we use our service as currency for comparison to others. We do the exact opposite of what Paul talked about in Galatians. Paul in Galatians wrote this striking verse, verse 10. He said, for am I now seeking the approval of man or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. Paul in Galatians says, listen, we don't live for other people. We don't live for the approval of our peers. We live for the approval of God. But when we adopt this life for God posture, when we try to perform at a rate that earns us his love and affection, we inevitably will realize that we fall short of that. And then we will turn our eyes to our peers and begin to compare ourselves to them. I know I'm disappointing to God, but these schmucks think I'm pretty great, so I'm just going to keep performing for them. A good way to know if this exists in you is to answer this question honestly. And listen, I'm about to step on some toes. I would say I'm sorry. I'm not. But this is me. I experienced this too. How many of you have ever served on a team, participated in a ministry, accepted an appointment to a board or to a committee, or pursued a position in ministry somehow. Not because it was your earnest and fervent desire to use your gifts to further God's kingdom, but because you liked the way that position or that appointment made you look to the people around you. How many of you have served on boards because of how it's perceived by others? How many of you have accepted appointments or desired to be on a committee or on a team because of the respect that it would garner from your peers? Listen, I'm chief among these people. I know through counseling of my own that the whole reason I got into the pastorate was because it was the quickest path of respect I could find in my life. Where I grew up, the people around me, the people that we respected most were the pastors. So I figured if I wanted the respect of other people, I'll just go do that. I can run my mouth for a while. I hope over the years God has purified that motive in me. But I'm lying if I tell you that every week I don't have to fight the grossness inside me that just wants to be impressive to you. If you can relate to that, it's probably because you too have fallen victim to this life for God posture. The more I perform, the more my God will love me and the more of the people around me will respect me. And suddenly our service to the Father simply becomes currency for comparison. And when we do that enough, when we do that enough, one of two things happens. Either we give up and we say, I can't compare to the people around me. I'm nobody. I'm nothing. I don't matter. I'll never matter in the church. I'm just kind of doing my little thing. I'm just staying in my box. People aren't going to respect me and we just forget it. We become discouraged and disheartened and we walk away from all that. Or we just double down and we become me monsters and we just perform, perform, perform. Look at me, look at all the things that I'm doing. When we don't even really want to be doing any of the things anyway, we just want the respect that they'll garner. And what happens when we do that is this last terrible thing that comes from this posture. We become deaf, blind, and numb to God's relentless and continual love for us. When we try to perform our way into God's love, to perform our way into the admiration from others, we become deaf, blind, and numb to the continual stream of God's wonderful affection to us. I wonder how many of you feel that way this morning. I wonder how many of you feel blinded and numbed to the fact that God loves you. I told you earlier that even as I preach that we're not disappointments to God, that he looks at us and he loves us. He's a loving father. We're not disappointments to him. I confess to you that I don't feel that truth. Every time I read about the love of the father, I don't know how much I feel that love. I feel that this performance, this idea of accomplishing enough for him, creates this voice in our head that's so loud that we need to do more, do more, do more, do more, that we drown out the voice of God that is telling us over and over again that he loves us and that we're enough for him. And we know this is true. The Bible shouts it at us. It tells us that the Lord is gracious and slow to anger and abounding in love and he is good to us. It tells us that give thanks to the Lord for he is good. His love endures forever. It tells us that he is love. It tells us that he loved us so much that he sent his son Jesus to die for us. Listen to this. If you're in this room, you probably know that this is true. If you're watching online, you probably know that this is true. The Bible screams at us that God loves us. Do you realize that he loves you so much that when you sinned and you messed up that relationship, he sent his son to die for you. His son whom he loved and whom he was well pleased to die for you so that you could have a path to spend eternity with him. Do you understand? God wants your soul and your presence in his life so much that he sent his son so that he could spend eternity with you. That's the whole reason that he did it? Y'all, I don't want to spend a week with any of you. Right? We don't want to spend that much time with anybody. What would you do to spend a week with a stranger? Nothing. I wouldn't give anything. I don't want to do that. God loves you so much that he sent his son to spend eternity with you. There couldn't be a more clear message of love coming out of Scripture than that truth. But yet we convince ourselves that we're somehow, we're the one. Everyone else in this room, they deserve it. But us, we should know better. And we're the one who doesn't deserve God's love. We're the one who can't hear that voice. We're the one who can't let it wash over us. And so we either get more discouraged or we try harder. And the whole time we make ourselves blind, deaf, and numb to this message of love that comes out of Scripture. And so my hope this morning, more than anything else, is that maybe for a few minutes that voice in your head that tells you that you're not good enough, that tells you that you're not worthy of the Father's love, that tells you He's going to be disappointed in you as soon as he gets to see you, that that voice that tells you to push harder and to do more and that you're not doing your part, that maybe that voice this morning for just a second will shut up long enough for you to hear the actual voice of God pouring out of Scripture, telling you over and over again that he loves you, that you're enough for him, that he waits like the father in the story of the prodigal son with open arms and runs to you. And that if you are here this morning or you're watching and you don't know him, you don't know Jesus yet, he is pursuing you. He is chasing after you. He is leaving everybody behind and coming after just you. He wants you so much that he died for you so that he could spend eternity with you. Can we please stop muting that voice coming out of Scripture and hear it? And accept God's love for us and quit trying to perform for it? My hope as we wrapped up with this posture this week is that over these last four weeks that God has primed our hearts, that he's revealed some things in us about why we follow him, about why we call God our Father and Jesus our Savior. And that as he's primed and readied our hearts that as we come back next week for the proper posture, life with God, that we will be ready and eagerly and earnestly desirous of what that posture is and what it looks like to be before Father for all the right reasons and finally find a way to walk with him that is fulfilling and life-giving and enriching so that we can hear the voice of the Father saying to us every day that he loves us, that we are adopted sons and daughters of the us. You're gracious. You're slow to anger. You're abounding in love. May we believe that we don't have to perform for you. May everything that we do be an outflowing of the love that you offer to us. God, help us to quit trying so hard to earn a thing that we already have. God, if any of us have adopted this posture of living our life for you, and our service has become currency for comparison, and it's driven us to this place where we assume that you're disappointed in us because we're simply not doing enough, may we please just be still this morning. Just calm down. Sit in your presence and bask in your love. May we feel that even as we finish up and sing. May we feel that as we go throughout our week. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

We are in the fourth part of our series now called With, where we've been reading through together and then discussing on Sundays the book With by a pastor and author named Sky Jethani. I want to thank Doug Bergeson last week for doing a phenomenal job filling in for me as we learned about life from God. Because I either have less courage or more sense than him, I'm not going to start my sermon by singing to you. I don't think that I could ever do that. If you missed that last week, watch the sermon at least for the song at the beginning that you may have missed. It was really, really great. As we've been moving through this series, we've been looking at different postures that we adopt before God that ultimately become harmful for us. They do more to hurt us than they do to help us. And this week we arrive at what I think is probably the sneakiest and maybe most damaging posture that we can adopt that is wrong. And I think that if you spent any time in the church, if you grew up, especially for those of you who grew up in church, if your memory, as far back as you can remember, when the doors were open, you were there, then I guarantee you this is going to be hitting on some nerves for you. If you've been a part of the church for any number of years, for any length of time, then there are going to be some things in this posture that resonate for you. I told you that when I read this book first in 2013, I've never read another book that caused me to stop, put it down, pray, and repent more than this one did. And this chapter in particular, this dude read my mail. So if it feels like at some point in the service I'm stepping on your toes, just know that that's not condemnation. That's not accusation. That's empathy. This is me. I almost made this sermon just a confessional, to just confess to the church body how I've walked through this posture. But as we approach this posture, this life for God, I wanted to share with you an experience that I had years ago. I think it was 2007, in about April or May of 2007. Jen and I, my wife, we were moving back home. We had lived our first year of marriage in Columbia, South Carolina, where I was going to go to seminary. We decided not to do that, so we moved back home, and I was going to pursue being a teacher, being a Bible teacher at a private high school. I didn't know which one. I was applying and hoping for the best. That's a really difficult job to get. I was really foolhardy in my efforts, but that's what we were trying to do. And there was a position that came open that somebody told me about. I didn't see it on any of the websites. Somebody told me about it, just word of mouth. And so I sent my resume in to them. And I ended up getting hired at this school called Covenant Christian Academy and became the Bible teacher there. At the same time, they were looking for a science teacher. And this is again in April or May. So this is, if you know anything about school world, this is after the hiring process. Hiring starts in February or March for the upcoming year. So this was actually too late in the year. So it was odd for them to even be hiring at this point. And they advertised very low key this Bible position and this science position at the same high school for three weeks. And in three weeks, I wonder how many resumes you think the science teaching position got. Three. I wonder how many resumes you think the Bible teaching position got. 60. In three weeks, barely advertised. And that's always stuck out to me. I thought that was odd. In my process to come here, I was looking for different jobs. This was back in 2017. There was a church in Kingsport, Tennessee, which if you know anything about that area of Tennessee, it's booty. There's nothing there. It is an undesirable area of the country. It just is. Being honest with you. I know somebody from there. They will confirm this. A church there had an open position for a senior pastor and received over 500 resumes from a search firm. Now, why is that the case? Why is it the case that this undesirable, this school that I got hired at, my starting salary was $27,000 a year in 2007. It was podunk out in the country, the far-flung suburbs of Atlanta with a school that had a cafe gym notarium. Like that's how, it was not this glamorous thing. Yeah, we got 60 resumes in three weeks. How's that happening? How is a church in the corner of Tennessee really not around very much at all getting 500 resumes in a year? Why is that happening? I think it's happening because of this life for God posture that we adopt as churches. The life for God posture says this, and I'll explain to you why I'm thinking this way in a minute, but the life for God posture says this, God's love for me, God's value for me is equal to my accomplishments for him. God's value for me, God's affection for me is equal to my accomplishments for him. The more I do for God, the more he values me. The more things I accomplish for God, the more he loves me and approves of me, the more valuable I am in his kingdom. It's this mindset that says, if I want to be a good Christian, then I have to go and do. I have to go and perform. I have to go and be a professional Christian. And this is why I think there's so many resumes when jobs like that open up because there's so many people who grew up in the church, who have been around the church and have been in this vice grip and this pressure cooker of if you're going to be a good Christian, then you need to be a professional one. If you really, really love God, then you'll go make a huge impact for him. If you grew up in the church, you felt this pressure of if someone's a really good Christian, they're going to leave everything and go be a missionary somewhere. They're going to go be a pastor. They're going to go start a ministry or a nonprofit. If you're just kind of a regular okay Christian, go get a business degree, make some money, and tithe so that the good Christians can go do the job. And now listen, I say that, and we chuckle at its absurdity, but you can't tell me that you haven't felt that pressure. You can't tell me that that hasn't felt true, that there's this economy within the church, that the more I do for God, the more valuable I am to him. The more I perform, the more he loves me. The more I do, the bigger the accolades get, the bigger crowd I draw, the bigger Bible study I have, the bigger following I have online, whatever it is, then the more the people around me and my God admire me. And this is a tricky, sneaky, pernicious posture, partly because it preys upon something that is in our very nature. It preys upon our desire to be valuable and to be valued. Every one of us is born with an intrinsic need for approval. Every one of us is born with a need in our hearts and our souls for someone to look at us and say, you're enough. I love you. You're good enough. I value you. We all need that. That's why my four-year-old daughter, Lily, everything she does, Daddy, watch me do this. She can't go down a flight of stairs without making me watch her jump down the last two. Now I watch her pause at three and consider it for a minute and then step to the second one and jump, right? Daddy, watch this. Daddy, look at this. Daddy, look at what I colored. Look at what I did in school. And it's all these little things. None of them are super impressive except that she's my daughter and I love her. But what is that in her except for the need to be approved of, the need to be valued, the need to perform, the need for somebody to look at her and say, yeah, you're good enough and I love you for that. And like, guys, we don't lose that need. We don't lose that desire. As you get older, you don't lose the need to be valuable and enough for somebody. That doesn't go away. We just have more nuanced ways of asking for it, right? We see this in young adolescent boys that brag about everything. All they're doing is begging you to tell them that they're valuable and that they're enough. As we mature past that, we let other people tell us that we're good enough, but we don't solicit it. Or we're really sneaky. In my early years of ministry, I used to ask people for feedback on a sermon or on a talk. And listen, I didn't really want your feedback. Don't be critical of me. Just tell me all the ways you think I did great. That's all I'm looking for. That's just a sneaky way to get you to tell me that I'm valuable and that I'm enough and that I performed. It's intrinsic in us to grope for that value. And this posture says the more I perform, the more valuable that I am. Another reason it's really particularly sneaky is we celebrate it in church. We celebrate the stories. I think of Sarah and Casey Prince who grew into adulthood here at Grace years ago, and then they go to South Africa to do God's work there, and we celebrate that, and we should. That's the problem. We should celebrate that. But what we don't do is celebrate like a faith leverant. I mean, she was the online partner of the week a couple of weeks ago. But that's not really celebrating. That's just a joke that's fun. She's a stay-at-home mom. She crafts lessons for her two boys and for her young daughter every day. She prays over them and pours into them and teaches them the Bible. And we don't celebrate that nearly as much as we celebrate someone leaving everything and growing across the world to preach the gospel, when in reality, both calls are the same. Both calls are equal. Both calls are from God. Timothy tells us that we are all vessels in God's house and he chooses which ones he will place where for noble purposes and for other purposes. We're all a part of the body of Christ. We all have our part to play. Yet some reason, for whatever reason, we value some gifts over others and some ministries over other ministries. And one of the reasons we do this is because it feels biblical, right? Like the Bible tells us to perform. If you know Scripture well, hopefully you've already thought of a few where you'd like to raise your hand and be like, but Nate, we're told to do ministry. We're told to preach the gospel. We're told that we should have an impact. And you're right. Paul tells us this over and over again. At the end of his life, he says, I've run the race. I've kept the faith. He says he's fought the good fight. He tells us to run our race as one who desires to win. That's performance. Jesus, as he leaves, his last instructions to the disciples are go and make disciples. The thing I did with you, now you go and do that. Go do missions. Go and do. He tells us to do that. When he calls the disciples, follow me and I will make you fishers of men. I will give you purpose. So he says in Matthew 4.19. So it seems biblical that we should adopt this posture of life for God. I'm going to follow God so that I can derive my sense of purpose and worth and value from him because he tells me to go and do these things. That's why it's pretty sneaky. And it's similar to the other postures, not life over God. Life over God says, I don't need God in my life. I'm going to be the authority in my life. I'm just going to extract his principles and apply them for maximum efficiency like a self-help guru, but I don't really need his authority in my life. That's a different one. But those other two postures, life under God, I'm going to live my life under his authority. Life from God, I'm going to follow God so that I can get blessings from him. Those seem biblical too. The Bible wants us to live our life under the authority of God. The Bible does say that if we follow him, we will be blessed. Those are in Scripture. But what I want us to see about those three postures, those two and this one this morning, is that these postures are the results of following God, but they serve as terrible reasons to follow him. They're the results of following God. When we follow God, those things happen, but they really serve as terrible reasons to follow him. When I follow Jesus, I'm going to live my life under his authority, life under him. That's okay. That's good. That's a result of giving my life to him. When I give my life to Christ, I'm going to experience blessings from him. That's a result of my walk with him. When I give my life to Christ, I'm going to do things for him. That's a result, but they make terrible reasons. And when these things become the reasons that we follow God, I think three really terrible things happen in our life. The first one is this. I want to walk through a little exercise before I tell you what it is. This exercise really stuck out to me from the book, and I wonder if it's true of us as well. I know it's gonna feel cheesy to do this. I have a very high cheese meter. I hate all things that are cheesy. So just trust me, I wouldn't ask you to do this unless I thought it was particularly effective. But I would like for you to close your eyes. If you're watching at home, close your eyes. If you're here, close your eyes. If I look at you and I see that your eyes aren't closed, I'm gonna shame you by name to everyone watching everywhere. But I want you to do this. Close your eyes and picture that you're in heaven and you're walking before the Father. You're in heaven and you can finally see the face of God. The first time after living the life that you've lived, you can now see his face. What does it look like? What's the primary emotion on the face of God as he looks back at you? What does he feel towards you? All right. You guys can look back up here. I would be willing to bet, just like it talked about in the book, just like I know what my answer is when I do that exercise, I would be willing to bet that a lot of us, if we answer that question honestly, how is God looking at us? We would say that he's disappointed. He's disappointed in me. I should have done more. I should have known better. He gifted me in ways. He gave me opportunities, and I didn't do as much as I could. My Father in heaven has got to be disappointed in me. He does this exercise in the book with a bunch of kids going to Bible college. And their answer was universally, he's disappointed in me. And listen, when we live a life where we feel like God's value for me is equal to my performance and accomplishments for him, I think we have no choice but to walk through life assuming God is disappointed in us. One of the terrible things that happen when we adopt this life for God posture is that we walk through life assuming that our good Father in heaven is disappointed in us and who we are. And sin is no longer this thing that damages our relationship with our Father. It's no longer this thing that necessitated the death of Jesus on our behalf. Sin simply becomes this thing that makes us less effective than we could be. We don't properly think about that either. I wonder if you can relate to that at all, the idea that God is disappointed in you. And listen, I said at the beginning, this chapter eats my lunch. This is me. Even as I sit here and I tell you in the next few minutes God's not disappointed in you, even as I finish talking about God's love for you, I'm just being honest with you. I'm not being hyperbolic. I'm not trying to make a point or be dramatic. I don't feel that. I feel God's stark disappointment in me. And if you're with me there, I wonder what that must do to us. What must that do to our psyches? There's an entire industry of counseling, a vast majority of which is based on helping people get over the fact that they feel like their parents are disappointed in them. We have a whole industry of counseling and psychology that sits down with people and helps them get over the wounds that their parents caused them by never being proud of them, by never telling them that they were enough, by not loving them the way that they needed to be loved. And we as adults have to move through that in our wounding and try to figure that out. There's a whole industry based around it. How much more then must it affect us for us to walk through our life convinced that disappointed in us when we're so sure that he loves everyone around us so much? If I were to ask you, close your eyes and imagine your spouse before God. Close your eyes and imagine anybody in this room or anybody watching online before God. What's God's face to them? You would say it's love. It's joy. It's happiness. So then why do you make his face disappointed at you? What must it do to the way that we think about God, to our heart for him, to just assume that he's disappointed in us? What must it do to the way that we raise our children and teach them about our good God? It's no wonder that maybe some of us have a hard time praying or spending time in the Bible because we think the God that we find there is disappointed in us, like an angry coach on the sideline waiting for us to come off the field. And because of that, because we so often walk through life assuming God is disappointed in who we are and how we've performed, I think it causes a lot of us to kind of give up on being able to earn God's affection that way. And because it does, we begin to look to our peers for affection and approval. And in this way, our service becomes currency for comparison. In this way, we use our service as currency for comparison to others. We do the exact opposite of what Paul talked about in Galatians. Paul in Galatians wrote this striking verse, verse 10. He said, for am I now seeking the approval of man or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. Paul in Galatians says, listen, we don't live for other people. We don't live for the approval of our peers. We live for the approval of God. But when we adopt this life for God posture, when we try to perform at a rate that earns us his love and affection, we inevitably will realize that we fall short of that. And then we will turn our eyes to our peers and begin to compare ourselves to them. I know I'm disappointing to God, but these schmucks think I'm pretty great, so I'm just going to keep performing for them. A good way to know if this exists in you is to answer this question honestly. And listen, I'm about to step on some toes. I would say I'm sorry. I'm not. But this is me. I experienced this too. How many of you have ever served on a team, participated in a ministry, accepted an appointment to a board or to a committee, or pursued a position in ministry somehow. Not because it was your earnest and fervent desire to use your gifts to further God's kingdom, but because you liked the way that position or that appointment made you look to the people around you. How many of you have served on boards because of how it's perceived by others? How many of you have accepted appointments or desired to be on a committee or on a team because of the respect that it would garner from your peers? Listen, I'm chief among these people. I know through counseling of my own that the whole reason I got into the pastorate was because it was the quickest path of respect I could find in my life. Where I grew up, the people around me, the people that we respected most were the pastors. So I figured if I wanted the respect of other people, I'll just go do that. I can run my mouth for a while. I hope over the years God has purified that motive in me. But I'm lying if I tell you that every week I don't have to fight the grossness inside me that just wants to be impressive to you. If you can relate to that, it's probably because you too have fallen victim to this life for God posture. The more I perform, the more my God will love me and the more of the people around me will respect me. And suddenly our service to the Father simply becomes currency for comparison. And when we do that enough, when we do that enough, one of two things happens. Either we give up and we say, I can't compare to the people around me. I'm nobody. I'm nothing. I don't matter. I'll never matter in the church. I'm just kind of doing my little thing. I'm just staying in my box. People aren't going to respect me and we just forget it. We become discouraged and disheartened and we walk away from all that. Or we just double down and we become me monsters and we just perform, perform, perform. Look at me, look at all the things that I'm doing. When we don't even really want to be doing any of the things anyway, we just want the respect that they'll garner. And what happens when we do that is this last terrible thing that comes from this posture. We become deaf, blind, and numb to God's relentless and continual love for us. When we try to perform our way into God's love, to perform our way into the admiration from others, we become deaf, blind, and numb to the continual stream of God's wonderful affection to us. I wonder how many of you feel that way this morning. I wonder how many of you feel blinded and numbed to the fact that God loves you. I told you earlier that even as I preach that we're not disappointments to God, that he looks at us and he loves us. He's a loving father. We're not disappointments to him. I confess to you that I don't feel that truth. Every time I read about the love of the father, I don't know how much I feel that love. I feel that this performance, this idea of accomplishing enough for him, creates this voice in our head that's so loud that we need to do more, do more, do more, do more, that we drown out the voice of God that is telling us over and over again that he loves us and that we're enough for him. And we know this is true. The Bible shouts it at us. It tells us that the Lord is gracious and slow to anger and abounding in love and he is good to us. It tells us that give thanks to the Lord for he is good. His love endures forever. It tells us that he is love. It tells us that he loved us so much that he sent his son Jesus to die for us. Listen to this. If you're in this room, you probably know that this is true. If you're watching online, you probably know that this is true. The Bible screams at us that God loves us. Do you realize that he loves you so much that when you sinned and you messed up that relationship, he sent his son to die for you. His son whom he loved and whom he was well pleased to die for you so that you could have a path to spend eternity with him. Do you understand? God wants your soul and your presence in his life so much that he sent his son so that he could spend eternity with you. That's the whole reason that he did it? Y'all, I don't want to spend a week with any of you. Right? We don't want to spend that much time with anybody. What would you do to spend a week with a stranger? Nothing. I wouldn't give anything. I don't want to do that. God loves you so much that he sent his son to spend eternity with you. There couldn't be a more clear message of love coming out of Scripture than that truth. But yet we convince ourselves that we're somehow, we're the one. Everyone else in this room, they deserve it. But us, we should know better. And we're the one who doesn't deserve God's love. We're the one who can't hear that voice. We're the one who can't let it wash over us. And so we either get more discouraged or we try harder. And the whole time we make ourselves blind, deaf, and numb to this message of love that comes out of Scripture. And so my hope this morning, more than anything else, is that maybe for a few minutes that voice in your head that tells you that you're not good enough, that tells you that you're not worthy of the Father's love, that tells you He's going to be disappointed in you as soon as he gets to see you, that that voice that tells you to push harder and to do more and that you're not doing your part, that maybe that voice this morning for just a second will shut up long enough for you to hear the actual voice of God pouring out of Scripture, telling you over and over again that he loves you, that you're enough for him, that he waits like the father in the story of the prodigal son with open arms and runs to you. And that if you are here this morning or you're watching and you don't know him, you don't know Jesus yet, he is pursuing you. He is chasing after you. He is leaving everybody behind and coming after just you. He wants you so much that he died for you so that he could spend eternity with you. Can we please stop muting that voice coming out of Scripture and hear it? And accept God's love for us and quit trying to perform for it? My hope as we wrapped up with this posture this week is that over these last four weeks that God has primed our hearts, that he's revealed some things in us about why we follow him, about why we call God our Father and Jesus our Savior. And that as he's primed and readied our hearts that as we come back next week for the proper posture, life with God, that we will be ready and eagerly and earnestly desirous of what that posture is and what it looks like to be before Father for all the right reasons and finally find a way to walk with him that is fulfilling and life-giving and enriching so that we can hear the voice of the Father saying to us every day that he loves us, that we are adopted sons and daughters of the us. You're gracious. You're slow to anger. You're abounding in love. May we believe that we don't have to perform for you. May everything that we do be an outflowing of the love that you offer to us. God, help us to quit trying so hard to earn a thing that we already have. God, if any of us have adopted this posture of living our life for you, and our service has become currency for comparison, and it's driven us to this place where we assume that you're disappointed in us because we're simply not doing enough, may we please just be still this morning. Just calm down. Sit in your presence and bask in your love. May we feel that even as we finish up and sing. May we feel that as we go throughout our week. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, my name is Nate, and I say I get to be the pastor here, although that's less convincing since I just said I don't want to preach to you guys. I still like to be the pastor. I just want to sit in the service, too, you know? And if I haven't gotten to meet you, I really would love to do that in the lobby afterwards if that's something that you would like to do as well. We are in the last part of our series called The Blessed Life, where we're looking at the blessings that come at the beginning of Jesus' first recorded public address, the Sermon on the Mount. You can find it in Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. That's where we've been looking at the blessings. But it's also recorded in Luke chapter 6, so you can find it there as well. As we've looked at the blessings, we've looked at three of them. Last week, Doug looked at poor in spirit, did a phenomenal job. Thank you once again, Doug. I told Doug after the service last week, and I would say publicly, that I think the church is so very blessed when we can just kind of give him this little idea or verse or thought. I think one time I allowed him like a part of one sentence, please preach on just this part of one sentence. And he takes that into his laboratory for like six months and just thinks on it and then just says, here you go. And we all just kind of walk away going, I think I should listen to that three or four more times, but we're so blessed by that. So thank you. This week, I want to look at the final blessing that we have selected. And when I say we, I mean me. There's nine blessings, and I picked three of them to talk about. Doug picked the other one. And as I chose them, one of the ones that I wanted to talk about as we moved through this series was this one found in Matthew chapter 5, verse 9. And it simply says, blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be the children of God, the sons and daughters of God, which is quite the blessing for this one. The others, you know, theirs is the kingdom of heaven, that they will be, their hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied, that will be filled, they will inherit the earth. But this one, God literally says, if you are a peacemaker, I will adopt you as my child. That's the blessing that flows from being someone who seeks to make peace. And for most of us, this is not the first time we've encountered this blessing or beatitude. Blessed are the peacemakers. And so when we think of it, we probably think of peacemakers. What I think about peacemakers, I had an experience a week, 10 days ago, where I met a buddy of mine in the afternoon just to chit-chat and catch up, just kind of like you do sometimes. And we got to talking, and he asked me about a mutual acquaintance of ours and how my relationship was with him. And I said, well, it's not super good. There's really still kind of a lot of hurt and anger there, so I wouldn't say that we're actually talking very much. And he said, well, why is that? Why is that bad? And for eight to ten minutes, I kind of enumerated my sob story of why I'm angry at this person, why I'm holding a grudge against this person, and why I'm not really too keen on cleaning that up. We don't really run in the same circles. We don't really run into each other. So it's not something that's in my face all the time. And I'm perfectly happy just floating through life, never forgiving them, never talking to them, just making them anathema to me and just moving on down the road. And I enumerated to him all the reasons why I'm justified in this hurt. And he responded with, you're right, that makes sense. And I would be angry too. You know you need to talk to him and forgive him, right? Just like flippantly, as if he hadn't heard the methodical case I laid out for 10 minutes so that he would know, yes, God does tell us to forgive, but surely this, Nate, is the exception. You were so deeply wronged. You do not have to forgive this person. He said, you know you have to forgive him, right? And I was like, eh, I mean, I think we're good. And he was like, no, you're not. You know you need to talk to him. And I'm like, yeah, but I don't want to. And he goes, okay, but you should. He's really stubborn, and he's not very smart. So this was really annoying. And I finally looked at him and I said, yeah, I know, you're right. I do. I don't want to, but I'll pray that I want to and that I can. And that was two weeks ago. I've thought about that person and that conversation every day since. And choosing a sermon on being a peacemaker doesn't help with the conviction that you have in your life that you've not made peace. I don't hold a lot of grudges, but apparently when I do, I hold them pretty tight. And so I thought, what a well-timed sermon for me. I don't know if it's going to help you guys. I'll just preach to myself. None of y'all hold grudges or mad at anybody. But I thought, what a well-timed sermon for me. I'm going to need this. This is going to be one of those ones that I'll be freshly convicted as I go through it. And it is. But as I approached the topic and began to read up on it, began to think through it, it actually came out in my studies that that sort of peacemaking, person to person, is not really what Jesus was talking about when he said, blessed are the peacemakers. See, to Jesus, a true peacemaker is one who reconciles someone with their God. So a peacemaker is someone who seeks to reconcile someone else with their creator God, which is different than horizontal peacemaking. A peacemaker is one who makes peace vertically between a person and their God. And so I kind of came into the week loaded for bear on why peacemaking is so important, why it matters so much, why we need to pursue it, and even the active part of peacemaking, how making peace isn't just staying quiet and simmering with anger and never saying anything to someone else to kind of not disturb the peace, but sometimes making peace looks like the exact opposite of peace for the sake of peace, right? Sometimes making peace looks like getting involved in World War II for the sake of making peace. And so sometimes in our lives and in our relationship, we can't just sit back. We can't just idly stand by and try to keep the waters calm where there's tension simmering underneath it. We need to actively pursue peace with difficult, challenging conversations. And I was ready to preach this because that's something I don't mind doing. And I felt like I was preaching from a strong suit. And it turns out I'm not. It's funny how God works because that's not really what this sermon is about. It's about the fact that making peace in the eyes of Jesus, first and foremost, means reconciling people to their God. And so really, as much as my buddy was a peacemaker that day, and really ultimately pushed me closer to my God in reconciliation with others, a true peacemaker is more like my friend who's a pastor. I have a friend who is a pastor and his gift, he's got this gift of evangelism. He shares Jesus all the time everywhere he goes. He's one of those guys when you go out to eat with him and the waiter or the waitress brings the food to the table, he'll say, hey, we're about to pray. Is there anything going on in your life we can pray about? And if you're like me, that makes you just a little tense. It's a little bit uncomfortable, but I can't tell you how many times out of that simple question people have broken down, people have shared things, people have wanted to talk. He'll stay after the meal and lead them to Christ right there in the restaurant. He likes to golf. He'll go golfing and he'll witness to his caddy for 18 holes when he goes on trips. And by the end, he's posting a selfie next to his caddy who just accepted Christ. And like, if you're next to him on an airplane and you don't know Jesus, you're at least going to fake like you do before the end of that flight. He is going to share his faith with you. He is going to share it all the time, and he is constantly, constantly helping people reconcile themselves with their creator. That's what a peacemaker does. A peacemaker helps someone see there is a creator God of the universe who really loves us, as we just sang, and pursues us and comes after us when we are the prodigal son or the prodigal daughter. He chases after us. He waits for us eagerly. He desires us. And we were made, Garden of Eden, perfect creation, perfect relationship. God walked with them in the cool of the evening. God designed you to be in relationship with him. It's the only reason you exist. It's the only reason he wanted to create you is so he could share himself with you. The problem is when we sin, and the easiest way to understand sin is when we assume authority in our life. When God is here and we are here and we go, gosh, I don't like this arrangement. I'm going to start making my own decisions regardless of what God wants me to do. Those decisions are sin. And that sin wrecks our relationship with God. And we cannot be reconciled to him. There is nothing we can do to reconcile our relationship with our creator God. And God in his goodness, because he loves us, sent his son to die for us and create a path of reconciliation back to him so that all we need to do to be reconciled to our creator God is open up our eyes to the fact that he created us, that he loves us, that our sin has distorted our relationship, but that he sent his son to die for us so that that relationship might be restored. And that's what heaven is. It's to exist in eternity in a perfect relationship with God. When we think about heaven, we probably think about the pearly gates and the golden streets and seeing our loved ones and the marriage supper of the lamb and all the things that heaven is going to be. But what heaven really is, the real draw, is to exist in right relationship with our God for all of eternity, exactly as we were intended to do that. And so a peacemaker is someone who opens up the eyes of others that they might be reconciled with their God. Do you understand that the teachers who are in that room right there teaching the fourth and fifth graders and who are on the other side of the aquarium supply store down the dark hallway. Teaching our kindergarten through third graders. And the teachers all down this hall who are loving on our children. Do you understand they're making peace? But slowly by slowly, brick by brick, seemingly innocuous lesson plan by lesson plan, they're helping our children make peace with their God. Do you understand that our teachers are peacemakers? Do you understand that the people who come on Sunday nights and volunteer to be small group leaders for our students, who make awkward small talk with seventh graders so you don't have to. Are slowly by slowly, bit by bit, helping open the eyes of those students to their creator God who loves them and sent his son for them. That bit by bit, those small group leaders are helping those students be reconciled to their God. Do you understand that small group leaders who open up their home and their schedules and facilitate those conversations are peacemakers who are reconciling others to their God? Do you understand that when in a small group setting you share something from your journey, something from what God has shown you that can help somebody else, that in that small way, way in that moment that you too are being a peacemaker? That really we are being peacemakers anytime we help someone take a step towards God. Anytime we help someone reconcile themselves back to their creator, when we help someone make vertical peace, we are being peacemakers. And so Jesus says, blessed are those who help others make peace with me. Blessed are those who help others see themselves as I see them and see me as they should see me. And so in this way, not only is it volunteering in the children's and the students' and small groups and conversations, but it's also being willing to have those difficult conversations. It's also my friend who said, you know you need to forgive that person. And it's not because they were trying to help me make peace with that person. It's because helping me make peace with that person will help me make peace with my God. You're a peacemaker when you sit down with a friend who you love and you care about and you say, hey man, I don't want to be in this conversation right now any more than you want to be in it. But I've noticed this habit or this hang up or this addiction or this sin that's in your life and it's not helping you. It's hurting you. And I love you. And I want to see what you look like on the other side of this sin. That's making peace. When as a spouse, you look at your husband or your wife, and you say, hey, you're acting this way, you're doing this thing, you're developing this habit, you're developing this hang-up, and it needs to end where this does. When you put your foot down and you say no more, you're making peace. You're pushing them towards their creator. And in those moments when it's really difficult to make peace and yet we pursue it anyways. Vertical peace. Jesus says we are blessed because we're helping people to be reconciled to their creator God. And it occurred to me as I thought through what true peacemaking was that Jesus is the great peacemaker. He offers the great peace out of which all other peace flows. Jesus himself is the great peacemaker, and he offers the great peace out of which all other peace flows. I'll tell you what I mean, but he's the great peacemaker as he hangs on the cross, reconciling us back to our creator God. He did not have to do that. His relationship with his God was fine. His relationship with his father was fine, but he did it for me and you. So as he hangs on the cross, he is the great peacemaker, creating the great path of reconciliation and providing us with the great and perfect peace. And it makes me wonder, how could we ever seek to be at peace with ourselves if we are not first at peace with our creator? And as I thought about this concept, and I thought about the great peace that Jesus offers, it occurs to me that I should mention this. I'm going to move over here. I'm going to be in this portion of the stage, because this is not the sermon proper, okay? This is not what I'm driving at, but I do want to tell you this. So allow me a parenthetical portion of the sermon, okay? We live in a culture that is increasingly aware of mental health issues, anxiety and depression in particular. And it's not like these issues didn't exist before. We just didn't have words for them or labels for them. We didn't really understand them or know what to do with them. We just called it being sad or being discouraged or worrying too much. I was actually talking with a guy this week who has a daughter in college who's struggling pretty big with anxiety and depression right now. And he mentioned to me that as she's going to counseling, they're doing all the right things, and they're being really diligent about it. And she's been sharing with him some of the stuff that she's been learning in counseling, some of the symptoms and some of the things and some of the stuff that she sees manifesting in her life. And he's realized, oh my goodness, I've walked with that my whole life too. I shouldn't have a name for it. I just thought I was sad. So we live in a culture with an increasing awareness of these things. And I want to be really careful because I would not for a second try to be one of those pastors who says we pray away the depression. If you're worried, you just don't trust God enough. If you're depressed, you're just not experiencing the joy of Jesus and you need to pursue him harder and pray and sing more. Could be part of it. But probably that there's a legitimate chemical imbalance that needs counseling and that needs some drugs maybe even for a short time. And so I do not for a second want to say that we pray the depression and the anxiety away all the time as a first measure. There are some things that require actual treatment. I don't want to be ignorant about that. However, if it's true that God created us, if it's true that he fashioned your soul to crave him, if it's true that we, along with all creation in Romans 8, cry out for the return of the king, that creation groans for the return of God, for him to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, if we claw for Eden and the perfection that he created, if it's true that there's a creator God and that creator God made you and he made you to crave him and to need him and to only find satisfaction through knowing him and being reconciled to him, how could we possibly seek our own peace without being at peace with our creator? It's not the whole measure for mental illness, but it's got to be one of them, doesn't it? It's got to be a part of it, doesn't it? So I would simply say if you were one who struggles in that way, man, we want you to get all the counseling. We want you to get, if you need prescriptions, we want you to do those. We want you to be diligent about those things. But there's not enough therapy or prescriptions in the world to reconcile you to your creator. And there's not enough treatment in the world to give you the peace that he offers first. And even if that's not what you deal with, even if that's not your struggle, I would still ask you, how can you possibly be at peace with yourself and at peace with those around you if your soul is out of harmony with your creator God? So for many of us, the first peace we need to be making is with ourselves. For many of us this morning, and here at the end we're going to take communion, we're going to have an opportunity to do this. If you get nothing else from this but to leave here with the desire to be reconciled with your creator, this morning is a win. If there's sin in your life that's keeping you from having a good relationship with him, fix it. If you're like me and there's a relationship in your life, if there's a grudge that you're holding, if there's forgiveness that you need to extend and it's prohibiting you from having a perfectly peaceful relationship with your God, then fix it. If there's a habit that you're missing, a discipline that you lack, if there's a desire that you don't have, pray to God earnestly that he would speak into those things, that he would give you that desire, that he would give you that discipline, that he would supply you with that habit so that you might pursue him. But let's leave here determined and hopeful that we can be reconciled with our creator. God, let us first make peace with ourselves and in that way be peacemakers. But it does, to me, come full circles to reconciliation with others because how could we possibly be at peace with others if we are not at peace with our creator. If there is someone in your life that you're angry with, if there's someone that's angry with you, if there's someone that you're frustrated with. If there's a relationship that isn't right. No matter what the dynamic is there. They wronged you years ago. You can't let go of it. You wronged them and you've got too much pride to go to them. There's a misunderstanding. Whatever it is that's causing you to lack peace with a brother or a sister, instead of sitting back and expecting them to act, can I just encourage you to seek peace with your creator, God? Can I encourage you, instead of focusing on that broken relationship, can you focus on this one? And as God repairs this one, look what would happen. How could you possibly be at peace with our creator and not desire peace with others? Why do you think God has reminded me of this broken relationship I have every day for 14 days and he will not let it go? There's other things I'd like to think about. There's other stuff. I mean, listen, I've got plenty to be convicted about, but that's the thing right now, and it's not going anywhere. Why do you think that happens? Because my soul longs to be at peace with Creator God, and this horizontal relationship is messing up this vertical one, and so I need to go fix it to be back in right relationship with my creator. Those of you who have broken relationships in your life, someone that you haven't forgiven, someone that you haven't spoken to for years, someone that has something against you or you have it against them, how could you possibly be at peace with your creator and not seek peace with them? Not seek to be reconciled with them. So when we do this, and this is, I think, the really cool part, when we are peacemakers, when we first make peace with our God and ourselves, and then we make peace with others, we seek reconciled relationships, we encourage others to reconcile their relationships. When we make true peace, we are imitators of Jesus. When we make true peace with ourselves and with others, we are imitators of Jesus in the way that he is the great peacemaker, that he made the great path to reconciliation with our creator God. When we do that, we are imitators of Christ as we make peace with ourselves and others. And this is why the blessing is so profound. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the sons of God. They will be called the daughters, the children of God. Because we are imitators of Christ. Of course. Of course when we make peace with our creator God, we acknowledge that we have broken our relationship and that he sent his son to reconcile that relationship and we claim the death on the cross as our reconciliation. Of course we are called sons of God. That's the promise throughout the whole scripture. It means we're believers and he claims us. And of course as we seek to reconcile other people with their God and they come to know God in a profound way and they become believers and they become sons and daughters of God. Of course we are imitating Christ and then called sons of God. Of course that's why this is the blessing. Maybe this is why scripture prioritizes peace so profoundly. Paul writes in Romans, as far as it depends on you, seek peace. As far as it relies on you, make peace. No matter what, Paul ends all of his letters with grace and peace to you. And I've always wondered why Paul made such a big deal out of peace. Because he wasn't talking about this peace. He's talking about this peace. Maybe this is why Jesus prays the high priestly prayer, John chapter 17, his longest recorded prayer. You know what he prays for? He prays for unity. Here and there. Peace. It had never occurred to me before how all of these themes are woven throughout Scripture. This use of the word peace that we see over and over again, God's encouragement through the different authors to pursue peace, to be people of peace, to lead quiet and peaceful lives. Jesus opening up the Beatitudes with blessed by the peacemakers. It had never occurred to me why peace was throughout all scripture. Because peace means this peace. Reconciling with our creator God. And so my prayer for you this morning as we worshiped, this week as I prepared, is that you will seek peace with your creator. You will acknowledge he is the creator God who loves you. Your sin has distorted that relationship and broken it irreconcilably. Accept that Jesus died for you and created a path of reconciliation. Pursue that peace. And in your pursuit of that peace, look around you and help others pursue that peace as well. And in doing so, we are imitators of Jesus. And God will call us his children. Let's pray. Lord, I know there are plenty of us here, me included, who do not feel at peace with you, would you help us? Would you wrestle with us? Would you remind us of this lack of peace and the gentle way that you do it over and over again until we pursue it. Father, if there are people here who have never made peace with you, whose souls have never found rest in you, who have wandered from one thing to the next trying to find the peace and the satisfaction that only you offer. Would this morning be the morning that they rest easy in you and reconcile themselves, claim the reconciliation that you offer, and make peace with their creator, God, finally. Father, for those of us who need to make peace with others, would you give us the courage and the strength to do that? For those of us who need to pursue peace with you through eliminating things that are in our life, would you give us the courage to do that? If we need to pursue peace with you by adding things to our life, would you give us the desire and the discipline to do that? God, this morning, we simply pray for peace with you and with our brothers and sisters around us. Let us be peacemakers. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, my name is Nate, and I say I get to be the pastor here, although that's less convincing since I just said I don't want to preach to you guys. I still like to be the pastor. I just want to sit in the service, too, you know? And if I haven't gotten to meet you, I really would love to do that in the lobby afterwards if that's something that you would like to do as well. We are in the last part of our series called The Blessed Life, where we're looking at the blessings that come at the beginning of Jesus' first recorded public address, the Sermon on the Mount. You can find it in Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. That's where we've been looking at the blessings. But it's also recorded in Luke chapter 6, so you can find it there as well. As we've looked at the blessings, we've looked at three of them. Last week, Doug looked at poor in spirit, did a phenomenal job. Thank you once again, Doug. I told Doug after the service last week, and I would say publicly, that I think the church is so very blessed when we can just kind of give him this little idea or verse or thought. I think one time I allowed him like a part of one sentence, please preach on just this part of one sentence. And he takes that into his laboratory for like six months and just thinks on it and then just says, here you go. And we all just kind of walk away going, I think I should listen to that three or four more times, but we're so blessed by that. So thank you. This week, I want to look at the final blessing that we have selected. And when I say we, I mean me. There's nine blessings, and I picked three of them to talk about. Doug picked the other one. And as I chose them, one of the ones that I wanted to talk about as we moved through this series was this one found in Matthew chapter 5, verse 9. And it simply says, blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be the children of God, the sons and daughters of God, which is quite the blessing for this one. The others, you know, theirs is the kingdom of heaven, that they will be, their hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied, that will be filled, they will inherit the earth. But this one, God literally says, if you are a peacemaker, I will adopt you as my child. That's the blessing that flows from being someone who seeks to make peace. And for most of us, this is not the first time we've encountered this blessing or beatitude. Blessed are the peacemakers. And so when we think of it, we probably think of peacemakers. What I think about peacemakers, I had an experience a week, 10 days ago, where I met a buddy of mine in the afternoon just to chit-chat and catch up, just kind of like you do sometimes. And we got to talking, and he asked me about a mutual acquaintance of ours and how my relationship was with him. And I said, well, it's not super good. There's really still kind of a lot of hurt and anger there, so I wouldn't say that we're actually talking very much. And he said, well, why is that? Why is that bad? And for eight to ten minutes, I kind of enumerated my sob story of why I'm angry at this person, why I'm holding a grudge against this person, and why I'm not really too keen on cleaning that up. We don't really run in the same circles. We don't really run into each other. So it's not something that's in my face all the time. And I'm perfectly happy just floating through life, never forgiving them, never talking to them, just making them anathema to me and just moving on down the road. And I enumerated to him all the reasons why I'm justified in this hurt. And he responded with, you're right, that makes sense. And I would be angry too. You know you need to talk to him and forgive him, right? Just like flippantly, as if he hadn't heard the methodical case I laid out for 10 minutes so that he would know, yes, God does tell us to forgive, but surely this, Nate, is the exception. You were so deeply wronged. You do not have to forgive this person. He said, you know you have to forgive him, right? And I was like, eh, I mean, I think we're good. And he was like, no, you're not. You know you need to talk to him. And I'm like, yeah, but I don't want to. And he goes, okay, but you should. He's really stubborn, and he's not very smart. So this was really annoying. And I finally looked at him and I said, yeah, I know, you're right. I do. I don't want to, but I'll pray that I want to and that I can. And that was two weeks ago. I've thought about that person and that conversation every day since. And choosing a sermon on being a peacemaker doesn't help with the conviction that you have in your life that you've not made peace. I don't hold a lot of grudges, but apparently when I do, I hold them pretty tight. And so I thought, what a well-timed sermon for me. I don't know if it's going to help you guys. I'll just preach to myself. None of y'all hold grudges or mad at anybody. But I thought, what a well-timed sermon for me. I'm going to need this. This is going to be one of those ones that I'll be freshly convicted as I go through it. And it is. But as I approached the topic and began to read up on it, began to think through it, it actually came out in my studies that that sort of peacemaking, person to person, is not really what Jesus was talking about when he said, blessed are the peacemakers. See, to Jesus, a true peacemaker is one who reconciles someone with their God. So a peacemaker is someone who seeks to reconcile someone else with their creator God, which is different than horizontal peacemaking. A peacemaker is one who makes peace vertically between a person and their God. And so I kind of came into the week loaded for bear on why peacemaking is so important, why it matters so much, why we need to pursue it, and even the active part of peacemaking, how making peace isn't just staying quiet and simmering with anger and never saying anything to someone else to kind of not disturb the peace, but sometimes making peace looks like the exact opposite of peace for the sake of peace, right? Sometimes making peace looks like getting involved in World War II for the sake of making peace. And so sometimes in our lives and in our relationship, we can't just sit back. We can't just idly stand by and try to keep the waters calm where there's tension simmering underneath it. We need to actively pursue peace with difficult, challenging conversations. And I was ready to preach this because that's something I don't mind doing. And I felt like I was preaching from a strong suit. And it turns out I'm not. It's funny how God works because that's not really what this sermon is about. It's about the fact that making peace in the eyes of Jesus, first and foremost, means reconciling people to their God. And so really, as much as my buddy was a peacemaker that day, and really ultimately pushed me closer to my God in reconciliation with others, a true peacemaker is more like my friend who's a pastor. I have a friend who is a pastor and his gift, he's got this gift of evangelism. He shares Jesus all the time everywhere he goes. He's one of those guys when you go out to eat with him and the waiter or the waitress brings the food to the table, he'll say, hey, we're about to pray. Is there anything going on in your life we can pray about? And if you're like me, that makes you just a little tense. It's a little bit uncomfortable, but I can't tell you how many times out of that simple question people have broken down, people have shared things, people have wanted to talk. He'll stay after the meal and lead them to Christ right there in the restaurant. He likes to golf. He'll go golfing and he'll witness to his caddy for 18 holes when he goes on trips. And by the end, he's posting a selfie next to his caddy who just accepted Christ. And like, if you're next to him on an airplane and you don't know Jesus, you're at least going to fake like you do before the end of that flight. He is going to share his faith with you. He is going to share it all the time, and he is constantly, constantly helping people reconcile themselves with their creator. That's what a peacemaker does. A peacemaker helps someone see there is a creator God of the universe who really loves us, as we just sang, and pursues us and comes after us when we are the prodigal son or the prodigal daughter. He chases after us. He waits for us eagerly. He desires us. And we were made, Garden of Eden, perfect creation, perfect relationship. God walked with them in the cool of the evening. God designed you to be in relationship with him. It's the only reason you exist. It's the only reason he wanted to create you is so he could share himself with you. The problem is when we sin, and the easiest way to understand sin is when we assume authority in our life. When God is here and we are here and we go, gosh, I don't like this arrangement. I'm going to start making my own decisions regardless of what God wants me to do. Those decisions are sin. And that sin wrecks our relationship with God. And we cannot be reconciled to him. There is nothing we can do to reconcile our relationship with our creator God. And God in his goodness, because he loves us, sent his son to die for us and create a path of reconciliation back to him so that all we need to do to be reconciled to our creator God is open up our eyes to the fact that he created us, that he loves us, that our sin has distorted our relationship, but that he sent his son to die for us so that that relationship might be restored. And that's what heaven is. It's to exist in eternity in a perfect relationship with God. When we think about heaven, we probably think about the pearly gates and the golden streets and seeing our loved ones and the marriage supper of the lamb and all the things that heaven is going to be. But what heaven really is, the real draw, is to exist in right relationship with our God for all of eternity, exactly as we were intended to do that. And so a peacemaker is someone who opens up the eyes of others that they might be reconciled with their God. Do you understand that the teachers who are in that room right there teaching the fourth and fifth graders and who are on the other side of the aquarium supply store down the dark hallway. Teaching our kindergarten through third graders. And the teachers all down this hall who are loving on our children. Do you understand they're making peace? But slowly by slowly, brick by brick, seemingly innocuous lesson plan by lesson plan, they're helping our children make peace with their God. Do you understand that our teachers are peacemakers? Do you understand that the people who come on Sunday nights and volunteer to be small group leaders for our students, who make awkward small talk with seventh graders so you don't have to. Are slowly by slowly, bit by bit, helping open the eyes of those students to their creator God who loves them and sent his son for them. That bit by bit, those small group leaders are helping those students be reconciled to their God. Do you understand that small group leaders who open up their home and their schedules and facilitate those conversations are peacemakers who are reconciling others to their God? Do you understand that when in a small group setting you share something from your journey, something from what God has shown you that can help somebody else, that in that small way, way in that moment that you too are being a peacemaker? That really we are being peacemakers anytime we help someone take a step towards God. Anytime we help someone reconcile themselves back to their creator, when we help someone make vertical peace, we are being peacemakers. And so Jesus says, blessed are those who help others make peace with me. Blessed are those who help others see themselves as I see them and see me as they should see me. And so in this way, not only is it volunteering in the children's and the students' and small groups and conversations, but it's also being willing to have those difficult conversations. It's also my friend who said, you know you need to forgive that person. And it's not because they were trying to help me make peace with that person. It's because helping me make peace with that person will help me make peace with my God. You're a peacemaker when you sit down with a friend who you love and you care about and you say, hey man, I don't want to be in this conversation right now any more than you want to be in it. But I've noticed this habit or this hang up or this addiction or this sin that's in your life and it's not helping you. It's hurting you. And I love you. And I want to see what you look like on the other side of this sin. That's making peace. When as a spouse, you look at your husband or your wife, and you say, hey, you're acting this way, you're doing this thing, you're developing this habit, you're developing this hang-up, and it needs to end where this does. When you put your foot down and you say no more, you're making peace. You're pushing them towards their creator. And in those moments when it's really difficult to make peace and yet we pursue it anyways. Vertical peace. Jesus says we are blessed because we're helping people to be reconciled to their creator God. And it occurred to me as I thought through what true peacemaking was that Jesus is the great peacemaker. He offers the great peace out of which all other peace flows. Jesus himself is the great peacemaker, and he offers the great peace out of which all other peace flows. I'll tell you what I mean, but he's the great peacemaker as he hangs on the cross, reconciling us back to our creator God. He did not have to do that. His relationship with his God was fine. His relationship with his father was fine, but he did it for me and you. So as he hangs on the cross, he is the great peacemaker, creating the great path of reconciliation and providing us with the great and perfect peace. And it makes me wonder, how could we ever seek to be at peace with ourselves if we are not first at peace with our creator? And as I thought about this concept, and I thought about the great peace that Jesus offers, it occurs to me that I should mention this. I'm going to move over here. I'm going to be in this portion of the stage, because this is not the sermon proper, okay? This is not what I'm driving at, but I do want to tell you this. So allow me a parenthetical portion of the sermon, okay? We live in a culture that is increasingly aware of mental health issues, anxiety and depression in particular. And it's not like these issues didn't exist before. We just didn't have words for them or labels for them. We didn't really understand them or know what to do with them. We just called it being sad or being discouraged or worrying too much. I was actually talking with a guy this week who has a daughter in college who's struggling pretty big with anxiety and depression right now. And he mentioned to me that as she's going to counseling, they're doing all the right things, and they're being really diligent about it. And she's been sharing with him some of the stuff that she's been learning in counseling, some of the symptoms and some of the things and some of the stuff that she sees manifesting in her life. And he's realized, oh my goodness, I've walked with that my whole life too. I shouldn't have a name for it. I just thought I was sad. So we live in a culture with an increasing awareness of these things. And I want to be really careful because I would not for a second try to be one of those pastors who says we pray away the depression. If you're worried, you just don't trust God enough. If you're depressed, you're just not experiencing the joy of Jesus and you need to pursue him harder and pray and sing more. Could be part of it. But probably that there's a legitimate chemical imbalance that needs counseling and that needs some drugs maybe even for a short time. And so I do not for a second want to say that we pray the depression and the anxiety away all the time as a first measure. There are some things that require actual treatment. I don't want to be ignorant about that. However, if it's true that God created us, if it's true that he fashioned your soul to crave him, if it's true that we, along with all creation in Romans 8, cry out for the return of the king, that creation groans for the return of God, for him to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, if we claw for Eden and the perfection that he created, if it's true that there's a creator God and that creator God made you and he made you to crave him and to need him and to only find satisfaction through knowing him and being reconciled to him, how could we possibly seek our own peace without being at peace with our creator? It's not the whole measure for mental illness, but it's got to be one of them, doesn't it? It's got to be a part of it, doesn't it? So I would simply say if you were one who struggles in that way, man, we want you to get all the counseling. We want you to get, if you need prescriptions, we want you to do those. We want you to be diligent about those things. But there's not enough therapy or prescriptions in the world to reconcile you to your creator. And there's not enough treatment in the world to give you the peace that he offers first. And even if that's not what you deal with, even if that's not your struggle, I would still ask you, how can you possibly be at peace with yourself and at peace with those around you if your soul is out of harmony with your creator God? So for many of us, the first peace we need to be making is with ourselves. For many of us this morning, and here at the end we're going to take communion, we're going to have an opportunity to do this. If you get nothing else from this but to leave here with the desire to be reconciled with your creator, this morning is a win. If there's sin in your life that's keeping you from having a good relationship with him, fix it. If you're like me and there's a relationship in your life, if there's a grudge that you're holding, if there's forgiveness that you need to extend and it's prohibiting you from having a perfectly peaceful relationship with your God, then fix it. If there's a habit that you're missing, a discipline that you lack, if there's a desire that you don't have, pray to God earnestly that he would speak into those things, that he would give you that desire, that he would give you that discipline, that he would supply you with that habit so that you might pursue him. But let's leave here determined and hopeful that we can be reconciled with our creator. God, let us first make peace with ourselves and in that way be peacemakers. But it does, to me, come full circles to reconciliation with others because how could we possibly be at peace with others if we are not at peace with our creator. If there is someone in your life that you're angry with, if there's someone that's angry with you, if there's someone that you're frustrated with. If there's a relationship that isn't right. No matter what the dynamic is there. They wronged you years ago. You can't let go of it. You wronged them and you've got too much pride to go to them. There's a misunderstanding. Whatever it is that's causing you to lack peace with a brother or a sister, instead of sitting back and expecting them to act, can I just encourage you to seek peace with your creator, God? Can I encourage you, instead of focusing on that broken relationship, can you focus on this one? And as God repairs this one, look what would happen. How could you possibly be at peace with our creator and not desire peace with others? Why do you think God has reminded me of this broken relationship I have every day for 14 days and he will not let it go? There's other things I'd like to think about. There's other stuff. I mean, listen, I've got plenty to be convicted about, but that's the thing right now, and it's not going anywhere. Why do you think that happens? Because my soul longs to be at peace with Creator God, and this horizontal relationship is messing up this vertical one, and so I need to go fix it to be back in right relationship with my creator. Those of you who have broken relationships in your life, someone that you haven't forgiven, someone that you haven't spoken to for years, someone that has something against you or you have it against them, how could you possibly be at peace with your creator and not seek peace with them? Not seek to be reconciled with them. So when we do this, and this is, I think, the really cool part, when we are peacemakers, when we first make peace with our God and ourselves, and then we make peace with others, we seek reconciled relationships, we encourage others to reconcile their relationships. When we make true peace, we are imitators of Jesus. When we make true peace with ourselves and with others, we are imitators of Jesus in the way that he is the great peacemaker, that he made the great path to reconciliation with our creator God. When we do that, we are imitators of Christ as we make peace with ourselves and others. And this is why the blessing is so profound. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the sons of God. They will be called the daughters, the children of God. Because we are imitators of Christ. Of course. Of course when we make peace with our creator God, we acknowledge that we have broken our relationship and that he sent his son to reconcile that relationship and we claim the death on the cross as our reconciliation. Of course we are called sons of God. That's the promise throughout the whole scripture. It means we're believers and he claims us. And of course as we seek to reconcile other people with their God and they come to know God in a profound way and they become believers and they become sons and daughters of God. Of course we are imitating Christ and then called sons of God. Of course that's why this is the blessing. Maybe this is why scripture prioritizes peace so profoundly. Paul writes in Romans, as far as it depends on you, seek peace. As far as it relies on you, make peace. No matter what, Paul ends all of his letters with grace and peace to you. And I've always wondered why Paul made such a big deal out of peace. Because he wasn't talking about this peace. He's talking about this peace. Maybe this is why Jesus prays the high priestly prayer, John chapter 17, his longest recorded prayer. You know what he prays for? He prays for unity. Here and there. Peace. It had never occurred to me before how all of these themes are woven throughout Scripture. This use of the word peace that we see over and over again, God's encouragement through the different authors to pursue peace, to be people of peace, to lead quiet and peaceful lives. Jesus opening up the Beatitudes with blessed by the peacemakers. It had never occurred to me why peace was throughout all scripture. Because peace means this peace. Reconciling with our creator God. And so my prayer for you this morning as we worshiped, this week as I prepared, is that you will seek peace with your creator. You will acknowledge he is the creator God who loves you. Your sin has distorted that relationship and broken it irreconcilably. Accept that Jesus died for you and created a path of reconciliation. Pursue that peace. And in your pursuit of that peace, look around you and help others pursue that peace as well. And in doing so, we are imitators of Jesus. And God will call us his children. Let's pray. Lord, I know there are plenty of us here, me included, who do not feel at peace with you, would you help us? Would you wrestle with us? Would you remind us of this lack of peace and the gentle way that you do it over and over again until we pursue it. Father, if there are people here who have never made peace with you, whose souls have never found rest in you, who have wandered from one thing to the next trying to find the peace and the satisfaction that only you offer. Would this morning be the morning that they rest easy in you and reconcile themselves, claim the reconciliation that you offer, and make peace with their creator, God, finally. Father, for those of us who need to make peace with others, would you give us the courage and the strength to do that? For those of us who need to pursue peace with you through eliminating things that are in our life, would you give us the courage to do that? If we need to pursue peace with you by adding things to our life, would you give us the desire and the discipline to do that? God, this morning, we simply pray for peace with you and with our brothers and sisters around us. Let us be peacemakers. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, my name is Nate, and I say I get to be the pastor here, although that's less convincing since I just said I don't want to preach to you guys. I still like to be the pastor. I just want to sit in the service, too, you know? And if I haven't gotten to meet you, I really would love to do that in the lobby afterwards if that's something that you would like to do as well. We are in the last part of our series called The Blessed Life, where we're looking at the blessings that come at the beginning of Jesus' first recorded public address, the Sermon on the Mount. You can find it in Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. That's where we've been looking at the blessings. But it's also recorded in Luke chapter 6, so you can find it there as well. As we've looked at the blessings, we've looked at three of them. Last week, Doug looked at poor in spirit, did a phenomenal job. Thank you once again, Doug. I told Doug after the service last week, and I would say publicly, that I think the church is so very blessed when we can just kind of give him this little idea or verse or thought. I think one time I allowed him like a part of one sentence, please preach on just this part of one sentence. And he takes that into his laboratory for like six months and just thinks on it and then just says, here you go. And we all just kind of walk away going, I think I should listen to that three or four more times, but we're so blessed by that. So thank you. This week, I want to look at the final blessing that we have selected. And when I say we, I mean me. There's nine blessings, and I picked three of them to talk about. Doug picked the other one. And as I chose them, one of the ones that I wanted to talk about as we moved through this series was this one found in Matthew chapter 5, verse 9. And it simply says, blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be the children of God, the sons and daughters of God, which is quite the blessing for this one. The others, you know, theirs is the kingdom of heaven, that they will be, their hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied, that will be filled, they will inherit the earth. But this one, God literally says, if you are a peacemaker, I will adopt you as my child. That's the blessing that flows from being someone who seeks to make peace. And for most of us, this is not the first time we've encountered this blessing or beatitude. Blessed are the peacemakers. And so when we think of it, we probably think of peacemakers. What I think about peacemakers, I had an experience a week, 10 days ago, where I met a buddy of mine in the afternoon just to chit-chat and catch up, just kind of like you do sometimes. And we got to talking, and he asked me about a mutual acquaintance of ours and how my relationship was with him. And I said, well, it's not super good. There's really still kind of a lot of hurt and anger there, so I wouldn't say that we're actually talking very much. And he said, well, why is that? Why is that bad? And for eight to ten minutes, I kind of enumerated my sob story of why I'm angry at this person, why I'm holding a grudge against this person, and why I'm not really too keen on cleaning that up. We don't really run in the same circles. We don't really run into each other. So it's not something that's in my face all the time. And I'm perfectly happy just floating through life, never forgiving them, never talking to them, just making them anathema to me and just moving on down the road. And I enumerated to him all the reasons why I'm justified in this hurt. And he responded with, you're right, that makes sense. And I would be angry too. You know you need to talk to him and forgive him, right? Just like flippantly, as if he hadn't heard the methodical case I laid out for 10 minutes so that he would know, yes, God does tell us to forgive, but surely this, Nate, is the exception. You were so deeply wronged. You do not have to forgive this person. He said, you know you have to forgive him, right? And I was like, eh, I mean, I think we're good. And he was like, no, you're not. You know you need to talk to him. And I'm like, yeah, but I don't want to. And he goes, okay, but you should. He's really stubborn, and he's not very smart. So this was really annoying. And I finally looked at him and I said, yeah, I know, you're right. I do. I don't want to, but I'll pray that I want to and that I can. And that was two weeks ago. I've thought about that person and that conversation every day since. And choosing a sermon on being a peacemaker doesn't help with the conviction that you have in your life that you've not made peace. I don't hold a lot of grudges, but apparently when I do, I hold them pretty tight. And so I thought, what a well-timed sermon for me. I don't know if it's going to help you guys. I'll just preach to myself. None of y'all hold grudges or mad at anybody. But I thought, what a well-timed sermon for me. I'm going to need this. This is going to be one of those ones that I'll be freshly convicted as I go through it. And it is. But as I approached the topic and began to read up on it, began to think through it, it actually came out in my studies that that sort of peacemaking, person to person, is not really what Jesus was talking about when he said, blessed are the peacemakers. See, to Jesus, a true peacemaker is one who reconciles someone with their God. So a peacemaker is someone who seeks to reconcile someone else with their creator God, which is different than horizontal peacemaking. A peacemaker is one who makes peace vertically between a person and their God. And so I kind of came into the week loaded for bear on why peacemaking is so important, why it matters so much, why we need to pursue it, and even the active part of peacemaking, how making peace isn't just staying quiet and simmering with anger and never saying anything to someone else to kind of not disturb the peace, but sometimes making peace looks like the exact opposite of peace for the sake of peace, right? Sometimes making peace looks like getting involved in World War II for the sake of making peace. And so sometimes in our lives and in our relationship, we can't just sit back. We can't just idly stand by and try to keep the waters calm where there's tension simmering underneath it. We need to actively pursue peace with difficult, challenging conversations. And I was ready to preach this because that's something I don't mind doing. And I felt like I was preaching from a strong suit. And it turns out I'm not. It's funny how God works because that's not really what this sermon is about. It's about the fact that making peace in the eyes of Jesus, first and foremost, means reconciling people to their God. And so really, as much as my buddy was a peacemaker that day, and really ultimately pushed me closer to my God in reconciliation with others, a true peacemaker is more like my friend who's a pastor. I have a friend who is a pastor and his gift, he's got this gift of evangelism. He shares Jesus all the time everywhere he goes. He's one of those guys when you go out to eat with him and the waiter or the waitress brings the food to the table, he'll say, hey, we're about to pray. Is there anything going on in your life we can pray about? And if you're like me, that makes you just a little tense. It's a little bit uncomfortable, but I can't tell you how many times out of that simple question people have broken down, people have shared things, people have wanted to talk. He'll stay after the meal and lead them to Christ right there in the restaurant. He likes to golf. He'll go golfing and he'll witness to his caddy for 18 holes when he goes on trips. And by the end, he's posting a selfie next to his caddy who just accepted Christ. And like, if you're next to him on an airplane and you don't know Jesus, you're at least going to fake like you do before the end of that flight. He is going to share his faith with you. He is going to share it all the time, and he is constantly, constantly helping people reconcile themselves with their creator. That's what a peacemaker does. A peacemaker helps someone see there is a creator God of the universe who really loves us, as we just sang, and pursues us and comes after us when we are the prodigal son or the prodigal daughter. He chases after us. He waits for us eagerly. He desires us. And we were made, Garden of Eden, perfect creation, perfect relationship. God walked with them in the cool of the evening. God designed you to be in relationship with him. It's the only reason you exist. It's the only reason he wanted to create you is so he could share himself with you. The problem is when we sin, and the easiest way to understand sin is when we assume authority in our life. When God is here and we are here and we go, gosh, I don't like this arrangement. I'm going to start making my own decisions regardless of what God wants me to do. Those decisions are sin. And that sin wrecks our relationship with God. And we cannot be reconciled to him. There is nothing we can do to reconcile our relationship with our creator God. And God in his goodness, because he loves us, sent his son to die for us and create a path of reconciliation back to him so that all we need to do to be reconciled to our creator God is open up our eyes to the fact that he created us, that he loves us, that our sin has distorted our relationship, but that he sent his son to die for us so that that relationship might be restored. And that's what heaven is. It's to exist in eternity in a perfect relationship with God. When we think about heaven, we probably think about the pearly gates and the golden streets and seeing our loved ones and the marriage supper of the lamb and all the things that heaven is going to be. But what heaven really is, the real draw, is to exist in right relationship with our God for all of eternity, exactly as we were intended to do that. And so a peacemaker is someone who opens up the eyes of others that they might be reconciled with their God. Do you understand that the teachers who are in that room right there teaching the fourth and fifth graders and who are on the other side of the aquarium supply store down the dark hallway. Teaching our kindergarten through third graders. And the teachers all down this hall who are loving on our children. Do you understand they're making peace? But slowly by slowly, brick by brick, seemingly innocuous lesson plan by lesson plan, they're helping our children make peace with their God. Do you understand that our teachers are peacemakers? Do you understand that the people who come on Sunday nights and volunteer to be small group leaders for our students, who make awkward small talk with seventh graders so you don't have to. Are slowly by slowly, bit by bit, helping open the eyes of those students to their creator God who loves them and sent his son for them. That bit by bit, those small group leaders are helping those students be reconciled to their God. Do you understand that small group leaders who open up their home and their schedules and facilitate those conversations are peacemakers who are reconciling others to their God? Do you understand that when in a small group setting you share something from your journey, something from what God has shown you that can help somebody else, that in that small way, way in that moment that you too are being a peacemaker? That really we are being peacemakers anytime we help someone take a step towards God. Anytime we help someone reconcile themselves back to their creator, when we help someone make vertical peace, we are being peacemakers. And so Jesus says, blessed are those who help others make peace with me. Blessed are those who help others see themselves as I see them and see me as they should see me. And so in this way, not only is it volunteering in the children's and the students' and small groups and conversations, but it's also being willing to have those difficult conversations. It's also my friend who said, you know you need to forgive that person. And it's not because they were trying to help me make peace with that person. It's because helping me make peace with that person will help me make peace with my God. You're a peacemaker when you sit down with a friend who you love and you care about and you say, hey man, I don't want to be in this conversation right now any more than you want to be in it. But I've noticed this habit or this hang up or this addiction or this sin that's in your life and it's not helping you. It's hurting you. And I love you. And I want to see what you look like on the other side of this sin. That's making peace. When as a spouse, you look at your husband or your wife, and you say, hey, you're acting this way, you're doing this thing, you're developing this habit, you're developing this hang-up, and it needs to end where this does. When you put your foot down and you say no more, you're making peace. You're pushing them towards their creator. And in those moments when it's really difficult to make peace and yet we pursue it anyways. Vertical peace. Jesus says we are blessed because we're helping people to be reconciled to their creator God. And it occurred to me as I thought through what true peacemaking was that Jesus is the great peacemaker. He offers the great peace out of which all other peace flows. Jesus himself is the great peacemaker, and he offers the great peace out of which all other peace flows. I'll tell you what I mean, but he's the great peacemaker as he hangs on the cross, reconciling us back to our creator God. He did not have to do that. His relationship with his God was fine. His relationship with his father was fine, but he did it for me and you. So as he hangs on the cross, he is the great peacemaker, creating the great path of reconciliation and providing us with the great and perfect peace. And it makes me wonder, how could we ever seek to be at peace with ourselves if we are not first at peace with our creator? And as I thought about this concept, and I thought about the great peace that Jesus offers, it occurs to me that I should mention this. I'm going to move over here. I'm going to be in this portion of the stage, because this is not the sermon proper, okay? This is not what I'm driving at, but I do want to tell you this. So allow me a parenthetical portion of the sermon, okay? We live in a culture that is increasingly aware of mental health issues, anxiety and depression in particular. And it's not like these issues didn't exist before. We just didn't have words for them or labels for them. We didn't really understand them or know what to do with them. We just called it being sad or being discouraged or worrying too much. I was actually talking with a guy this week who has a daughter in college who's struggling pretty big with anxiety and depression right now. And he mentioned to me that as she's going to counseling, they're doing all the right things, and they're being really diligent about it. And she's been sharing with him some of the stuff that she's been learning in counseling, some of the symptoms and some of the things and some of the stuff that she sees manifesting in her life. And he's realized, oh my goodness, I've walked with that my whole life too. I shouldn't have a name for it. I just thought I was sad. So we live in a culture with an increasing awareness of these things. And I want to be really careful because I would not for a second try to be one of those pastors who says we pray away the depression. If you're worried, you just don't trust God enough. If you're depressed, you're just not experiencing the joy of Jesus and you need to pursue him harder and pray and sing more. Could be part of it. But probably that there's a legitimate chemical imbalance that needs counseling and that needs some drugs maybe even for a short time. And so I do not for a second want to say that we pray the depression and the anxiety away all the time as a first measure. There are some things that require actual treatment. I don't want to be ignorant about that. However, if it's true that God created us, if it's true that he fashioned your soul to crave him, if it's true that we, along with all creation in Romans 8, cry out for the return of the king, that creation groans for the return of God, for him to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, if we claw for Eden and the perfection that he created, if it's true that there's a creator God and that creator God made you and he made you to crave him and to need him and to only find satisfaction through knowing him and being reconciled to him, how could we possibly seek our own peace without being at peace with our creator? It's not the whole measure for mental illness, but it's got to be one of them, doesn't it? It's got to be a part of it, doesn't it? So I would simply say if you were one who struggles in that way, man, we want you to get all the counseling. We want you to get, if you need prescriptions, we want you to do those. We want you to be diligent about those things. But there's not enough therapy or prescriptions in the world to reconcile you to your creator. And there's not enough treatment in the world to give you the peace that he offers first. And even if that's not what you deal with, even if that's not your struggle, I would still ask you, how can you possibly be at peace with yourself and at peace with those around you if your soul is out of harmony with your creator God? So for many of us, the first peace we need to be making is with ourselves. For many of us this morning, and here at the end we're going to take communion, we're going to have an opportunity to do this. If you get nothing else from this but to leave here with the desire to be reconciled with your creator, this morning is a win. If there's sin in your life that's keeping you from having a good relationship with him, fix it. If you're like me and there's a relationship in your life, if there's a grudge that you're holding, if there's forgiveness that you need to extend and it's prohibiting you from having a perfectly peaceful relationship with your God, then fix it. If there's a habit that you're missing, a discipline that you lack, if there's a desire that you don't have, pray to God earnestly that he would speak into those things, that he would give you that desire, that he would give you that discipline, that he would supply you with that habit so that you might pursue him. But let's leave here determined and hopeful that we can be reconciled with our creator. God, let us first make peace with ourselves and in that way be peacemakers. But it does, to me, come full circles to reconciliation with others because how could we possibly be at peace with others if we are not at peace with our creator. If there is someone in your life that you're angry with, if there's someone that's angry with you, if there's someone that you're frustrated with. If there's a relationship that isn't right. No matter what the dynamic is there. They wronged you years ago. You can't let go of it. You wronged them and you've got too much pride to go to them. There's a misunderstanding. Whatever it is that's causing you to lack peace with a brother or a sister, instead of sitting back and expecting them to act, can I just encourage you to seek peace with your creator, God? Can I encourage you, instead of focusing on that broken relationship, can you focus on this one? And as God repairs this one, look what would happen. How could you possibly be at peace with our creator and not desire peace with others? Why do you think God has reminded me of this broken relationship I have every day for 14 days and he will not let it go? There's other things I'd like to think about. There's other stuff. I mean, listen, I've got plenty to be convicted about, but that's the thing right now, and it's not going anywhere. Why do you think that happens? Because my soul longs to be at peace with Creator God, and this horizontal relationship is messing up this vertical one, and so I need to go fix it to be back in right relationship with my creator. Those of you who have broken relationships in your life, someone that you haven't forgiven, someone that you haven't spoken to for years, someone that has something against you or you have it against them, how could you possibly be at peace with your creator and not seek peace with them? Not seek to be reconciled with them. So when we do this, and this is, I think, the really cool part, when we are peacemakers, when we first make peace with our God and ourselves, and then we make peace with others, we seek reconciled relationships, we encourage others to reconcile their relationships. When we make true peace, we are imitators of Jesus. When we make true peace with ourselves and with others, we are imitators of Jesus in the way that he is the great peacemaker, that he made the great path to reconciliation with our creator God. When we do that, we are imitators of Christ as we make peace with ourselves and others. And this is why the blessing is so profound. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the sons of God. They will be called the daughters, the children of God. Because we are imitators of Christ. Of course. Of course when we make peace with our creator God, we acknowledge that we have broken our relationship and that he sent his son to reconcile that relationship and we claim the death on the cross as our reconciliation. Of course we are called sons of God. That's the promise throughout the whole scripture. It means we're believers and he claims us. And of course as we seek to reconcile other people with their God and they come to know God in a profound way and they become believers and they become sons and daughters of God. Of course we are imitating Christ and then called sons of God. Of course that's why this is the blessing. Maybe this is why scripture prioritizes peace so profoundly. Paul writes in Romans, as far as it depends on you, seek peace. As far as it relies on you, make peace. No matter what, Paul ends all of his letters with grace and peace to you. And I've always wondered why Paul made such a big deal out of peace. Because he wasn't talking about this peace. He's talking about this peace. Maybe this is why Jesus prays the high priestly prayer, John chapter 17, his longest recorded prayer. You know what he prays for? He prays for unity. Here and there. Peace. It had never occurred to me before how all of these themes are woven throughout Scripture. This use of the word peace that we see over and over again, God's encouragement through the different authors to pursue peace, to be people of peace, to lead quiet and peaceful lives. Jesus opening up the Beatitudes with blessed by the peacemakers. It had never occurred to me why peace was throughout all scripture. Because peace means this peace. Reconciling with our creator God. And so my prayer for you this morning as we worshiped, this week as I prepared, is that you will seek peace with your creator. You will acknowledge he is the creator God who loves you. Your sin has distorted that relationship and broken it irreconcilably. Accept that Jesus died for you and created a path of reconciliation. Pursue that peace. And in your pursuit of that peace, look around you and help others pursue that peace as well. And in doing so, we are imitators of Jesus. And God will call us his children. Let's pray. Lord, I know there are plenty of us here, me included, who do not feel at peace with you, would you help us? Would you wrestle with us? Would you remind us of this lack of peace and the gentle way that you do it over and over again until we pursue it. Father, if there are people here who have never made peace with you, whose souls have never found rest in you, who have wandered from one thing to the next trying to find the peace and the satisfaction that only you offer. Would this morning be the morning that they rest easy in you and reconcile themselves, claim the reconciliation that you offer, and make peace with their creator, God, finally. Father, for those of us who need to make peace with others, would you give us the courage and the strength to do that? For those of us who need to pursue peace with you through eliminating things that are in our life, would you give us the courage to do that? If we need to pursue peace with you by adding things to our life, would you give us the desire and the discipline to do that? God, this morning, we simply pray for peace with you and with our brothers and sisters around us. Let us be peacemakers. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that after the service. We are in the second part of our series called 27, where we're going to be this summer and next summer going through the 27 books of the New Testament and kind of giving you an overview of each book with the goal of kind of raising the biblical literacy of the church, making us more aware of and comfortable with the Bible, and kind of knowing what each of the books are about. And hopefully this series serves to drive you into God's Word. This week we arrive at the Gospel of Mark. Last week we looked at the Gospel of Matthew. And in the next two weeks we'll look at Luke and John. So we're kind of doing a sub-series here in June of the Gospels. As I was thinking about the Gospel of Mark and the message of Mark, I was reminded of a story that I heard a while back. I think I actually heard Andy Stanley talking about this. Andy Stanley is a pastor out of Atlanta. A lot of you know who he is. If you don't know who he is, you're probably not a very good Christian, but we're happy you're here. But he's a pastor out of Atlanta, really great. I really love a lot of the stuff that he does. And I think I heard him tell this story, but I also went online and it's been written about a couple different times in a couple different ways. But in January of 2013, then President Obama, he had just been reelected, and he invited Andy Stanley to come give a sermon the morning of his inauguration at St. John's Episcopal Church. And in this room was going to be, of course, Barack and Michelle and their family, but cabinet members, his staff members, very high-level people, easily. This is the most powerful room in the world. And Andy Stanley is invited to give a sermon to the most powerful person in the world. And it makes me wonder, when I first heard this story, my immediate thought is, oh my gosh, what are you talking about? What do you preach to that room? What do you preach to someone who's about to take the oath of office for the President of the United States. And I wonder what you would say if you had 20 minutes before the next president takes office, regardless of your political affiliations. I couldn't care less what they are. Just stick with me on this. Don't be the guy that's listening to this part of the sermon being like, I'd tell you what I'd tell him. No, you wouldn't. No, you wouldn't, all right? Shut up. What would you actually want to say to try to be maximum helpful and inspirational to the leader of the free world? It makes me so nervous to think about that and what I would say. But here's what Andy Stanley said, and it's stuck with me ever since. He asked this of President Obama. What do you do when you realize you're the most powerful person in the room? He's saying this to the man who is and will continue to be the most powerful person on the planet. And to a very powerful room, Andy Stanley says, what do you do when you realize you're the most powerful person in the room? He speaks right to where they are, and he answers it with this. You leverage your power for the benefit of the other people in the room. What do you do when you realize you're the most powerful person in this space? You leverage that power and that authority and that influence for the benefit of the people around you, not for yourself. That is a great message to the President of the United States. I don't know what the passage was. I looked hard to try to figure it, to try to find it, to try to find the actual sermon, because all that is, all that you can find if you Google it is a bunch of really conservative Christian online magazines who are upset that he called President Obama the pastor-in-chief during the sermon. Everybody got all worked up about that. So there's tons of articles that he had the audacity to say that, which who cares? And you can't find the actual sermon text. I wish I could find the sermon text because I'm certain, I'm certain that Andy preached this out of the Gospel of Mark. I'm certain that he did. Because I bring up that story. What do you do when you're the most powerful person in the room? You use your power and your influence for the benefit of the people around you. And he looked at President Obama and he said, you are in a very big room. My hope and prayer for you is that you will leverage everything that you have to make it better for the people around you. I wish every government official could listen to this sermon the day they took office. And I'm certain that the sermon came from the Gospel of Mark because that distilled down is the message of the Gospel of Mark, is to be a humble servant. Last week, I told you that Matthew was written to the Jewish community and depicts Jesus as a king. This week in Mark, Mark was written to the Romans to depict Jesus as a servant. Mark was written to a Roman audience and depicts Jesus as a servant. Mark was written by a guy named John Mark. You may recognize him if you're familiar with the book of Acts. After the first missionary journey, Paul parted ways with him and Barnabas, and then eventually John Mark got back in Paul's good graces and was with the disciples during this time. He was also very close with Peter, and his gospel is really a collection of the stories that Peter told John Mark. So this is almost the gospel according to Peter, but John Mark happened to be the one that wrote it down. It's a very urgent gospel. It's a very quick gospel. If you've never read a gospel before, I would tell you to start with Mark. It's very action-packed. It just goes from one thing to the next, and it's a very succinct gospel, and it was the first gospel written. And again, it was written to the Romans because the Romans were very prevalent in that day and age. And it was written to portray Jesus as a servant. And it's interesting that each of the Gospels is written to a different audience. Matthew is written to the Jews, Mark to the Romans, Luke to the Greeks, and John to the whole world. And in each case, Jesus is depicted in such a way that it's very clear that the author's intent is to kind of arrest your attention and make you look at this Jesus figure. So when you're a Jewish person and Jesus is depicted as the king, that's what you expect him to be. So you're listening, you're all in. When you're a Greek person and Jesus is depicted as a man, as a human, you're all wrapped up in humanity and humanity being the apex of creation. And so you're paying attention. When you're reading the Gospel of John and it presents this man as a god, you're leaning in. That's interesting to me. And so to a Roman person, getting a message about this all-powerful creator god who takes on human form and is the most powerful person, literally, who has ever lived, it would arrest your attention to note that he was a servant. Now, why is it so powerful to depict Jesus as a servant to the Roman audience? Well, to a Roman, the whole point of having power was not to have to serve anyone else. To the Roman mind, the whole point of accumulating wealth and influence and power and authority was to put yourself in a situation where you didn't have to serve anyone else. You had someone serving you. To grow were very comfortable with servanthood. They did not have the sensibilities that we had. If you were a rich person, you had some servants. How you treated them was up to you. And to be a servant was to be the lowest of the low. It was better to be poor and have your own hut to live in, but no one telling you what to do every day than it was to be the servant in the home of a rich person where you just lived at their beck and call. Or beck and call, I don't know. So to the Roman mind, they would never ever have expected Jesus to be depicted as a servant because that was the lowest of the low. And to them, as you accumulated power and authority, you accumulated servants. The whole reason for having more power was so that you had to do less things for yourself. And you know, even though in the United States, we certainly don't have a servant or slavery culture, but we do think of authority and power in a lot of the same ways. We do think that to grow in authority and to grow in power and influence means that you have more people around you to do more things for you. We start to develop this idea that certain tasks are beneath us. I don't have to do that anymore. Remember, I saw one of the guys on Shark Tank, one of the sharks in the NBC hit show, Shark Tank. If you haven't heard of it, I'm not going to explain it to you. But they're billionaires, and one of them makes a comment that he doesn't wear a watch. And they were like, why don't you wear a watch? He goes, I don't need to. Whenever I get somewhere, I'm on time. And you're like, oh, oh, you're a jerk. As people accrue power and authority and influence in certain circles, we just assume that there's going to start to be some tasks that are beneath them, and there's going to be rights and privileges that come with their influence and power. One of my favorite stories that came out of the Donald Trump presidency, don't worry, I'm not going to say anything. Just know that whenever, if you're a pastor and you say any president's name at all, the whole room goes. This is going to be fine. I've read biographies, different accounts. This is, this is, this is, this is actually, this is a verifiable fact that in the Oval Office, I believe underneath the Resolute Desk, the Resolute Desk is the name of the President's Desk. If you didn't know that, I will not belittle you for not knowing things about the Bible here, but come on, that's just basic U.S. stuff. You got to know what the Resolute Desk is. There's a button under the Resolute Desk, and President Trump would delight in having guests into the Oval Office, and he'd say, hey, watch this, and he would press the button, and a few minutes later, a waiter would come in with ice-cold Diet Cokes, and he would love that this button would usher in Diet Cokes, right? And I think that's delightful. And I've heard, I've read somewhere, I don't know if this is true, I just want to believe it to be true, that Joe Biden kept that, President Biden kept that button in place, and for him, they bring in ice cream sundaes. Isn't that fun? I love it. Grandpa Joe bringing in ice cream sundaes for the kids. This is great. Now, what we would expect and what the Romans would expect is for Jesus to be the one hitting the button. And what Mark says is, no, he's the one bringing the Cokes. He's the one in the kitchen waiting for the call, cracking it open and pouring it over ice and bringing as many as is needed, and he's doing it with a smile on his face. That's who Jesus was, and that's how he's depicted. And to a Roman mind that would expect someone in authority to just continue to be in authority the way that everyone around them is in authority. It's pretty groundbreaking to think that Jesus is the one bringing the cokes, not hitting the button. And to the American mind, I think it does the same thing. Because if we're being honest, we don't think of people in authority as typically as the people bringing the Coke. We think of them as the ones that are hitting the button. And so I think if I had to summarize the book of Mark, if there was a summary verse, what is Mark about? What does Mark want us to know? What is he trying to communicate, not just to the Roman audience, but to us and to all people for all time? In Mark's words, what's he trying to communicate? Well, we actually have that in Mark chapter 10, and it's Jesus's words. On the screen, we're going to start in verse 43, but I'm going to start reading from verse 42. Verse 42 says, That is the summary verse, the summary passage of Mark. That whoever wants to be greatest among you must be least. Whoever wants to be first must be last. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve. That's the message of Mark. And I love how Jesus begins this discourse. Do not be like the Gentiles who lord their authority over one another. Have you ever had an experience with someone who got a scintilla of authority and it just went straight to their head and they were the most annoying humans on the planet? I have. His name was Philip, and I'm going to tell you his story. Normally, I do not use names to disparage people. I just say a guy that I know, but this time, Philip has it coming. This is years ago, 24, 25, I'm working for my dad, and my dad's an accountant. In the 70s, he got into this weird niche of accounting where he audits housing authorities. He travels around the country, and that's what he does. And so I'm working for my my dad and I'm on a trip, I think Dallas-Fort Worth, I'm working with Phillip. Phillip is my age. This is his first time on a business trip being the auditor in charge. It's on the work papers. It says auditor in charge, Phillip. I won't say his last name. That's not fair. Then you'll Google him or something. But he's listed as the auditor in charge. It's a big deal. And it's just me and him traveling. He's the boss. And I was very clear. I knew that I had that job because of who my dad was. He had a CPA. As Philip did. He passed the test. I had theology classes. I had nothing. Dude, you're the boss. Whatever you need me to do, I'll do. And so there's this one test that I would run in the test and control series, and I had to schedule out an account. This particular account was about $12 million. And I had to just basically retrace it through the year and make it zero out. And I don't even know what that means now. I don't know how to explain to you. I could get Greg as an accountant, he could come up here and he could kind of translate for you guys. I don't know what that means. I just know that I needed to zero it out. I needed to make sure that everything they were inputting into it had a reliable source and that it all matched up and that they weren't cooking the books, which I'm the guy to make sure no one's getting away with anything financially. I sure do know. Gosh. So anyways, I've got to schedule this thing out. And I'm scheduling it out, and I get the difference down to less than $100. And I'm going back through. It's one of those, I've got to stack. I've got this book, that thing that was printed out on the dot matrix with the green and white paper, and I'm flipping through, and I'm highlighting, and I'm looking, and I got it down to $100, about $100. And once you got the difference down to a small enough amount, you could just put on the cover page to make it all zero out, you could just put that amount there and you could write next to it, immaterial difference, which is accounting speak for, we didn't figure this out, but we're pretty sure it's fine. That's what that means. Like it's,, this doesn't matter. It's a, it's a hundred dollars and a 12 million dollar account. No fraud here, all right? So, I've been working on this thing for six or seven hours. I get it down to a hundred bucks. I can't get it down any lower than that, and I go to Phillip. I say, hey, Phillip, I've got this thing down to about a hundred bucks. Can I just, you cool if I write this off as an immaterial difference? And Philip goes, I just really want to do this one right, Nate. So I need you to go find me that $100. And I'm like, okay. All right. So I go back to the office. I'm like, I got to find this. I got to find the new sheriff in town. It's $100. Okay, here we go. So I'm flipping back to the thing again. I'm looking for it again. I find some stuff. I'm looking and I've got it down. I've got it down to four cents. Got it down to four cents. I know. And I'm just, I've got to find this four cents. I don't even care about Philip anymore. I've got to find this four cents, right? We go to dinner. We're done. I come back the next morning. I spend all morning looking, thumbing through this thing for the four cents. I had it memorized, right? I can't find it. I have to admit defeat. And I'm like, gosh, I don't want to go into Philip's office, but I got to go into Philip's office. I'm like, hey dude, I got it down to four cents. I'm going to write that off as immaterial difference if that's all right. And Philip looks me in the eye and he says, I'm going to need you to find me that four cents. I have never been closer to jumping across a desk and strangling someone out than I was in that moment. I was livid. So I go back to the office and I'm like, I can't find the four cents. Let me see what I can do here. So I grabbed the previous year's work papers. So because every job you go on, you bring the work papers from the previous year in case you need to reference something, see what we did last year, or in this case, discover that your boss is a jerk. So I found the folder. I opened it up. I go to the test that I'm working on. And guess who did that test last year? Philip did. And do you know what he wrote off as an immaterial difference? $208. I'll never forget that number. It was $208 to my four cents, and I was so mad. And I went back to him, and I told him, you know, last year you wrote off $208 as an immaterial difference. I think four cents in a $12 million account seems pretty reasonable. And he said, I need you to find me the four cents. So I went back to the office, and I wrote it off as immaterial difference, and I never looked back. I tried to play nice to you, Phillip, but guess what? My dad's the boss, and I know that he's going to take my side on this, so I'm not even that worried about it. I didn't want to do this to you, but I had to. Don't be like Philip. Gentiles, when they get an ounce of authority lorded over you, and they want to make sure that they're afforded the respect and the rights and privileges that come with leadership, you're going to address me as this, as doctor or pastor or whatever, Mr. or Mrs., if they're C-suite. You're going to address me as this. You're going to talk to me like this. You're going to defer to me. And sometimes when people get in power, they're nice until you start acting like you're equals. Then they got to make sure that you know how things balance out. That's what Gentiles do. They lord their authority over people. And worse than being annoying, when Christians do this, we push people away from God. If you're a leader in any capacity, small to large, and you allow that authority and that position of power and that influence to go to your head, and part of what you try to do with that influence is maintain your influence, and you lord it over people, you're actually pushing people away from Jesus. You're actually harming, you're not just harming yourself and harming your relationship with that person, you are harming the very kingdom of Jesus if you hold your leadership and authority in ways that the Gentiles do. If you hold it for yourself rather than for others. And what's actually interesting among many things that Andy Stanley said to Barack Obama that day is he came back at the end and he said, what do you do when you realize you're the most powerful person in the room? Will you leverage that for the benefit of the people around you? And then he says, and actually, to do anything less than this is to think that you're greater than Christ himself. To do anything less than serve is to act as though you're greater than Christ. Because the greatest one of all time came to serve and to be last. So when we don't do that, we are declaring to ourselves in our tiny little universes that we are better than Jesus. And in church, and this is the converse of this, when we do serve, when we do carry leadership, when we do carry authority like Jesus did, when we do that, we can actually pull people into Jesus by being Christ-like. We talk a lot in church about being Christ-like, about being more like Jesus. When the word sanctification comes up, sanctification is this time period and process from the point in which we become saved. Our salvation process starts to when it is sealed and done when we go to heaven. That intermittent time when we are in God's hand but we are not yet perfected in heaven is sanctification. And I always describe sanctification as becoming the process through which we become more like Christ in character. That's what sanctification is. So in the Christian journey, in the Christian life, we are all of us who would call ourselves Christians, seeking to be more like Christ. And so what Mark says is, if you want to be more like Jesus, serve others more. If you want to be more like Jesus, then anytime you have any influence anywhere at all, use it for the benefit of the people around you rather than yourself. And when you do that, it will draw people into Christ. That's the message of Mark. That when we don't carry our authority and our influence like Jesus does, we push people away. And when we do carry it like Jesus did, we draw people into him with Christ-like character. Now, I know that there are some of you who may be thinking to yourself, like, dude, I'm not in charge of anything, okay? I don't lead anybody. I don't have circles of influence. I don't do that. I'm not in charge of anyone anywhere. I get that. We move into seasons where we have greater and less influence. But I would submit to you that we all do at some point in our life and at some point in our week. Maybe you're a stay-at-home mom. You're in charge of those kids. Might not feel that way all the time. Might feel like they're in charge of you, but you're in charge of those kids. How are you going to exert your authority over them? Are we going to be the kind of parent that makes sure that our kids know who the boss is at every moment of every day? Are we going to be the kind of parent that sits lazily on the couch and the purpose of our kids is to go get us something from the fridge and bring it to us rather than engaging with them? How are we going to use the influence and the authority that we have in our homes? If we go to school and we volunteer, we're in charge of those kids for at least for a small amount of time. If you're over there, you're in charge for a small amount of time. If you're working at Summer Extreme this week, you're in charge for a small amount of time. We all move into places where we are the one who is in authority, where we are the one who has the most influence, where our voice is the heaviest one in the room. And when we are, how are we going to treat it? How are we going to usher a little bit of Jesus into their day, into that moment? Even when we go sit down at a restaurant, we are in authority over our server. What can we do in that meal to serve them, to show them a little bit of Jesus, to make their day a little bit better, to leave a good imprint on them for that day? How can we carry the authority that we have, even in that small situation, to bring them closer to Jesus and not push them further away? We can do this in the drive-through, in a position of authority. We are in authority. The people helping us are the people who are working for us. We can show them a little bit of Jesus just in that moment to draw them closer into our Savior. And if you don't think I'm right, go through a drive-through with my wife, Jen. Because when we go through a drive-through together, this is, I'm not making this up. When we go through a drive-ru together, if we get the food and the drinks and it's done, like we've reached the end of this exchange, and I've not been adequately kind to the people that we've been talking to, she will lean across me and say very loudly, thank you so much, you're doing great, have a nice day. And then look at me. Now, I didn't know there was such a thing as vindictive kindness, but she has figured it out. And she'll sprinkle a little Jesus on both of us on the way. A little bit on them, make their day better. A little bit on me, make my day worse, but I need to get better. I think we need to realize when we have opportunities to act in unexpected ways, to show people the kindness that exudes from our Savior, be those conduits of grace that we talk about being around here. But to more of you, not maybe more of you, but to a big portion of you, you do have some authority. You do have people who work for you. Maybe you're a team lead. Maybe you just got a new job and there's new people that are listening to you now and you've got to figure this out. Maybe you've got two employees. Maybe you've got 200 or 2,000. I know that we do have a lot of leaders in this church. And to those of you who do have people working for you, those of you that do have the opportunity to influence. Now here's what I would say about you, the ones that I know who do carry influence here. I know that you know this already. And I know that it means a lot to you to try to be the type of leader that Jesus was. And I know that serving your staff and serving the people around you matters a lot. But let this morning be an encouragement and a reminder for you to dive back into that. If you're here this morning and you do lead somewhere, you're on a board, you run a classroom, you have employees. You run a business. You oversee whatever. And you have been using that authority to serve yourself and to help yourself climb? I get it. That's how the world handles authority. But in your efforts to do that, I just want you to know as a Christian, you're actually pushing people away from you and from your Savior. But Jesus shows us that there is a way to lead and to have influence and authority that will be so radical that it would draw people into him. And for those of you who do lead, I wonder what could be better one day at your retirement party or after you're gone and there's a group of your employees and coworkers sitting around and they're talking about what it was like to work for you, what it was like to be led for you. What if the ones who believe in Jesus said about you, because that person was in my life, I'm closer to Jesus than I would have ever been? What if what they said about you after you retired, and no one's around, and they're not saying this to blow smoke up your dress, they're saying this because they mean it, because God put that person in my life, I'm closer to him than I think I ever would be because I got to watch them serve God faithfully for years. What a privilege it was to work under them because of what it showed me about who their Jesus was. What if the people who don't know Jesus but work for you would say about you, after seeing you at your best and your worst, after watching how you leverage your influence and authority, what if they were to say about you, you know what, I don't share the faith that they do, but they're one of the ones that I believe when they say it. I don't know that I believe like they do, but I know that they believed. I know that they love their Jesus. They were the real deal. We all, in different times and different ways, move into and out of positions of influence. The message of Mark is that when you find yourself there, remember, you can leverage your authority to get people to serve you and do what you want. But that's not what Jesus did. And that's not what he told you to do. And I am convinced that the best thing possible that anybody could say about you after working with you or for you or being under your leadership for any amount of time is, I am closer to Jesus because God put that person in my life. And we get them there by serving them. That's why Jesus says, whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me. So whether we lead in small ways at the drive-through or in big ways, leading in life. We should carry that leadership and that influence and that authority like Jesus did and try to use it to serve others. Now a couple practical things on how we do that and I'll wrap up. Two things. How can we begin to be people who serve like Jesus served? Well I think one of the things we can do is that we can begin to equate serving with being Christ-like, not being belittled. We can begin to equate serving with being like Christ, not being belittled. This week, I reached out to an old friend of mine who is a pastor about an hour and a half away from here. And he and I worked at summer camp together years ago and have loosely kept in touch. And I emailed him and I just said, hey, man, I'm so sorry that it's taken me six years of living this close to you to try to get together, but I'd love to get together and just talk as pastors and buy you lunch sometime. Let me know if that's going to be possible. And he emailed me back, and he said, is Ruth's Chris or nothing for me, which is pretty typical of this guy. It's funny. And then he says, I'll have to get back with you on when. If you don't hear from me, feel free to email me again. And I thought, nope. If you don't email me, we will never speak in our whole lives. Because what did he do? He belittled me. Made me a secretary. I'm not your secretary. But as I was preparing the sermon, and I wrote that point, well, looks like I'll be emailing John. Because it's an opportunity to be Christ-like, not to be belittled. When we get asked to do something that we feel is beneath us, jump at it. Do it. It's an opportunity to be Christ-like, not be belittled. The second thing we can do is we can pray this prayer of confession and repentance. And as we consider the message of the gospel of Mark, and we consider this idea that to be first we must be last, to be great we must be least. I would encourage us all to pray this prayer together as I pray here in a second, but the prayer is simply this. Father, show me where I'm leveraging my power to be served rather than to serve. Whatever power and influence you've given me, however loud my voice is in a particular room, would you please show me where I'm using that influence and that authority for myself and not for the people that are around me? And in praying that prayer, hopefully he will open our eyes to greater opportunities of service and servanthood so that we can be like Christ and serve people towards the kingdom of God. Let's pray. Father, we just thank you for who you are and for how you love us. We know that your son could have showed up and just lorded it over us, and he would have had every right to do it, to just ascend to the throne, to be the most important and most powerful person in the room. He could have done that, but he came meek and mild, and he came as a servant. God, as you move us into positions of authority and influence, would you remind us of the way that your son came and that your son led and that your son served so that we might do the same? Would you, Father, in your goodness, keep us humble, make us eager to serve, give us a heart that sees the needs of others and meets them where they are, and deflate our egos where they're too big and where they're making it hard for us to serve like we need to. Thank you for your son. Thank you for the cross. Thank you for how you've loved us. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that after the service. We are in the second part of our series called 27, where we're going to be this summer and next summer going through the 27 books of the New Testament and kind of giving you an overview of each book with the goal of kind of raising the biblical literacy of the church, making us more aware of and comfortable with the Bible, and kind of knowing what each of the books are about. And hopefully this series serves to drive you into God's Word. This week we arrive at the Gospel of Mark. Last week we looked at the Gospel of Matthew. And in the next two weeks we'll look at Luke and John. So we're kind of doing a sub-series here in June of the Gospels. As I was thinking about the Gospel of Mark and the message of Mark, I was reminded of a story that I heard a while back. I think I actually heard Andy Stanley talking about this. Andy Stanley is a pastor out of Atlanta. A lot of you know who he is. If you don't know who he is, you're probably not a very good Christian, but we're happy you're here. But he's a pastor out of Atlanta, really great. I really love a lot of the stuff that he does. And I think I heard him tell this story, but I also went online and it's been written about a couple different times in a couple different ways. But in January of 2013, then President Obama, he had just been reelected, and he invited Andy Stanley to come give a sermon the morning of his inauguration at St. John's Episcopal Church. And in this room was going to be, of course, Barack and Michelle and their family, but cabinet members, his staff members, very high-level people, easily. This is the most powerful room in the world. And Andy Stanley is invited to give a sermon to the most powerful person in the world. And it makes me wonder, when I first heard this story, my immediate thought is, oh my gosh, what are you talking about? What do you preach to that room? What do you preach to someone who's about to take the oath of office for the President of the United States. And I wonder what you would say if you had 20 minutes before the next president takes office, regardless of your political affiliations. I couldn't care less what they are. Just stick with me on this. Don't be the guy that's listening to this part of the sermon being like, I'd tell you what I'd tell him. No, you wouldn't. No, you wouldn't, all right? Shut up. What would you actually want to say to try to be maximum helpful and inspirational to the leader of the free world? It makes me so nervous to think about that and what I would say. But here's what Andy Stanley said, and it's stuck with me ever since. He asked this of President Obama. What do you do when you realize you're the most powerful person in the room? He's saying this to the man who is and will continue to be the most powerful person on the planet. And to a very powerful room, Andy Stanley says, what do you do when you realize you're the most powerful person in the room? He speaks right to where they are, and he answers it with this. You leverage your power for the benefit of the other people in the room. What do you do when you realize you're the most powerful person in this space? You leverage that power and that authority and that influence for the benefit of the people around you, not for yourself. That is a great message to the President of the United States. I don't know what the passage was. I looked hard to try to figure it, to try to find it, to try to find the actual sermon, because all that is, all that you can find if you Google it is a bunch of really conservative Christian online magazines who are upset that he called President Obama the pastor-in-chief during the sermon. Everybody got all worked up about that. So there's tons of articles that he had the audacity to say that, which who cares? And you can't find the actual sermon text. I wish I could find the sermon text because I'm certain, I'm certain that Andy preached this out of the Gospel of Mark. I'm certain that he did. Because I bring up that story. What do you do when you're the most powerful person in the room? You use your power and your influence for the benefit of the people around you. And he looked at President Obama and he said, you are in a very big room. My hope and prayer for you is that you will leverage everything that you have to make it better for the people around you. I wish every government official could listen to this sermon the day they took office. And I'm certain that the sermon came from the Gospel of Mark because that distilled down is the message of the Gospel of Mark, is to be a humble servant. Last week, I told you that Matthew was written to the Jewish community and depicts Jesus as a king. This week in Mark, Mark was written to the Romans to depict Jesus as a servant. Mark was written to a Roman audience and depicts Jesus as a servant. Mark was written by a guy named John Mark. You may recognize him if you're familiar with the book of Acts. After the first missionary journey, Paul parted ways with him and Barnabas, and then eventually John Mark got back in Paul's good graces and was with the disciples during this time. He was also very close with Peter, and his gospel is really a collection of the stories that Peter told John Mark. So this is almost the gospel according to Peter, but John Mark happened to be the one that wrote it down. It's a very urgent gospel. It's a very quick gospel. If you've never read a gospel before, I would tell you to start with Mark. It's very action-packed. It just goes from one thing to the next, and it's a very succinct gospel, and it was the first gospel written. And again, it was written to the Romans because the Romans were very prevalent in that day and age. And it was written to portray Jesus as a servant. And it's interesting that each of the Gospels is written to a different audience. Matthew is written to the Jews, Mark to the Romans, Luke to the Greeks, and John to the whole world. And in each case, Jesus is depicted in such a way that it's very clear that the author's intent is to kind of arrest your attention and make you look at this Jesus figure. So when you're a Jewish person and Jesus is depicted as the king, that's what you expect him to be. So you're listening, you're all in. When you're a Greek person and Jesus is depicted as a man, as a human, you're all wrapped up in humanity and humanity being the apex of creation. And so you're paying attention. When you're reading the Gospel of John and it presents this man as a god, you're leaning in. That's interesting to me. And so to a Roman person, getting a message about this all-powerful creator god who takes on human form and is the most powerful person, literally, who has ever lived, it would arrest your attention to note that he was a servant. Now, why is it so powerful to depict Jesus as a servant to the Roman audience? Well, to a Roman, the whole point of having power was not to have to serve anyone else. To the Roman mind, the whole point of accumulating wealth and influence and power and authority was to put yourself in a situation where you didn't have to serve anyone else. You had someone serving you. To grow were very comfortable with servanthood. They did not have the sensibilities that we had. If you were a rich person, you had some servants. How you treated them was up to you. And to be a servant was to be the lowest of the low. It was better to be poor and have your own hut to live in, but no one telling you what to do every day than it was to be the servant in the home of a rich person where you just lived at their beck and call. Or beck and call, I don't know. So to the Roman mind, they would never ever have expected Jesus to be depicted as a servant because that was the lowest of the low. And to them, as you accumulated power and authority, you accumulated servants. The whole reason for having more power was so that you had to do less things for yourself. And you know, even though in the United States, we certainly don't have a servant or slavery culture, but we do think of authority and power in a lot of the same ways. We do think that to grow in authority and to grow in power and influence means that you have more people around you to do more things for you. We start to develop this idea that certain tasks are beneath us. I don't have to do that anymore. Remember, I saw one of the guys on Shark Tank, one of the sharks in the NBC hit show, Shark Tank. If you haven't heard of it, I'm not going to explain it to you. But they're billionaires, and one of them makes a comment that he doesn't wear a watch. And they were like, why don't you wear a watch? He goes, I don't need to. Whenever I get somewhere, I'm on time. And you're like, oh, oh, you're a jerk. As people accrue power and authority and influence in certain circles, we just assume that there's going to start to be some tasks that are beneath them, and there's going to be rights and privileges that come with their influence and power. One of my favorite stories that came out of the Donald Trump presidency, don't worry, I'm not going to say anything. Just know that whenever, if you're a pastor and you say any president's name at all, the whole room goes. This is going to be fine. I've read biographies, different accounts. This is, this is, this is, this is actually, this is a verifiable fact that in the Oval Office, I believe underneath the Resolute Desk, the Resolute Desk is the name of the President's Desk. If you didn't know that, I will not belittle you for not knowing things about the Bible here, but come on, that's just basic U.S. stuff. You got to know what the Resolute Desk is. There's a button under the Resolute Desk, and President Trump would delight in having guests into the Oval Office, and he'd say, hey, watch this, and he would press the button, and a few minutes later, a waiter would come in with ice-cold Diet Cokes, and he would love that this button would usher in Diet Cokes, right? And I think that's delightful. And I've heard, I've read somewhere, I don't know if this is true, I just want to believe it to be true, that Joe Biden kept that, President Biden kept that button in place, and for him, they bring in ice cream sundaes. Isn't that fun? I love it. Grandpa Joe bringing in ice cream sundaes for the kids. This is great. Now, what we would expect and what the Romans would expect is for Jesus to be the one hitting the button. And what Mark says is, no, he's the one bringing the Cokes. He's the one in the kitchen waiting for the call, cracking it open and pouring it over ice and bringing as many as is needed, and he's doing it with a smile on his face. That's who Jesus was, and that's how he's depicted. And to a Roman mind that would expect someone in authority to just continue to be in authority the way that everyone around them is in authority. It's pretty groundbreaking to think that Jesus is the one bringing the cokes, not hitting the button. And to the American mind, I think it does the same thing. Because if we're being honest, we don't think of people in authority as typically as the people bringing the Coke. We think of them as the ones that are hitting the button. And so I think if I had to summarize the book of Mark, if there was a summary verse, what is Mark about? What does Mark want us to know? What is he trying to communicate, not just to the Roman audience, but to us and to all people for all time? In Mark's words, what's he trying to communicate? Well, we actually have that in Mark chapter 10, and it's Jesus's words. On the screen, we're going to start in verse 43, but I'm going to start reading from verse 42. Verse 42 says, That is the summary verse, the summary passage of Mark. That whoever wants to be greatest among you must be least. Whoever wants to be first must be last. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve. That's the message of Mark. And I love how Jesus begins this discourse. Do not be like the Gentiles who lord their authority over one another. Have you ever had an experience with someone who got a scintilla of authority and it just went straight to their head and they were the most annoying humans on the planet? I have. His name was Philip, and I'm going to tell you his story. Normally, I do not use names to disparage people. I just say a guy that I know, but this time, Philip has it coming. This is years ago, 24, 25, I'm working for my dad, and my dad's an accountant. In the 70s, he got into this weird niche of accounting where he audits housing authorities. He travels around the country, and that's what he does. And so I'm working for my my dad and I'm on a trip, I think Dallas-Fort Worth, I'm working with Phillip. Phillip is my age. This is his first time on a business trip being the auditor in charge. It's on the work papers. It says auditor in charge, Phillip. I won't say his last name. That's not fair. Then you'll Google him or something. But he's listed as the auditor in charge. It's a big deal. And it's just me and him traveling. He's the boss. And I was very clear. I knew that I had that job because of who my dad was. He had a CPA. As Philip did. He passed the test. I had theology classes. I had nothing. Dude, you're the boss. Whatever you need me to do, I'll do. And so there's this one test that I would run in the test and control series, and I had to schedule out an account. This particular account was about $12 million. And I had to just basically retrace it through the year and make it zero out. And I don't even know what that means now. I don't know how to explain to you. I could get Greg as an accountant, he could come up here and he could kind of translate for you guys. I don't know what that means. I just know that I needed to zero it out. I needed to make sure that everything they were inputting into it had a reliable source and that it all matched up and that they weren't cooking the books, which I'm the guy to make sure no one's getting away with anything financially. I sure do know. Gosh. So anyways, I've got to schedule this thing out. And I'm scheduling it out, and I get the difference down to less than $100. And I'm going back through. It's one of those, I've got to stack. I've got this book, that thing that was printed out on the dot matrix with the green and white paper, and I'm flipping through, and I'm highlighting, and I'm looking, and I got it down to $100, about $100. And once you got the difference down to a small enough amount, you could just put on the cover page to make it all zero out, you could just put that amount there and you could write next to it, immaterial difference, which is accounting speak for, we didn't figure this out, but we're pretty sure it's fine. That's what that means. Like it's,, this doesn't matter. It's a, it's a hundred dollars and a 12 million dollar account. No fraud here, all right? So, I've been working on this thing for six or seven hours. I get it down to a hundred bucks. I can't get it down any lower than that, and I go to Phillip. I say, hey, Phillip, I've got this thing down to about a hundred bucks. Can I just, you cool if I write this off as an immaterial difference? And Philip goes, I just really want to do this one right, Nate. So I need you to go find me that $100. And I'm like, okay. All right. So I go back to the office. I'm like, I got to find this. I got to find the new sheriff in town. It's $100. Okay, here we go. So I'm flipping back to the thing again. I'm looking for it again. I find some stuff. I'm looking and I've got it down. I've got it down to four cents. Got it down to four cents. I know. And I'm just, I've got to find this four cents. I don't even care about Philip anymore. I've got to find this four cents, right? We go to dinner. We're done. I come back the next morning. I spend all morning looking, thumbing through this thing for the four cents. I had it memorized, right? I can't find it. I have to admit defeat. And I'm like, gosh, I don't want to go into Philip's office, but I got to go into Philip's office. I'm like, hey dude, I got it down to four cents. I'm going to write that off as immaterial difference if that's all right. And Philip looks me in the eye and he says, I'm going to need you to find me that four cents. I have never been closer to jumping across a desk and strangling someone out than I was in that moment. I was livid. So I go back to the office and I'm like, I can't find the four cents. Let me see what I can do here. So I grabbed the previous year's work papers. So because every job you go on, you bring the work papers from the previous year in case you need to reference something, see what we did last year, or in this case, discover that your boss is a jerk. So I found the folder. I opened it up. I go to the test that I'm working on. And guess who did that test last year? Philip did. And do you know what he wrote off as an immaterial difference? $208. I'll never forget that number. It was $208 to my four cents, and I was so mad. And I went back to him, and I told him, you know, last year you wrote off $208 as an immaterial difference. I think four cents in a $12 million account seems pretty reasonable. And he said, I need you to find me the four cents. So I went back to the office, and I wrote it off as immaterial difference, and I never looked back. I tried to play nice to you, Phillip, but guess what? My dad's the boss, and I know that he's going to take my side on this, so I'm not even that worried about it. I didn't want to do this to you, but I had to. Don't be like Philip. Gentiles, when they get an ounce of authority lorded over you, and they want to make sure that they're afforded the respect and the rights and privileges that come with leadership, you're going to address me as this, as doctor or pastor or whatever, Mr. or Mrs., if they're C-suite. You're going to address me as this. You're going to talk to me like this. You're going to defer to me. And sometimes when people get in power, they're nice until you start acting like you're equals. Then they got to make sure that you know how things balance out. That's what Gentiles do. They lord their authority over people. And worse than being annoying, when Christians do this, we push people away from God. If you're a leader in any capacity, small to large, and you allow that authority and that position of power and that influence to go to your head, and part of what you try to do with that influence is maintain your influence, and you lord it over people, you're actually pushing people away from Jesus. You're actually harming, you're not just harming yourself and harming your relationship with that person, you are harming the very kingdom of Jesus if you hold your leadership and authority in ways that the Gentiles do. If you hold it for yourself rather than for others. And what's actually interesting among many things that Andy Stanley said to Barack Obama that day is he came back at the end and he said, what do you do when you realize you're the most powerful person in the room? Will you leverage that for the benefit of the people around you? And then he says, and actually, to do anything less than this is to think that you're greater than Christ himself. To do anything less than serve is to act as though you're greater than Christ. Because the greatest one of all time came to serve and to be last. So when we don't do that, we are declaring to ourselves in our tiny little universes that we are better than Jesus. And in church, and this is the converse of this, when we do serve, when we do carry leadership, when we do carry authority like Jesus did, when we do that, we can actually pull people into Jesus by being Christ-like. We talk a lot in church about being Christ-like, about being more like Jesus. When the word sanctification comes up, sanctification is this time period and process from the point in which we become saved. Our salvation process starts to when it is sealed and done when we go to heaven. That intermittent time when we are in God's hand but we are not yet perfected in heaven is sanctification. And I always describe sanctification as becoming the process through which we become more like Christ in character. That's what sanctification is. So in the Christian journey, in the Christian life, we are all of us who would call ourselves Christians, seeking to be more like Christ. And so what Mark says is, if you want to be more like Jesus, serve others more. If you want to be more like Jesus, then anytime you have any influence anywhere at all, use it for the benefit of the people around you rather than yourself. And when you do that, it will draw people into Christ. That's the message of Mark. That when we don't carry our authority and our influence like Jesus does, we push people away. And when we do carry it like Jesus did, we draw people into him with Christ-like character. Now, I know that there are some of you who may be thinking to yourself, like, dude, I'm not in charge of anything, okay? I don't lead anybody. I don't have circles of influence. I don't do that. I'm not in charge of anyone anywhere. I get that. We move into seasons where we have greater and less influence. But I would submit to you that we all do at some point in our life and at some point in our week. Maybe you're a stay-at-home mom. You're in charge of those kids. Might not feel that way all the time. Might feel like they're in charge of you, but you're in charge of those kids. How are you going to exert your authority over them? Are we going to be the kind of parent that makes sure that our kids know who the boss is at every moment of every day? Are we going to be the kind of parent that sits lazily on the couch and the purpose of our kids is to go get us something from the fridge and bring it to us rather than engaging with them? How are we going to use the influence and the authority that we have in our homes? If we go to school and we volunteer, we're in charge of those kids for at least for a small amount of time. If you're over there, you're in charge for a small amount of time. If you're working at Summer Extreme this week, you're in charge for a small amount of time. We all move into places where we are the one who is in authority, where we are the one who has the most influence, where our voice is the heaviest one in the room. And when we are, how are we going to treat it? How are we going to usher a little bit of Jesus into their day, into that moment? Even when we go sit down at a restaurant, we are in authority over our server. What can we do in that meal to serve them, to show them a little bit of Jesus, to make their day a little bit better, to leave a good imprint on them for that day? How can we carry the authority that we have, even in that small situation, to bring them closer to Jesus and not push them further away? We can do this in the drive-through, in a position of authority. We are in authority. The people helping us are the people who are working for us. We can show them a little bit of Jesus just in that moment to draw them closer into our Savior. And if you don't think I'm right, go through a drive-through with my wife, Jen. Because when we go through a drive-through together, this is, I'm not making this up. When we go through a drive-ru together, if we get the food and the drinks and it's done, like we've reached the end of this exchange, and I've not been adequately kind to the people that we've been talking to, she will lean across me and say very loudly, thank you so much, you're doing great, have a nice day. And then look at me. Now, I didn't know there was such a thing as vindictive kindness, but she has figured it out. And she'll sprinkle a little Jesus on both of us on the way. A little bit on them, make their day better. A little bit on me, make my day worse, but I need to get better. I think we need to realize when we have opportunities to act in unexpected ways, to show people the kindness that exudes from our Savior, be those conduits of grace that we talk about being around here. But to more of you, not maybe more of you, but to a big portion of you, you do have some authority. You do have people who work for you. Maybe you're a team lead. Maybe you just got a new job and there's new people that are listening to you now and you've got to figure this out. Maybe you've got two employees. Maybe you've got 200 or 2,000. I know that we do have a lot of leaders in this church. And to those of you who do have people working for you, those of you that do have the opportunity to influence. Now here's what I would say about you, the ones that I know who do carry influence here. I know that you know this already. And I know that it means a lot to you to try to be the type of leader that Jesus was. And I know that serving your staff and serving the people around you matters a lot. But let this morning be an encouragement and a reminder for you to dive back into that. If you're here this morning and you do lead somewhere, you're on a board, you run a classroom, you have employees. You run a business. You oversee whatever. And you have been using that authority to serve yourself and to help yourself climb? I get it. That's how the world handles authority. But in your efforts to do that, I just want you to know as a Christian, you're actually pushing people away from you and from your Savior. But Jesus shows us that there is a way to lead and to have influence and authority that will be so radical that it would draw people into him. And for those of you who do lead, I wonder what could be better one day at your retirement party or after you're gone and there's a group of your employees and coworkers sitting around and they're talking about what it was like to work for you, what it was like to be led for you. What if the ones who believe in Jesus said about you, because that person was in my life, I'm closer to Jesus than I would have ever been? What if what they said about you after you retired, and no one's around, and they're not saying this to blow smoke up your dress, they're saying this because they mean it, because God put that person in my life, I'm closer to him than I think I ever would be because I got to watch them serve God faithfully for years. What a privilege it was to work under them because of what it showed me about who their Jesus was. What if the people who don't know Jesus but work for you would say about you, after seeing you at your best and your worst, after watching how you leverage your influence and authority, what if they were to say about you, you know what, I don't share the faith that they do, but they're one of the ones that I believe when they say it. I don't know that I believe like they do, but I know that they believed. I know that they love their Jesus. They were the real deal. We all, in different times and different ways, move into and out of positions of influence. The message of Mark is that when you find yourself there, remember, you can leverage your authority to get people to serve you and do what you want. But that's not what Jesus did. And that's not what he told you to do. And I am convinced that the best thing possible that anybody could say about you after working with you or for you or being under your leadership for any amount of time is, I am closer to Jesus because God put that person in my life. And we get them there by serving them. That's why Jesus says, whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me. So whether we lead in small ways at the drive-through or in big ways, leading in life. We should carry that leadership and that influence and that authority like Jesus did and try to use it to serve others. Now a couple practical things on how we do that and I'll wrap up. Two things. How can we begin to be people who serve like Jesus served? Well I think one of the things we can do is that we can begin to equate serving with being Christ-like, not being belittled. We can begin to equate serving with being like Christ, not being belittled. This week, I reached out to an old friend of mine who is a pastor about an hour and a half away from here. And he and I worked at summer camp together years ago and have loosely kept in touch. And I emailed him and I just said, hey, man, I'm so sorry that it's taken me six years of living this close to you to try to get together, but I'd love to get together and just talk as pastors and buy you lunch sometime. Let me know if that's going to be possible. And he emailed me back, and he said, is Ruth's Chris or nothing for me, which is pretty typical of this guy. It's funny. And then he says, I'll have to get back with you on when. If you don't hear from me, feel free to email me again. And I thought, nope. If you don't email me, we will never speak in our whole lives. Because what did he do? He belittled me. Made me a secretary. I'm not your secretary. But as I was preparing the sermon, and I wrote that point, well, looks like I'll be emailing John. Because it's an opportunity to be Christ-like, not to be belittled. When we get asked to do something that we feel is beneath us, jump at it. Do it. It's an opportunity to be Christ-like, not be belittled. The second thing we can do is we can pray this prayer of confession and repentance. And as we consider the message of the gospel of Mark, and we consider this idea that to be first we must be last, to be great we must be least. I would encourage us all to pray this prayer together as I pray here in a second, but the prayer is simply this. Father, show me where I'm leveraging my power to be served rather than to serve. Whatever power and influence you've given me, however loud my voice is in a particular room, would you please show me where I'm using that influence and that authority for myself and not for the people that are around me? And in praying that prayer, hopefully he will open our eyes to greater opportunities of service and servanthood so that we can be like Christ and serve people towards the kingdom of God. Let's pray. Father, we just thank you for who you are and for how you love us. We know that your son could have showed up and just lorded it over us, and he would have had every right to do it, to just ascend to the throne, to be the most important and most powerful person in the room. He could have done that, but he came meek and mild, and he came as a servant. God, as you move us into positions of authority and influence, would you remind us of the way that your son came and that your son led and that your son served so that we might do the same? Would you, Father, in your goodness, keep us humble, make us eager to serve, give us a heart that sees the needs of others and meets them where they are, and deflate our egos where they're too big and where they're making it hard for us to serve like we need to. Thank you for your son. Thank you for the cross. Thank you for how you've loved us. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten a chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service, or we could also do it outside. I don't want to confine that to just the lobby. We're starting a new series today called 27. This series, believe it or not, is going to be two summers long. It's going to be the summer series this summer and next summer. And what we're going to do is look at an overview of all 27 books of the New Testament. We're going to start in Matthew and move right through and kind of give you guys an idea of what each book contains, what it's about, what it's for, who wrote it, why they wrote it, and those kinds of things. Now, we're doing this series for a couple of reasons, but the primary one is in an effort, and not that I sense a deficiency, but I think every church needs this, in an effort to continue to raise what I think of as the biblical literacy of the church. How familiar are we with the Bible? How well can we find the books? How well do we know what they're all about and how it all orders together? And I think that we have a wide swath of knowledge and people in the room. So some of us know the Bible really well. And we're grateful and blessed to have a body that is diverse in how well we know Scripture. Some of you could probably teach this series. And so my hope for those who know their Bibles well, know there's four Gospels, that Acts is the lone narrative book in the New Testament, and then we have the Pauline epistles and the general epistles, and they're written to the churches for different reasons and all the things. Like, if you know that stuff, then my hope is, as we zero in on each book, that you can learn something new and different that you may not have thought about or been aware of or exposed to before, and that hopefully something will spark and cause you to want to deep dive into these books a little bit more. Maybe you buy a commentary or start to watch another sermon series on it and dive deeper into this book. We hope that this series will compel you towards scripture. I say as often as I can that the single most important habit that anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. I don't think there's any habit more important or valuable than that one. And so we hope that this series will compel you towards that. Now, if you're on the opposite end of the biblical knowledge spectrum and you didn't even know that there was 27 books in the New Testament, as a matter of fact, you're not exactly sure what the New Testament is. You just hear church people use that word. Then this is for you too. The New Testament, by the way, is just the books of the Bible that were written after Jesus was born. There's a more technical explanation of that, but that's essentially what's going on there. All the books that were written before Jesus, Old Testament. After Jesus, New Testament. And in the New Testament, there's 27 books. For those who care, there's 39 in the Old Testament, 66 total. Unless you're Catholic, then there's an apocrypha, and that's just a whole mess. But in the Protestant Bible, 66 books. I don't know. I don't know why I do things. I don't know why I say things sometimes. They just, they happen. And then they come out and I'm like, what was that about? I don't know. I don't know. Sorry, I'm editing. Right now I'm editing to make fun of myself more. Let's get back to the sermon. My hope is that for those of us who feel like, gosh, I don't know anything about the Bible. It's intimidating and unapproachable. I hope that you can make sense of it. And I don't want anyone to feel bad for not knowing where books are. If I say turn to Ephesians, you have to use the table of contents. That's fine. We just want to move in a direction where all of us are learning a little bit more about our Bible and pressed towards the Bible. So the sermons in this series are going to feel, I wouldn't say professorial because I'm not smart enough to be a professor, but they're going to feel more instructive than sermons about how to manage our emotions, which are more practical. So these are just to help us think better and more about the Bible and understand it as we dive into the Bible. That being said, in June, we're doing like a little sub-series within the larger series where we're going to look at the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are what's called synoptic Gospels. They cover pretty much the same chronology. They include a lot of the same stories. Those authors are trying to get a lot of the same points across. They're written to different people and depict Jesus as different things in each We'll be make comparisons. I am like, but he doesn't talk in parables like he does in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And so for the month of June, we're going to move through the Gospels, look at how they're different, which aspects of Jesus they highlight, and what we can learn from that. So this week, we're in the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew was written to the Jews and depicts Jesus as king. Matthew was written to the Jewish people in the first century, and it depicts Jesus as the king. This is really important because, I'm going to move right to it, because the Jewish people needed Matthew's gospel because they missed the Messiah. Matthew needed to be written, and it needed to be written to the Jews, and it needed to be written to prove to them that Jesus was actually the Messiah that he came to be because they missed him. And it's really tragic that they did because for generation after generation, for four millennia, the Jewish people were looking for the Messiah. They had prophecies and prophets trickle in to point them towards the Messiah. They're waiting on him. They're looking for him. His arrival could be any day. You never know. Every lifetime that happens, just like every lifetime that happens, we're convinced that Jesus is going to return while we're here. Everybody thinks that all the time. So must they have thought that about the Messiah arriving. Certainly it will be now. And he didn't, and he didn't, and he didn't. And they waited, and they waited, and they waited. And these are God's people. These are the children of Abraham. These are his descendants. These are the ones of all the world. These are the people who should know, who when the Messiah gets there, they should be like, that's the guy. They should know. And yet, when Jesus shows up and he says, I'm the guy, they go, no, you're not. And he's like, but really I am. And they're like, actually, you're not. And because you claim you are and you're not, we're going to kill you. That is a very loose paraphrase of a non-existent conversation that happened between Jesus and a whole country. But that's the vibe, all right? That's generally what's going on. Unless we think that it really wasn't the Jews who killed him and rejected him, it really wasn't the Israelites who killed him and rejected him, it was just this sect of religious leaders, Caiaphas and his cronies, the high priest and the others around him, and maybe Pilate and not caring, and he had a hand in it, and they did. But before Pilate kills Jesus, he tries to say, hey, we don't need to kill this guy. He didn't really do anything. And the Jewish people say, kill him and let his blood be on our heads and on the heads of our children, which is communal guilt. Okay? They missed Jesus. Now, there's forgiveness and repentance for that. Jesus needed to die that death so that they could be reunited with their father in heaven, and it worked out. But the Jews missed him. The Israelites missed the Messiah. And so they needed the book of Matthew to be written to them, to prove to them that that guy you killed on that cross, he was actually the guy. The guy that you killed for saying he was the guy, he was right. You've got a big blind spot. Let me show you. Let me prove to you that he was who he says he was. That's why in the book of Matthew, as you read it, you'll be following along. If you have a Bible now, you can look. It's right there. You'll be following along. You know how the Bible has two columns on each page? The column will pause and indent, and there will be a quote, sometimes short, sometimes long, and then it will get back to the regular discourse. And there's all sorts of pausing, indented quotes all throughout the book of Matthew. And what those indented quotes are are Old Testament prophecies about Jesus and who he was. And it goes like this. If you open up your Bible to the book of Matthew, you'll see three times that he does this in the first two chapters. I'm just going to run through them real quick so you know what I'm talking about. Matthew chapter 1, verse 22. I'm going to start reading in verse 21. See? All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, and then he breaks down into the quote from the Old Testament prophet. You turn the page, or maybe I don't know how your Bible works out said this had to happen. That is all through the gospel of Matthew. Because the Gospel of Matthew was written to a Jewish community that had rejected the Messiah. And what Matthew is doing is saying, hey, I know that you guys know your Old Testament, the Tanakh, the laws and the prophets, what we would think of as the Old Testament in the Bible. I know that you know that. I know that you know your prophets. I know that you know your prophecies. Their biblical literacy as a culture was much higher than ours is in church. So when Matthew quotes these prophets, they know who it was. They've been taught those prophecies. They've heard those things before. And there ought to be, there ought to be light bulbs going off in their minds going, oh, he does fulfill that. Oh, he does fulfill that. Oh, that is actually true. Oh, my goodness, he is and was the Messiah. So he wrote it to the unbelieving first century Jewish audience to show them that you did actually kill the Messiah and we need to turn and put our faith in him because he still lives. That was the point of the gospel of Matthew. And to me, when I think about why Matthew was written, and I think about some other things that we'll get into here in a second. It causes me to come back to questions like this. If Jesus showed up today, would you need your own gospel to show you that you missed him? If Jesus showed up today in Israel and the world pointed to him and said, that's the Messiah, that's Jesus, would you recognize him? Would you acknowledge him for who he was? Or would you be part of the crowd that rejected him and needed a separate gospel written to you after the fact to show you that he really was who he says he was? A more simple way to ask that is, if Jesus showed up in your life, would you notice him? If Jesus just plopped down right in the middle of grace, would we acknowledge that he was the Messiah? Or would we not be able to recognize him? Would we reject him, call him a weird cult leader, or a crazy person, and have him arrested or ignore him? Or if Jesus showed up, would we recognize him? I think about that question all the time. And I think about it all the time because the very people who were supposed to identify Jesus as Jesus didn't do it. The very people who had all the resources and all the exposure and knew all the quotes and all the scripture, when Jesus showed up, they didn't recognize him. And I don't know about you guys, but in modern Christianity, I'm that person. I've been in church my whole life. I've learned about Jesus from a very young age. I pray to him every day. I'm the one that's supposed to recognize when he shows up. You, most of you, are the people who are supposed to recognize when he shows up. Would you? Or would we do what they did and miss him? To answer that question, we have got to ask, why did they miss him? Right? That's the question. We have to go back and go, what did they do that we can try to avoid doing? Why did they miss who Jesus was? And how can we avoid doing what they did so that if Jesus were to show up today, we would recognize him and see him? I would contend with you that there's a couple different reasons, big reasons, why they missed the Messiah and they didn't recognize him and see him. I would contend with you that there's a couple different reasons, big reasons why they missed the Messiah and they didn't recognize him. But I would contend with you that overall, they couldn't see Jesus because they were blinded by their religious expectations. They had some expectations of who the Messiah was going to be and what the Messiah was going to do. And because they had those expectations, it blinded them from being able to see the actual real Messiah. And here's what's so scary about these expectations. These expectations came from their own religion. They came from their own faith. They came from Judaism. They came from, listen to me, well-meaning teachers over the centuries who were doing the best they could to point God's people towards God. I do not think that there was some grand conspiracy with little pernicious machinations through the decades to just tilt the course a little bit so that God's people could not see their God. I believe that there was good, well-meaning teachers in the Old Testament, men and women who were instructing God's people to be able to point them towards God, and they allowed things to get in there that started to just knock them off by a couple degrees so that by the time Jesus shows up thousands or hundreds of years later, they don't recognize him anymore. Because through the decades and through the centuries and down through the millennia, they began to put expectations on who their Messiah would be that Jesus did not put on himself. They started to think things would be true of Jesus that Jesus never said, that God never said. The biggest one is this. And what I'm about to tell you is so important that if you don't understand this, you really can't understand all of the Gospels. You'll still get the important part of the Gospel. Jesus died for your sins and he reunites you with your Heavenly Father. You'll get that part, but you won't understand the nuances of the gospels if you don't understand what I'm about to say. It is such, it may be, it's one of the most important tensions that's laced throughout all the gospels that helps you understand how Jesus's world interacted with him. You've got to understand this. The biggest expectation they had of Jesus is that he was going to be an earthly king to sit on an earthly throne. They believe with all their heart that when Jesus showed up, in this day, ancient Israel, when Jesus is born, they are a far-flung province of the Roman Empire. They're a corner of the globe. They don't matter. And they believe if the Messiah shows up, he is going to go and kick Herod out of the palace. He's going to take over David's throne. He is going to sit on the throne and rule. He will overthrow Roman rule. He will rise Israel to international prominence, and he will be the king of kings there. That's what they expect is going to happen. And so it's not necessarily that they didn't like Jesus when they met him. It's just that they expected him to sit on the earthly throne and establish an earthly kingdom. And so when Jesus shows up and he says, I'm the guy, they go, that's great. Let's go to the throne. And he's like, no, no, I don to. Chill out. I don't want to do that yet. And they're like, okay, are you ready to do it now? I actually had someone suggest, and I think this is super interesting, that Judas, the one who betrayed Jesus, didn't betray him to betray him and be a jerk, but he was just trying to get the wheels in motion to make this guy king. And he figured something needs to happen, so I'm going to do it. Which is why Judas, it makes sense that Judas would have killed himself after the fact when he found out that he was way wrong about that. But there was tremendous pressure being exerted upon Jesus to become the actual king. There's that scene where he disappears from the midst of the people because they're pressing on him, trying to get him and take him to Jerusalem and make him king. And he's like, that's not what I came for. They took Jesus, Jesus who came to be the king of the universe, the king of all creation, the king of heaven and earth, king of kings and Lord of lords. And they said, that's great. We want to make you the king of Israel. And he said, I didn't come for Israel, that small potatoes. I came for the universe. You guys don't understand. Pilate, at the end of his life, asked him, are you really a king? He's like, yeah, but not the kind you're thinking about. They had that expectation on Jesus that he was going to be an earthly king of an earthly kingdom. And because they were blinded by that expectation, when Jesus didn't want to go sit on the throne, they said, well, you can't possibly be the guy. So they killed him. Their religious expectations blinded them from who Jesus was. Jesus shows up. He starts hanging out with sinners, tax collectors, prostitutes, and drunkards. And they're like, if you're the Messiah, you shouldn't be doing that. And he's like, well, I am the Messiah, and I am doing that. So you need to adjust. They were blinded by their own expectations. Which makes really the most important question this morning. And this question, I think, is so important that if it's not already, for me, it rattles around in the back of my head all the time. Because I'm a dad, and I want to raise my children to believe in Jesus. I want to live a life that's authentic to Jesus. I want to be one that if he walked through the doors, I would know him, and I would see him, and I would recognize him. I don't want to be one of the ones who rejects Jesus. I want to be Nicodemus and go, hey, maybe there's something to this. I want to be John the Baptist. And so he must become greater and I must become less. I want to be one of the ones that recognizes Jesus if he walks through the doors. So I'm constantly thinking about, not constantly, but it rattles around there pretty regularly. And this is something that if it's not blazoned in your head, I would write it down somewhere and return at least quarterly and pray through this question. What blinding expectations are we carrying? What expectations do I have of Jesus that if he were to show up would cause me to not recognize him? I think that's an incredibly important question. I don't know how often you do reviews at work. How are you doing? Are you doing well? Are you fulfilling the job description? Are we still on the same page here? This needs to be a quarterly personal review. What expectations have I allowed to trickle into my life that might cause me to miss the Messiah if he showed up? Because I hope you're like me and you want to be someone who recognizes Jesus when he arrives. So I think that question, what blinding expectations am I carrying, is an incredibly important one. So I've got some for you this morning that I think could represent a large swath of the room, but I bet that there's more, and I bet that it's worth praying about, and that's really what I want to encourage you to do. Take that statement home, find some time to pray about it and think on it and chew on it a little bit and let it rattle around in your brain for years and years like it does me. Because I want us to be a church that knows and sees Jesus because I think, I think Jesus is moving now in so many ways that we might not see. I think Jesus is loving us through people that we might not understand as loving us through Jesus, if that makes any sense. We're receiving love and affection from someone, but we don't see Jesus' hand in that because he couldn't use that person. I think Jesus is moving in communities and in movements and is spurring things on in our culture in his subtle ways that we don't recognize or maybe even flat out reject because it doesn't look like we think it should look. It doesn't behave like we think it should behave. And I think that it's highly possible that we don't have to talk about the hypothetical if Jesus showed up, would we recognize him? I think it's actually helpful to say, do we see the Jesus now that's in our life, that's loving on us, that's moving in our community? Do we see his influence in all the places where it actually is or have our religious expectations and our religious baggage and our intellectual baggage put blinders on our eyes so that we can only see portions and snippets of Jesus instead of recognizing all that he's doing in our life. So this isn't just an important hypothetical question for one day, but for right now too, as we look to see Jesus in our lives and in the lives of the people around us. So what are some of the expectations that we can have that could potentially blind us? I think the first one I would mention, and this kind of trickles down into all of them, is we expect Jesus to have a temporal perspective rather than an eternal one. I think we expect Jesus to have a temporal perspective rather than one that is eternal. See, I don't think that we realize, this is kind of an esoteric thought experiment, but I don't think we realize how much our being in a temporal world and a temporal body that's going to last 70, 80, 90 years impacts the way that we think and how much Jesus existing in eternity, seeing eternity for all that it is, actually changes the way that he thinks and interacts with the world. I think that there are some things that we see as tragic because our view is temporal that Jesus sees as merciful because his view is eternal. I think that there is so much that when we get to heaven one day and we are granted this eternal perspective where we will go, oh, that makes so much more sense now. I used to not understand that. Now I completely understand that. I used to be mad at Jesus about that, now I'm not mad at Jesus at all. I think having an eternal perspective changes everything about how we view the world, and it's so hard to get ourselves out of our limited temporal perspective and really truly believe what Paul says when he says that we are like a mist or a vapor, here one day and gone the next. When he says, though we endure this pain for a little while, just a small portion, we have no idea how infinitesimally small, I don't know that word, how really small our life is compared to the whole span of eternity. And it also helps us understand Jesus as we read him in the Gospels. I think this is a really funny question. I heard it years ago, and I think it's great. How come Jesus, knowing everything about everything, when he exists in ancient Israel, and he's teaching people, he's doing the Sermon on the Mount, he's doing the Beatitudes, bless the peacemakers, bless the poor in spirit, bless the meek, don't commit adultery, don't steal from people, we're the salt of the earth, we're the light of the world, all the things. How about at the end of it, why doesn't he just tack on and also, listen, I'm not really going to get into this, okay, because I'm not going to do science on you guys, but just wash your hands. Just wash your hands. Why doesn't he tell ancient Israel, like, just, you know, after the bathroom, just soap up, you know, before you tend to wound? Maybe just wash your hands a little bit. Like, why doesn't he do that? That's not like a big deal. Just a little deal. Just give him a little bit to make the world a little bit better place. Why doesn't he do that? That's not what he came to do. He didn't come then to make the world a better place. He came to live a perfect life, to die a perfect death, to train the disciples, and to leave behind the church. That's what he came to do. He's thinking about eternity. You ever wonder how many people existed in ancient Israel contemporary to Jesus? Hearing about all the miracles that he's performing and all the wonderful things that he's doing and how he's healing people and even raising people from the dead. I wonder how many people there were that were contemporaries of Jesus who got up one day and took themselves to where he was to be healed or took the loved one to where he was to be healed. All the faith and all the ardor and all the desire and they had to walk away with that same disease broken hearted because Jesus didn't heal them. How many people were in the crowds who desperately needed to be healed but they weren't? I bet there was a bunch. And I bet they were pretty miffed. You healed that lady, you wouldn't heal my wife? Don't we do the same thing? You healed that cancer, you won't heal this one? You saved that person, you won't save this one? How many people were walking around doing that back then? And why didn't Jesus walk around healing everyone? Because that's a temporal question. He had an eternal perspective. That's not what he came to do. He had other stuff to do. It was an eternal agenda. So I think a lot of the expectations that we place on Jesus come from this place of a temporal perspective when we really need to see him through the lens of the eternal. Another one, another expectation that can potentially blind us, kind of bleeds into that one, is we expect Jesus to protect us and our families from tragedy. Don't we? We would never say it out loud. No one ever says, I'm a Christian now, and I follow the Bible as well as I can. I pray every day. I go to church. And because of that, God's going to protect me and my family from tragedy. We don't say that out loud, but we certainly think it. And I know that we think it because I can't tell you how many people I've sat with and how many times in my life I've experienced the emotion of, God, how can you let this happen? This isn't fair. Why not? Well, because I love you and follow you and I'm devoted to you and you shouldn't let things like this happen to me. Oh, where'd you pick that one up? Was it the book of Job? Which says the exact opposite of that. I'm not going to beat this drum too hard because I do this sermon about twice a year because it's such a pernicious teaching in God's church. And I hate it so much that we would have this expectation that to follow Jesus means that we get to dodge the raindrops of tragedy in our life. That is not the case, and God never said it would be. He does not promise to prevent those things from happening. He promises to walk through them with us, that in those moments he will be closer to us than any other times. That's what he promises, but he doesn't promise that his children will not endure pain. He actually promises in a bunch of different ways that we will. And yet, people walk away from the faith because something tragic happened in their life and they think that that makes God unfair. It's an expectation that we have of Jesus that blinds him in our life, blinds us from being able to see him in our life. Like I said, I'm not going to belabor it, but I see this belief causing more people to walk away from the faith than to be drawn to Jesus. We need to carefully root that out of our lives. And it's in, even though I say it, it's in me. I know it's in me. We need to always reexamine how we respond to tragedy and the idea of fairness because Jesus did not give us that expectation. Another one that can tend to blind us is that we expect Jesus to be a better version of ourselves. If Jesus were to show up in our lives, we would expect that he's not going to be like us because we've got some rough edges, right? Probably not going to laugh at all the jokes I laugh at. But he's going to laugh at some of them. He's going to be pretty good. He's going to be a little bit sarcastic. He's going to be a little bit funny. He's probably going to be really pragmatic, you know. He's probably going to choose the minivan over the SUV. That's what Jesus would do. He's going to drive the sensible car. Jesus would have driven a Leaf. I don't know if you know that. He would be, that's an old school joke. I used to drive a Leaf years ago and people who have been here for a while still make fun of me for that. And they should. And if we find out you drive one, we're making fun of you too. But we expect Jesus to be like we would, right? Especially in our politics. Jen's like, please, please be careful. If we lean right, we're pretty sure that Jesus would too. And he would have mercy on the godless liberals. And some of them might be Christians, you know, maybe. And God's patient with them. They're just swept up in culture and they're, you know, they're sissies. But God has patience for them. If we lean left, we think God would probably lean left too. He'd probably vote Democrat. And he has patience for his misguided children on the right who live in echo chambers. They're going to be fine. Right? We think Jesus would be like us, and that he has our opinions about all the things. Maybe just a little bit more measured. We tend to remake Jesus in our own image. Here's another way I know this is true. I'm just going to be honest with you. If Jesus shows up and he's from the hills of Appalachia and it turns out he's Pentecostal, I'm going to be real uncomfortable with that. That's going to take some adjusting to do. But he might be. He might be. And that would be great. All those people for all those years would be like, see, stuffy Presbyterians, we told you. And you're like, yep, you did. You did. You tried to tell us. We wouldn't listen. He might be. But because I think Jesus is going to be like I am, probably not. But can you see how if we remake Jesus in our own image, we make him so small that we might not be able to recognize him if he shows up not looking like us? Because, spoiler alert, he will not. Here's another one. I almost didn't include this. This is a little touchy. But I think it's true. I think it's worth saying. I think it needs to be said in church. I think we expect Jesus to prioritize our country. I don't know about you, but I grew up in a country, and I'm American, by the way. I grew up in a country where it wasn't said in the church. I never had a pastor that preached about this because I had a good pastor. But it was in Christian culture that America's really important to Jesus. We are the righteous right hand of God fighting back the godless commies. And if we don't do it, atheism will take over the world. And God needs America to protect his grand plan. So America, because we're a Christian nation, no we're not, is most important to God. No, it's not. I've heard people read America into the Bible, into the prophecies about the end time. Well, that's definitely the United States of America. Okay. Well, it wasn't Rome and it wasn't Greece, so maybe it's us. I've seen people do this. We're trying to read ourselves into the prophecies and into the texts. And we still continue to think that somehow the United States of America is the apple of God's eye. No, it's not. He cares just as much about North Korea as he does about the United States. He cares a little bit less about Canada, and we know that. And that's fine. But we've got to abandon this sort of American nationalistic faith where we put American flags and Christian flags in our churches. And we think that somehow to be a patriot is to be more Christian. No, it's not. It's fine. It's fine. Be patriotic. It's wonderful. But we should not conflate that with faith. And I think that I grew up in a country that did. Maybe you didn't, so I'll leave that right there. But to me, that's a disturbing trend I see in our culture. The last one is we expect Jesus to make sense. Don't we? We expect Jesus, we can tie him up, we can put him in the boxes, we can tie him up neat and in bow. We're going to understand him. We're going to write systematic theologies about him. We're going to be able to understand him. We're going to be able to understand everything that he did to understand everything that he's doing and to predict his future action because he's Jesus and we like to understand everything. So we're going to be able to understand and compartmentalize this Jesus too. When Jesus never, ever wanted to be understood, he's too big for our understanding. Do you realize that he taught in parables to intentionally be misunderstood? He taught in parables. He says, they said, why the disciples go, why do you teach in parables? And he's like, cause I don't want everybody to understand me. What? Doesn't that seem counter to what we would think Jesus would do? And yet that's what he did. Jesus, he's approached by the rich young ruler and the rich young, and this guy, I don't know if it's a rich young ruler, it's a rich guy, and he says, hey, I'm in. I want to follow you. What do I need to do? And Jesus says, you need to sell everything that you have and follow me. And the guy walks away dejected. That doesn't make any sense. That actually feels counterproductive to what Jesus is trying to do. If I were a pastor and Jesus were a pastor, and he came to me for advice, which would totally make sense. And he said, hey, I've got this rich guy and he wants to know what he should do to follow me. That'd be interesting. And I would tell him, that's great. That's great. Share with him the gospel, bring him in, Start to disciple him. Put him with somebody who can disciple him. Make sure he's in Bible studies. And over time, start to gently, when you have these opportunities for conversations, gently nudge him towards the idea of stewardship so that he can come around to this understanding and this belief that everything that he has is really yours. And let's let that progress as it should. But you don't want to hit him with it up front because you'll scare him away like a scared baby deer, and then we might never get him back. Not because he's rich, but because we care about his soul. And Jesus goes, that's stupid. I'm just going to tell him. And the guy runs away. Who knows if he came back or not? That doesn't make sense. Jesus was culling the herd all the time. There was a time when the following got too big, and he just kind of looked at them, and he said, he said, I'll tell you the truth. Unless you eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. And people are like, okay, this just became a weird cult. I am out. And they started leaving left and right. And he looks at his disciples. And he goes, are you going to leave too? And this is, I don't think I'll ever get a tattoo. If I do, it might be this phrase. I love this phrase. I love what Peter says in this moment. He says, are you guys going to leave too? And Peter says, you're the Christ. Where are we going to go? I love it. Because what's Peter saying? He's going to be like, dude, I've been following you for two years. You don't make any sense. I don't have a clue what you just were talking about. That's weird, man. But you're Jesus, and I've got nowhere else to go. So I'm in, even if I don't understand you. Because we serve a God that's too big to be understood by you. And if he were, if you could understand him, you wouldn't want to follow him. All through Scripture, Jesus is too big and too marvelous and too miraculous and too wild to be understood and tamed by our intellect. Even at the very beginning, if we look at God introducing himself to the world, he shows up in the burning bush and he tells Moses, hey, go and free my people from Egypt. And Moses is like, all right, cool, got it. What's your name? And God's like, nah, I'm not going to tell you. I am. What's that mean? I'm not going to tell you that either. Just go do what I'm asking you to do, but I'm not going to be reduced to your names. I'm not going to be reduced to your titles. I'm not going to be reduced to a box that you want to put me in. Forget it. I will not do that with you. In Job, Job goes to God and he asks him the question that every generation has asked, which is essentially, why do you let bad things happen to good people, God? And in Job 38, 39, and 40, God tells him in a very not nice way. It's not like kind at all. That basically, I'm not going to tell you because if I did, you wouldn't understand it. So how about you just let me be God and you be Job and we'll keep this train moving. He's not going to explain it to him because he can't understand it. And they come out and tell us in Romans that his ways are higher than our ways. Jesus is far too big and far too wild and far too mysterious and far too wonderful to be reduced to something that's going to make sense to you all the time. And I think that was probably the big sin of the Israelites. Their expectations had reduced Jesus to something he never wanted to be. And when he didn't fit into the mold that they created for him, they killed him because they missed him. And I worry about me, and I worry about my kids, and I worry about my church. That the mold that we are casting for our Savior is so small that he can never fit in it even if he wanted to. And because he doesn't fit into the mold that we've created, we might reject him. I do not want that to be true of us. So how do we make sure that's not true? We constantly examine, what are my expectations of Jesus that he did not give me? We learn, we take in, we read from the Bible what the Bible says. We don't read into it what we want it to say. And I think we pray earnestly, God, where you are, help me see it. But let us not commit the sin of the Israelites and try to reduce our wonderful and wild and miraculous and mysterious God to something that he never wanted to be. That's the message that I get from Matthew. I hope that you'll return to that, that you'll pray about it, and that that question will haunt you as much as it does me, because maybe, maybe that will help us see Jesus when he arrives. Let's pray. God, we love you. We thank you for your son, Jesus. Thank you for who he was and what he did. Lord, we pray that we would have eyes to see and ears to hear. And we know, we know that we cannot see you. We cannot feel you. We cannot identify you. We cannot be moved by you without the Holy Spirit. So give us your spirit in increasing measure that we might see you where you are and where you are acting and where you are loving, that we might be true and authentic worshipers of you and worship you in spirit and in truth. God, help us be okay with you not making sense sometimes. Help us be people who can see how big you are and how wonderful you are. Help us be people who don't reduce you to what we expect, but rather marvel at all the ways you reveal yourself. Again, God, help us be people who worship you in spirit and in truth. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten a chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service, or we could also do it outside. I don't want to confine that to just the lobby. We're starting a new series today called 27. This series, believe it or not, is going to be two summers long. It's going to be the summer series this summer and next summer. And what we're going to do is look at an overview of all 27 books of the New Testament. We're going to start in Matthew and move right through and kind of give you guys an idea of what each book contains, what it's about, what it's for, who wrote it, why they wrote it, and those kinds of things. Now, we're doing this series for a couple of reasons, but the primary one is in an effort, and not that I sense a deficiency, but I think every church needs this, in an effort to continue to raise what I think of as the biblical literacy of the church. How familiar are we with the Bible? How well can we find the books? How well do we know what they're all about and how it all orders together? And I think that we have a wide swath of knowledge and people in the room. So some of us know the Bible really well. And we're grateful and blessed to have a body that is diverse in how well we know Scripture. Some of you could probably teach this series. And so my hope for those who know their Bibles well, know there's four Gospels, that Acts is the lone narrative book in the New Testament, and then we have the Pauline epistles and the general epistles, and they're written to the churches for different reasons and all the things. Like, if you know that stuff, then my hope is, as we zero in on each book, that you can learn something new and different that you may not have thought about or been aware of or exposed to before, and that hopefully something will spark and cause you to want to deep dive into these books a little bit more. Maybe you buy a commentary or start to watch another sermon series on it and dive deeper into this book. We hope that this series will compel you towards scripture. I say as often as I can that the single most important habit that anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. I don't think there's any habit more important or valuable than that one. And so we hope that this series will compel you towards that. Now, if you're on the opposite end of the biblical knowledge spectrum and you didn't even know that there was 27 books in the New Testament, as a matter of fact, you're not exactly sure what the New Testament is. You just hear church people use that word. Then this is for you too. The New Testament, by the way, is just the books of the Bible that were written after Jesus was born. There's a more technical explanation of that, but that's essentially what's going on there. All the books that were written before Jesus, Old Testament. After Jesus, New Testament. And in the New Testament, there's 27 books. For those who care, there's 39 in the Old Testament, 66 total. Unless you're Catholic, then there's an apocrypha, and that's just a whole mess. But in the Protestant Bible, 66 books. I don't know. I don't know why I do things. I don't know why I say things sometimes. They just, they happen. And then they come out and I'm like, what was that about? I don't know. I don't know. Sorry, I'm editing. Right now I'm editing to make fun of myself more. Let's get back to the sermon. My hope is that for those of us who feel like, gosh, I don't know anything about the Bible. It's intimidating and unapproachable. I hope that you can make sense of it. And I don't want anyone to feel bad for not knowing where books are. If I say turn to Ephesians, you have to use the table of contents. That's fine. We just want to move in a direction where all of us are learning a little bit more about our Bible and pressed towards the Bible. So the sermons in this series are going to feel, I wouldn't say professorial because I'm not smart enough to be a professor, but they're going to feel more instructive than sermons about how to manage our emotions, which are more practical. So these are just to help us think better and more about the Bible and understand it as we dive into the Bible. That being said, in June, we're doing like a little sub-series within the larger series where we're going to look at the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are what's called synoptic Gospels. They cover pretty much the same chronology. They include a lot of the same stories. Those authors are trying to get a lot of the same points across. They're written to different people and depict Jesus as different things in each We'll be make comparisons. I am like, but he doesn't talk in parables like he does in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And so for the month of June, we're going to move through the Gospels, look at how they're different, which aspects of Jesus they highlight, and what we can learn from that. So this week, we're in the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew was written to the Jews and depicts Jesus as king. Matthew was written to the Jewish people in the first century, and it depicts Jesus as the king. This is really important because, I'm going to move right to it, because the Jewish people needed Matthew's gospel because they missed the Messiah. Matthew needed to be written, and it needed to be written to the Jews, and it needed to be written to prove to them that Jesus was actually the Messiah that he came to be because they missed him. And it's really tragic that they did because for generation after generation, for four millennia, the Jewish people were looking for the Messiah. They had prophecies and prophets trickle in to point them towards the Messiah. They're waiting on him. They're looking for him. His arrival could be any day. You never know. Every lifetime that happens, just like every lifetime that happens, we're convinced that Jesus is going to return while we're here. Everybody thinks that all the time. So must they have thought that about the Messiah arriving. Certainly it will be now. And he didn't, and he didn't, and he didn't. And they waited, and they waited, and they waited. And these are God's people. These are the children of Abraham. These are his descendants. These are the ones of all the world. These are the people who should know, who when the Messiah gets there, they should be like, that's the guy. They should know. And yet, when Jesus shows up and he says, I'm the guy, they go, no, you're not. And he's like, but really I am. And they're like, actually, you're not. And because you claim you are and you're not, we're going to kill you. That is a very loose paraphrase of a non-existent conversation that happened between Jesus and a whole country. But that's the vibe, all right? That's generally what's going on. Unless we think that it really wasn't the Jews who killed him and rejected him, it really wasn't the Israelites who killed him and rejected him, it was just this sect of religious leaders, Caiaphas and his cronies, the high priest and the others around him, and maybe Pilate and not caring, and he had a hand in it, and they did. But before Pilate kills Jesus, he tries to say, hey, we don't need to kill this guy. He didn't really do anything. And the Jewish people say, kill him and let his blood be on our heads and on the heads of our children, which is communal guilt. Okay? They missed Jesus. Now, there's forgiveness and repentance for that. Jesus needed to die that death so that they could be reunited with their father in heaven, and it worked out. But the Jews missed him. The Israelites missed the Messiah. And so they needed the book of Matthew to be written to them, to prove to them that that guy you killed on that cross, he was actually the guy. The guy that you killed for saying he was the guy, he was right. You've got a big blind spot. Let me show you. Let me prove to you that he was who he says he was. That's why in the book of Matthew, as you read it, you'll be following along. If you have a Bible now, you can look. It's right there. You'll be following along. You know how the Bible has two columns on each page? The column will pause and indent, and there will be a quote, sometimes short, sometimes long, and then it will get back to the regular discourse. And there's all sorts of pausing, indented quotes all throughout the book of Matthew. And what those indented quotes are are Old Testament prophecies about Jesus and who he was. And it goes like this. If you open up your Bible to the book of Matthew, you'll see three times that he does this in the first two chapters. I'm just going to run through them real quick so you know what I'm talking about. Matthew chapter 1, verse 22. I'm going to start reading in verse 21. See? All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, and then he breaks down into the quote from the Old Testament prophet. You turn the page, or maybe I don't know how your Bible works out said this had to happen. That is all through the gospel of Matthew. Because the Gospel of Matthew was written to a Jewish community that had rejected the Messiah. And what Matthew is doing is saying, hey, I know that you guys know your Old Testament, the Tanakh, the laws and the prophets, what we would think of as the Old Testament in the Bible. I know that you know that. I know that you know your prophets. I know that you know your prophecies. Their biblical literacy as a culture was much higher than ours is in church. So when Matthew quotes these prophets, they know who it was. They've been taught those prophecies. They've heard those things before. And there ought to be, there ought to be light bulbs going off in their minds going, oh, he does fulfill that. Oh, he does fulfill that. Oh, that is actually true. Oh, my goodness, he is and was the Messiah. So he wrote it to the unbelieving first century Jewish audience to show them that you did actually kill the Messiah and we need to turn and put our faith in him because he still lives. That was the point of the gospel of Matthew. And to me, when I think about why Matthew was written, and I think about some other things that we'll get into here in a second. It causes me to come back to questions like this. If Jesus showed up today, would you need your own gospel to show you that you missed him? If Jesus showed up today in Israel and the world pointed to him and said, that's the Messiah, that's Jesus, would you recognize him? Would you acknowledge him for who he was? Or would you be part of the crowd that rejected him and needed a separate gospel written to you after the fact to show you that he really was who he says he was? A more simple way to ask that is, if Jesus showed up in your life, would you notice him? If Jesus just plopped down right in the middle of grace, would we acknowledge that he was the Messiah? Or would we not be able to recognize him? Would we reject him, call him a weird cult leader, or a crazy person, and have him arrested or ignore him? Or if Jesus showed up, would we recognize him? I think about that question all the time. And I think about it all the time because the very people who were supposed to identify Jesus as Jesus didn't do it. The very people who had all the resources and all the exposure and knew all the quotes and all the scripture, when Jesus showed up, they didn't recognize him. And I don't know about you guys, but in modern Christianity, I'm that person. I've been in church my whole life. I've learned about Jesus from a very young age. I pray to him every day. I'm the one that's supposed to recognize when he shows up. You, most of you, are the people who are supposed to recognize when he shows up. Would you? Or would we do what they did and miss him? To answer that question, we have got to ask, why did they miss him? Right? That's the question. We have to go back and go, what did they do that we can try to avoid doing? Why did they miss who Jesus was? And how can we avoid doing what they did so that if Jesus were to show up today, we would recognize him and see him? I would contend with you that there's a couple different reasons, big reasons, why they missed the Messiah and they didn't recognize him and see him. I would contend with you that there's a couple different reasons, big reasons why they missed the Messiah and they didn't recognize him. But I would contend with you that overall, they couldn't see Jesus because they were blinded by their religious expectations. They had some expectations of who the Messiah was going to be and what the Messiah was going to do. And because they had those expectations, it blinded them from being able to see the actual real Messiah. And here's what's so scary about these expectations. These expectations came from their own religion. They came from their own faith. They came from Judaism. They came from, listen to me, well-meaning teachers over the centuries who were doing the best they could to point God's people towards God. I do not think that there was some grand conspiracy with little pernicious machinations through the decades to just tilt the course a little bit so that God's people could not see their God. I believe that there was good, well-meaning teachers in the Old Testament, men and women who were instructing God's people to be able to point them towards God, and they allowed things to get in there that started to just knock them off by a couple degrees so that by the time Jesus shows up thousands or hundreds of years later, they don't recognize him anymore. Because through the decades and through the centuries and down through the millennia, they began to put expectations on who their Messiah would be that Jesus did not put on himself. They started to think things would be true of Jesus that Jesus never said, that God never said. The biggest one is this. And what I'm about to tell you is so important that if you don't understand this, you really can't understand all of the Gospels. You'll still get the important part of the Gospel. Jesus died for your sins and he reunites you with your Heavenly Father. You'll get that part, but you won't understand the nuances of the gospels if you don't understand what I'm about to say. It is such, it may be, it's one of the most important tensions that's laced throughout all the gospels that helps you understand how Jesus's world interacted with him. You've got to understand this. The biggest expectation they had of Jesus is that he was going to be an earthly king to sit on an earthly throne. They believe with all their heart that when Jesus showed up, in this day, ancient Israel, when Jesus is born, they are a far-flung province of the Roman Empire. They're a corner of the globe. They don't matter. And they believe if the Messiah shows up, he is going to go and kick Herod out of the palace. He's going to take over David's throne. He is going to sit on the throne and rule. He will overthrow Roman rule. He will rise Israel to international prominence, and he will be the king of kings there. That's what they expect is going to happen. And so it's not necessarily that they didn't like Jesus when they met him. It's just that they expected him to sit on the earthly throne and establish an earthly kingdom. And so when Jesus shows up and he says, I'm the guy, they go, that's great. Let's go to the throne. And he's like, no, no, I don to. Chill out. I don't want to do that yet. And they're like, okay, are you ready to do it now? I actually had someone suggest, and I think this is super interesting, that Judas, the one who betrayed Jesus, didn't betray him to betray him and be a jerk, but he was just trying to get the wheels in motion to make this guy king. And he figured something needs to happen, so I'm going to do it. Which is why Judas, it makes sense that Judas would have killed himself after the fact when he found out that he was way wrong about that. But there was tremendous pressure being exerted upon Jesus to become the actual king. There's that scene where he disappears from the midst of the people because they're pressing on him, trying to get him and take him to Jerusalem and make him king. And he's like, that's not what I came for. They took Jesus, Jesus who came to be the king of the universe, the king of all creation, the king of heaven and earth, king of kings and Lord of lords. And they said, that's great. We want to make you the king of Israel. And he said, I didn't come for Israel, that small potatoes. I came for the universe. You guys don't understand. Pilate, at the end of his life, asked him, are you really a king? He's like, yeah, but not the kind you're thinking about. They had that expectation on Jesus that he was going to be an earthly king of an earthly kingdom. And because they were blinded by that expectation, when Jesus didn't want to go sit on the throne, they said, well, you can't possibly be the guy. So they killed him. Their religious expectations blinded them from who Jesus was. Jesus shows up. He starts hanging out with sinners, tax collectors, prostitutes, and drunkards. And they're like, if you're the Messiah, you shouldn't be doing that. And he's like, well, I am the Messiah, and I am doing that. So you need to adjust. They were blinded by their own expectations. Which makes really the most important question this morning. And this question, I think, is so important that if it's not already, for me, it rattles around in the back of my head all the time. Because I'm a dad, and I want to raise my children to believe in Jesus. I want to live a life that's authentic to Jesus. I want to be one that if he walked through the doors, I would know him, and I would see him, and I would recognize him. I don't want to be one of the ones who rejects Jesus. I want to be Nicodemus and go, hey, maybe there's something to this. I want to be John the Baptist. And so he must become greater and I must become less. I want to be one of the ones that recognizes Jesus if he walks through the doors. So I'm constantly thinking about, not constantly, but it rattles around there pretty regularly. And this is something that if it's not blazoned in your head, I would write it down somewhere and return at least quarterly and pray through this question. What blinding expectations are we carrying? What expectations do I have of Jesus that if he were to show up would cause me to not recognize him? I think that's an incredibly important question. I don't know how often you do reviews at work. How are you doing? Are you doing well? Are you fulfilling the job description? Are we still on the same page here? This needs to be a quarterly personal review. What expectations have I allowed to trickle into my life that might cause me to miss the Messiah if he showed up? Because I hope you're like me and you want to be someone who recognizes Jesus when he arrives. So I think that question, what blinding expectations am I carrying, is an incredibly important one. So I've got some for you this morning that I think could represent a large swath of the room, but I bet that there's more, and I bet that it's worth praying about, and that's really what I want to encourage you to do. Take that statement home, find some time to pray about it and think on it and chew on it a little bit and let it rattle around in your brain for years and years like it does me. Because I want us to be a church that knows and sees Jesus because I think, I think Jesus is moving now in so many ways that we might not see. I think Jesus is loving us through people that we might not understand as loving us through Jesus, if that makes any sense. We're receiving love and affection from someone, but we don't see Jesus' hand in that because he couldn't use that person. I think Jesus is moving in communities and in movements and is spurring things on in our culture in his subtle ways that we don't recognize or maybe even flat out reject because it doesn't look like we think it should look. It doesn't behave like we think it should behave. And I think that it's highly possible that we don't have to talk about the hypothetical if Jesus showed up, would we recognize him? I think it's actually helpful to say, do we see the Jesus now that's in our life, that's loving on us, that's moving in our community? Do we see his influence in all the places where it actually is or have our religious expectations and our religious baggage and our intellectual baggage put blinders on our eyes so that we can only see portions and snippets of Jesus instead of recognizing all that he's doing in our life. So this isn't just an important hypothetical question for one day, but for right now too, as we look to see Jesus in our lives and in the lives of the people around us. So what are some of the expectations that we can have that could potentially blind us? I think the first one I would mention, and this kind of trickles down into all of them, is we expect Jesus to have a temporal perspective rather than an eternal one. I think we expect Jesus to have a temporal perspective rather than one that is eternal. See, I don't think that we realize, this is kind of an esoteric thought experiment, but I don't think we realize how much our being in a temporal world and a temporal body that's going to last 70, 80, 90 years impacts the way that we think and how much Jesus existing in eternity, seeing eternity for all that it is, actually changes the way that he thinks and interacts with the world. I think that there are some things that we see as tragic because our view is temporal that Jesus sees as merciful because his view is eternal. I think that there is so much that when we get to heaven one day and we are granted this eternal perspective where we will go, oh, that makes so much more sense now. I used to not understand that. Now I completely understand that. I used to be mad at Jesus about that, now I'm not mad at Jesus at all. I think having an eternal perspective changes everything about how we view the world, and it's so hard to get ourselves out of our limited temporal perspective and really truly believe what Paul says when he says that we are like a mist or a vapor, here one day and gone the next. When he says, though we endure this pain for a little while, just a small portion, we have no idea how infinitesimally small, I don't know that word, how really small our life is compared to the whole span of eternity. And it also helps us understand Jesus as we read him in the Gospels. I think this is a really funny question. I heard it years ago, and I think it's great. How come Jesus, knowing everything about everything, when he exists in ancient Israel, and he's teaching people, he's doing the Sermon on the Mount, he's doing the Beatitudes, bless the peacemakers, bless the poor in spirit, bless the meek, don't commit adultery, don't steal from people, we're the salt of the earth, we're the light of the world, all the things. How about at the end of it, why doesn't he just tack on and also, listen, I'm not really going to get into this, okay, because I'm not going to do science on you guys, but just wash your hands. Just wash your hands. Why doesn't he tell ancient Israel, like, just, you know, after the bathroom, just soap up, you know, before you tend to wound? Maybe just wash your hands a little bit. Like, why doesn't he do that? That's not like a big deal. Just a little deal. Just give him a little bit to make the world a little bit better place. Why doesn't he do that? That's not what he came to do. He didn't come then to make the world a better place. He came to live a perfect life, to die a perfect death, to train the disciples, and to leave behind the church. That's what he came to do. He's thinking about eternity. You ever wonder how many people existed in ancient Israel contemporary to Jesus? Hearing about all the miracles that he's performing and all the wonderful things that he's doing and how he's healing people and even raising people from the dead. I wonder how many people there were that were contemporaries of Jesus who got up one day and took themselves to where he was to be healed or took the loved one to where he was to be healed. All the faith and all the ardor and all the desire and they had to walk away with that same disease broken hearted because Jesus didn't heal them. How many people were in the crowds who desperately needed to be healed but they weren't? I bet there was a bunch. And I bet they were pretty miffed. You healed that lady, you wouldn't heal my wife? Don't we do the same thing? You healed that cancer, you won't heal this one? You saved that person, you won't save this one? How many people were walking around doing that back then? And why didn't Jesus walk around healing everyone? Because that's a temporal question. He had an eternal perspective. That's not what he came to do. He had other stuff to do. It was an eternal agenda. So I think a lot of the expectations that we place on Jesus come from this place of a temporal perspective when we really need to see him through the lens of the eternal. Another one, another expectation that can potentially blind us, kind of bleeds into that one, is we expect Jesus to protect us and our families from tragedy. Don't we? We would never say it out loud. No one ever says, I'm a Christian now, and I follow the Bible as well as I can. I pray every day. I go to church. And because of that, God's going to protect me and my family from tragedy. We don't say that out loud, but we certainly think it. And I know that we think it because I can't tell you how many people I've sat with and how many times in my life I've experienced the emotion of, God, how can you let this happen? This isn't fair. Why not? Well, because I love you and follow you and I'm devoted to you and you shouldn't let things like this happen to me. Oh, where'd you pick that one up? Was it the book of Job? Which says the exact opposite of that. I'm not going to beat this drum too hard because I do this sermon about twice a year because it's such a pernicious teaching in God's church. And I hate it so much that we would have this expectation that to follow Jesus means that we get to dodge the raindrops of tragedy in our life. That is not the case, and God never said it would be. He does not promise to prevent those things from happening. He promises to walk through them with us, that in those moments he will be closer to us than any other times. That's what he promises, but he doesn't promise that his children will not endure pain. He actually promises in a bunch of different ways that we will. And yet, people walk away from the faith because something tragic happened in their life and they think that that makes God unfair. It's an expectation that we have of Jesus that blinds him in our life, blinds us from being able to see him in our life. Like I said, I'm not going to belabor it, but I see this belief causing more people to walk away from the faith than to be drawn to Jesus. We need to carefully root that out of our lives. And it's in, even though I say it, it's in me. I know it's in me. We need to always reexamine how we respond to tragedy and the idea of fairness because Jesus did not give us that expectation. Another one that can tend to blind us is that we expect Jesus to be a better version of ourselves. If Jesus were to show up in our lives, we would expect that he's not going to be like us because we've got some rough edges, right? Probably not going to laugh at all the jokes I laugh at. But he's going to laugh at some of them. He's going to be pretty good. He's going to be a little bit sarcastic. He's going to be a little bit funny. He's probably going to be really pragmatic, you know. He's probably going to choose the minivan over the SUV. That's what Jesus would do. He's going to drive the sensible car. Jesus would have driven a Leaf. I don't know if you know that. He would be, that's an old school joke. I used to drive a Leaf years ago and people who have been here for a while still make fun of me for that. And they should. And if we find out you drive one, we're making fun of you too. But we expect Jesus to be like we would, right? Especially in our politics. Jen's like, please, please be careful. If we lean right, we're pretty sure that Jesus would too. And he would have mercy on the godless liberals. And some of them might be Christians, you know, maybe. And God's patient with them. They're just swept up in culture and they're, you know, they're sissies. But God has patience for them. If we lean left, we think God would probably lean left too. He'd probably vote Democrat. And he has patience for his misguided children on the right who live in echo chambers. They're going to be fine. Right? We think Jesus would be like us, and that he has our opinions about all the things. Maybe just a little bit more measured. We tend to remake Jesus in our own image. Here's another way I know this is true. I'm just going to be honest with you. If Jesus shows up and he's from the hills of Appalachia and it turns out he's Pentecostal, I'm going to be real uncomfortable with that. That's going to take some adjusting to do. But he might be. He might be. And that would be great. All those people for all those years would be like, see, stuffy Presbyterians, we told you. And you're like, yep, you did. You did. You tried to tell us. We wouldn't listen. He might be. But because I think Jesus is going to be like I am, probably not. But can you see how if we remake Jesus in our own image, we make him so small that we might not be able to recognize him if he shows up not looking like us? Because, spoiler alert, he will not. Here's another one. I almost didn't include this. This is a little touchy. But I think it's true. I think it's worth saying. I think it needs to be said in church. I think we expect Jesus to prioritize our country. I don't know about you, but I grew up in a country, and I'm American, by the way. I grew up in a country where it wasn't said in the church. I never had a pastor that preached about this because I had a good pastor. But it was in Christian culture that America's really important to Jesus. We are the righteous right hand of God fighting back the godless commies. And if we don't do it, atheism will take over the world. And God needs America to protect his grand plan. So America, because we're a Christian nation, no we're not, is most important to God. No, it's not. I've heard people read America into the Bible, into the prophecies about the end time. Well, that's definitely the United States of America. Okay. Well, it wasn't Rome and it wasn't Greece, so maybe it's us. I've seen people do this. We're trying to read ourselves into the prophecies and into the texts. And we still continue to think that somehow the United States of America is the apple of God's eye. No, it's not. He cares just as much about North Korea as he does about the United States. He cares a little bit less about Canada, and we know that. And that's fine. But we've got to abandon this sort of American nationalistic faith where we put American flags and Christian flags in our churches. And we think that somehow to be a patriot is to be more Christian. No, it's not. It's fine. It's fine. Be patriotic. It's wonderful. But we should not conflate that with faith. And I think that I grew up in a country that did. Maybe you didn't, so I'll leave that right there. But to me, that's a disturbing trend I see in our culture. The last one is we expect Jesus to make sense. Don't we? We expect Jesus, we can tie him up, we can put him in the boxes, we can tie him up neat and in bow. We're going to understand him. We're going to write systematic theologies about him. We're going to be able to understand him. We're going to be able to understand everything that he did to understand everything that he's doing and to predict his future action because he's Jesus and we like to understand everything. So we're going to be able to understand and compartmentalize this Jesus too. When Jesus never, ever wanted to be understood, he's too big for our understanding. Do you realize that he taught in parables to intentionally be misunderstood? He taught in parables. He says, they said, why the disciples go, why do you teach in parables? And he's like, cause I don't want everybody to understand me. What? Doesn't that seem counter to what we would think Jesus would do? And yet that's what he did. Jesus, he's approached by the rich young ruler and the rich young, and this guy, I don't know if it's a rich young ruler, it's a rich guy, and he says, hey, I'm in. I want to follow you. What do I need to do? And Jesus says, you need to sell everything that you have and follow me. And the guy walks away dejected. That doesn't make any sense. That actually feels counterproductive to what Jesus is trying to do. If I were a pastor and Jesus were a pastor, and he came to me for advice, which would totally make sense. And he said, hey, I've got this rich guy and he wants to know what he should do to follow me. That'd be interesting. And I would tell him, that's great. That's great. Share with him the gospel, bring him in, Start to disciple him. Put him with somebody who can disciple him. Make sure he's in Bible studies. And over time, start to gently, when you have these opportunities for conversations, gently nudge him towards the idea of stewardship so that he can come around to this understanding and this belief that everything that he has is really yours. And let's let that progress as it should. But you don't want to hit him with it up front because you'll scare him away like a scared baby deer, and then we might never get him back. Not because he's rich, but because we care about his soul. And Jesus goes, that's stupid. I'm just going to tell him. And the guy runs away. Who knows if he came back or not? That doesn't make sense. Jesus was culling the herd all the time. There was a time when the following got too big, and he just kind of looked at them, and he said, he said, I'll tell you the truth. Unless you eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. And people are like, okay, this just became a weird cult. I am out. And they started leaving left and right. And he looks at his disciples. And he goes, are you going to leave too? And this is, I don't think I'll ever get a tattoo. If I do, it might be this phrase. I love this phrase. I love what Peter says in this moment. He says, are you guys going to leave too? And Peter says, you're the Christ. Where are we going to go? I love it. Because what's Peter saying? He's going to be like, dude, I've been following you for two years. You don't make any sense. I don't have a clue what you just were talking about. That's weird, man. But you're Jesus, and I've got nowhere else to go. So I'm in, even if I don't understand you. Because we serve a God that's too big to be understood by you. And if he were, if you could understand him, you wouldn't want to follow him. All through Scripture, Jesus is too big and too marvelous and too miraculous and too wild to be understood and tamed by our intellect. Even at the very beginning, if we look at God introducing himself to the world, he shows up in the burning bush and he tells Moses, hey, go and free my people from Egypt. And Moses is like, all right, cool, got it. What's your name? And God's like, nah, I'm not going to tell you. I am. What's that mean? I'm not going to tell you that either. Just go do what I'm asking you to do, but I'm not going to be reduced to your names. I'm not going to be reduced to your titles. I'm not going to be reduced to a box that you want to put me in. Forget it. I will not do that with you. In Job, Job goes to God and he asks him the question that every generation has asked, which is essentially, why do you let bad things happen to good people, God? And in Job 38, 39, and 40, God tells him in a very not nice way. It's not like kind at all. That basically, I'm not going to tell you because if I did, you wouldn't understand it. So how about you just let me be God and you be Job and we'll keep this train moving. He's not going to explain it to him because he can't understand it. And they come out and tell us in Romans that his ways are higher than our ways. Jesus is far too big and far too wild and far too mysterious and far too wonderful to be reduced to something that's going to make sense to you all the time. And I think that was probably the big sin of the Israelites. Their expectations had reduced Jesus to something he never wanted to be. And when he didn't fit into the mold that they created for him, they killed him because they missed him. And I worry about me, and I worry about my kids, and I worry about my church. That the mold that we are casting for our Savior is so small that he can never fit in it even if he wanted to. And because he doesn't fit into the mold that we've created, we might reject him. I do not want that to be true of us. So how do we make sure that's not true? We constantly examine, what are my expectations of Jesus that he did not give me? We learn, we take in, we read from the Bible what the Bible says. We don't read into it what we want it to say. And I think we pray earnestly, God, where you are, help me see it. But let us not commit the sin of the Israelites and try to reduce our wonderful and wild and miraculous and mysterious God to something that he never wanted to be. That's the message that I get from Matthew. I hope that you'll return to that, that you'll pray about it, and that that question will haunt you as much as it does me, because maybe, maybe that will help us see Jesus when he arrives. Let's pray. God, we love you. We thank you for your son, Jesus. Thank you for who he was and what he did. Lord, we pray that we would have eyes to see and ears to hear. And we know, we know that we cannot see you. We cannot feel you. We cannot identify you. We cannot be moved by you without the Holy Spirit. So give us your spirit in increasing measure that we might see you where you are and where you are acting and where you are loving, that we might be true and authentic worshipers of you and worship you in spirit and in truth. God, help us be okay with you not making sense sometimes. Help us be people who can see how big you are and how wonderful you are. Help us be people who don't reduce you to what we expect, but rather marvel at all the ways you reveal yourself. Again, God, help us be people who worship you in spirit and in truth. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten a chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that in the lobby after the service, or we could also do it outside. I don't want to confine that to just the lobby. We're starting a new series today called 27. This series, believe it or not, is going to be two summers long. It's going to be the summer series this summer and next summer. And what we're going to do is look at an overview of all 27 books of the New Testament. We're going to start in Matthew and move right through and kind of give you guys an idea of what each book contains, what it's about, what it's for, who wrote it, why they wrote it, and those kinds of things. Now, we're doing this series for a couple of reasons, but the primary one is in an effort, and not that I sense a deficiency, but I think every church needs this, in an effort to continue to raise what I think of as the biblical literacy of the church. How familiar are we with the Bible? How well can we find the books? How well do we know what they're all about and how it all orders together? And I think that we have a wide swath of knowledge and people in the room. So some of us know the Bible really well. And we're grateful and blessed to have a body that is diverse in how well we know Scripture. Some of you could probably teach this series. And so my hope for those who know their Bibles well, know there's four Gospels, that Acts is the lone narrative book in the New Testament, and then we have the Pauline epistles and the general epistles, and they're written to the churches for different reasons and all the things. Like, if you know that stuff, then my hope is, as we zero in on each book, that you can learn something new and different that you may not have thought about or been aware of or exposed to before, and that hopefully something will spark and cause you to want to deep dive into these books a little bit more. Maybe you buy a commentary or start to watch another sermon series on it and dive deeper into this book. We hope that this series will compel you towards scripture. I say as often as I can that the single most important habit that anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. I don't think there's any habit more important or valuable than that one. And so we hope that this series will compel you towards that. Now, if you're on the opposite end of the biblical knowledge spectrum and you didn't even know that there was 27 books in the New Testament, as a matter of fact, you're not exactly sure what the New Testament is. You just hear church people use that word. Then this is for you too. The New Testament, by the way, is just the books of the Bible that were written after Jesus was born. There's a more technical explanation of that, but that's essentially what's going on there. All the books that were written before Jesus, Old Testament. After Jesus, New Testament. And in the New Testament, there's 27 books. For those who care, there's 39 in the Old Testament, 66 total. Unless you're Catholic, then there's an apocrypha, and that's just a whole mess. But in the Protestant Bible, 66 books. I don't know. I don't know why I do things. I don't know why I say things sometimes. They just, they happen. And then they come out and I'm like, what was that about? I don't know. I don't know. Sorry, I'm editing. Right now I'm editing to make fun of myself more. Let's get back to the sermon. My hope is that for those of us who feel like, gosh, I don't know anything about the Bible. It's intimidating and unapproachable. I hope that you can make sense of it. And I don't want anyone to feel bad for not knowing where books are. If I say turn to Ephesians, you have to use the table of contents. That's fine. We just want to move in a direction where all of us are learning a little bit more about our Bible and pressed towards the Bible. So the sermons in this series are going to feel, I wouldn't say professorial because I'm not smart enough to be a professor, but they're going to feel more instructive than sermons about how to manage our emotions, which are more practical. So these are just to help us think better and more about the Bible and understand it as we dive into the Bible. That being said, in June, we're doing like a little sub-series within the larger series where we're going to look at the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are what's called synoptic Gospels. They cover pretty much the same chronology. They include a lot of the same stories. Those authors are trying to get a lot of the same points across. They're written to different people and depict Jesus as different things in each We'll be make comparisons. I am like, but he doesn't talk in parables like he does in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And so for the month of June, we're going to move through the Gospels, look at how they're different, which aspects of Jesus they highlight, and what we can learn from that. So this week, we're in the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew was written to the Jews and depicts Jesus as king. Matthew was written to the Jewish people in the first century, and it depicts Jesus as the king. This is really important because, I'm going to move right to it, because the Jewish people needed Matthew's gospel because they missed the Messiah. Matthew needed to be written, and it needed to be written to the Jews, and it needed to be written to prove to them that Jesus was actually the Messiah that he came to be because they missed him. And it's really tragic that they did because for generation after generation, for four millennia, the Jewish people were looking for the Messiah. They had prophecies and prophets trickle in to point them towards the Messiah. They're waiting on him. They're looking for him. His arrival could be any day. You never know. Every lifetime that happens, just like every lifetime that happens, we're convinced that Jesus is going to return while we're here. Everybody thinks that all the time. So must they have thought that about the Messiah arriving. Certainly it will be now. And he didn't, and he didn't, and he didn't. And they waited, and they waited, and they waited. And these are God's people. These are the children of Abraham. These are his descendants. These are the ones of all the world. These are the people who should know, who when the Messiah gets there, they should be like, that's the guy. They should know. And yet, when Jesus shows up and he says, I'm the guy, they go, no, you're not. And he's like, but really I am. And they're like, actually, you're not. And because you claim you are and you're not, we're going to kill you. That is a very loose paraphrase of a non-existent conversation that happened between Jesus and a whole country. But that's the vibe, all right? That's generally what's going on. Unless we think that it really wasn't the Jews who killed him and rejected him, it really wasn't the Israelites who killed him and rejected him, it was just this sect of religious leaders, Caiaphas and his cronies, the high priest and the others around him, and maybe Pilate and not caring, and he had a hand in it, and they did. But before Pilate kills Jesus, he tries to say, hey, we don't need to kill this guy. He didn't really do anything. And the Jewish people say, kill him and let his blood be on our heads and on the heads of our children, which is communal guilt. Okay? They missed Jesus. Now, there's forgiveness and repentance for that. Jesus needed to die that death so that they could be reunited with their father in heaven, and it worked out. But the Jews missed him. The Israelites missed the Messiah. And so they needed the book of Matthew to be written to them, to prove to them that that guy you killed on that cross, he was actually the guy. The guy that you killed for saying he was the guy, he was right. You've got a big blind spot. Let me show you. Let me prove to you that he was who he says he was. That's why in the book of Matthew, as you read it, you'll be following along. If you have a Bible now, you can look. It's right there. You'll be following along. You know how the Bible has two columns on each page? The column will pause and indent, and there will be a quote, sometimes short, sometimes long, and then it will get back to the regular discourse. And there's all sorts of pausing, indented quotes all throughout the book of Matthew. And what those indented quotes are are Old Testament prophecies about Jesus and who he was. And it goes like this. If you open up your Bible to the book of Matthew, you'll see three times that he does this in the first two chapters. I'm just going to run through them real quick so you know what I'm talking about. Matthew chapter 1, verse 22. I'm going to start reading in verse 21. See? All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, and then he breaks down into the quote from the Old Testament prophet. You turn the page, or maybe I don't know how your Bible works out said this had to happen. That is all through the gospel of Matthew. Because the Gospel of Matthew was written to a Jewish community that had rejected the Messiah. And what Matthew is doing is saying, hey, I know that you guys know your Old Testament, the Tanakh, the laws and the prophets, what we would think of as the Old Testament in the Bible. I know that you know that. I know that you know your prophets. I know that you know your prophecies. Their biblical literacy as a culture was much higher than ours is in church. So when Matthew quotes these prophets, they know who it was. They've been taught those prophecies. They've heard those things before. And there ought to be, there ought to be light bulbs going off in their minds going, oh, he does fulfill that. Oh, he does fulfill that. Oh, that is actually true. Oh, my goodness, he is and was the Messiah. So he wrote it to the unbelieving first century Jewish audience to show them that you did actually kill the Messiah and we need to turn and put our faith in him because he still lives. That was the point of the gospel of Matthew. And to me, when I think about why Matthew was written, and I think about some other things that we'll get into here in a second. It causes me to come back to questions like this. If Jesus showed up today, would you need your own gospel to show you that you missed him? If Jesus showed up today in Israel and the world pointed to him and said, that's the Messiah, that's Jesus, would you recognize him? Would you acknowledge him for who he was? Or would you be part of the crowd that rejected him and needed a separate gospel written to you after the fact to show you that he really was who he says he was? A more simple way to ask that is, if Jesus showed up in your life, would you notice him? If Jesus just plopped down right in the middle of grace, would we acknowledge that he was the Messiah? Or would we not be able to recognize him? Would we reject him, call him a weird cult leader, or a crazy person, and have him arrested or ignore him? Or if Jesus showed up, would we recognize him? I think about that question all the time. And I think about it all the time because the very people who were supposed to identify Jesus as Jesus didn't do it. The very people who had all the resources and all the exposure and knew all the quotes and all the scripture, when Jesus showed up, they didn't recognize him. And I don't know about you guys, but in modern Christianity, I'm that person. I've been in church my whole life. I've learned about Jesus from a very young age. I pray to him every day. I'm the one that's supposed to recognize when he shows up. You, most of you, are the people who are supposed to recognize when he shows up. Would you? Or would we do what they did and miss him? To answer that question, we have got to ask, why did they miss him? Right? That's the question. We have to go back and go, what did they do that we can try to avoid doing? Why did they miss who Jesus was? And how can we avoid doing what they did so that if Jesus were to show up today, we would recognize him and see him? I would contend with you that there's a couple different reasons, big reasons, why they missed the Messiah and they didn't recognize him and see him. I would contend with you that there's a couple different reasons, big reasons why they missed the Messiah and they didn't recognize him. But I would contend with you that overall, they couldn't see Jesus because they were blinded by their religious expectations. They had some expectations of who the Messiah was going to be and what the Messiah was going to do. And because they had those expectations, it blinded them from being able to see the actual real Messiah. And here's what's so scary about these expectations. These expectations came from their own religion. They came from their own faith. They came from Judaism. They came from, listen to me, well-meaning teachers over the centuries who were doing the best they could to point God's people towards God. I do not think that there was some grand conspiracy with little pernicious machinations through the decades to just tilt the course a little bit so that God's people could not see their God. I believe that there was good, well-meaning teachers in the Old Testament, men and women who were instructing God's people to be able to point them towards God, and they allowed things to get in there that started to just knock them off by a couple degrees so that by the time Jesus shows up thousands or hundreds of years later, they don't recognize him anymore. Because through the decades and through the centuries and down through the millennia, they began to put expectations on who their Messiah would be that Jesus did not put on himself. They started to think things would be true of Jesus that Jesus never said, that God never said. The biggest one is this. And what I'm about to tell you is so important that if you don't understand this, you really can't understand all of the Gospels. You'll still get the important part of the Gospel. Jesus died for your sins and he reunites you with your Heavenly Father. You'll get that part, but you won't understand the nuances of the gospels if you don't understand what I'm about to say. It is such, it may be, it's one of the most important tensions that's laced throughout all the gospels that helps you understand how Jesus's world interacted with him. You've got to understand this. The biggest expectation they had of Jesus is that he was going to be an earthly king to sit on an earthly throne. They believe with all their heart that when Jesus showed up, in this day, ancient Israel, when Jesus is born, they are a far-flung province of the Roman Empire. They're a corner of the globe. They don't matter. And they believe if the Messiah shows up, he is going to go and kick Herod out of the palace. He's going to take over David's throne. He is going to sit on the throne and rule. He will overthrow Roman rule. He will rise Israel to international prominence, and he will be the king of kings there. That's what they expect is going to happen. And so it's not necessarily that they didn't like Jesus when they met him. It's just that they expected him to sit on the earthly throne and establish an earthly kingdom. And so when Jesus shows up and he says, I'm the guy, they go, that's great. Let's go to the throne. And he's like, no, no, I don to. Chill out. I don't want to do that yet. And they're like, okay, are you ready to do it now? I actually had someone suggest, and I think this is super interesting, that Judas, the one who betrayed Jesus, didn't betray him to betray him and be a jerk, but he was just trying to get the wheels in motion to make this guy king. And he figured something needs to happen, so I'm going to do it. Which is why Judas, it makes sense that Judas would have killed himself after the fact when he found out that he was way wrong about that. But there was tremendous pressure being exerted upon Jesus to become the actual king. There's that scene where he disappears from the midst of the people because they're pressing on him, trying to get him and take him to Jerusalem and make him king. And he's like, that's not what I came for. They took Jesus, Jesus who came to be the king of the universe, the king of all creation, the king of heaven and earth, king of kings and Lord of lords. And they said, that's great. We want to make you the king of Israel. And he said, I didn't come for Israel, that small potatoes. I came for the universe. You guys don't understand. Pilate, at the end of his life, asked him, are you really a king? He's like, yeah, but not the kind you're thinking about. They had that expectation on Jesus that he was going to be an earthly king of an earthly kingdom. And because they were blinded by that expectation, when Jesus didn't want to go sit on the throne, they said, well, you can't possibly be the guy. So they killed him. Their religious expectations blinded them from who Jesus was. Jesus shows up. He starts hanging out with sinners, tax collectors, prostitutes, and drunkards. And they're like, if you're the Messiah, you shouldn't be doing that. And he's like, well, I am the Messiah, and I am doing that. So you need to adjust. They were blinded by their own expectations. Which makes really the most important question this morning. And this question, I think, is so important that if it's not already, for me, it rattles around in the back of my head all the time. Because I'm a dad, and I want to raise my children to believe in Jesus. I want to live a life that's authentic to Jesus. I want to be one that if he walked through the doors, I would know him, and I would see him, and I would recognize him. I don't want to be one of the ones who rejects Jesus. I want to be Nicodemus and go, hey, maybe there's something to this. I want to be John the Baptist. And so he must become greater and I must become less. I want to be one of the ones that recognizes Jesus if he walks through the doors. So I'm constantly thinking about, not constantly, but it rattles around there pretty regularly. And this is something that if it's not blazoned in your head, I would write it down somewhere and return at least quarterly and pray through this question. What blinding expectations are we carrying? What expectations do I have of Jesus that if he were to show up would cause me to not recognize him? I think that's an incredibly important question. I don't know how often you do reviews at work. How are you doing? Are you doing well? Are you fulfilling the job description? Are we still on the same page here? This needs to be a quarterly personal review. What expectations have I allowed to trickle into my life that might cause me to miss the Messiah if he showed up? Because I hope you're like me and you want to be someone who recognizes Jesus when he arrives. So I think that question, what blinding expectations am I carrying, is an incredibly important one. So I've got some for you this morning that I think could represent a large swath of the room, but I bet that there's more, and I bet that it's worth praying about, and that's really what I want to encourage you to do. Take that statement home, find some time to pray about it and think on it and chew on it a little bit and let it rattle around in your brain for years and years like it does me. Because I want us to be a church that knows and sees Jesus because I think, I think Jesus is moving now in so many ways that we might not see. I think Jesus is loving us through people that we might not understand as loving us through Jesus, if that makes any sense. We're receiving love and affection from someone, but we don't see Jesus' hand in that because he couldn't use that person. I think Jesus is moving in communities and in movements and is spurring things on in our culture in his subtle ways that we don't recognize or maybe even flat out reject because it doesn't look like we think it should look. It doesn't behave like we think it should behave. And I think that it's highly possible that we don't have to talk about the hypothetical if Jesus showed up, would we recognize him? I think it's actually helpful to say, do we see the Jesus now that's in our life, that's loving on us, that's moving in our community? Do we see his influence in all the places where it actually is or have our religious expectations and our religious baggage and our intellectual baggage put blinders on our eyes so that we can only see portions and snippets of Jesus instead of recognizing all that he's doing in our life. So this isn't just an important hypothetical question for one day, but for right now too, as we look to see Jesus in our lives and in the lives of the people around us. So what are some of the expectations that we can have that could potentially blind us? I think the first one I would mention, and this kind of trickles down into all of them, is we expect Jesus to have a temporal perspective rather than an eternal one. I think we expect Jesus to have a temporal perspective rather than one that is eternal. See, I don't think that we realize, this is kind of an esoteric thought experiment, but I don't think we realize how much our being in a temporal world and a temporal body that's going to last 70, 80, 90 years impacts the way that we think and how much Jesus existing in eternity, seeing eternity for all that it is, actually changes the way that he thinks and interacts with the world. I think that there are some things that we see as tragic because our view is temporal that Jesus sees as merciful because his view is eternal. I think that there is so much that when we get to heaven one day and we are granted this eternal perspective where we will go, oh, that makes so much more sense now. I used to not understand that. Now I completely understand that. I used to be mad at Jesus about that, now I'm not mad at Jesus at all. I think having an eternal perspective changes everything about how we view the world, and it's so hard to get ourselves out of our limited temporal perspective and really truly believe what Paul says when he says that we are like a mist or a vapor, here one day and gone the next. When he says, though we endure this pain for a little while, just a small portion, we have no idea how infinitesimally small, I don't know that word, how really small our life is compared to the whole span of eternity. And it also helps us understand Jesus as we read him in the Gospels. I think this is a really funny question. I heard it years ago, and I think it's great. How come Jesus, knowing everything about everything, when he exists in ancient Israel, and he's teaching people, he's doing the Sermon on the Mount, he's doing the Beatitudes, bless the peacemakers, bless the poor in spirit, bless the meek, don't commit adultery, don't steal from people, we're the salt of the earth, we're the light of the world, all the things. How about at the end of it, why doesn't he just tack on and also, listen, I'm not really going to get into this, okay, because I'm not going to do science on you guys, but just wash your hands. Just wash your hands. Why doesn't he tell ancient Israel, like, just, you know, after the bathroom, just soap up, you know, before you tend to wound? Maybe just wash your hands a little bit. Like, why doesn't he do that? That's not like a big deal. Just a little deal. Just give him a little bit to make the world a little bit better place. Why doesn't he do that? That's not what he came to do. He didn't come then to make the world a better place. He came to live a perfect life, to die a perfect death, to train the disciples, and to leave behind the church. That's what he came to do. He's thinking about eternity. You ever wonder how many people existed in ancient Israel contemporary to Jesus? Hearing about all the miracles that he's performing and all the wonderful things that he's doing and how he's healing people and even raising people from the dead. I wonder how many people there were that were contemporaries of Jesus who got up one day and took themselves to where he was to be healed or took the loved one to where he was to be healed. All the faith and all the ardor and all the desire and they had to walk away with that same disease broken hearted because Jesus didn't heal them. How many people were in the crowds who desperately needed to be healed but they weren't? I bet there was a bunch. And I bet they were pretty miffed. You healed that lady, you wouldn't heal my wife? Don't we do the same thing? You healed that cancer, you won't heal this one? You saved that person, you won't save this one? How many people were walking around doing that back then? And why didn't Jesus walk around healing everyone? Because that's a temporal question. He had an eternal perspective. That's not what he came to do. He had other stuff to do. It was an eternal agenda. So I think a lot of the expectations that we place on Jesus come from this place of a temporal perspective when we really need to see him through the lens of the eternal. Another one, another expectation that can potentially blind us, kind of bleeds into that one, is we expect Jesus to protect us and our families from tragedy. Don't we? We would never say it out loud. No one ever says, I'm a Christian now, and I follow the Bible as well as I can. I pray every day. I go to church. And because of that, God's going to protect me and my family from tragedy. We don't say that out loud, but we certainly think it. And I know that we think it because I can't tell you how many people I've sat with and how many times in my life I've experienced the emotion of, God, how can you let this happen? This isn't fair. Why not? Well, because I love you and follow you and I'm devoted to you and you shouldn't let things like this happen to me. Oh, where'd you pick that one up? Was it the book of Job? Which says the exact opposite of that. I'm not going to beat this drum too hard because I do this sermon about twice a year because it's such a pernicious teaching in God's church. And I hate it so much that we would have this expectation that to follow Jesus means that we get to dodge the raindrops of tragedy in our life. That is not the case, and God never said it would be. He does not promise to prevent those things from happening. He promises to walk through them with us, that in those moments he will be closer to us than any other times. That's what he promises, but he doesn't promise that his children will not endure pain. He actually promises in a bunch of different ways that we will. And yet, people walk away from the faith because something tragic happened in their life and they think that that makes God unfair. It's an expectation that we have of Jesus that blinds him in our life, blinds us from being able to see him in our life. Like I said, I'm not going to belabor it, but I see this belief causing more people to walk away from the faith than to be drawn to Jesus. We need to carefully root that out of our lives. And it's in, even though I say it, it's in me. I know it's in me. We need to always reexamine how we respond to tragedy and the idea of fairness because Jesus did not give us that expectation. Another one that can tend to blind us is that we expect Jesus to be a better version of ourselves. If Jesus were to show up in our lives, we would expect that he's not going to be like us because we've got some rough edges, right? Probably not going to laugh at all the jokes I laugh at. But he's going to laugh at some of them. He's going to be pretty good. He's going to be a little bit sarcastic. He's going to be a little bit funny. He's probably going to be really pragmatic, you know. He's probably going to choose the minivan over the SUV. That's what Jesus would do. He's going to drive the sensible car. Jesus would have driven a Leaf. I don't know if you know that. He would be, that's an old school joke. I used to drive a Leaf years ago and people who have been here for a while still make fun of me for that. And they should. And if we find out you drive one, we're making fun of you too. But we expect Jesus to be like we would, right? Especially in our politics. Jen's like, please, please be careful. If we lean right, we're pretty sure that Jesus would too. And he would have mercy on the godless liberals. And some of them might be Christians, you know, maybe. And God's patient with them. They're just swept up in culture and they're, you know, they're sissies. But God has patience for them. If we lean left, we think God would probably lean left too. He'd probably vote Democrat. And he has patience for his misguided children on the right who live in echo chambers. They're going to be fine. Right? We think Jesus would be like us, and that he has our opinions about all the things. Maybe just a little bit more measured. We tend to remake Jesus in our own image. Here's another way I know this is true. I'm just going to be honest with you. If Jesus shows up and he's from the hills of Appalachia and it turns out he's Pentecostal, I'm going to be real uncomfortable with that. That's going to take some adjusting to do. But he might be. He might be. And that would be great. All those people for all those years would be like, see, stuffy Presbyterians, we told you. And you're like, yep, you did. You did. You tried to tell us. We wouldn't listen. He might be. But because I think Jesus is going to be like I am, probably not. But can you see how if we remake Jesus in our own image, we make him so small that we might not be able to recognize him if he shows up not looking like us? Because, spoiler alert, he will not. Here's another one. I almost didn't include this. This is a little touchy. But I think it's true. I think it's worth saying. I think it needs to be said in church. I think we expect Jesus to prioritize our country. I don't know about you, but I grew up in a country, and I'm American, by the way. I grew up in a country where it wasn't said in the church. I never had a pastor that preached about this because I had a good pastor. But it was in Christian culture that America's really important to Jesus. We are the righteous right hand of God fighting back the godless commies. And if we don't do it, atheism will take over the world. And God needs America to protect his grand plan. So America, because we're a Christian nation, no we're not, is most important to God. No, it's not. I've heard people read America into the Bible, into the prophecies about the end time. Well, that's definitely the United States of America. Okay. Well, it wasn't Rome and it wasn't Greece, so maybe it's us. I've seen people do this. We're trying to read ourselves into the prophecies and into the texts. And we still continue to think that somehow the United States of America is the apple of God's eye. No, it's not. He cares just as much about North Korea as he does about the United States. He cares a little bit less about Canada, and we know that. And that's fine. But we've got to abandon this sort of American nationalistic faith where we put American flags and Christian flags in our churches. And we think that somehow to be a patriot is to be more Christian. No, it's not. It's fine. It's fine. Be patriotic. It's wonderful. But we should not conflate that with faith. And I think that I grew up in a country that did. Maybe you didn't, so I'll leave that right there. But to me, that's a disturbing trend I see in our culture. The last one is we expect Jesus to make sense. Don't we? We expect Jesus, we can tie him up, we can put him in the boxes, we can tie him up neat and in bow. We're going to understand him. We're going to write systematic theologies about him. We're going to be able to understand him. We're going to be able to understand everything that he did to understand everything that he's doing and to predict his future action because he's Jesus and we like to understand everything. So we're going to be able to understand and compartmentalize this Jesus too. When Jesus never, ever wanted to be understood, he's too big for our understanding. Do you realize that he taught in parables to intentionally be misunderstood? He taught in parables. He says, they said, why the disciples go, why do you teach in parables? And he's like, cause I don't want everybody to understand me. What? Doesn't that seem counter to what we would think Jesus would do? And yet that's what he did. Jesus, he's approached by the rich young ruler and the rich young, and this guy, I don't know if it's a rich young ruler, it's a rich guy, and he says, hey, I'm in. I want to follow you. What do I need to do? And Jesus says, you need to sell everything that you have and follow me. And the guy walks away dejected. That doesn't make any sense. That actually feels counterproductive to what Jesus is trying to do. If I were a pastor and Jesus were a pastor, and he came to me for advice, which would totally make sense. And he said, hey, I've got this rich guy and he wants to know what he should do to follow me. That'd be interesting. And I would tell him, that's great. That's great. Share with him the gospel, bring him in, Start to disciple him. Put him with somebody who can disciple him. Make sure he's in Bible studies. And over time, start to gently, when you have these opportunities for conversations, gently nudge him towards the idea of stewardship so that he can come around to this understanding and this belief that everything that he has is really yours. And let's let that progress as it should. But you don't want to hit him with it up front because you'll scare him away like a scared baby deer, and then we might never get him back. Not because he's rich, but because we care about his soul. And Jesus goes, that's stupid. I'm just going to tell him. And the guy runs away. Who knows if he came back or not? That doesn't make sense. Jesus was culling the herd all the time. There was a time when the following got too big, and he just kind of looked at them, and he said, he said, I'll tell you the truth. Unless you eat of my flesh and drink of my blood, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. And people are like, okay, this just became a weird cult. I am out. And they started leaving left and right. And he looks at his disciples. And he goes, are you going to leave too? And this is, I don't think I'll ever get a tattoo. If I do, it might be this phrase. I love this phrase. I love what Peter says in this moment. He says, are you guys going to leave too? And Peter says, you're the Christ. Where are we going to go? I love it. Because what's Peter saying? He's going to be like, dude, I've been following you for two years. You don't make any sense. I don't have a clue what you just were talking about. That's weird, man. But you're Jesus, and I've got nowhere else to go. So I'm in, even if I don't understand you. Because we serve a God that's too big to be understood by you. And if he were, if you could understand him, you wouldn't want to follow him. All through Scripture, Jesus is too big and too marvelous and too miraculous and too wild to be understood and tamed by our intellect. Even at the very beginning, if we look at God introducing himself to the world, he shows up in the burning bush and he tells Moses, hey, go and free my people from Egypt. And Moses is like, all right, cool, got it. What's your name? And God's like, nah, I'm not going to tell you. I am. What's that mean? I'm not going to tell you that either. Just go do what I'm asking you to do, but I'm not going to be reduced to your names. I'm not going to be reduced to your titles. I'm not going to be reduced to a box that you want to put me in. Forget it. I will not do that with you. In Job, Job goes to God and he asks him the question that every generation has asked, which is essentially, why do you let bad things happen to good people, God? And in Job 38, 39, and 40, God tells him in a very not nice way. It's not like kind at all. That basically, I'm not going to tell you because if I did, you wouldn't understand it. So how about you just let me be God and you be Job and we'll keep this train moving. He's not going to explain it to him because he can't understand it. And they come out and tell us in Romans that his ways are higher than our ways. Jesus is far too big and far too wild and far too mysterious and far too wonderful to be reduced to something that's going to make sense to you all the time. And I think that was probably the big sin of the Israelites. Their expectations had reduced Jesus to something he never wanted to be. And when he didn't fit into the mold that they created for him, they killed him because they missed him. And I worry about me, and I worry about my kids, and I worry about my church. That the mold that we are casting for our Savior is so small that he can never fit in it even if he wanted to. And because he doesn't fit into the mold that we've created, we might reject him. I do not want that to be true of us. So how do we make sure that's not true? We constantly examine, what are my expectations of Jesus that he did not give me? We learn, we take in, we read from the Bible what the Bible says. We don't read into it what we want it to say. And I think we pray earnestly, God, where you are, help me see it. But let us not commit the sin of the Israelites and try to reduce our wonderful and wild and miraculous and mysterious God to something that he never wanted to be. That's the message that I get from Matthew. I hope that you'll return to that, that you'll pray about it, and that that question will haunt you as much as it does me, because maybe, maybe that will help us see Jesus when he arrives. Let's pray. God, we love you. We thank you for your son, Jesus. Thank you for who he was and what he did. Lord, we pray that we would have eyes to see and ears to hear. And we know, we know that we cannot see you. We cannot feel you. We cannot identify you. We cannot be moved by you without the Holy Spirit. So give us your spirit in increasing measure that we might see you where you are and where you are acting and where you are loving, that we might be true and authentic worshipers of you and worship you in spirit and in truth. God, help us be okay with you not making sense sometimes. Help us be people who can see how big you are and how wonderful you are. Help us be people who don't reduce you to what we expect, but rather marvel at all the ways you reveal yourself. Again, God, help us be people who worship you in spirit and in truth. In Jesus' name, amen.