I am super excited for this sermon this morning. If you let me, I think I could go for about 90 minutes, so buckle up. Thanks for being here. Thanks for joining us online. I'm so glad to get to be with my church family, with faces that I know and love, some of whom love me back after this week. It's been a week, man. It's been arduous. And I've been excited for this sermon since we outlined this series. And I opened up my Bible and I was reading through James and breaking it out into sermons and trying to figure out which parts we get to talk about and which parts we'll have to save for the next time we go through James. And when I arrived at this passage in chapter 3, chapter 3, verses 13 through 18, I was just excited to get to share the message from James with you guys, with my church. Because I don't know how you guys have felt about all the divisiveness and contention in our culture, racial and political and otherwise. But it's been wearying to my soul. It's been hard on my heart. It has grieved me that our culture has been this divided. It's been at least 50 years since our country has seen division like this. And as a pastor, it hurts my heart. And it hurts my heart in part because it's just a lot. But it also hurts my heart because I believe that Jesus' bride, the church, has a part to play in this, in this divisiveness. We actually have a role that God wants us to step into, that he asks us to step into. We have a role in our culture right now of who we should be and what we should do, and I believe that James speaks directly to that role and gives us hope and purpose in the midst of this contention. So I'm excited to talk with my church about that this morning. So let's look at James chapter 3, verses 13 through 18. I'm going to read them all, and then we'll talk about the passage. James writes this, Who is wise and understanding among you? By his conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. I love that phrase. James has this flourish for writing that Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, does not have. Paul writes his books like an engineer would write their book. It's very matter-of-fact, systemic, like this is how we're doing it. James has this flourish, and so he brackets this idea, which, by the way, he's extracting this idea out of the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount was Jesus' first recorded public address. This is almost like a commentary on the things that Jesus taught in that sermon. And Jesus says, blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth and blessed are the peacemakers. And so it's like James is pausing to say, yeah, let's talk about those people and why they're needed and how we become like them. And so he opens up with this great phrase that the good works in the meekness of wisdom, and then he brackets it with that great phrase at the end, and harvest a righteousness s is it that wisdom has to be meek? Why is wisdom meek? Why did he choose to pair those things up together? Why did he couple them together in that way? Why is wisdom meek? And so to answer that question, I started thinking about, well, who's the person that I know or that I've seen? What's the example or the personification of someone who lets themselves show, whose good deeds are shown in the meekness of their wisdom. And since I don't like to use myself as an example, I'm just kidding, I'm terrible at this. I thought of my mom-mom. My grandmother on my mom's side, I think personified someone who walked in the meekness of wisdom. Her husband, Don, my papa, I'm very southern, so those are their names, was loud and bombastic. He was a phenomenal storyteller. He was the guy that if you went to dinner with a group of friends and he got sat on the opposite end of the table as you, you were bummed out. Because you're talking to whatever boring person is over here, and you're like, I wish I could listen to that guy. That was my grandpa. That was my papa Don. And Linda was quiet. She was diminutive. She was happy to stay in the background. She didn't really want any of the focus on her. And I didn't appreciate it when I was a kid, because I didn't really understand all those dynamics. But as an adult, as the years progressed, particularly towards the end of her life, when she and I were in the habit of having coffee together every other Monday morning and just chatting for a while, I got to see the ways that her quiet strength and gentle, meek wisdom had carried her through so many seasons of her life. And so I thought, well, she's the example to me of the meekness of wisdom. Then what made her meek? So I thought about her life. She grew up in rural Baton Rouge. I have a great uncle named Dodie Sandifer. All right, that's how Cajun we are. She grew up in a very racist home. Racism was so ubiquitous in her family that when my mom was a little girl, she used racial slurs without understanding what they were. Mama grew to disdain that part of her heritage. She grew to see the evil in it. And when I did her funeral, in her retirement years, she was a bank teller. And when I did her funeral, many of her co-workers, her African-American co-workers, came to the funeral and told me how much they loved my mama and how much she meant to them and how well she loved them. She changed over the course of her lifetime. When my mom was eight, they did a church called Forest Hills, did a bus ministry where you used to be able to do this. Can you imagine? They just drove a bus through neighborhoods and just invited kids to get on. It doesn't matter. Do you have your parents' permission? We don't care. We're going to get you saved. Come to church. Do your parents know where you are? It doesn't matter. Let's go to church. They just went. I can't imagine just sending Mike Harris right here, just go get a bus and just drive around Falls River and just grab kids. It'll be fine. That's so weird. But they they did that in the 60s and so my mom went and praised God that she did because she accepted Christ. And because she accepted Christ, my mom and my papa started going to church with her. So here's a woman who grew up without a faith and she embraces a faith. She changes. But as she embraces that change, she got involved in what I believe was one of the worst kinds of churches. Super legalistic and damaging. I'm talking about super conservative, 70s, Southern Baptist, fundamental oppression. No going to movies, ever. Don't be seen at the movie house, is what it was called. No dancing. Girls wear skirts and dresses only. Always below the knees. None of this, none of this, none of this. It was just writ with legalism. And because she didn't know any better, that's the faith she taught her kids. But she grew up. She grew in wisdom. And she started going to churches that lived a more gracious faith. And she became more gracious in her faith. And she moved away from those old things that she believed. And I could talk to you and tell you story after story of ways that I didn't see at the time, but as I reflect back on her now and watching the scope of her life, ways that I saw her change, ways that I saw her grow in her wisdom. And it occurred to me that wisdom is meek because wisdom knows what it is to hold something ardently and fervently and fanatically in your 20s and be ashamed of it in your 50s. Right? Wisdom knows what it is to hold an opinion tightly and then to see the currents of change move through the community and hold it a little bit more loosely and regret how tightly you used to hold it and who you hurt in holding it that way. Wisdom has fallen on its face a few times. Wisdom knows that it has some shadows in its past and some skeletons in its closet, so it's not going to leap to beat you too hard with yours. Because wisdom has grown in grace. Wisdom has made mistakes. Wisdom has seen who they were when they were younger and been forced through introspection to offer themselves grace for their humanity and likewise is gracious towards others in their humanity. Wisdom is someone in their 60s who doesn't get super annoyed by the person in their 20s because they understand and they were that person too. That's what wisdom does. Because of that, I came to the conclusion that acquiring wisdom is a humbling process. That's why we pair meekness with wisdom because acquiring true wisdom is a humbling process. That's why we pair meekness with wisdom, because acquiring true wisdom is a humbling process. You don't grow in wisdom by just stridently thinking you're right all the time. I'll never forget when I was 18 years old, my dad took me to college. I went to Auburn University my freshman year. He drove me to college, he dropped me off, and he said, son, I'm bringing you here, and I hope that you get dumber. And I was a snot-nosed 18-year-old kid who thought he knew everything. And what he was telling me is you need to grow in wisdom, which, by the way, can you imagine how insufferable I was at 18? I would hate that guy. Like, good, find a new church, pal. I needed to grow in wisdom. I needed to be humbled. I needed to know that I wasn't right about everything. And I think that that's why James pairs meekness with wisdom. Because acquiring wisdom is a humbling process. And so, I want to offer this to you. You take it or leave it. Okay, this is Nate talking, not Scripture. This is just my opinion. You're smart adults. You take it for what it's worth. But I think that there's a litmus test for whether or not we're growing in wisdom, particularly growing in the meekness of wisdom. And I think it's this question. When's the last time you changed your mind about something important? For you as an individual, the things that you hold dear, the things that you hold firmly and stridently, when's the last time you changed your mind about something important? And I'm not talking about going to Winston's for lunch thinking that you're going to get the health nut salad and then calling an audible and getting the prime room sandwich with french fries. I'm not talking about that kind of mind change. I'm talking about the way that you used to feel about a community. Has that shifted? The way over the years that you viewed the other side of the aisle, has that grown more or less gracious? This person in your neighborhood that you can't stand, have you grown to be able to appreciate them a little bit more? The person that you were in their 20s, have you been forced to offer yourself grace for being that person? Have you changed your mind about something that's important to you? Because if you haven't, if you can't think of anything, there's only really two options. Either, dude, you're nailing it. Like, you're right about everything. And that's super impressive. Good for you. Let's have lunch. Or we're just walking in our strideful ignorance, refusing to learn anything that God is trying to teach us. Right? If our mind never changes about anything important, then we're not very open to growing in the meekness of wisdom. That's why just being old doesn't make one wise. Being old and learned and introspective and adaptable and malleable and impressionable and open to reason, like James says here, is how we grow in the meekness of wisdom. So I would ask this morning, are you growing in wisdom? And again, that's my litmus test. If you don't like it, throw it out. If it's helpful, use it. But I think it's important to understand how meekness and wisdom work together, because if we don't, if we can't be meek in our wisdom, then I don't think we can do what we're told to do in the rest of the passage. I want to pick it back up at verse 17. He finishes it this way. He says, but the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. I don't just want to blow by that verse because I think those things are so very important. It is pure. It seeks peace. And this is the thing that I love in here. It is gentle. True wisdom. God's wisdom from above. It's gentle. As I prayed before the sermon a few minutes ago, I prayed, God, let me be brave and let me be gentle. Bravery is not often what I struggle with. Gentleness is. True wisdom is gentle. It's open to reason. It's not convinced of its own correctness all the time. And then he finishes it this way with this great sentence. I just love it. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. And that sounds nice, but we might think to ourselves, what is a harvest of righteousness? I think it goes with the theme in the book of James. In the first week, remember I said that the reason that James wrote this letter was to help us, to help the church pursue wholeness, to help the church become this whole person with a sincere faith, to not live as two disjointed people, as the old nature and the new nature, but to walk in the person that God wanted us to become, to walk in the person that Jesus died to turn us into. We related to Romans 7 where Paul laments, the things that I want to do, I do not do. The things that I do, I do not want to do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? That lament is why James was written. And so what he's saying is you will reap a harvest of righteousness. You will move towards that wholeness, towards being the person that God created you to be and died for you to become. A sowing peace by making peace. James is telling us that it's our role to make peace, that true wisdom makes peace. And so I thought, if it's our role to make peace, if that's what God has called us to do, what does it look like to make peace? What does a peacemaker do? I think it's an important question. The first answer, I think, is that a peacemaker values understanding over persuading. A peacemaker values understanding someone over persuading them. Often when we're in a conflict, when we're in a situation, in a relationship or a dynamic where we're not at peace. There's tension here. I think so very often we approach it trying to be persuasive. If they could only see my side, if they could only understand what I'm talking about, if they would only see it from my perspective, or if they would just be encountered with this list of facts, which by the way, 2020 has shown us that facts really are not argument winners anymore. We've all got our own set. We don't trust anybody else's. So that ain't it. Persuasion is not the goal. Understanding is the goal for a peacemaker. The other night, I had a moment in the house that I was very much not proud of. We've got a daughter named Lily, and Lily is the sweetest. She is the best when you see her. A lot of you have seen her on social media, or you might see her here in the church, and she is sweet and cute and adorable, and she's very quiet and meek in the church because she's scared of everyone, and that bodes well for us as parents because it looks like she has behaved. And she is. She is. But here's the thing with Lily. She has a will. She's found it, which is a fun part of parenting, I think. I've told Jen a few times, you're not raising yourself, sweetheart. I'm very sorry for this. You're raising me. And the other day, she expressed that will more than normal, and it got me frazzled. I was getting a little tired of it. And at night, it was time for her to go to bed, and I told her to clean up her room. She had taken some stuff out of a small Tupperware container or a plastic bin or something, and it was kind of all over the floor. It was like little magnets that you can dress girls up with or whatever. And I told her to clean it up. And she said, okay, Daddy. And then I walked out. I came back five minutes later. It was like two things in the bin. And I'm like, what are you doing? Like, clean up. Let's go. I told you to clean. And she's like, I know, but I'm doing it this way. I said, I don't care what way you're doing it. Clean up, sweetheart. Let's go. And I left. And I came back. And there was not adequate progress made. And so I get frustrated. I said, all right, that's it. I'm going to clean this up. You go to the potty, and then we're going to bed. That's it. And she starts to leave, but she says, but Dad, I want to do the other thing. And I said, I don't care. Go and come back. And things started to escalate. And they ended in tears on both sides. And I was not proud of myself at all. And the night ended with us hugging and falling asleep next to each other in her bed, and the world is good. But as I was thinking about it the next morning, she wasn't being defiant, at least not intentionally. She wanted to organize her toys. She didn't want me to put them all up together because she was in the middle of a task, and she just wanted to keep the things that she had separated, separated. She just didn't want me to mess it up. She wasn't trying to say, I'm not going to put it up. She just had a system and it was important to her because she was going to wake up in the morning and she was going to keep playing with it. And if I would have taken just a dang second to understand a four-year-old instead of trying to persuade her, it all could have been avoided. I could have made peace. Instead, I was an idiot. And it makes me wonder how many conflicts in our life would go away if we chose understanding over persuasion. If we just stopped for a minute and thought, am I really right about all the intentions and motives and stupidity that I'm reading into this instance? Or would it be worth it to talk to them and see what their side is? Would it be worth it to try to empathize? Those of us that have relationships in our life that are not at peace, how many of those could be made peaceful if we would simply choose understanding over persuasion? It's not a panacea, but it's a start, isn't it? Peacemakers make that choice. The next thing in your notes, it says that a peacemaker seeks harmony over victory. And that's well and good and that's fine and we can talk about that. But I actually, as I was thinking about it just this morning, it occurred to me that actually what a peacemaker does is they prize the victory over small victories. A peacemaker prizes the victory over small victories. Guys, we're a church. We're believers. The only reason we walk the earth after we come to faith is to share our faith with others. The only reason we still breathe is to bring as many people with us to heaven on our way as possible. That's it. We are here for the souls of men and women. That's why we're doing the whole thing. That's why the first thing in our mission statement is to connect people with Jesus. That's what we want to do. That's the victory. That's what this whole thing is about, is to unite people with their Savior. Yet sometimes we get so caught up in pursuing the small victory that we forsake the victory. Yesterday on Facebook, I posted something that I feel is true. And I just said to Christians that the way that we respond right now in light of the election matters a lot. And I just said, if you're a guy won, be gracious. If you're a guy lost, be gracious. And I wrote that. People started to comment or whatever. I went away. I had dinner with some friends and came back to my phone hours later. And when I came back to my phone, I scrolled down and there was a comment from a guy that actually I met the year that I went to Auburn. I don't know him very well, but we're Facebook friends, and he commented, what should I be if I didn't vote for either of them because I didn't like them, which I think that's not an unfair stance, and I said, you should be gracious, but before I could say that, under his comment, someone else that I know, I know him from back home. He's a good man. He's a loving man. I like this guy. I've since deleted these comments, so you can't go and look at them. He commented under my Auburn friend's thing this big paragraph about how could you think about voting for so-and-so when all of these reasons point that you should vote for so-and-so. Just demeaning him and tearing him down. And then my Auburn friend responded to that, don't come at me with that stuff and did his own paragraph with an article attached to make his point. I didn't read both of the comments. I deleted them immediately. But here's what I know. My Auburn friend is not a believer. The man from back home is. And when I saw his comment in my Facebook thread where he attacked this guy for the way that he felt politically, I thought to myself, what are you doing, man? What are you doing? What are you trying to win? All he has to do is click your name and he knows who you are and what you stand for. And you're going to turn him off to your savior so you can turn him on to your candidate. Who cares? He sacrificed the victory to try to win a victory. And it doesn't matter. Church, the victory is the souls of men. The victory is acquainting people with their Savior. The victory is that people would see Jesus in us and want that in them too. The victory is not in small political or otherwise silly arguments. We're the church. We pursue souls. We pursue the victory. And when we do this, when we make peace by prizing what's important, when we make peace by seeking understanding rather than persuasion, when we sow that peacemaking, we reap a harvest of righteousness. We walk exactly as the people that God designed us to be, which is why I think it's impossible to make true peace if we cannot walk in the meekness of wisdom. They go hand in hand. So here's what's vitally important to me at Grace. That we be peacemakers. That we walk in the meekness of wisdom, that we understand that the true victory is that people would see Jesus, not that they would see our side. So, Grace, let's be peacemakers. I'm going to pray for us. Father, would you make us whole? Would you heal our hearts? Would you heal our community and our country's division? Would you make us your agents of peace? Lord, I pray that we would reap a harvest of righteousness by making as much peace as we can and pointing people towards you. God, may we be brave about the things that matter and may we be gracious about the things that don't. Father, let us walk increasingly in the meekness of wisdom that comes from you And let us in that meekness point people towards your son. It's in his name that we pray. Amen.
I am super excited for this sermon this morning. If you let me, I think I could go for about 90 minutes, so buckle up. Thanks for being here. Thanks for joining us online. I'm so glad to get to be with my church family, with faces that I know and love, some of whom love me back after this week. It's been a week, man. It's been arduous. And I've been excited for this sermon since we outlined this series. And I opened up my Bible and I was reading through James and breaking it out into sermons and trying to figure out which parts we get to talk about and which parts we'll have to save for the next time we go through James. And when I arrived at this passage in chapter 3, chapter 3, verses 13 through 18, I was just excited to get to share the message from James with you guys, with my church. Because I don't know how you guys have felt about all the divisiveness and contention in our culture, racial and political and otherwise. But it's been wearying to my soul. It's been hard on my heart. It has grieved me that our culture has been this divided. It's been at least 50 years since our country has seen division like this. And as a pastor, it hurts my heart. And it hurts my heart in part because it's just a lot. But it also hurts my heart because I believe that Jesus' bride, the church, has a part to play in this, in this divisiveness. We actually have a role that God wants us to step into, that he asks us to step into. We have a role in our culture right now of who we should be and what we should do, and I believe that James speaks directly to that role and gives us hope and purpose in the midst of this contention. So I'm excited to talk with my church about that this morning. So let's look at James chapter 3, verses 13 through 18. I'm going to read them all, and then we'll talk about the passage. James writes this, Who is wise and understanding among you? By his conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. I love that phrase. James has this flourish for writing that Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, does not have. Paul writes his books like an engineer would write their book. It's very matter-of-fact, systemic, like this is how we're doing it. James has this flourish, and so he brackets this idea, which, by the way, he's extracting this idea out of the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount was Jesus' first recorded public address. This is almost like a commentary on the things that Jesus taught in that sermon. And Jesus says, blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth and blessed are the peacemakers. And so it's like James is pausing to say, yeah, let's talk about those people and why they're needed and how we become like them. And so he opens up with this great phrase that the good works in the meekness of wisdom, and then he brackets it with that great phrase at the end, and harvest a righteousness s is it that wisdom has to be meek? Why is wisdom meek? Why did he choose to pair those things up together? Why did he couple them together in that way? Why is wisdom meek? And so to answer that question, I started thinking about, well, who's the person that I know or that I've seen? What's the example or the personification of someone who lets themselves show, whose good deeds are shown in the meekness of their wisdom. And since I don't like to use myself as an example, I'm just kidding, I'm terrible at this. I thought of my mom-mom. My grandmother on my mom's side, I think personified someone who walked in the meekness of wisdom. Her husband, Don, my papa, I'm very southern, so those are their names, was loud and bombastic. He was a phenomenal storyteller. He was the guy that if you went to dinner with a group of friends and he got sat on the opposite end of the table as you, you were bummed out. Because you're talking to whatever boring person is over here, and you're like, I wish I could listen to that guy. That was my grandpa. That was my papa Don. And Linda was quiet. She was diminutive. She was happy to stay in the background. She didn't really want any of the focus on her. And I didn't appreciate it when I was a kid, because I didn't really understand all those dynamics. But as an adult, as the years progressed, particularly towards the end of her life, when she and I were in the habit of having coffee together every other Monday morning and just chatting for a while, I got to see the ways that her quiet strength and gentle, meek wisdom had carried her through so many seasons of her life. And so I thought, well, she's the example to me of the meekness of wisdom. Then what made her meek? So I thought about her life. She grew up in rural Baton Rouge. I have a great uncle named Dodie Sandifer. All right, that's how Cajun we are. She grew up in a very racist home. Racism was so ubiquitous in her family that when my mom was a little girl, she used racial slurs without understanding what they were. Mama grew to disdain that part of her heritage. She grew to see the evil in it. And when I did her funeral, in her retirement years, she was a bank teller. And when I did her funeral, many of her co-workers, her African-American co-workers, came to the funeral and told me how much they loved my mama and how much she meant to them and how well she loved them. She changed over the course of her lifetime. When my mom was eight, they did a church called Forest Hills, did a bus ministry where you used to be able to do this. Can you imagine? They just drove a bus through neighborhoods and just invited kids to get on. It doesn't matter. Do you have your parents' permission? We don't care. We're going to get you saved. Come to church. Do your parents know where you are? It doesn't matter. Let's go to church. They just went. I can't imagine just sending Mike Harris right here, just go get a bus and just drive around Falls River and just grab kids. It'll be fine. That's so weird. But they they did that in the 60s and so my mom went and praised God that she did because she accepted Christ. And because she accepted Christ, my mom and my papa started going to church with her. So here's a woman who grew up without a faith and she embraces a faith. She changes. But as she embraces that change, she got involved in what I believe was one of the worst kinds of churches. Super legalistic and damaging. I'm talking about super conservative, 70s, Southern Baptist, fundamental oppression. No going to movies, ever. Don't be seen at the movie house, is what it was called. No dancing. Girls wear skirts and dresses only. Always below the knees. None of this, none of this, none of this. It was just writ with legalism. And because she didn't know any better, that's the faith she taught her kids. But she grew up. She grew in wisdom. And she started going to churches that lived a more gracious faith. And she became more gracious in her faith. And she moved away from those old things that she believed. And I could talk to you and tell you story after story of ways that I didn't see at the time, but as I reflect back on her now and watching the scope of her life, ways that I saw her change, ways that I saw her grow in her wisdom. And it occurred to me that wisdom is meek because wisdom knows what it is to hold something ardently and fervently and fanatically in your 20s and be ashamed of it in your 50s. Right? Wisdom knows what it is to hold an opinion tightly and then to see the currents of change move through the community and hold it a little bit more loosely and regret how tightly you used to hold it and who you hurt in holding it that way. Wisdom has fallen on its face a few times. Wisdom knows that it has some shadows in its past and some skeletons in its closet, so it's not going to leap to beat you too hard with yours. Because wisdom has grown in grace. Wisdom has made mistakes. Wisdom has seen who they were when they were younger and been forced through introspection to offer themselves grace for their humanity and likewise is gracious towards others in their humanity. Wisdom is someone in their 60s who doesn't get super annoyed by the person in their 20s because they understand and they were that person too. That's what wisdom does. Because of that, I came to the conclusion that acquiring wisdom is a humbling process. That's why we pair meekness with wisdom because acquiring true wisdom is a humbling process. That's why we pair meekness with wisdom, because acquiring true wisdom is a humbling process. You don't grow in wisdom by just stridently thinking you're right all the time. I'll never forget when I was 18 years old, my dad took me to college. I went to Auburn University my freshman year. He drove me to college, he dropped me off, and he said, son, I'm bringing you here, and I hope that you get dumber. And I was a snot-nosed 18-year-old kid who thought he knew everything. And what he was telling me is you need to grow in wisdom, which, by the way, can you imagine how insufferable I was at 18? I would hate that guy. Like, good, find a new church, pal. I needed to grow in wisdom. I needed to be humbled. I needed to know that I wasn't right about everything. And I think that that's why James pairs meekness with wisdom. Because acquiring wisdom is a humbling process. And so, I want to offer this to you. You take it or leave it. Okay, this is Nate talking, not Scripture. This is just my opinion. You're smart adults. You take it for what it's worth. But I think that there's a litmus test for whether or not we're growing in wisdom, particularly growing in the meekness of wisdom. And I think it's this question. When's the last time you changed your mind about something important? For you as an individual, the things that you hold dear, the things that you hold firmly and stridently, when's the last time you changed your mind about something important? And I'm not talking about going to Winston's for lunch thinking that you're going to get the health nut salad and then calling an audible and getting the prime room sandwich with french fries. I'm not talking about that kind of mind change. I'm talking about the way that you used to feel about a community. Has that shifted? The way over the years that you viewed the other side of the aisle, has that grown more or less gracious? This person in your neighborhood that you can't stand, have you grown to be able to appreciate them a little bit more? The person that you were in their 20s, have you been forced to offer yourself grace for being that person? Have you changed your mind about something that's important to you? Because if you haven't, if you can't think of anything, there's only really two options. Either, dude, you're nailing it. Like, you're right about everything. And that's super impressive. Good for you. Let's have lunch. Or we're just walking in our strideful ignorance, refusing to learn anything that God is trying to teach us. Right? If our mind never changes about anything important, then we're not very open to growing in the meekness of wisdom. That's why just being old doesn't make one wise. Being old and learned and introspective and adaptable and malleable and impressionable and open to reason, like James says here, is how we grow in the meekness of wisdom. So I would ask this morning, are you growing in wisdom? And again, that's my litmus test. If you don't like it, throw it out. If it's helpful, use it. But I think it's important to understand how meekness and wisdom work together, because if we don't, if we can't be meek in our wisdom, then I don't think we can do what we're told to do in the rest of the passage. I want to pick it back up at verse 17. He finishes it this way. He says, but the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. I don't just want to blow by that verse because I think those things are so very important. It is pure. It seeks peace. And this is the thing that I love in here. It is gentle. True wisdom. God's wisdom from above. It's gentle. As I prayed before the sermon a few minutes ago, I prayed, God, let me be brave and let me be gentle. Bravery is not often what I struggle with. Gentleness is. True wisdom is gentle. It's open to reason. It's not convinced of its own correctness all the time. And then he finishes it this way with this great sentence. I just love it. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. And that sounds nice, but we might think to ourselves, what is a harvest of righteousness? I think it goes with the theme in the book of James. In the first week, remember I said that the reason that James wrote this letter was to help us, to help the church pursue wholeness, to help the church become this whole person with a sincere faith, to not live as two disjointed people, as the old nature and the new nature, but to walk in the person that God wanted us to become, to walk in the person that Jesus died to turn us into. We related to Romans 7 where Paul laments, the things that I want to do, I do not do. The things that I do, I do not want to do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? That lament is why James was written. And so what he's saying is you will reap a harvest of righteousness. You will move towards that wholeness, towards being the person that God created you to be and died for you to become. A sowing peace by making peace. James is telling us that it's our role to make peace, that true wisdom makes peace. And so I thought, if it's our role to make peace, if that's what God has called us to do, what does it look like to make peace? What does a peacemaker do? I think it's an important question. The first answer, I think, is that a peacemaker values understanding over persuading. A peacemaker values understanding someone over persuading them. Often when we're in a conflict, when we're in a situation, in a relationship or a dynamic where we're not at peace. There's tension here. I think so very often we approach it trying to be persuasive. If they could only see my side, if they could only understand what I'm talking about, if they would only see it from my perspective, or if they would just be encountered with this list of facts, which by the way, 2020 has shown us that facts really are not argument winners anymore. We've all got our own set. We don't trust anybody else's. So that ain't it. Persuasion is not the goal. Understanding is the goal for a peacemaker. The other night, I had a moment in the house that I was very much not proud of. We've got a daughter named Lily, and Lily is the sweetest. She is the best when you see her. A lot of you have seen her on social media, or you might see her here in the church, and she is sweet and cute and adorable, and she's very quiet and meek in the church because she's scared of everyone, and that bodes well for us as parents because it looks like she has behaved. And she is. She is. But here's the thing with Lily. She has a will. She's found it, which is a fun part of parenting, I think. I've told Jen a few times, you're not raising yourself, sweetheart. I'm very sorry for this. You're raising me. And the other day, she expressed that will more than normal, and it got me frazzled. I was getting a little tired of it. And at night, it was time for her to go to bed, and I told her to clean up her room. She had taken some stuff out of a small Tupperware container or a plastic bin or something, and it was kind of all over the floor. It was like little magnets that you can dress girls up with or whatever. And I told her to clean it up. And she said, okay, Daddy. And then I walked out. I came back five minutes later. It was like two things in the bin. And I'm like, what are you doing? Like, clean up. Let's go. I told you to clean. And she's like, I know, but I'm doing it this way. I said, I don't care what way you're doing it. Clean up, sweetheart. Let's go. And I left. And I came back. And there was not adequate progress made. And so I get frustrated. I said, all right, that's it. I'm going to clean this up. You go to the potty, and then we're going to bed. That's it. And she starts to leave, but she says, but Dad, I want to do the other thing. And I said, I don't care. Go and come back. And things started to escalate. And they ended in tears on both sides. And I was not proud of myself at all. And the night ended with us hugging and falling asleep next to each other in her bed, and the world is good. But as I was thinking about it the next morning, she wasn't being defiant, at least not intentionally. She wanted to organize her toys. She didn't want me to put them all up together because she was in the middle of a task, and she just wanted to keep the things that she had separated, separated. She just didn't want me to mess it up. She wasn't trying to say, I'm not going to put it up. She just had a system and it was important to her because she was going to wake up in the morning and she was going to keep playing with it. And if I would have taken just a dang second to understand a four-year-old instead of trying to persuade her, it all could have been avoided. I could have made peace. Instead, I was an idiot. And it makes me wonder how many conflicts in our life would go away if we chose understanding over persuasion. If we just stopped for a minute and thought, am I really right about all the intentions and motives and stupidity that I'm reading into this instance? Or would it be worth it to talk to them and see what their side is? Would it be worth it to try to empathize? Those of us that have relationships in our life that are not at peace, how many of those could be made peaceful if we would simply choose understanding over persuasion? It's not a panacea, but it's a start, isn't it? Peacemakers make that choice. The next thing in your notes, it says that a peacemaker seeks harmony over victory. And that's well and good and that's fine and we can talk about that. But I actually, as I was thinking about it just this morning, it occurred to me that actually what a peacemaker does is they prize the victory over small victories. A peacemaker prizes the victory over small victories. Guys, we're a church. We're believers. The only reason we walk the earth after we come to faith is to share our faith with others. The only reason we still breathe is to bring as many people with us to heaven on our way as possible. That's it. We are here for the souls of men and women. That's why we're doing the whole thing. That's why the first thing in our mission statement is to connect people with Jesus. That's what we want to do. That's the victory. That's what this whole thing is about, is to unite people with their Savior. Yet sometimes we get so caught up in pursuing the small victory that we forsake the victory. Yesterday on Facebook, I posted something that I feel is true. And I just said to Christians that the way that we respond right now in light of the election matters a lot. And I just said, if you're a guy won, be gracious. If you're a guy lost, be gracious. And I wrote that. People started to comment or whatever. I went away. I had dinner with some friends and came back to my phone hours later. And when I came back to my phone, I scrolled down and there was a comment from a guy that actually I met the year that I went to Auburn. I don't know him very well, but we're Facebook friends, and he commented, what should I be if I didn't vote for either of them because I didn't like them, which I think that's not an unfair stance, and I said, you should be gracious, but before I could say that, under his comment, someone else that I know, I know him from back home. He's a good man. He's a loving man. I like this guy. I've since deleted these comments, so you can't go and look at them. He commented under my Auburn friend's thing this big paragraph about how could you think about voting for so-and-so when all of these reasons point that you should vote for so-and-so. Just demeaning him and tearing him down. And then my Auburn friend responded to that, don't come at me with that stuff and did his own paragraph with an article attached to make his point. I didn't read both of the comments. I deleted them immediately. But here's what I know. My Auburn friend is not a believer. The man from back home is. And when I saw his comment in my Facebook thread where he attacked this guy for the way that he felt politically, I thought to myself, what are you doing, man? What are you doing? What are you trying to win? All he has to do is click your name and he knows who you are and what you stand for. And you're going to turn him off to your savior so you can turn him on to your candidate. Who cares? He sacrificed the victory to try to win a victory. And it doesn't matter. Church, the victory is the souls of men. The victory is acquainting people with their Savior. The victory is that people would see Jesus in us and want that in them too. The victory is not in small political or otherwise silly arguments. We're the church. We pursue souls. We pursue the victory. And when we do this, when we make peace by prizing what's important, when we make peace by seeking understanding rather than persuasion, when we sow that peacemaking, we reap a harvest of righteousness. We walk exactly as the people that God designed us to be, which is why I think it's impossible to make true peace if we cannot walk in the meekness of wisdom. They go hand in hand. So here's what's vitally important to me at Grace. That we be peacemakers. That we walk in the meekness of wisdom, that we understand that the true victory is that people would see Jesus, not that they would see our side. So, Grace, let's be peacemakers. I'm going to pray for us. Father, would you make us whole? Would you heal our hearts? Would you heal our community and our country's division? Would you make us your agents of peace? Lord, I pray that we would reap a harvest of righteousness by making as much peace as we can and pointing people towards you. God, may we be brave about the things that matter and may we be gracious about the things that don't. Father, let us walk increasingly in the meekness of wisdom that comes from you And let us in that meekness point people towards your son. It's in his name that we pray. Amen.
I am super excited for this sermon this morning. If you let me, I think I could go for about 90 minutes, so buckle up. Thanks for being here. Thanks for joining us online. I'm so glad to get to be with my church family, with faces that I know and love, some of whom love me back after this week. It's been a week, man. It's been arduous. And I've been excited for this sermon since we outlined this series. And I opened up my Bible and I was reading through James and breaking it out into sermons and trying to figure out which parts we get to talk about and which parts we'll have to save for the next time we go through James. And when I arrived at this passage in chapter 3, chapter 3, verses 13 through 18, I was just excited to get to share the message from James with you guys, with my church. Because I don't know how you guys have felt about all the divisiveness and contention in our culture, racial and political and otherwise. But it's been wearying to my soul. It's been hard on my heart. It has grieved me that our culture has been this divided. It's been at least 50 years since our country has seen division like this. And as a pastor, it hurts my heart. And it hurts my heart in part because it's just a lot. But it also hurts my heart because I believe that Jesus' bride, the church, has a part to play in this, in this divisiveness. We actually have a role that God wants us to step into, that he asks us to step into. We have a role in our culture right now of who we should be and what we should do, and I believe that James speaks directly to that role and gives us hope and purpose in the midst of this contention. So I'm excited to talk with my church about that this morning. So let's look at James chapter 3, verses 13 through 18. I'm going to read them all, and then we'll talk about the passage. James writes this, Who is wise and understanding among you? By his conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. I love that phrase. James has this flourish for writing that Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, does not have. Paul writes his books like an engineer would write their book. It's very matter-of-fact, systemic, like this is how we're doing it. James has this flourish, and so he brackets this idea, which, by the way, he's extracting this idea out of the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount was Jesus' first recorded public address. This is almost like a commentary on the things that Jesus taught in that sermon. And Jesus says, blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth and blessed are the peacemakers. And so it's like James is pausing to say, yeah, let's talk about those people and why they're needed and how we become like them. And so he opens up with this great phrase that the good works in the meekness of wisdom, and then he brackets it with that great phrase at the end, and harvest a righteousness s is it that wisdom has to be meek? Why is wisdom meek? Why did he choose to pair those things up together? Why did he couple them together in that way? Why is wisdom meek? And so to answer that question, I started thinking about, well, who's the person that I know or that I've seen? What's the example or the personification of someone who lets themselves show, whose good deeds are shown in the meekness of their wisdom. And since I don't like to use myself as an example, I'm just kidding, I'm terrible at this. I thought of my mom-mom. My grandmother on my mom's side, I think personified someone who walked in the meekness of wisdom. Her husband, Don, my papa, I'm very southern, so those are their names, was loud and bombastic. He was a phenomenal storyteller. He was the guy that if you went to dinner with a group of friends and he got sat on the opposite end of the table as you, you were bummed out. Because you're talking to whatever boring person is over here, and you're like, I wish I could listen to that guy. That was my grandpa. That was my papa Don. And Linda was quiet. She was diminutive. She was happy to stay in the background. She didn't really want any of the focus on her. And I didn't appreciate it when I was a kid, because I didn't really understand all those dynamics. But as an adult, as the years progressed, particularly towards the end of her life, when she and I were in the habit of having coffee together every other Monday morning and just chatting for a while, I got to see the ways that her quiet strength and gentle, meek wisdom had carried her through so many seasons of her life. And so I thought, well, she's the example to me of the meekness of wisdom. Then what made her meek? So I thought about her life. She grew up in rural Baton Rouge. I have a great uncle named Dodie Sandifer. All right, that's how Cajun we are. She grew up in a very racist home. Racism was so ubiquitous in her family that when my mom was a little girl, she used racial slurs without understanding what they were. Mama grew to disdain that part of her heritage. She grew to see the evil in it. And when I did her funeral, in her retirement years, she was a bank teller. And when I did her funeral, many of her co-workers, her African-American co-workers, came to the funeral and told me how much they loved my mama and how much she meant to them and how well she loved them. She changed over the course of her lifetime. When my mom was eight, they did a church called Forest Hills, did a bus ministry where you used to be able to do this. Can you imagine? They just drove a bus through neighborhoods and just invited kids to get on. It doesn't matter. Do you have your parents' permission? We don't care. We're going to get you saved. Come to church. Do your parents know where you are? It doesn't matter. Let's go to church. They just went. I can't imagine just sending Mike Harris right here, just go get a bus and just drive around Falls River and just grab kids. It'll be fine. That's so weird. But they they did that in the 60s and so my mom went and praised God that she did because she accepted Christ. And because she accepted Christ, my mom and my papa started going to church with her. So here's a woman who grew up without a faith and she embraces a faith. She changes. But as she embraces that change, she got involved in what I believe was one of the worst kinds of churches. Super legalistic and damaging. I'm talking about super conservative, 70s, Southern Baptist, fundamental oppression. No going to movies, ever. Don't be seen at the movie house, is what it was called. No dancing. Girls wear skirts and dresses only. Always below the knees. None of this, none of this, none of this. It was just writ with legalism. And because she didn't know any better, that's the faith she taught her kids. But she grew up. She grew in wisdom. And she started going to churches that lived a more gracious faith. And she became more gracious in her faith. And she moved away from those old things that she believed. And I could talk to you and tell you story after story of ways that I didn't see at the time, but as I reflect back on her now and watching the scope of her life, ways that I saw her change, ways that I saw her grow in her wisdom. And it occurred to me that wisdom is meek because wisdom knows what it is to hold something ardently and fervently and fanatically in your 20s and be ashamed of it in your 50s. Right? Wisdom knows what it is to hold an opinion tightly and then to see the currents of change move through the community and hold it a little bit more loosely and regret how tightly you used to hold it and who you hurt in holding it that way. Wisdom has fallen on its face a few times. Wisdom knows that it has some shadows in its past and some skeletons in its closet, so it's not going to leap to beat you too hard with yours. Because wisdom has grown in grace. Wisdom has made mistakes. Wisdom has seen who they were when they were younger and been forced through introspection to offer themselves grace for their humanity and likewise is gracious towards others in their humanity. Wisdom is someone in their 60s who doesn't get super annoyed by the person in their 20s because they understand and they were that person too. That's what wisdom does. Because of that, I came to the conclusion that acquiring wisdom is a humbling process. That's why we pair meekness with wisdom because acquiring true wisdom is a humbling process. That's why we pair meekness with wisdom, because acquiring true wisdom is a humbling process. You don't grow in wisdom by just stridently thinking you're right all the time. I'll never forget when I was 18 years old, my dad took me to college. I went to Auburn University my freshman year. He drove me to college, he dropped me off, and he said, son, I'm bringing you here, and I hope that you get dumber. And I was a snot-nosed 18-year-old kid who thought he knew everything. And what he was telling me is you need to grow in wisdom, which, by the way, can you imagine how insufferable I was at 18? I would hate that guy. Like, good, find a new church, pal. I needed to grow in wisdom. I needed to be humbled. I needed to know that I wasn't right about everything. And I think that that's why James pairs meekness with wisdom. Because acquiring wisdom is a humbling process. And so, I want to offer this to you. You take it or leave it. Okay, this is Nate talking, not Scripture. This is just my opinion. You're smart adults. You take it for what it's worth. But I think that there's a litmus test for whether or not we're growing in wisdom, particularly growing in the meekness of wisdom. And I think it's this question. When's the last time you changed your mind about something important? For you as an individual, the things that you hold dear, the things that you hold firmly and stridently, when's the last time you changed your mind about something important? And I'm not talking about going to Winston's for lunch thinking that you're going to get the health nut salad and then calling an audible and getting the prime room sandwich with french fries. I'm not talking about that kind of mind change. I'm talking about the way that you used to feel about a community. Has that shifted? The way over the years that you viewed the other side of the aisle, has that grown more or less gracious? This person in your neighborhood that you can't stand, have you grown to be able to appreciate them a little bit more? The person that you were in their 20s, have you been forced to offer yourself grace for being that person? Have you changed your mind about something that's important to you? Because if you haven't, if you can't think of anything, there's only really two options. Either, dude, you're nailing it. Like, you're right about everything. And that's super impressive. Good for you. Let's have lunch. Or we're just walking in our strideful ignorance, refusing to learn anything that God is trying to teach us. Right? If our mind never changes about anything important, then we're not very open to growing in the meekness of wisdom. That's why just being old doesn't make one wise. Being old and learned and introspective and adaptable and malleable and impressionable and open to reason, like James says here, is how we grow in the meekness of wisdom. So I would ask this morning, are you growing in wisdom? And again, that's my litmus test. If you don't like it, throw it out. If it's helpful, use it. But I think it's important to understand how meekness and wisdom work together, because if we don't, if we can't be meek in our wisdom, then I don't think we can do what we're told to do in the rest of the passage. I want to pick it back up at verse 17. He finishes it this way. He says, but the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. I don't just want to blow by that verse because I think those things are so very important. It is pure. It seeks peace. And this is the thing that I love in here. It is gentle. True wisdom. God's wisdom from above. It's gentle. As I prayed before the sermon a few minutes ago, I prayed, God, let me be brave and let me be gentle. Bravery is not often what I struggle with. Gentleness is. True wisdom is gentle. It's open to reason. It's not convinced of its own correctness all the time. And then he finishes it this way with this great sentence. I just love it. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. And that sounds nice, but we might think to ourselves, what is a harvest of righteousness? I think it goes with the theme in the book of James. In the first week, remember I said that the reason that James wrote this letter was to help us, to help the church pursue wholeness, to help the church become this whole person with a sincere faith, to not live as two disjointed people, as the old nature and the new nature, but to walk in the person that God wanted us to become, to walk in the person that Jesus died to turn us into. We related to Romans 7 where Paul laments, the things that I want to do, I do not do. The things that I do, I do not want to do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? That lament is why James was written. And so what he's saying is you will reap a harvest of righteousness. You will move towards that wholeness, towards being the person that God created you to be and died for you to become. A sowing peace by making peace. James is telling us that it's our role to make peace, that true wisdom makes peace. And so I thought, if it's our role to make peace, if that's what God has called us to do, what does it look like to make peace? What does a peacemaker do? I think it's an important question. The first answer, I think, is that a peacemaker values understanding over persuading. A peacemaker values understanding someone over persuading them. Often when we're in a conflict, when we're in a situation, in a relationship or a dynamic where we're not at peace. There's tension here. I think so very often we approach it trying to be persuasive. If they could only see my side, if they could only understand what I'm talking about, if they would only see it from my perspective, or if they would just be encountered with this list of facts, which by the way, 2020 has shown us that facts really are not argument winners anymore. We've all got our own set. We don't trust anybody else's. So that ain't it. Persuasion is not the goal. Understanding is the goal for a peacemaker. The other night, I had a moment in the house that I was very much not proud of. We've got a daughter named Lily, and Lily is the sweetest. She is the best when you see her. A lot of you have seen her on social media, or you might see her here in the church, and she is sweet and cute and adorable, and she's very quiet and meek in the church because she's scared of everyone, and that bodes well for us as parents because it looks like she has behaved. And she is. She is. But here's the thing with Lily. She has a will. She's found it, which is a fun part of parenting, I think. I've told Jen a few times, you're not raising yourself, sweetheart. I'm very sorry for this. You're raising me. And the other day, she expressed that will more than normal, and it got me frazzled. I was getting a little tired of it. And at night, it was time for her to go to bed, and I told her to clean up her room. She had taken some stuff out of a small Tupperware container or a plastic bin or something, and it was kind of all over the floor. It was like little magnets that you can dress girls up with or whatever. And I told her to clean it up. And she said, okay, Daddy. And then I walked out. I came back five minutes later. It was like two things in the bin. And I'm like, what are you doing? Like, clean up. Let's go. I told you to clean. And she's like, I know, but I'm doing it this way. I said, I don't care what way you're doing it. Clean up, sweetheart. Let's go. And I left. And I came back. And there was not adequate progress made. And so I get frustrated. I said, all right, that's it. I'm going to clean this up. You go to the potty, and then we're going to bed. That's it. And she starts to leave, but she says, but Dad, I want to do the other thing. And I said, I don't care. Go and come back. And things started to escalate. And they ended in tears on both sides. And I was not proud of myself at all. And the night ended with us hugging and falling asleep next to each other in her bed, and the world is good. But as I was thinking about it the next morning, she wasn't being defiant, at least not intentionally. She wanted to organize her toys. She didn't want me to put them all up together because she was in the middle of a task, and she just wanted to keep the things that she had separated, separated. She just didn't want me to mess it up. She wasn't trying to say, I'm not going to put it up. She just had a system and it was important to her because she was going to wake up in the morning and she was going to keep playing with it. And if I would have taken just a dang second to understand a four-year-old instead of trying to persuade her, it all could have been avoided. I could have made peace. Instead, I was an idiot. And it makes me wonder how many conflicts in our life would go away if we chose understanding over persuasion. If we just stopped for a minute and thought, am I really right about all the intentions and motives and stupidity that I'm reading into this instance? Or would it be worth it to talk to them and see what their side is? Would it be worth it to try to empathize? Those of us that have relationships in our life that are not at peace, how many of those could be made peaceful if we would simply choose understanding over persuasion? It's not a panacea, but it's a start, isn't it? Peacemakers make that choice. The next thing in your notes, it says that a peacemaker seeks harmony over victory. And that's well and good and that's fine and we can talk about that. But I actually, as I was thinking about it just this morning, it occurred to me that actually what a peacemaker does is they prize the victory over small victories. A peacemaker prizes the victory over small victories. Guys, we're a church. We're believers. The only reason we walk the earth after we come to faith is to share our faith with others. The only reason we still breathe is to bring as many people with us to heaven on our way as possible. That's it. We are here for the souls of men and women. That's why we're doing the whole thing. That's why the first thing in our mission statement is to connect people with Jesus. That's what we want to do. That's the victory. That's what this whole thing is about, is to unite people with their Savior. Yet sometimes we get so caught up in pursuing the small victory that we forsake the victory. Yesterday on Facebook, I posted something that I feel is true. And I just said to Christians that the way that we respond right now in light of the election matters a lot. And I just said, if you're a guy won, be gracious. If you're a guy lost, be gracious. And I wrote that. People started to comment or whatever. I went away. I had dinner with some friends and came back to my phone hours later. And when I came back to my phone, I scrolled down and there was a comment from a guy that actually I met the year that I went to Auburn. I don't know him very well, but we're Facebook friends, and he commented, what should I be if I didn't vote for either of them because I didn't like them, which I think that's not an unfair stance, and I said, you should be gracious, but before I could say that, under his comment, someone else that I know, I know him from back home. He's a good man. He's a loving man. I like this guy. I've since deleted these comments, so you can't go and look at them. He commented under my Auburn friend's thing this big paragraph about how could you think about voting for so-and-so when all of these reasons point that you should vote for so-and-so. Just demeaning him and tearing him down. And then my Auburn friend responded to that, don't come at me with that stuff and did his own paragraph with an article attached to make his point. I didn't read both of the comments. I deleted them immediately. But here's what I know. My Auburn friend is not a believer. The man from back home is. And when I saw his comment in my Facebook thread where he attacked this guy for the way that he felt politically, I thought to myself, what are you doing, man? What are you doing? What are you trying to win? All he has to do is click your name and he knows who you are and what you stand for. And you're going to turn him off to your savior so you can turn him on to your candidate. Who cares? He sacrificed the victory to try to win a victory. And it doesn't matter. Church, the victory is the souls of men. The victory is acquainting people with their Savior. The victory is that people would see Jesus in us and want that in them too. The victory is not in small political or otherwise silly arguments. We're the church. We pursue souls. We pursue the victory. And when we do this, when we make peace by prizing what's important, when we make peace by seeking understanding rather than persuasion, when we sow that peacemaking, we reap a harvest of righteousness. We walk exactly as the people that God designed us to be, which is why I think it's impossible to make true peace if we cannot walk in the meekness of wisdom. They go hand in hand. So here's what's vitally important to me at Grace. That we be peacemakers. That we walk in the meekness of wisdom, that we understand that the true victory is that people would see Jesus, not that they would see our side. So, Grace, let's be peacemakers. I'm going to pray for us. Father, would you make us whole? Would you heal our hearts? Would you heal our community and our country's division? Would you make us your agents of peace? Lord, I pray that we would reap a harvest of righteousness by making as much peace as we can and pointing people towards you. God, may we be brave about the things that matter and may we be gracious about the things that don't. Father, let us walk increasingly in the meekness of wisdom that comes from you And let us in that meekness point people towards your son. It's in his name that we pray. Amen.
Good morning. How you doing? A couple of things. My name's Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. I love seeing everybody here for the second service. There's a lot of space at the first service, so feel free. And in case you're wondering, does God smile more when you come to the early service? He does. He's smiling a little bit now, but man, the grin on his face when you get up that much earlier is really something special. The Lord moves in that first service. The other thing I want to mention is this. I'm super excited about this. It may not be the case. You never know what's going to happen for the rest of the tournament. But for now, Jen, my wife, is beating all of us in the churchwide bracket challenge, which is a pretty big deal. If you know Scott Hunter, he's in dead last, and that's fun too. All right, we're in the eighth part of our series in John, and I really enjoy getting to move through the book of John with you. This morning, we arrive at what I think is a critical seminal teaching of Jesus in this book. And to help us think about it, I want us to go back to that first day of a class that we took in college, okay? If you didn't have the experience of doing that or you haven't had it yet, you're not missing much. It's overrated. But for those that had to do it, there's this common experience on the first day of class in college. And I'm talking about back before the internet was a thing, when us old people went to college. It's not often that I get to lump myself in with the old people, but this week I do. This was before we had the Internet. You didn't know what to expect in your class, right? And so you'd go on that first day. You're taking whatever it is you're taking, Philosophy 101 or English 101 or whatever it is, and you don't know what to expect. It's the great unknown. What's this professor going to be like? What are my assignments going to be? How do I achieve success in this class? We all bring a different set of goals to the class. I mean, some of y'all are nerds, and you wanted to get an A, and so you thought, like, what am I going to have to do? And I don't mean that really. I wish I would have cared more about getting good grades. But some of you guys really cared about your grades, and so you're thinking, what do I need to do to get an A in this class? I just want to know the work that I'm going to have to do. For me, my academic goals were literally just, what do I have to do so that my parents aren't furious at me at the end of the semester? They were helping out with college, so what do I have to do to keep the gravy train rolling? That's the amount of effort I'd like to give to right? And there are some of you, you got there and you flipped to the back and you look at the assignments and you went, I will never step foot in this class again, right? Because there's too much work there. That's what we did. You get to class. For those that don't have the experience, you get to class. The professor gives you the syllabus. You grab it. And then at the top of the syllabus, you always read this thing. It says that the successful student will be proficient in yada, yada, yada, right? Or the successful student will be proficient in these things. And so you're like, okay, well, this is the goal of the class. This is what it looks like to be successful in this class. Now I know this, but then what are you really interested in? You're really interested in the assignments. What am I going to have to do to achieve the success? And then in the syllabus, you'll remember he or she would have like the philosophy of the class and their philosophy of teaching and all the goals and all the different things. You went, yeah, I don't care about that. You flip to the back of it, and that's where they had the assignment load. And you wanted to see how many tests, how long is the paper going to have to be, right? What am I going to have to do in this class to pass? And that's when some of us went, I don't think I'm coming back to this place because it was just too much work. But we've had that experience. And to me, regardless of what kind of student you were, whether you're a straight A student or you're a slacker like me, you would go to that class with a set of goals. I want to accomplish this in the class. And then you would love the syllabus because that would bring, that would make the unknown known. It would tell you, this is what's expected of me here. This is how they're defining success, and these are the things that I have to do to be successful. And we like this mindset. We have this mindset about a lot of the things that we do. We all, all of us, if we're old enough, have jobs, or we've had a job before. You get to that job, and what do they do? They give you a job description, and at the top of the job description, it says, this is what this position is for. This position will do this and this and this and this. And then there's objectives underneath that. This is how those things are going to be accomplished. This employee will do this thing and this thing and this thing. We like having a very clearly defined version of success, and we like having clear steps to achieve that success, don't we? And we often apply this to our faith. In every Bible study that I've ever been in, I've been in church my whole life. I've been doing ministry for about 20, I went pro in my Christianity about 20 years ago. And in every Bible study that I've ever been in, and a lot of conversations with with my friends and a lot of different small groups, this idea gets presented. And it happened again a couple of weeks ago in the young person small group that my wife and I are leading now. One of the girls said, wouldn't it be nice if there was like a to-do list for our faith? If there were just some clearly defined parameters in the Bible so that we know what to do and when to do it. Wouldn't it be nice if we kind of had a syllabus or a job description for our faith? And this is a commonly expressed desire because the Bible can be very confusing and it can be very intimidating and there's a lot in there to learn. And there are some churches, and then Christianity in and of itself, there's some churches that think this way about an issue, this issue is terrible and it's wrong and you should never do it. And then there's churches over here who are like, no, that's actually pretty okay and we encourage it and we think that you should do it. And there's churches all over the spectrum and there's different ways to interpret the scripture. There's tons of different denominations. And sometimes it's really difficult to figure out, man, what is it that I'm supposed to do? And if you're a new believer or a non-believer, I think a very natural thing to think is, I'm considering this faith, what is it going to require of me? Or, I'm a Christian now, I'd like to be a good one, what does that mean? Is there a to-do list? Is there just something simple where I can know what to do? How is success defined? And how do I achieve that success? Which is why I think John 15 is such a great passage, because I think that Jesus gives us our course syllabus for Christianity. So a little bit different this morning is your notes on the back of the bulletin that you received, you have notes on the back of that. The back of that is actually a course syllabus for Christianity 101. So if you don't have the notes, I'd like you to slip up your hand and the ushers will try to get one to you. Is there anybody that needs one? Some of the ushers have some and they're going to go around making sure folks have those. This is Christianity 101, okay? This is your course syllabus for this morning. You'll notice on it, I am your professor, Professor Rector. I do that. I'm not going to get the chance to do that probably ever again in my life, except for when I pretend at church. So I'm your professor this morning. Class is in session. We're going to take a lot more notes than we normally do. I would encourage you to get out a pen. There's one more, a couple more over here. Just send the whole pile down. I encourage you to get out a pen and write along with me, okay? If you don't have any now, we're out. So you're just going to have to go old school and cheat with your neighbor, okay? You have to look on to theirs. I believe, one more, she's auctioning it off. She's auctioning it off. I believe that Jesus gives us our core syllabus for Christianity in John chapter 15. I'm going to read the first five verses, and then we're going to talk about why I think this is true. If you have a Bible, you can open to it. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. But this is what Jesus says. He says, That's important. We're going to come back to that later. Verse 5, this is the clincher. All right, so this week we arrive at one of these great I am statements that Jesus makes. In the other Gospels, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we have the parables. You're probably familiar with them. They're made-up stories that Jesus tells to make a moral point. And in John, we don't have any of those parables. What we see is Jesus making these I am statements. I'm the bread of life. I'm the living water. I'm the way, the truth, and the life. I am the good shepherd. And now this week, he says, I am the vine, and you are the branches. And this is said to an agrarian society that understood what it was to grow grapes and try to make wine from these grapes. It was part of that culture. They were very familiar with this terminology, and that's what he's talking about. I am the vine, you are the branches, you're going to grow grapes. Connect to me and you will bear much fruit. And so in our terminology and way of thinking of it, it makes more sense to say that I am the tree trunk and you are the branches. But what he's saying is, I'm the source of life, I'm the source of joy, and you are attached to me. And when you abide in me, when you are attached to me and you remain attached to me, you will bear much fruit. All right, that's what he's saying in this verse. And so in verse 5, when he says, I am the vine, you are the branches, abide in me, and I in you, and you will bear much fruit, that really is a packed statement. There's a lot of questions that come out of that statement. For me, the first thing that I see is what does it mean to bear fruit, and why is he talking about that? And I think that that helps set us up for the goal of the course. So at the top of the syllabus you have the student will be proficient in these things. So if we're thinking about Christianity as a course, we're trying to figure out what it is we need to do, then what we need to know is that the course goal is that the successful student or Christian will show proficiency in bearing fruit. Okay, if you're a believer and you want to know if you're successful, if you're thinking about becoming a Christian and you want to know what's going to be expected of me. If you're a new believer and you want to go, okay, well now what do I have to do? The successful student or Christian, the person who is successful in Christianity will be proficient in bearing fruit. And I say that because this seems to be the goal of the passage. Jesus says, abide in me, get attached to me, remain attached to me, and you will bear fruit. Do this, follow my commandments, obey me, love me. Why? So that you can bear fruit. It seems to be that the point of the Christian life, the reason that Jesus leaves us here rather than taking us to heaven immediately upon salvation is so that we can bear fruit. So if you want to know what's the whole point of the Christian life, why are we here? Christianity 101, the successful student will show proficiency in bearing fruit. That's the point. So then you have to ask, okay, what does it mean to bear fruit? And those of you who are church people, you've heard this before, you know this passage. And if I were to ask you, hey, it says that if I'm attached, if I abide, that I will bear fruit. What does it mean to bear fruit? You would probably go, well, it means that you should, well, now hang on. Because it gets a little complicated, doesn't it? What does it mean? Some people would say that it means that we should bear the fruit of the Spirit that Paul talks about in Galatians 5. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We should become more like God in character and develop those traits in our life. To bear fruit means to bear the fruit of the Spirit. Other people would say, well, it means to bear the fruit of ministry. It means that in your life, you're leading people to Jesus, you're discipling people, bringing them closer to Jesus, that there is actually evidence of ministry and people what I think Jesus would say is that it's both. And I think that he says this in what we talked about last week in John chapter 13. If you weren't here last week, in John chapter 13, Jesus tells the disciples, I'm giving you a new commandment that you should love one another as I have loved you. That's the new commandment. That's what we're supposed to do. And then the question becomes, how do I do that? So last week is kind of, what are we supposed to do? We're supposed to love one another as Jesus loved us. And this week is, how do we do that? Well, we do that by abiding. And so what it means to bear fruit, I think, is this. When we love somebody as Jesus loved us, not as we love ourselves, a higher standard, Jesus' love. When we love somebody as Jesus loved us, it is impossible to do that without bearing the fruit of the Spirit in our life, right? How are you going to love other people as Jesus has loved you if we're not bearing love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control? How are we going to be able to do that if we're not becoming more like God in character? We can't. So part of it is to bear the fruit of the Spirit. But then the results of this love, if we love other people as Jesus loved them, when Jesus loved these people, what did they do? They drew more closely to him. And so when we love others as Jesus loved us, it's going to have this natural effect of drawing them into the Father, of drawing them towards Jesus. And so I think it's safe to define for the purposes of the course, again, in our syllabus, that bearing fruit will be defined as loving others towards Jesus. When we're looking at this and it says that we should bear much fruit, what does it mean to bear fruit? It means that we are proficient in loving others towards Jesus. Loving them in such a way that when they look at our impact in their life, they go, I am closer to Jesus because of them. To bear fruit simply is to look at the wake of our life and the people that we know in our life and have people who would point to us and say, I love Jesus more because of the way that they love me. I love Jesus more. I feel closer to Jesus because of their influence in my life. That is fruit. It's both a character, that has both a character aspect and a ministry aspect. But that's what it means to bear fruit, is to love people towards Jesus. So that's the goal for the course, right? That's what success looks like. The successful student will be proficient in bearing fruit or loving people towards Jesus. So now, how do we do that? And that's what this passage answers. And it gives us, I think, our assignments. And so the coursework, the objective, the first objective, our first assignment, the first thing we have to do is abide in Christ. Plain and simple. Abide in Christ. And if you're a church person, you've heard this before. You know this passage. This is a famous passage. You know how this goes. But I think it works pretty similarly. If I say, what does it mean to abide in Christ? I think sometimes we have a hard time explaining that or understanding that. And so I really wanted to dive into it this week so I could do a good job hopefully explaining it to you. And one of the things that I learned that I thought was most helpful was this idea. See, Jesus is talking to the disciples at the end of his life. We are in the middle of Passion Week in the chronology of the life of Christ. In a couple of days, he's going to be arrested and crucified and then raised from the dead, and we celebrate Easter, right, in the story of Jesus. So he's very near the end of his life. He's been moving through life with the disciples for three years now. He's been doing ministry with them. He's been ministering to them. He's been discipling them. He's been training them. He's been teaching them. He's been loving on them. He's been developing them. And so over these three years, there's this intimate relationship that has formed between them. And to me, it's very interesting that here at the end of his life, he calls the disciples to abide. Abide in me are his instructions to the disciples. But that's not what he said when he met the disciples. When he met the disciples and he called them to himself, what did he tell them to do? Follow me, right? So three years ago, it was follow me. Three years later, after spending all this time together, it's abide. And I love that there's a relational maturation to the calling of Jesus in this passage, where at the beginning he says, I want you to follow me. And when you follow someone, there's a distance there. I'm watching what you're doing and I'm trying to do those things. But when you abide, there's this relational aspect to it of knowing someone intimately, knowing them well. Let your heart beat with mine. Let what brings me joy bring you joy. Let what breaks my heart break your heart. Let my goals be your goals. There is this relational dynamic to abiding. The word there in the text literally means to get connected and remain connected like a branch is to a tree. So over these three years with Jesus, we see this relational component where we're supposed to know him intimately. I think if we want to make it our goal to abide in Christ, one of the very first things we have to do is find time in our day, every day, to spend time in word and spend time in prayer. If we want to abide in Christ, if we want to know him intimately, if we want to pursue him, what do we need to do? We need to get up every day, spend time in God's word and spend time in his presence through prayer. We have to do that. That's an integral part of our life. And this is actually this idea, abide, we are to abide in Christ, is where we get this idea of having a personal relationship with our Savior. You guys have heard that before. Even if you're not a believer, you're here because someone drug you here. First of all, I'm so glad that you're here, and I'll try to go quickly for you. But second of all, you understand, and you've probably heard this term before, that we should have a personal relationship with Jesus. And sometimes we talk about how this separates us from other religions, that we're actually invited into a relationship with our Savior and with our God. But it's a very natural question to go, okay, I'm invited into a relationship with Jesus, but how do I have a relationship with this person or this entity that I don't interact with the same way as I do everyone else? I can't see him. I can't touch him. I can't see the look in his eye. I can't hear the cadence of his voice. How do I get to know somebody that I can't see or feel or touch? How do I have this intimate relationship with what feels like at times a distant God? That's a very fair question to ask. And Jesus actually answers this. I was nervous about how to explain it. How do we abide in Christ? How do we have this personal relationship with him? How do we experience the connection that the disciples felt? And I was actually kind of nervous about explaining this to you until I got to read the passage and really study it. And what I found is that Jesus answers this question in verse 10. And so really this is the second part of, this is our second assignment, our second objective. We want to be successful in the class of Christianity. The first thing we do is we abide in Christ. The second thing we do is we abide by obeying. We abide by obeying. In verse 10, Jesus says this. He says, If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. If you keep my commandments, you abide in my love. You want to know how to abide in Christ? Obey him. You want to bear fruit? You want to be a successful Christian? You want to do what you're supposed to do, what you were put on this earth to do? Then abide in Christ. You want to abide in Christ? Well, Jesus says, obey him. You want to abide in me? Obey me. That means all the things, right? That means that when Jesus says in Matthew, in the Sermon on the Mount, that when someone hits us in the face that we need to turn the other cheek and not seek revenge, that we learn what that means and that we do that. That means that when someone asks us to go a mile and Jesus tells us to go an extra mile, we go an extra mile. When Jesus tells us that when someone asks for our fleece, we should give them our coat as well, we give them our coat. When Jesus tells us that we should be generous and that we should care for the poor, then we be generous and we care for the poor. When he tells us that, when he redefines and correctly defines the commandment on adultery, that it's not simply sleeping with another person's spouse, but it's looking at anyone with lust in your heart, then we define that as our definition of adultery. If we want to abide in Christ, then we walk in lockstep with his commands and we submit our life to his word. John 1 says that Jesus is the word of God, so we obey God's word, right? That's what we do. But here's the thing. Being obedient to the Bible, being obedient to Jesus's commandments, it's pretty challenging. It's pretty difficult. It takes a long time to get proficient at it. Some of us have a hard time with it all the time. And as I think about what it means to really obey God, I kind of think about it like I think about a golf swing. Back in 2013, I went to the Masters for the first time. Now, the Masters is a golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia. It's the greatest sporting event on the planet. If you don't agree with that, take it up with someone else. I'm not into frivolous conversations, okay? This is actually, I played golf a little bit when I was a kid. This is my Pawpaw Six Iron. He taught me how to play. I like to have pieces of him up here whenever I can. But I learned to play a little bit when I was a kid. But I left it to play other sports. I had ADD big time, I think. It was undiagnosed, but man, it was there. And so I liked to play soccer, and I walked away from golf a little bit. But in 2013, I went and I saw the Masters, and I thought, I've got to play this sport. This looks super fun. And so I grabbed a set of clubs, and I started going to the range as often as I could get there. A shameful amount of time. I neglected gym for golf. And so I started playing, right? And once you start playing golf, you start learning that the golf swing is pretty stinking complicated. It doesn't look complicated. You watch it on TV, it seems like a pretty simple thing. But man, if you've ever tried to hit that ball any distance, even just in the air, you know it is difficult, okay? And so I started learning to play golf and you start to learn, man, there's all these technical aspects to the golf swing. Now, some of y'all know the golf swing a lot better than I do. So please don't judge me too harshly. But you do the golf swing and you wanna square up to the ball. It's called a dress, okay? The's on the ground. You want to address it, so you want to make sure your club head is facing the right way behind it. You want your feet to be spread about shoulder width apart if you've got an iron in your hand. Not too far, because you'll look ridiculous like a sumo wrestler. So you just want it right there, right? And then you've got to grip the club. And there's actually a way to do this. They, like, tell you. I went and got golf lessons one time. And the first thing the guy said is, show me how you grip the club. And I'm like, you're weird. Just tell me how to swing the club. But apparently it's important. You have to interlock your fingers in the back. Or if you're fancy, you can cover over your fingers in the back. But you don't do it like this. That's what crazy people do, okay? You can't do that. You have to grab it like this. And this hand needs to be in a certain place. And did you know that your thumb has to go in the crease of your hand right there? It took me two years to learn that. I don't know why they didn't tell me that. But you have to put your thumb right there, and then you hold it. Your knuckle's got to be in a certain place. If you rotate your hand too far under, you're going to hook it. You don't want to do that. And if you do it too far this way, you're going to slice it. You don't want to do that. So it's got to be just right. And then they tell you, once you get the club, that you just want to hold it like a baby bird, okay? Like you just want it to be real gentle. I've got like this death grip on there, and people have told me, you're going to strangle that bird, man. You need to let it go. So you got to be gentle with it, you know? Just hold it like pillow soft, like you do a lot of dishes or something. And then you want to take it back. And when you take it back, you want to keep your left arm straight. And you want to keep your left wrist flat. I do this sometimes or this. You don't want to do that. You want to keep it flat, right, so that when you meet the ball, like it's flush. And so you come back. And when you come back, you want to bend your left leg, but not too much. You don't want to look like a crazy person. You got to do it a little bit. And then I had somebody one time on my backswing tell me, you want your back pocket to face the target. And I'm like, well, how do you, I don't know what that looks like. Like, I don't even, I'm not, maybe that dude was a gymnast. Like, I don't even know how to make that one work, man. And then you go and you do the thing and you follow through. And sometimes I'll follow through and people will say things that I don't understand. Like, I'll hit the ball and it didn't do what I wanted to because it never does. And people will go, oh, you double crossed that one. And I'm like, what are you talking, I don't know what that, I don't know what it means to double cross. Or sometimes people will tell me, your hands got a little fast on that one. And I'm just thinking to myself, like isn't that the point? Don't we want our hands to go fast in a golf swing? Like I'm thinking that slow hands is not good for golf. But it's super complicated, right? And so here's what we know about golf. When you're golfing with your buddies and somebody's struggling and you want to give them a little tip, I'm going to coach you. I'm terrible at golf. I have a 20-plus handicap, but I'm going to coach you. I'm going to give you the thing that's going to make you good at it. You can give somebody one tip to start thinking about one thing. Your backswing's a little fast. You want to slow that down, and it'll screw them up for the rest of the round. They won't be able to hit that because they'll be thinking about all the things. They won't be able to hit that for anything. So here's what they tell you in golf if you want to improve your swing. You get what's called a swing thought. When you're swinging the club, you get a swing thought. You get to think about one thing. Just do one thing. There's so many aspects to the swing. It's so technical and so complicated. You could think about 12 different things if you wanted to, but if you want to get better at it, you think about one thing. I played an entire round of golf focused on keeping my left heel on the ground when I would swing the club. The whole round, that's all I thought about all day. You get one swing thought. Because if you take more than that, you won't be able to keep up with it. It'll be a messy jumble in your head and you won't see success. But the way they teach you to get better at golf is you take one swing thought and you get better at that. You don't think about all the other things. You get better at the one thing, whatever's most urgent for you. And then once you get that down, you get that into muscle memory, then you do the next thing. That's how they teach you. And I think obedience works the same way. There's so many things to focus on. There's so many areas. We need to grow in our kindness. We need to grow in our generosity. We need to grow in our patience. We need to grow in our humility. We need to stop doing this one sin that's kicking our tail. We need to start doing this thing that God's been tugging on our heart about for a long time. There's so many different things we could do to try to obey God. But I want to submit to you that the way to really learn obedience is to just have one obedience thought. Just take the next thing. Just take the next step. I'm not saying that we don't worry about all the other things. When you're learning a golf swing, you don't forego everything else you've already worked on to work on the next thing. You keep those intact too, but then you work on the next thing. And I think our Christian life is much the same way. We should have, and we are wise to have, an obedience thought, a next step of obedience, a thing that we can do to begin to obey God a little bit better and a little bit better. And the beautiful thing about this is, I think all of us have a next step of obedience. Whether you've been walking with God for five days or for 50 years, there's always the next thing that you can work on. There's always the next thing that God would have you, the next step of obedience that he would have you take. If you were to go to a PGA event and talk to one of the guys who does it professionally and ask him, what are you working on with your swing? None of them would ever tell you, nothing, this is as good as it gets. They would always tell you that they're working on something. And this is how it is with our obedience to God. No matter how many years we've been walking, no matter how mature or immature we are, every one of us in the room has a next step of obedience that we can take. And if we're going to learn to obey God and follow Him and abide in Christ, then I think it boils down to simply taking our next step of obedience. So objective three, our third assignment in how we abide in Christ, is by praying, stepping, and trusting. We pray, we step, and we trust. Under that, I have a prayer for you where I'm encouraging you to pray, Father, show me my next step of obedience. And that's a prayer that I would encourage you to pray now and pray every day this week. Father, show me my next step of obedience. What would you have me do? So we pray about it. God, what's my next step? What do you have for me? What's the next thing you want me to do? Maybe it's to get more serious about church attendance. Maybe it's to get more serious about a small group. Maybe it's to get up every day and spend time in God's word. Maybe it's simply to consider Him, to read a book or do some research or have a conversation with somebody that would help us grow in our faith a little bit. Maybe it's to start the discipline of tithing or giving. Maybe it's to actually have the conversation that we've been having. Maybe you know exactly what it is because God's been pressing it on our hearts for weeks or months and we haven't listened. But we should pray that God would show us our next step of obedience that he would have us take. And then we trust. We step. We take the step. We obey him, and then we trust that it was the right thing, and we trust that life is going to be better on the other side of obedience. A couple of weeks ago, we talked about obedience, and we talked about this idea that sometimes the reason we're not obedient to God is because we believe that life is better on this side of obedience. And so to actually step into obedience requires a degree of trust that life is actually going to be better for us on the other side of obedience, that that's where we find God's grace and God's love. And so often obedience takes faith in God and the courage to actually take the step. But here's what happens when we do this. I love this. This is my favorite part about this teaching. When we take a step of obedience, however difficult it is, God impresses something on our hearts. I want you to do this. I want you to get up 30 minutes earlier and I want you to spend some time with me. I want you to actually give to this thing. I want you to actually have that conversation. It's a difficult step when he shows it to us. But if we'll take it, and when we take that step in our fear and what we're met with is God's grace and goodness, we'll see that we can actually trust him. And because we've had this experience of taking a step in faith and being met with God's goodness, it'll give us more courage to take the next step, won't it? And then the next step, and then the step after that. And then for our life, we are simply taking these steps of obedience as we grow closer to Jesus and abide in him. And then here's what happens as we take these steps of obedience. We abide in Christ. And Jesus says that when we abide in him, we will bear much fruit. And here's what I love about that. If you think about an apple tree, if you think about a branch attached to an apple tree, that tree decides when and what kind of fruit that branch is going to bear. That branch doesn't get to decide, you know what? I want to give us apples in the wintertime. I really like apple pie. I'm doing winter apples. That's what's happening this year. That's not how that works. The tree decides when that branch is going to bear fruit. The branch doesn't get to go, you know what, fellas? I'm really thinking pears. They're in. Turkey and brie, it's really good. That's what we're going to do. The tree doesn't get to decide, I'm tired of being in an orchard, I want to be in a mangrove. We're doing oranges this season. That doesn't happen. The tree decides when the branch will bear fruit and what kind of fruit it is. Look at this. When you abide in Christ, when you are connected and you stay connected and you're following him and you know him intimately, when you're connected to the tree, you will bear much fruit. And it's not up to you when and where you bear that fruit. It's not up to you what kind of fruit that is. It's not up to you when the season is when you bear it. The tree decides that. You remain connected to Christ, and Christ says, I'll decide when and where you bear fruit. I love the freedom of this. And my role, my heart is for grace. We've given our lives to build God's church here. So I want to see grace grow. I want to see the kingdom expand here. I want to see lives impacted. I want to hear the story about somebody coming, visiting with us over VBS or Summer Extreme, and their kid coming to faith who didn't know Jesus comes to know Jesus here. And then that kid goes home and tells their parents what they saw here. And then their parents come, and their parents get plugged into a small group, and they accept Christ. And then they grow in their faith by taking their next steps of obedience and then there are elders and there are leaders and they're leading their small group. I want to see that story. I want to see marriages rescued here and strengthened here. I want to see little kids that grow up here and then grow up to follow Christ so well and so closely and know him so good that they disciple us. I want some of the kids that are in there to preach up here one day and tell us what they've learned about God. I want to see all this stuff happen in our church, and I want to see you guys live healthy and vibrant lives in spiritual faith. I want to see that. Do you know how we bring that about? Do you know what my role is in bringing all those things about? Getting up every day and spending time in God's Word and time in prayer and trying to take my next step of obedience, abiding in Christ. If I want to see that fruit at grace, if I want to see God do incredible things, you know what I need to do? Abide in Christ. Obey Him. He'll decide when and where we start bringing fruit. It's not about strategy. It's not about how good I preach. It's not about how good Steve does. It's not about marketing campaigns. It's not about follow-up. It's not about any of that stuff. It's about abiding in Christ, and Jesus will handle the rest. In your lives, you have kids you worry about and you pray for. You have ministries that you're involved in. You volunteer in different places. You have companies or groups of people around you that you want to influence and draw towards Jesus. You want to have a wake of people in your life who would say, I'm closer to Jesus because I knew that person. We want these things. You know how you get those things? Abide in Christ. Obey him. Get connected, stay connected. Take the next step of obedience. Pursue him daily. And guess what? He will decide when and where you bear fruit. But here's the promise. You will bear much fruit. Just simply abide in him. Pursue him. Obey him. Have the confidence and the faith to take the next step that he shows you, and you will abide abide in Christ and then the tree will decide when and where you bear fruit. There's a glorious freedom to this. And when we bear much fruit, you should know two things happen in this passage. Two things happen as a result of our bearing fruit. We are pruned and we are proven. We are pruned and we are proven. The second verse of this passage, Jesus says, when you bear much fruit, the Father will prune you so that you can bear more fruit. And make no mistake about it, that pruning hurts. That's the branches getting cut. That's when they lose a piece of themselves. I don't have time to delve into what pruning is like all the way this morning, but I know that for years and years, Jen and I prayed for a baby. We prayed to get pregnant, and it took a lot longer than we wanted it to take. We finally got pregnant, and then we miscarried. I've shared that with you guys before. That was four or five years ago. That was a super difficult thing. That's the hardest thing we've ever had to walk through as a couple. But I am convinced that that was a pruning period for us. Because how could I come lead a church? And how could Jen partner with me in this ministry if we didn't know grief? If we didn't know tragedy? If we didn't know what that was like? How could I teach about God's view of grief and how he's with us in our suffering unless I had experienced that? How could I empathize with someone who would shake their fist at God and say, why me, this isn't fair, unless I had walked through that in my life as well? I believe that part of the reason for that was a pruning to make us more effective in what God would have us do. I'm not saying that's the reason for all of our pain, but I'm saying that's the reason for some of it. God prunes us. That's why I hate the health and wealth gospel. We're not promised prosperity and a tragic free life. We're promised that if God prunes us, it's so that we will be more effective and bear more fruit, which is the whole point. And then, in that bearing fruit, we are proven. Every Christian ever has wondered, am I really saved? Did I do it right? Did I say the right prayer? Do I really have faith? If I were to die today, do I really know I'm going to go to heaven? You know what proves your faith? Fruit. Jesus says in this passage, you will bear much fruit, and so prove that you are my disciples. You want to not doubt your salvation? Look at the wake of your life and see if there is fruit there. When we bear fruit, two things happen. We are pruned and we are proven. And then as a result of all of this, all of these things, this idea of taking steps of obedience and finding God to meet us there in trust, of abiding in him and just focusing on him and not worrying about the end of the passage, verse 11. He says, these things I have spoken to you. So this lesson, what I've just taught you about the vine and the branches, these things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full. All of these things, knowing Jesus, abiding in him, obeying him, bearing fruit, being pruned and being proven, all of these things conspire to fill you with joy. Because in simply abiding in Christ, we are relieved of the pressure of productivity. We are relieved from the pressure of results because it's not our responsibility to bring about the fruit. We just follow Jesus. We are relieved of the sense of hopelessness that sometimes comes from pain because we know that it's serving a purpose to prune us and make us more effective at bearing fruit for God's kingdom. And we are relieved of the worry and the anxiety of, am I actually saved? Am I actually going to persevere? Because the proof is in the fruit that we have borne. God relieves us of all of those things and frees us up to simply follow him, to wake up every day, spend time in God's word, spend time in prayer, and to say, Father, what's the step of obedience you would have me take today? And when we do that, we experience the fullness, not of our joy, of his joy. So that's my prayer for you. That you would go from this place and that you would abide in Christ and experience the fullness of Jesus' joy. And my challenge to you is that you would pray now and every day this week, Father, what step of obedience would you have me take today? Father, please show me my next step of obedience. And I believe that by doing that and taking the step that he reveals to you, that we will abide in Christ and that by abiding in Christ, his word will be true and we will bear much fruit. And that by bearing much fruit, we will experience the fullness of the joy of Jesus. I'm going to pray for you. And as I pray, I want to encourage you right now to go ahead and begin asking God, what's my next step of obedience? Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for this morning. We thank you for your word, how clear it is. We thank you that your son boiled things down for us to this place where we can understand it. I pray that we would simply abide in you, God. Create a fire in each of our hearts to know you, to abide in you, to walk with you, to obey you. Give us the strength to pray the prayer, to ask what our next step is. Give us the courage and the faith to take the step. Give us the clarity to see it. Give us the gratitude for your grace that meets us there. God, whether it's a big step or a small one, I pray that we would take it. I pray that this would be a church full of people who are abiding in you and with you. And God, we can't wait to see the fruit that you bring about here in our lives and in this place. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.
Good morning. How you doing? A couple of things. My name's Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. I love seeing everybody here for the second service. There's a lot of space at the first service, so feel free. And in case you're wondering, does God smile more when you come to the early service? He does. He's smiling a little bit now, but man, the grin on his face when you get up that much earlier is really something special. The Lord moves in that first service. The other thing I want to mention is this. I'm super excited about this. It may not be the case. You never know what's going to happen for the rest of the tournament. But for now, Jen, my wife, is beating all of us in the churchwide bracket challenge, which is a pretty big deal. If you know Scott Hunter, he's in dead last, and that's fun too. All right, we're in the eighth part of our series in John, and I really enjoy getting to move through the book of John with you. This morning, we arrive at what I think is a critical seminal teaching of Jesus in this book. And to help us think about it, I want us to go back to that first day of a class that we took in college, okay? If you didn't have the experience of doing that or you haven't had it yet, you're not missing much. It's overrated. But for those that had to do it, there's this common experience on the first day of class in college. And I'm talking about back before the internet was a thing, when us old people went to college. It's not often that I get to lump myself in with the old people, but this week I do. This was before we had the Internet. You didn't know what to expect in your class, right? And so you'd go on that first day. You're taking whatever it is you're taking, Philosophy 101 or English 101 or whatever it is, and you don't know what to expect. It's the great unknown. What's this professor going to be like? What are my assignments going to be? How do I achieve success in this class? We all bring a different set of goals to the class. I mean, some of y'all are nerds, and you wanted to get an A, and so you thought, like, what am I going to have to do? And I don't mean that really. I wish I would have cared more about getting good grades. But some of you guys really cared about your grades, and so you're thinking, what do I need to do to get an A in this class? I just want to know the work that I'm going to have to do. For me, my academic goals were literally just, what do I have to do so that my parents aren't furious at me at the end of the semester? They were helping out with college, so what do I have to do to keep the gravy train rolling? That's the amount of effort I'd like to give to right? And there are some of you, you got there and you flipped to the back and you look at the assignments and you went, I will never step foot in this class again, right? Because there's too much work there. That's what we did. You get to class. For those that don't have the experience, you get to class. The professor gives you the syllabus. You grab it. And then at the top of the syllabus, you always read this thing. It says that the successful student will be proficient in yada, yada, yada, right? Or the successful student will be proficient in these things. And so you're like, okay, well, this is the goal of the class. This is what it looks like to be successful in this class. Now I know this, but then what are you really interested in? You're really interested in the assignments. What am I going to have to do to achieve the success? And then in the syllabus, you'll remember he or she would have like the philosophy of the class and their philosophy of teaching and all the goals and all the different things. You went, yeah, I don't care about that. You flip to the back of it, and that's where they had the assignment load. And you wanted to see how many tests, how long is the paper going to have to be, right? What am I going to have to do in this class to pass? And that's when some of us went, I don't think I'm coming back to this place because it was just too much work. But we've had that experience. And to me, regardless of what kind of student you were, whether you're a straight A student or you're a slacker like me, you would go to that class with a set of goals. I want to accomplish this in the class. And then you would love the syllabus because that would bring, that would make the unknown known. It would tell you, this is what's expected of me here. This is how they're defining success, and these are the things that I have to do to be successful. And we like this mindset. We have this mindset about a lot of the things that we do. We all, all of us, if we're old enough, have jobs, or we've had a job before. You get to that job, and what do they do? They give you a job description, and at the top of the job description, it says, this is what this position is for. This position will do this and this and this and this. And then there's objectives underneath that. This is how those things are going to be accomplished. This employee will do this thing and this thing and this thing. We like having a very clearly defined version of success, and we like having clear steps to achieve that success, don't we? And we often apply this to our faith. In every Bible study that I've ever been in, I've been in church my whole life. I've been doing ministry for about 20, I went pro in my Christianity about 20 years ago. And in every Bible study that I've ever been in, and a lot of conversations with with my friends and a lot of different small groups, this idea gets presented. And it happened again a couple of weeks ago in the young person small group that my wife and I are leading now. One of the girls said, wouldn't it be nice if there was like a to-do list for our faith? If there were just some clearly defined parameters in the Bible so that we know what to do and when to do it. Wouldn't it be nice if we kind of had a syllabus or a job description for our faith? And this is a commonly expressed desire because the Bible can be very confusing and it can be very intimidating and there's a lot in there to learn. And there are some churches, and then Christianity in and of itself, there's some churches that think this way about an issue, this issue is terrible and it's wrong and you should never do it. And then there's churches over here who are like, no, that's actually pretty okay and we encourage it and we think that you should do it. And there's churches all over the spectrum and there's different ways to interpret the scripture. There's tons of different denominations. And sometimes it's really difficult to figure out, man, what is it that I'm supposed to do? And if you're a new believer or a non-believer, I think a very natural thing to think is, I'm considering this faith, what is it going to require of me? Or, I'm a Christian now, I'd like to be a good one, what does that mean? Is there a to-do list? Is there just something simple where I can know what to do? How is success defined? And how do I achieve that success? Which is why I think John 15 is such a great passage, because I think that Jesus gives us our course syllabus for Christianity. So a little bit different this morning is your notes on the back of the bulletin that you received, you have notes on the back of that. The back of that is actually a course syllabus for Christianity 101. So if you don't have the notes, I'd like you to slip up your hand and the ushers will try to get one to you. Is there anybody that needs one? Some of the ushers have some and they're going to go around making sure folks have those. This is Christianity 101, okay? This is your course syllabus for this morning. You'll notice on it, I am your professor, Professor Rector. I do that. I'm not going to get the chance to do that probably ever again in my life, except for when I pretend at church. So I'm your professor this morning. Class is in session. We're going to take a lot more notes than we normally do. I would encourage you to get out a pen. There's one more, a couple more over here. Just send the whole pile down. I encourage you to get out a pen and write along with me, okay? If you don't have any now, we're out. So you're just going to have to go old school and cheat with your neighbor, okay? You have to look on to theirs. I believe, one more, she's auctioning it off. She's auctioning it off. I believe that Jesus gives us our core syllabus for Christianity in John chapter 15. I'm going to read the first five verses, and then we're going to talk about why I think this is true. If you have a Bible, you can open to it. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. But this is what Jesus says. He says, That's important. We're going to come back to that later. Verse 5, this is the clincher. All right, so this week we arrive at one of these great I am statements that Jesus makes. In the other Gospels, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we have the parables. You're probably familiar with them. They're made-up stories that Jesus tells to make a moral point. And in John, we don't have any of those parables. What we see is Jesus making these I am statements. I'm the bread of life. I'm the living water. I'm the way, the truth, and the life. I am the good shepherd. And now this week, he says, I am the vine, and you are the branches. And this is said to an agrarian society that understood what it was to grow grapes and try to make wine from these grapes. It was part of that culture. They were very familiar with this terminology, and that's what he's talking about. I am the vine, you are the branches, you're going to grow grapes. Connect to me and you will bear much fruit. And so in our terminology and way of thinking of it, it makes more sense to say that I am the tree trunk and you are the branches. But what he's saying is, I'm the source of life, I'm the source of joy, and you are attached to me. And when you abide in me, when you are attached to me and you remain attached to me, you will bear much fruit. All right, that's what he's saying in this verse. And so in verse 5, when he says, I am the vine, you are the branches, abide in me, and I in you, and you will bear much fruit, that really is a packed statement. There's a lot of questions that come out of that statement. For me, the first thing that I see is what does it mean to bear fruit, and why is he talking about that? And I think that that helps set us up for the goal of the course. So at the top of the syllabus you have the student will be proficient in these things. So if we're thinking about Christianity as a course, we're trying to figure out what it is we need to do, then what we need to know is that the course goal is that the successful student or Christian will show proficiency in bearing fruit. Okay, if you're a believer and you want to know if you're successful, if you're thinking about becoming a Christian and you want to know what's going to be expected of me. If you're a new believer and you want to go, okay, well now what do I have to do? The successful student or Christian, the person who is successful in Christianity will be proficient in bearing fruit. And I say that because this seems to be the goal of the passage. Jesus says, abide in me, get attached to me, remain attached to me, and you will bear fruit. Do this, follow my commandments, obey me, love me. Why? So that you can bear fruit. It seems to be that the point of the Christian life, the reason that Jesus leaves us here rather than taking us to heaven immediately upon salvation is so that we can bear fruit. So if you want to know what's the whole point of the Christian life, why are we here? Christianity 101, the successful student will show proficiency in bearing fruit. That's the point. So then you have to ask, okay, what does it mean to bear fruit? And those of you who are church people, you've heard this before, you know this passage. And if I were to ask you, hey, it says that if I'm attached, if I abide, that I will bear fruit. What does it mean to bear fruit? You would probably go, well, it means that you should, well, now hang on. Because it gets a little complicated, doesn't it? What does it mean? Some people would say that it means that we should bear the fruit of the Spirit that Paul talks about in Galatians 5. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We should become more like God in character and develop those traits in our life. To bear fruit means to bear the fruit of the Spirit. Other people would say, well, it means to bear the fruit of ministry. It means that in your life, you're leading people to Jesus, you're discipling people, bringing them closer to Jesus, that there is actually evidence of ministry and people what I think Jesus would say is that it's both. And I think that he says this in what we talked about last week in John chapter 13. If you weren't here last week, in John chapter 13, Jesus tells the disciples, I'm giving you a new commandment that you should love one another as I have loved you. That's the new commandment. That's what we're supposed to do. And then the question becomes, how do I do that? So last week is kind of, what are we supposed to do? We're supposed to love one another as Jesus loved us. And this week is, how do we do that? Well, we do that by abiding. And so what it means to bear fruit, I think, is this. When we love somebody as Jesus loved us, not as we love ourselves, a higher standard, Jesus' love. When we love somebody as Jesus loved us, it is impossible to do that without bearing the fruit of the Spirit in our life, right? How are you going to love other people as Jesus has loved you if we're not bearing love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control? How are we going to be able to do that if we're not becoming more like God in character? We can't. So part of it is to bear the fruit of the Spirit. But then the results of this love, if we love other people as Jesus loved them, when Jesus loved these people, what did they do? They drew more closely to him. And so when we love others as Jesus loved us, it's going to have this natural effect of drawing them into the Father, of drawing them towards Jesus. And so I think it's safe to define for the purposes of the course, again, in our syllabus, that bearing fruit will be defined as loving others towards Jesus. When we're looking at this and it says that we should bear much fruit, what does it mean to bear fruit? It means that we are proficient in loving others towards Jesus. Loving them in such a way that when they look at our impact in their life, they go, I am closer to Jesus because of them. To bear fruit simply is to look at the wake of our life and the people that we know in our life and have people who would point to us and say, I love Jesus more because of the way that they love me. I love Jesus more. I feel closer to Jesus because of their influence in my life. That is fruit. It's both a character, that has both a character aspect and a ministry aspect. But that's what it means to bear fruit, is to love people towards Jesus. So that's the goal for the course, right? That's what success looks like. The successful student will be proficient in bearing fruit or loving people towards Jesus. So now, how do we do that? And that's what this passage answers. And it gives us, I think, our assignments. And so the coursework, the objective, the first objective, our first assignment, the first thing we have to do is abide in Christ. Plain and simple. Abide in Christ. And if you're a church person, you've heard this before. You know this passage. This is a famous passage. You know how this goes. But I think it works pretty similarly. If I say, what does it mean to abide in Christ? I think sometimes we have a hard time explaining that or understanding that. And so I really wanted to dive into it this week so I could do a good job hopefully explaining it to you. And one of the things that I learned that I thought was most helpful was this idea. See, Jesus is talking to the disciples at the end of his life. We are in the middle of Passion Week in the chronology of the life of Christ. In a couple of days, he's going to be arrested and crucified and then raised from the dead, and we celebrate Easter, right, in the story of Jesus. So he's very near the end of his life. He's been moving through life with the disciples for three years now. He's been doing ministry with them. He's been ministering to them. He's been discipling them. He's been training them. He's been teaching them. He's been loving on them. He's been developing them. And so over these three years, there's this intimate relationship that has formed between them. And to me, it's very interesting that here at the end of his life, he calls the disciples to abide. Abide in me are his instructions to the disciples. But that's not what he said when he met the disciples. When he met the disciples and he called them to himself, what did he tell them to do? Follow me, right? So three years ago, it was follow me. Three years later, after spending all this time together, it's abide. And I love that there's a relational maturation to the calling of Jesus in this passage, where at the beginning he says, I want you to follow me. And when you follow someone, there's a distance there. I'm watching what you're doing and I'm trying to do those things. But when you abide, there's this relational aspect to it of knowing someone intimately, knowing them well. Let your heart beat with mine. Let what brings me joy bring you joy. Let what breaks my heart break your heart. Let my goals be your goals. There is this relational dynamic to abiding. The word there in the text literally means to get connected and remain connected like a branch is to a tree. So over these three years with Jesus, we see this relational component where we're supposed to know him intimately. I think if we want to make it our goal to abide in Christ, one of the very first things we have to do is find time in our day, every day, to spend time in word and spend time in prayer. If we want to abide in Christ, if we want to know him intimately, if we want to pursue him, what do we need to do? We need to get up every day, spend time in God's word and spend time in his presence through prayer. We have to do that. That's an integral part of our life. And this is actually this idea, abide, we are to abide in Christ, is where we get this idea of having a personal relationship with our Savior. You guys have heard that before. Even if you're not a believer, you're here because someone drug you here. First of all, I'm so glad that you're here, and I'll try to go quickly for you. But second of all, you understand, and you've probably heard this term before, that we should have a personal relationship with Jesus. And sometimes we talk about how this separates us from other religions, that we're actually invited into a relationship with our Savior and with our God. But it's a very natural question to go, okay, I'm invited into a relationship with Jesus, but how do I have a relationship with this person or this entity that I don't interact with the same way as I do everyone else? I can't see him. I can't touch him. I can't see the look in his eye. I can't hear the cadence of his voice. How do I get to know somebody that I can't see or feel or touch? How do I have this intimate relationship with what feels like at times a distant God? That's a very fair question to ask. And Jesus actually answers this. I was nervous about how to explain it. How do we abide in Christ? How do we have this personal relationship with him? How do we experience the connection that the disciples felt? And I was actually kind of nervous about explaining this to you until I got to read the passage and really study it. And what I found is that Jesus answers this question in verse 10. And so really this is the second part of, this is our second assignment, our second objective. We want to be successful in the class of Christianity. The first thing we do is we abide in Christ. The second thing we do is we abide by obeying. We abide by obeying. In verse 10, Jesus says this. He says, If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. If you keep my commandments, you abide in my love. You want to know how to abide in Christ? Obey him. You want to bear fruit? You want to be a successful Christian? You want to do what you're supposed to do, what you were put on this earth to do? Then abide in Christ. You want to abide in Christ? Well, Jesus says, obey him. You want to abide in me? Obey me. That means all the things, right? That means that when Jesus says in Matthew, in the Sermon on the Mount, that when someone hits us in the face that we need to turn the other cheek and not seek revenge, that we learn what that means and that we do that. That means that when someone asks us to go a mile and Jesus tells us to go an extra mile, we go an extra mile. When Jesus tells us that when someone asks for our fleece, we should give them our coat as well, we give them our coat. When Jesus tells us that we should be generous and that we should care for the poor, then we be generous and we care for the poor. When he tells us that, when he redefines and correctly defines the commandment on adultery, that it's not simply sleeping with another person's spouse, but it's looking at anyone with lust in your heart, then we define that as our definition of adultery. If we want to abide in Christ, then we walk in lockstep with his commands and we submit our life to his word. John 1 says that Jesus is the word of God, so we obey God's word, right? That's what we do. But here's the thing. Being obedient to the Bible, being obedient to Jesus's commandments, it's pretty challenging. It's pretty difficult. It takes a long time to get proficient at it. Some of us have a hard time with it all the time. And as I think about what it means to really obey God, I kind of think about it like I think about a golf swing. Back in 2013, I went to the Masters for the first time. Now, the Masters is a golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia. It's the greatest sporting event on the planet. If you don't agree with that, take it up with someone else. I'm not into frivolous conversations, okay? This is actually, I played golf a little bit when I was a kid. This is my Pawpaw Six Iron. He taught me how to play. I like to have pieces of him up here whenever I can. But I learned to play a little bit when I was a kid. But I left it to play other sports. I had ADD big time, I think. It was undiagnosed, but man, it was there. And so I liked to play soccer, and I walked away from golf a little bit. But in 2013, I went and I saw the Masters, and I thought, I've got to play this sport. This looks super fun. And so I grabbed a set of clubs, and I started going to the range as often as I could get there. A shameful amount of time. I neglected gym for golf. And so I started playing, right? And once you start playing golf, you start learning that the golf swing is pretty stinking complicated. It doesn't look complicated. You watch it on TV, it seems like a pretty simple thing. But man, if you've ever tried to hit that ball any distance, even just in the air, you know it is difficult, okay? And so I started learning to play golf and you start to learn, man, there's all these technical aspects to the golf swing. Now, some of y'all know the golf swing a lot better than I do. So please don't judge me too harshly. But you do the golf swing and you wanna square up to the ball. It's called a dress, okay? The's on the ground. You want to address it, so you want to make sure your club head is facing the right way behind it. You want your feet to be spread about shoulder width apart if you've got an iron in your hand. Not too far, because you'll look ridiculous like a sumo wrestler. So you just want it right there, right? And then you've got to grip the club. And there's actually a way to do this. They, like, tell you. I went and got golf lessons one time. And the first thing the guy said is, show me how you grip the club. And I'm like, you're weird. Just tell me how to swing the club. But apparently it's important. You have to interlock your fingers in the back. Or if you're fancy, you can cover over your fingers in the back. But you don't do it like this. That's what crazy people do, okay? You can't do that. You have to grab it like this. And this hand needs to be in a certain place. And did you know that your thumb has to go in the crease of your hand right there? It took me two years to learn that. I don't know why they didn't tell me that. But you have to put your thumb right there, and then you hold it. Your knuckle's got to be in a certain place. If you rotate your hand too far under, you're going to hook it. You don't want to do that. And if you do it too far this way, you're going to slice it. You don't want to do that. So it's got to be just right. And then they tell you, once you get the club, that you just want to hold it like a baby bird, okay? Like you just want it to be real gentle. I've got like this death grip on there, and people have told me, you're going to strangle that bird, man. You need to let it go. So you got to be gentle with it, you know? Just hold it like pillow soft, like you do a lot of dishes or something. And then you want to take it back. And when you take it back, you want to keep your left arm straight. And you want to keep your left wrist flat. I do this sometimes or this. You don't want to do that. You want to keep it flat, right, so that when you meet the ball, like it's flush. And so you come back. And when you come back, you want to bend your left leg, but not too much. You don't want to look like a crazy person. You got to do it a little bit. And then I had somebody one time on my backswing tell me, you want your back pocket to face the target. And I'm like, well, how do you, I don't know what that looks like. Like, I don't even, I'm not, maybe that dude was a gymnast. Like, I don't even know how to make that one work, man. And then you go and you do the thing and you follow through. And sometimes I'll follow through and people will say things that I don't understand. Like, I'll hit the ball and it didn't do what I wanted to because it never does. And people will go, oh, you double crossed that one. And I'm like, what are you talking, I don't know what that, I don't know what it means to double cross. Or sometimes people will tell me, your hands got a little fast on that one. And I'm just thinking to myself, like isn't that the point? Don't we want our hands to go fast in a golf swing? Like I'm thinking that slow hands is not good for golf. But it's super complicated, right? And so here's what we know about golf. When you're golfing with your buddies and somebody's struggling and you want to give them a little tip, I'm going to coach you. I'm terrible at golf. I have a 20-plus handicap, but I'm going to coach you. I'm going to give you the thing that's going to make you good at it. You can give somebody one tip to start thinking about one thing. Your backswing's a little fast. You want to slow that down, and it'll screw them up for the rest of the round. They won't be able to hit that because they'll be thinking about all the things. They won't be able to hit that for anything. So here's what they tell you in golf if you want to improve your swing. You get what's called a swing thought. When you're swinging the club, you get a swing thought. You get to think about one thing. Just do one thing. There's so many aspects to the swing. It's so technical and so complicated. You could think about 12 different things if you wanted to, but if you want to get better at it, you think about one thing. I played an entire round of golf focused on keeping my left heel on the ground when I would swing the club. The whole round, that's all I thought about all day. You get one swing thought. Because if you take more than that, you won't be able to keep up with it. It'll be a messy jumble in your head and you won't see success. But the way they teach you to get better at golf is you take one swing thought and you get better at that. You don't think about all the other things. You get better at the one thing, whatever's most urgent for you. And then once you get that down, you get that into muscle memory, then you do the next thing. That's how they teach you. And I think obedience works the same way. There's so many things to focus on. There's so many areas. We need to grow in our kindness. We need to grow in our generosity. We need to grow in our patience. We need to grow in our humility. We need to stop doing this one sin that's kicking our tail. We need to start doing this thing that God's been tugging on our heart about for a long time. There's so many different things we could do to try to obey God. But I want to submit to you that the way to really learn obedience is to just have one obedience thought. Just take the next thing. Just take the next step. I'm not saying that we don't worry about all the other things. When you're learning a golf swing, you don't forego everything else you've already worked on to work on the next thing. You keep those intact too, but then you work on the next thing. And I think our Christian life is much the same way. We should have, and we are wise to have, an obedience thought, a next step of obedience, a thing that we can do to begin to obey God a little bit better and a little bit better. And the beautiful thing about this is, I think all of us have a next step of obedience. Whether you've been walking with God for five days or for 50 years, there's always the next thing that you can work on. There's always the next thing that God would have you, the next step of obedience that he would have you take. If you were to go to a PGA event and talk to one of the guys who does it professionally and ask him, what are you working on with your swing? None of them would ever tell you, nothing, this is as good as it gets. They would always tell you that they're working on something. And this is how it is with our obedience to God. No matter how many years we've been walking, no matter how mature or immature we are, every one of us in the room has a next step of obedience that we can take. And if we're going to learn to obey God and follow Him and abide in Christ, then I think it boils down to simply taking our next step of obedience. So objective three, our third assignment in how we abide in Christ, is by praying, stepping, and trusting. We pray, we step, and we trust. Under that, I have a prayer for you where I'm encouraging you to pray, Father, show me my next step of obedience. And that's a prayer that I would encourage you to pray now and pray every day this week. Father, show me my next step of obedience. What would you have me do? So we pray about it. God, what's my next step? What do you have for me? What's the next thing you want me to do? Maybe it's to get more serious about church attendance. Maybe it's to get more serious about a small group. Maybe it's to get up every day and spend time in God's word. Maybe it's simply to consider Him, to read a book or do some research or have a conversation with somebody that would help us grow in our faith a little bit. Maybe it's to start the discipline of tithing or giving. Maybe it's to actually have the conversation that we've been having. Maybe you know exactly what it is because God's been pressing it on our hearts for weeks or months and we haven't listened. But we should pray that God would show us our next step of obedience that he would have us take. And then we trust. We step. We take the step. We obey him, and then we trust that it was the right thing, and we trust that life is going to be better on the other side of obedience. A couple of weeks ago, we talked about obedience, and we talked about this idea that sometimes the reason we're not obedient to God is because we believe that life is better on this side of obedience. And so to actually step into obedience requires a degree of trust that life is actually going to be better for us on the other side of obedience, that that's where we find God's grace and God's love. And so often obedience takes faith in God and the courage to actually take the step. But here's what happens when we do this. I love this. This is my favorite part about this teaching. When we take a step of obedience, however difficult it is, God impresses something on our hearts. I want you to do this. I want you to get up 30 minutes earlier and I want you to spend some time with me. I want you to actually give to this thing. I want you to actually have that conversation. It's a difficult step when he shows it to us. But if we'll take it, and when we take that step in our fear and what we're met with is God's grace and goodness, we'll see that we can actually trust him. And because we've had this experience of taking a step in faith and being met with God's goodness, it'll give us more courage to take the next step, won't it? And then the next step, and then the step after that. And then for our life, we are simply taking these steps of obedience as we grow closer to Jesus and abide in him. And then here's what happens as we take these steps of obedience. We abide in Christ. And Jesus says that when we abide in him, we will bear much fruit. And here's what I love about that. If you think about an apple tree, if you think about a branch attached to an apple tree, that tree decides when and what kind of fruit that branch is going to bear. That branch doesn't get to decide, you know what? I want to give us apples in the wintertime. I really like apple pie. I'm doing winter apples. That's what's happening this year. That's not how that works. The tree decides when that branch is going to bear fruit. The branch doesn't get to go, you know what, fellas? I'm really thinking pears. They're in. Turkey and brie, it's really good. That's what we're going to do. The tree doesn't get to decide, I'm tired of being in an orchard, I want to be in a mangrove. We're doing oranges this season. That doesn't happen. The tree decides when the branch will bear fruit and what kind of fruit it is. Look at this. When you abide in Christ, when you are connected and you stay connected and you're following him and you know him intimately, when you're connected to the tree, you will bear much fruit. And it's not up to you when and where you bear that fruit. It's not up to you what kind of fruit that is. It's not up to you when the season is when you bear it. The tree decides that. You remain connected to Christ, and Christ says, I'll decide when and where you bear fruit. I love the freedom of this. And my role, my heart is for grace. We've given our lives to build God's church here. So I want to see grace grow. I want to see the kingdom expand here. I want to see lives impacted. I want to hear the story about somebody coming, visiting with us over VBS or Summer Extreme, and their kid coming to faith who didn't know Jesus comes to know Jesus here. And then that kid goes home and tells their parents what they saw here. And then their parents come, and their parents get plugged into a small group, and they accept Christ. And then they grow in their faith by taking their next steps of obedience and then there are elders and there are leaders and they're leading their small group. I want to see that story. I want to see marriages rescued here and strengthened here. I want to see little kids that grow up here and then grow up to follow Christ so well and so closely and know him so good that they disciple us. I want some of the kids that are in there to preach up here one day and tell us what they've learned about God. I want to see all this stuff happen in our church, and I want to see you guys live healthy and vibrant lives in spiritual faith. I want to see that. Do you know how we bring that about? Do you know what my role is in bringing all those things about? Getting up every day and spending time in God's Word and time in prayer and trying to take my next step of obedience, abiding in Christ. If I want to see that fruit at grace, if I want to see God do incredible things, you know what I need to do? Abide in Christ. Obey Him. He'll decide when and where we start bringing fruit. It's not about strategy. It's not about how good I preach. It's not about how good Steve does. It's not about marketing campaigns. It's not about follow-up. It's not about any of that stuff. It's about abiding in Christ, and Jesus will handle the rest. In your lives, you have kids you worry about and you pray for. You have ministries that you're involved in. You volunteer in different places. You have companies or groups of people around you that you want to influence and draw towards Jesus. You want to have a wake of people in your life who would say, I'm closer to Jesus because I knew that person. We want these things. You know how you get those things? Abide in Christ. Obey him. Get connected, stay connected. Take the next step of obedience. Pursue him daily. And guess what? He will decide when and where you bear fruit. But here's the promise. You will bear much fruit. Just simply abide in him. Pursue him. Obey him. Have the confidence and the faith to take the next step that he shows you, and you will abide abide in Christ and then the tree will decide when and where you bear fruit. There's a glorious freedom to this. And when we bear much fruit, you should know two things happen in this passage. Two things happen as a result of our bearing fruit. We are pruned and we are proven. We are pruned and we are proven. The second verse of this passage, Jesus says, when you bear much fruit, the Father will prune you so that you can bear more fruit. And make no mistake about it, that pruning hurts. That's the branches getting cut. That's when they lose a piece of themselves. I don't have time to delve into what pruning is like all the way this morning, but I know that for years and years, Jen and I prayed for a baby. We prayed to get pregnant, and it took a lot longer than we wanted it to take. We finally got pregnant, and then we miscarried. I've shared that with you guys before. That was four or five years ago. That was a super difficult thing. That's the hardest thing we've ever had to walk through as a couple. But I am convinced that that was a pruning period for us. Because how could I come lead a church? And how could Jen partner with me in this ministry if we didn't know grief? If we didn't know tragedy? If we didn't know what that was like? How could I teach about God's view of grief and how he's with us in our suffering unless I had experienced that? How could I empathize with someone who would shake their fist at God and say, why me, this isn't fair, unless I had walked through that in my life as well? I believe that part of the reason for that was a pruning to make us more effective in what God would have us do. I'm not saying that's the reason for all of our pain, but I'm saying that's the reason for some of it. God prunes us. That's why I hate the health and wealth gospel. We're not promised prosperity and a tragic free life. We're promised that if God prunes us, it's so that we will be more effective and bear more fruit, which is the whole point. And then, in that bearing fruit, we are proven. Every Christian ever has wondered, am I really saved? Did I do it right? Did I say the right prayer? Do I really have faith? If I were to die today, do I really know I'm going to go to heaven? You know what proves your faith? Fruit. Jesus says in this passage, you will bear much fruit, and so prove that you are my disciples. You want to not doubt your salvation? Look at the wake of your life and see if there is fruit there. When we bear fruit, two things happen. We are pruned and we are proven. And then as a result of all of this, all of these things, this idea of taking steps of obedience and finding God to meet us there in trust, of abiding in him and just focusing on him and not worrying about the end of the passage, verse 11. He says, these things I have spoken to you. So this lesson, what I've just taught you about the vine and the branches, these things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full. All of these things, knowing Jesus, abiding in him, obeying him, bearing fruit, being pruned and being proven, all of these things conspire to fill you with joy. Because in simply abiding in Christ, we are relieved of the pressure of productivity. We are relieved from the pressure of results because it's not our responsibility to bring about the fruit. We just follow Jesus. We are relieved of the sense of hopelessness that sometimes comes from pain because we know that it's serving a purpose to prune us and make us more effective at bearing fruit for God's kingdom. And we are relieved of the worry and the anxiety of, am I actually saved? Am I actually going to persevere? Because the proof is in the fruit that we have borne. God relieves us of all of those things and frees us up to simply follow him, to wake up every day, spend time in God's word, spend time in prayer, and to say, Father, what's the step of obedience you would have me take today? And when we do that, we experience the fullness, not of our joy, of his joy. So that's my prayer for you. That you would go from this place and that you would abide in Christ and experience the fullness of Jesus' joy. And my challenge to you is that you would pray now and every day this week, Father, what step of obedience would you have me take today? Father, please show me my next step of obedience. And I believe that by doing that and taking the step that he reveals to you, that we will abide in Christ and that by abiding in Christ, his word will be true and we will bear much fruit. And that by bearing much fruit, we will experience the fullness of the joy of Jesus. I'm going to pray for you. And as I pray, I want to encourage you right now to go ahead and begin asking God, what's my next step of obedience? Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for this morning. We thank you for your word, how clear it is. We thank you that your son boiled things down for us to this place where we can understand it. I pray that we would simply abide in you, God. Create a fire in each of our hearts to know you, to abide in you, to walk with you, to obey you. Give us the strength to pray the prayer, to ask what our next step is. Give us the courage and the faith to take the step. Give us the clarity to see it. Give us the gratitude for your grace that meets us there. God, whether it's a big step or a small one, I pray that we would take it. I pray that this would be a church full of people who are abiding in you and with you. And God, we can't wait to see the fruit that you bring about here in our lives and in this place. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.
Good morning. How you doing? A couple of things. My name's Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. I love seeing everybody here for the second service. There's a lot of space at the first service, so feel free. And in case you're wondering, does God smile more when you come to the early service? He does. He's smiling a little bit now, but man, the grin on his face when you get up that much earlier is really something special. The Lord moves in that first service. The other thing I want to mention is this. I'm super excited about this. It may not be the case. You never know what's going to happen for the rest of the tournament. But for now, Jen, my wife, is beating all of us in the churchwide bracket challenge, which is a pretty big deal. If you know Scott Hunter, he's in dead last, and that's fun too. All right, we're in the eighth part of our series in John, and I really enjoy getting to move through the book of John with you. This morning, we arrive at what I think is a critical seminal teaching of Jesus in this book. And to help us think about it, I want us to go back to that first day of a class that we took in college, okay? If you didn't have the experience of doing that or you haven't had it yet, you're not missing much. It's overrated. But for those that had to do it, there's this common experience on the first day of class in college. And I'm talking about back before the internet was a thing, when us old people went to college. It's not often that I get to lump myself in with the old people, but this week I do. This was before we had the Internet. You didn't know what to expect in your class, right? And so you'd go on that first day. You're taking whatever it is you're taking, Philosophy 101 or English 101 or whatever it is, and you don't know what to expect. It's the great unknown. What's this professor going to be like? What are my assignments going to be? How do I achieve success in this class? We all bring a different set of goals to the class. I mean, some of y'all are nerds, and you wanted to get an A, and so you thought, like, what am I going to have to do? And I don't mean that really. I wish I would have cared more about getting good grades. But some of you guys really cared about your grades, and so you're thinking, what do I need to do to get an A in this class? I just want to know the work that I'm going to have to do. For me, my academic goals were literally just, what do I have to do so that my parents aren't furious at me at the end of the semester? They were helping out with college, so what do I have to do to keep the gravy train rolling? That's the amount of effort I'd like to give to right? And there are some of you, you got there and you flipped to the back and you look at the assignments and you went, I will never step foot in this class again, right? Because there's too much work there. That's what we did. You get to class. For those that don't have the experience, you get to class. The professor gives you the syllabus. You grab it. And then at the top of the syllabus, you always read this thing. It says that the successful student will be proficient in yada, yada, yada, right? Or the successful student will be proficient in these things. And so you're like, okay, well, this is the goal of the class. This is what it looks like to be successful in this class. Now I know this, but then what are you really interested in? You're really interested in the assignments. What am I going to have to do to achieve the success? And then in the syllabus, you'll remember he or she would have like the philosophy of the class and their philosophy of teaching and all the goals and all the different things. You went, yeah, I don't care about that. You flip to the back of it, and that's where they had the assignment load. And you wanted to see how many tests, how long is the paper going to have to be, right? What am I going to have to do in this class to pass? And that's when some of us went, I don't think I'm coming back to this place because it was just too much work. But we've had that experience. And to me, regardless of what kind of student you were, whether you're a straight A student or you're a slacker like me, you would go to that class with a set of goals. I want to accomplish this in the class. And then you would love the syllabus because that would bring, that would make the unknown known. It would tell you, this is what's expected of me here. This is how they're defining success, and these are the things that I have to do to be successful. And we like this mindset. We have this mindset about a lot of the things that we do. We all, all of us, if we're old enough, have jobs, or we've had a job before. You get to that job, and what do they do? They give you a job description, and at the top of the job description, it says, this is what this position is for. This position will do this and this and this and this. And then there's objectives underneath that. This is how those things are going to be accomplished. This employee will do this thing and this thing and this thing. We like having a very clearly defined version of success, and we like having clear steps to achieve that success, don't we? And we often apply this to our faith. In every Bible study that I've ever been in, I've been in church my whole life. I've been doing ministry for about 20, I went pro in my Christianity about 20 years ago. And in every Bible study that I've ever been in, and a lot of conversations with with my friends and a lot of different small groups, this idea gets presented. And it happened again a couple of weeks ago in the young person small group that my wife and I are leading now. One of the girls said, wouldn't it be nice if there was like a to-do list for our faith? If there were just some clearly defined parameters in the Bible so that we know what to do and when to do it. Wouldn't it be nice if we kind of had a syllabus or a job description for our faith? And this is a commonly expressed desire because the Bible can be very confusing and it can be very intimidating and there's a lot in there to learn. And there are some churches, and then Christianity in and of itself, there's some churches that think this way about an issue, this issue is terrible and it's wrong and you should never do it. And then there's churches over here who are like, no, that's actually pretty okay and we encourage it and we think that you should do it. And there's churches all over the spectrum and there's different ways to interpret the scripture. There's tons of different denominations. And sometimes it's really difficult to figure out, man, what is it that I'm supposed to do? And if you're a new believer or a non-believer, I think a very natural thing to think is, I'm considering this faith, what is it going to require of me? Or, I'm a Christian now, I'd like to be a good one, what does that mean? Is there a to-do list? Is there just something simple where I can know what to do? How is success defined? And how do I achieve that success? Which is why I think John 15 is such a great passage, because I think that Jesus gives us our course syllabus for Christianity. So a little bit different this morning is your notes on the back of the bulletin that you received, you have notes on the back of that. The back of that is actually a course syllabus for Christianity 101. So if you don't have the notes, I'd like you to slip up your hand and the ushers will try to get one to you. Is there anybody that needs one? Some of the ushers have some and they're going to go around making sure folks have those. This is Christianity 101, okay? This is your course syllabus for this morning. You'll notice on it, I am your professor, Professor Rector. I do that. I'm not going to get the chance to do that probably ever again in my life, except for when I pretend at church. So I'm your professor this morning. Class is in session. We're going to take a lot more notes than we normally do. I would encourage you to get out a pen. There's one more, a couple more over here. Just send the whole pile down. I encourage you to get out a pen and write along with me, okay? If you don't have any now, we're out. So you're just going to have to go old school and cheat with your neighbor, okay? You have to look on to theirs. I believe, one more, she's auctioning it off. She's auctioning it off. I believe that Jesus gives us our core syllabus for Christianity in John chapter 15. I'm going to read the first five verses, and then we're going to talk about why I think this is true. If you have a Bible, you can open to it. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. But this is what Jesus says. He says, That's important. We're going to come back to that later. Verse 5, this is the clincher. All right, so this week we arrive at one of these great I am statements that Jesus makes. In the other Gospels, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we have the parables. You're probably familiar with them. They're made-up stories that Jesus tells to make a moral point. And in John, we don't have any of those parables. What we see is Jesus making these I am statements. I'm the bread of life. I'm the living water. I'm the way, the truth, and the life. I am the good shepherd. And now this week, he says, I am the vine, and you are the branches. And this is said to an agrarian society that understood what it was to grow grapes and try to make wine from these grapes. It was part of that culture. They were very familiar with this terminology, and that's what he's talking about. I am the vine, you are the branches, you're going to grow grapes. Connect to me and you will bear much fruit. And so in our terminology and way of thinking of it, it makes more sense to say that I am the tree trunk and you are the branches. But what he's saying is, I'm the source of life, I'm the source of joy, and you are attached to me. And when you abide in me, when you are attached to me and you remain attached to me, you will bear much fruit. All right, that's what he's saying in this verse. And so in verse 5, when he says, I am the vine, you are the branches, abide in me, and I in you, and you will bear much fruit, that really is a packed statement. There's a lot of questions that come out of that statement. For me, the first thing that I see is what does it mean to bear fruit, and why is he talking about that? And I think that that helps set us up for the goal of the course. So at the top of the syllabus you have the student will be proficient in these things. So if we're thinking about Christianity as a course, we're trying to figure out what it is we need to do, then what we need to know is that the course goal is that the successful student or Christian will show proficiency in bearing fruit. Okay, if you're a believer and you want to know if you're successful, if you're thinking about becoming a Christian and you want to know what's going to be expected of me. If you're a new believer and you want to go, okay, well now what do I have to do? The successful student or Christian, the person who is successful in Christianity will be proficient in bearing fruit. And I say that because this seems to be the goal of the passage. Jesus says, abide in me, get attached to me, remain attached to me, and you will bear fruit. Do this, follow my commandments, obey me, love me. Why? So that you can bear fruit. It seems to be that the point of the Christian life, the reason that Jesus leaves us here rather than taking us to heaven immediately upon salvation is so that we can bear fruit. So if you want to know what's the whole point of the Christian life, why are we here? Christianity 101, the successful student will show proficiency in bearing fruit. That's the point. So then you have to ask, okay, what does it mean to bear fruit? And those of you who are church people, you've heard this before, you know this passage. And if I were to ask you, hey, it says that if I'm attached, if I abide, that I will bear fruit. What does it mean to bear fruit? You would probably go, well, it means that you should, well, now hang on. Because it gets a little complicated, doesn't it? What does it mean? Some people would say that it means that we should bear the fruit of the Spirit that Paul talks about in Galatians 5. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We should become more like God in character and develop those traits in our life. To bear fruit means to bear the fruit of the Spirit. Other people would say, well, it means to bear the fruit of ministry. It means that in your life, you're leading people to Jesus, you're discipling people, bringing them closer to Jesus, that there is actually evidence of ministry and people what I think Jesus would say is that it's both. And I think that he says this in what we talked about last week in John chapter 13. If you weren't here last week, in John chapter 13, Jesus tells the disciples, I'm giving you a new commandment that you should love one another as I have loved you. That's the new commandment. That's what we're supposed to do. And then the question becomes, how do I do that? So last week is kind of, what are we supposed to do? We're supposed to love one another as Jesus loved us. And this week is, how do we do that? Well, we do that by abiding. And so what it means to bear fruit, I think, is this. When we love somebody as Jesus loved us, not as we love ourselves, a higher standard, Jesus' love. When we love somebody as Jesus loved us, it is impossible to do that without bearing the fruit of the Spirit in our life, right? How are you going to love other people as Jesus has loved you if we're not bearing love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control? How are we going to be able to do that if we're not becoming more like God in character? We can't. So part of it is to bear the fruit of the Spirit. But then the results of this love, if we love other people as Jesus loved them, when Jesus loved these people, what did they do? They drew more closely to him. And so when we love others as Jesus loved us, it's going to have this natural effect of drawing them into the Father, of drawing them towards Jesus. And so I think it's safe to define for the purposes of the course, again, in our syllabus, that bearing fruit will be defined as loving others towards Jesus. When we're looking at this and it says that we should bear much fruit, what does it mean to bear fruit? It means that we are proficient in loving others towards Jesus. Loving them in such a way that when they look at our impact in their life, they go, I am closer to Jesus because of them. To bear fruit simply is to look at the wake of our life and the people that we know in our life and have people who would point to us and say, I love Jesus more because of the way that they love me. I love Jesus more. I feel closer to Jesus because of their influence in my life. That is fruit. It's both a character, that has both a character aspect and a ministry aspect. But that's what it means to bear fruit, is to love people towards Jesus. So that's the goal for the course, right? That's what success looks like. The successful student will be proficient in bearing fruit or loving people towards Jesus. So now, how do we do that? And that's what this passage answers. And it gives us, I think, our assignments. And so the coursework, the objective, the first objective, our first assignment, the first thing we have to do is abide in Christ. Plain and simple. Abide in Christ. And if you're a church person, you've heard this before. You know this passage. This is a famous passage. You know how this goes. But I think it works pretty similarly. If I say, what does it mean to abide in Christ? I think sometimes we have a hard time explaining that or understanding that. And so I really wanted to dive into it this week so I could do a good job hopefully explaining it to you. And one of the things that I learned that I thought was most helpful was this idea. See, Jesus is talking to the disciples at the end of his life. We are in the middle of Passion Week in the chronology of the life of Christ. In a couple of days, he's going to be arrested and crucified and then raised from the dead, and we celebrate Easter, right, in the story of Jesus. So he's very near the end of his life. He's been moving through life with the disciples for three years now. He's been doing ministry with them. He's been ministering to them. He's been discipling them. He's been training them. He's been teaching them. He's been loving on them. He's been developing them. And so over these three years, there's this intimate relationship that has formed between them. And to me, it's very interesting that here at the end of his life, he calls the disciples to abide. Abide in me are his instructions to the disciples. But that's not what he said when he met the disciples. When he met the disciples and he called them to himself, what did he tell them to do? Follow me, right? So three years ago, it was follow me. Three years later, after spending all this time together, it's abide. And I love that there's a relational maturation to the calling of Jesus in this passage, where at the beginning he says, I want you to follow me. And when you follow someone, there's a distance there. I'm watching what you're doing and I'm trying to do those things. But when you abide, there's this relational aspect to it of knowing someone intimately, knowing them well. Let your heart beat with mine. Let what brings me joy bring you joy. Let what breaks my heart break your heart. Let my goals be your goals. There is this relational dynamic to abiding. The word there in the text literally means to get connected and remain connected like a branch is to a tree. So over these three years with Jesus, we see this relational component where we're supposed to know him intimately. I think if we want to make it our goal to abide in Christ, one of the very first things we have to do is find time in our day, every day, to spend time in word and spend time in prayer. If we want to abide in Christ, if we want to know him intimately, if we want to pursue him, what do we need to do? We need to get up every day, spend time in God's word and spend time in his presence through prayer. We have to do that. That's an integral part of our life. And this is actually this idea, abide, we are to abide in Christ, is where we get this idea of having a personal relationship with our Savior. You guys have heard that before. Even if you're not a believer, you're here because someone drug you here. First of all, I'm so glad that you're here, and I'll try to go quickly for you. But second of all, you understand, and you've probably heard this term before, that we should have a personal relationship with Jesus. And sometimes we talk about how this separates us from other religions, that we're actually invited into a relationship with our Savior and with our God. But it's a very natural question to go, okay, I'm invited into a relationship with Jesus, but how do I have a relationship with this person or this entity that I don't interact with the same way as I do everyone else? I can't see him. I can't touch him. I can't see the look in his eye. I can't hear the cadence of his voice. How do I get to know somebody that I can't see or feel or touch? How do I have this intimate relationship with what feels like at times a distant God? That's a very fair question to ask. And Jesus actually answers this. I was nervous about how to explain it. How do we abide in Christ? How do we have this personal relationship with him? How do we experience the connection that the disciples felt? And I was actually kind of nervous about explaining this to you until I got to read the passage and really study it. And what I found is that Jesus answers this question in verse 10. And so really this is the second part of, this is our second assignment, our second objective. We want to be successful in the class of Christianity. The first thing we do is we abide in Christ. The second thing we do is we abide by obeying. We abide by obeying. In verse 10, Jesus says this. He says, If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. If you keep my commandments, you abide in my love. You want to know how to abide in Christ? Obey him. You want to bear fruit? You want to be a successful Christian? You want to do what you're supposed to do, what you were put on this earth to do? Then abide in Christ. You want to abide in Christ? Well, Jesus says, obey him. You want to abide in me? Obey me. That means all the things, right? That means that when Jesus says in Matthew, in the Sermon on the Mount, that when someone hits us in the face that we need to turn the other cheek and not seek revenge, that we learn what that means and that we do that. That means that when someone asks us to go a mile and Jesus tells us to go an extra mile, we go an extra mile. When Jesus tells us that when someone asks for our fleece, we should give them our coat as well, we give them our coat. When Jesus tells us that we should be generous and that we should care for the poor, then we be generous and we care for the poor. When he tells us that, when he redefines and correctly defines the commandment on adultery, that it's not simply sleeping with another person's spouse, but it's looking at anyone with lust in your heart, then we define that as our definition of adultery. If we want to abide in Christ, then we walk in lockstep with his commands and we submit our life to his word. John 1 says that Jesus is the word of God, so we obey God's word, right? That's what we do. But here's the thing. Being obedient to the Bible, being obedient to Jesus's commandments, it's pretty challenging. It's pretty difficult. It takes a long time to get proficient at it. Some of us have a hard time with it all the time. And as I think about what it means to really obey God, I kind of think about it like I think about a golf swing. Back in 2013, I went to the Masters for the first time. Now, the Masters is a golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia. It's the greatest sporting event on the planet. If you don't agree with that, take it up with someone else. I'm not into frivolous conversations, okay? This is actually, I played golf a little bit when I was a kid. This is my Pawpaw Six Iron. He taught me how to play. I like to have pieces of him up here whenever I can. But I learned to play a little bit when I was a kid. But I left it to play other sports. I had ADD big time, I think. It was undiagnosed, but man, it was there. And so I liked to play soccer, and I walked away from golf a little bit. But in 2013, I went and I saw the Masters, and I thought, I've got to play this sport. This looks super fun. And so I grabbed a set of clubs, and I started going to the range as often as I could get there. A shameful amount of time. I neglected gym for golf. And so I started playing, right? And once you start playing golf, you start learning that the golf swing is pretty stinking complicated. It doesn't look complicated. You watch it on TV, it seems like a pretty simple thing. But man, if you've ever tried to hit that ball any distance, even just in the air, you know it is difficult, okay? And so I started learning to play golf and you start to learn, man, there's all these technical aspects to the golf swing. Now, some of y'all know the golf swing a lot better than I do. So please don't judge me too harshly. But you do the golf swing and you wanna square up to the ball. It's called a dress, okay? The's on the ground. You want to address it, so you want to make sure your club head is facing the right way behind it. You want your feet to be spread about shoulder width apart if you've got an iron in your hand. Not too far, because you'll look ridiculous like a sumo wrestler. So you just want it right there, right? And then you've got to grip the club. And there's actually a way to do this. They, like, tell you. I went and got golf lessons one time. And the first thing the guy said is, show me how you grip the club. And I'm like, you're weird. Just tell me how to swing the club. But apparently it's important. You have to interlock your fingers in the back. Or if you're fancy, you can cover over your fingers in the back. But you don't do it like this. That's what crazy people do, okay? You can't do that. You have to grab it like this. And this hand needs to be in a certain place. And did you know that your thumb has to go in the crease of your hand right there? It took me two years to learn that. I don't know why they didn't tell me that. But you have to put your thumb right there, and then you hold it. Your knuckle's got to be in a certain place. If you rotate your hand too far under, you're going to hook it. You don't want to do that. And if you do it too far this way, you're going to slice it. You don't want to do that. So it's got to be just right. And then they tell you, once you get the club, that you just want to hold it like a baby bird, okay? Like you just want it to be real gentle. I've got like this death grip on there, and people have told me, you're going to strangle that bird, man. You need to let it go. So you got to be gentle with it, you know? Just hold it like pillow soft, like you do a lot of dishes or something. And then you want to take it back. And when you take it back, you want to keep your left arm straight. And you want to keep your left wrist flat. I do this sometimes or this. You don't want to do that. You want to keep it flat, right, so that when you meet the ball, like it's flush. And so you come back. And when you come back, you want to bend your left leg, but not too much. You don't want to look like a crazy person. You got to do it a little bit. And then I had somebody one time on my backswing tell me, you want your back pocket to face the target. And I'm like, well, how do you, I don't know what that looks like. Like, I don't even, I'm not, maybe that dude was a gymnast. Like, I don't even know how to make that one work, man. And then you go and you do the thing and you follow through. And sometimes I'll follow through and people will say things that I don't understand. Like, I'll hit the ball and it didn't do what I wanted to because it never does. And people will go, oh, you double crossed that one. And I'm like, what are you talking, I don't know what that, I don't know what it means to double cross. Or sometimes people will tell me, your hands got a little fast on that one. And I'm just thinking to myself, like isn't that the point? Don't we want our hands to go fast in a golf swing? Like I'm thinking that slow hands is not good for golf. But it's super complicated, right? And so here's what we know about golf. When you're golfing with your buddies and somebody's struggling and you want to give them a little tip, I'm going to coach you. I'm terrible at golf. I have a 20-plus handicap, but I'm going to coach you. I'm going to give you the thing that's going to make you good at it. You can give somebody one tip to start thinking about one thing. Your backswing's a little fast. You want to slow that down, and it'll screw them up for the rest of the round. They won't be able to hit that because they'll be thinking about all the things. They won't be able to hit that for anything. So here's what they tell you in golf if you want to improve your swing. You get what's called a swing thought. When you're swinging the club, you get a swing thought. You get to think about one thing. Just do one thing. There's so many aspects to the swing. It's so technical and so complicated. You could think about 12 different things if you wanted to, but if you want to get better at it, you think about one thing. I played an entire round of golf focused on keeping my left heel on the ground when I would swing the club. The whole round, that's all I thought about all day. You get one swing thought. Because if you take more than that, you won't be able to keep up with it. It'll be a messy jumble in your head and you won't see success. But the way they teach you to get better at golf is you take one swing thought and you get better at that. You don't think about all the other things. You get better at the one thing, whatever's most urgent for you. And then once you get that down, you get that into muscle memory, then you do the next thing. That's how they teach you. And I think obedience works the same way. There's so many things to focus on. There's so many areas. We need to grow in our kindness. We need to grow in our generosity. We need to grow in our patience. We need to grow in our humility. We need to stop doing this one sin that's kicking our tail. We need to start doing this thing that God's been tugging on our heart about for a long time. There's so many different things we could do to try to obey God. But I want to submit to you that the way to really learn obedience is to just have one obedience thought. Just take the next thing. Just take the next step. I'm not saying that we don't worry about all the other things. When you're learning a golf swing, you don't forego everything else you've already worked on to work on the next thing. You keep those intact too, but then you work on the next thing. And I think our Christian life is much the same way. We should have, and we are wise to have, an obedience thought, a next step of obedience, a thing that we can do to begin to obey God a little bit better and a little bit better. And the beautiful thing about this is, I think all of us have a next step of obedience. Whether you've been walking with God for five days or for 50 years, there's always the next thing that you can work on. There's always the next thing that God would have you, the next step of obedience that he would have you take. If you were to go to a PGA event and talk to one of the guys who does it professionally and ask him, what are you working on with your swing? None of them would ever tell you, nothing, this is as good as it gets. They would always tell you that they're working on something. And this is how it is with our obedience to God. No matter how many years we've been walking, no matter how mature or immature we are, every one of us in the room has a next step of obedience that we can take. And if we're going to learn to obey God and follow Him and abide in Christ, then I think it boils down to simply taking our next step of obedience. So objective three, our third assignment in how we abide in Christ, is by praying, stepping, and trusting. We pray, we step, and we trust. Under that, I have a prayer for you where I'm encouraging you to pray, Father, show me my next step of obedience. And that's a prayer that I would encourage you to pray now and pray every day this week. Father, show me my next step of obedience. What would you have me do? So we pray about it. God, what's my next step? What do you have for me? What's the next thing you want me to do? Maybe it's to get more serious about church attendance. Maybe it's to get more serious about a small group. Maybe it's to get up every day and spend time in God's word. Maybe it's simply to consider Him, to read a book or do some research or have a conversation with somebody that would help us grow in our faith a little bit. Maybe it's to start the discipline of tithing or giving. Maybe it's to actually have the conversation that we've been having. Maybe you know exactly what it is because God's been pressing it on our hearts for weeks or months and we haven't listened. But we should pray that God would show us our next step of obedience that he would have us take. And then we trust. We step. We take the step. We obey him, and then we trust that it was the right thing, and we trust that life is going to be better on the other side of obedience. A couple of weeks ago, we talked about obedience, and we talked about this idea that sometimes the reason we're not obedient to God is because we believe that life is better on this side of obedience. And so to actually step into obedience requires a degree of trust that life is actually going to be better for us on the other side of obedience, that that's where we find God's grace and God's love. And so often obedience takes faith in God and the courage to actually take the step. But here's what happens when we do this. I love this. This is my favorite part about this teaching. When we take a step of obedience, however difficult it is, God impresses something on our hearts. I want you to do this. I want you to get up 30 minutes earlier and I want you to spend some time with me. I want you to actually give to this thing. I want you to actually have that conversation. It's a difficult step when he shows it to us. But if we'll take it, and when we take that step in our fear and what we're met with is God's grace and goodness, we'll see that we can actually trust him. And because we've had this experience of taking a step in faith and being met with God's goodness, it'll give us more courage to take the next step, won't it? And then the next step, and then the step after that. And then for our life, we are simply taking these steps of obedience as we grow closer to Jesus and abide in him. And then here's what happens as we take these steps of obedience. We abide in Christ. And Jesus says that when we abide in him, we will bear much fruit. And here's what I love about that. If you think about an apple tree, if you think about a branch attached to an apple tree, that tree decides when and what kind of fruit that branch is going to bear. That branch doesn't get to decide, you know what? I want to give us apples in the wintertime. I really like apple pie. I'm doing winter apples. That's what's happening this year. That's not how that works. The tree decides when that branch is going to bear fruit. The branch doesn't get to go, you know what, fellas? I'm really thinking pears. They're in. Turkey and brie, it's really good. That's what we're going to do. The tree doesn't get to decide, I'm tired of being in an orchard, I want to be in a mangrove. We're doing oranges this season. That doesn't happen. The tree decides when the branch will bear fruit and what kind of fruit it is. Look at this. When you abide in Christ, when you are connected and you stay connected and you're following him and you know him intimately, when you're connected to the tree, you will bear much fruit. And it's not up to you when and where you bear that fruit. It's not up to you what kind of fruit that is. It's not up to you when the season is when you bear it. The tree decides that. You remain connected to Christ, and Christ says, I'll decide when and where you bear fruit. I love the freedom of this. And my role, my heart is for grace. We've given our lives to build God's church here. So I want to see grace grow. I want to see the kingdom expand here. I want to see lives impacted. I want to hear the story about somebody coming, visiting with us over VBS or Summer Extreme, and their kid coming to faith who didn't know Jesus comes to know Jesus here. And then that kid goes home and tells their parents what they saw here. And then their parents come, and their parents get plugged into a small group, and they accept Christ. And then they grow in their faith by taking their next steps of obedience and then there are elders and there are leaders and they're leading their small group. I want to see that story. I want to see marriages rescued here and strengthened here. I want to see little kids that grow up here and then grow up to follow Christ so well and so closely and know him so good that they disciple us. I want some of the kids that are in there to preach up here one day and tell us what they've learned about God. I want to see all this stuff happen in our church, and I want to see you guys live healthy and vibrant lives in spiritual faith. I want to see that. Do you know how we bring that about? Do you know what my role is in bringing all those things about? Getting up every day and spending time in God's Word and time in prayer and trying to take my next step of obedience, abiding in Christ. If I want to see that fruit at grace, if I want to see God do incredible things, you know what I need to do? Abide in Christ. Obey Him. He'll decide when and where we start bringing fruit. It's not about strategy. It's not about how good I preach. It's not about how good Steve does. It's not about marketing campaigns. It's not about follow-up. It's not about any of that stuff. It's about abiding in Christ, and Jesus will handle the rest. In your lives, you have kids you worry about and you pray for. You have ministries that you're involved in. You volunteer in different places. You have companies or groups of people around you that you want to influence and draw towards Jesus. You want to have a wake of people in your life who would say, I'm closer to Jesus because I knew that person. We want these things. You know how you get those things? Abide in Christ. Obey him. Get connected, stay connected. Take the next step of obedience. Pursue him daily. And guess what? He will decide when and where you bear fruit. But here's the promise. You will bear much fruit. Just simply abide in him. Pursue him. Obey him. Have the confidence and the faith to take the next step that he shows you, and you will abide abide in Christ and then the tree will decide when and where you bear fruit. There's a glorious freedom to this. And when we bear much fruit, you should know two things happen in this passage. Two things happen as a result of our bearing fruit. We are pruned and we are proven. We are pruned and we are proven. The second verse of this passage, Jesus says, when you bear much fruit, the Father will prune you so that you can bear more fruit. And make no mistake about it, that pruning hurts. That's the branches getting cut. That's when they lose a piece of themselves. I don't have time to delve into what pruning is like all the way this morning, but I know that for years and years, Jen and I prayed for a baby. We prayed to get pregnant, and it took a lot longer than we wanted it to take. We finally got pregnant, and then we miscarried. I've shared that with you guys before. That was four or five years ago. That was a super difficult thing. That's the hardest thing we've ever had to walk through as a couple. But I am convinced that that was a pruning period for us. Because how could I come lead a church? And how could Jen partner with me in this ministry if we didn't know grief? If we didn't know tragedy? If we didn't know what that was like? How could I teach about God's view of grief and how he's with us in our suffering unless I had experienced that? How could I empathize with someone who would shake their fist at God and say, why me, this isn't fair, unless I had walked through that in my life as well? I believe that part of the reason for that was a pruning to make us more effective in what God would have us do. I'm not saying that's the reason for all of our pain, but I'm saying that's the reason for some of it. God prunes us. That's why I hate the health and wealth gospel. We're not promised prosperity and a tragic free life. We're promised that if God prunes us, it's so that we will be more effective and bear more fruit, which is the whole point. And then, in that bearing fruit, we are proven. Every Christian ever has wondered, am I really saved? Did I do it right? Did I say the right prayer? Do I really have faith? If I were to die today, do I really know I'm going to go to heaven? You know what proves your faith? Fruit. Jesus says in this passage, you will bear much fruit, and so prove that you are my disciples. You want to not doubt your salvation? Look at the wake of your life and see if there is fruit there. When we bear fruit, two things happen. We are pruned and we are proven. And then as a result of all of this, all of these things, this idea of taking steps of obedience and finding God to meet us there in trust, of abiding in him and just focusing on him and not worrying about the end of the passage, verse 11. He says, these things I have spoken to you. So this lesson, what I've just taught you about the vine and the branches, these things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be full. All of these things, knowing Jesus, abiding in him, obeying him, bearing fruit, being pruned and being proven, all of these things conspire to fill you with joy. Because in simply abiding in Christ, we are relieved of the pressure of productivity. We are relieved from the pressure of results because it's not our responsibility to bring about the fruit. We just follow Jesus. We are relieved of the sense of hopelessness that sometimes comes from pain because we know that it's serving a purpose to prune us and make us more effective at bearing fruit for God's kingdom. And we are relieved of the worry and the anxiety of, am I actually saved? Am I actually going to persevere? Because the proof is in the fruit that we have borne. God relieves us of all of those things and frees us up to simply follow him, to wake up every day, spend time in God's word, spend time in prayer, and to say, Father, what's the step of obedience you would have me take today? And when we do that, we experience the fullness, not of our joy, of his joy. So that's my prayer for you. That you would go from this place and that you would abide in Christ and experience the fullness of Jesus' joy. And my challenge to you is that you would pray now and every day this week, Father, what step of obedience would you have me take today? Father, please show me my next step of obedience. And I believe that by doing that and taking the step that he reveals to you, that we will abide in Christ and that by abiding in Christ, his word will be true and we will bear much fruit. And that by bearing much fruit, we will experience the fullness of the joy of Jesus. I'm going to pray for you. And as I pray, I want to encourage you right now to go ahead and begin asking God, what's my next step of obedience? Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. We thank you for this morning. We thank you for your word, how clear it is. We thank you that your son boiled things down for us to this place where we can understand it. I pray that we would simply abide in you, God. Create a fire in each of our hearts to know you, to abide in you, to walk with you, to obey you. Give us the strength to pray the prayer, to ask what our next step is. Give us the courage and the faith to take the step. Give us the clarity to see it. Give us the gratitude for your grace that meets us there. God, whether it's a big step or a small one, I pray that we would take it. I pray that this would be a church full of people who are abiding in you and with you. And God, we can't wait to see the fruit that you bring about here in our lives and in this place. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.
Oh, hey there, pals. Don't you just love this music? It's nostalgic, isn't it? Takes you back to a simpler time, when you were a kid and things were light and fun. I love times like that. I'll tell you what else makes me feel nostalgic. It's those old Bible stories. The ones that we learned in Sunday school or maybe just picked them up somewhere along the way. I love the heroes, David and Goliath, Noah and the Ark, Jonah and the whale. The list really does go on and on. And I wonder, pals, how long has it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kids stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along and that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, mailman Kyle. Oh, today, Moses and the Ten Commandments. That's enough of that. We are, we are. That was 10, 10 long weeks, friends. Once more time with feeling on that. If this is your first Sunday with us, this is the 10th part of our series, Kids Stories for Grownups. We've been showing that video or a portion of it every week, and I want to throw up in my mouth a little bit every time I see it. So I'm glad, I'm glad that that has run its its course and we've got more videos for you in the future. As we wrap up the series, we're going to wrap it up looking at the story of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. And though it is one of the shorter stories that we will tell in this series, I would argue that it is perhaps the most impactful one that we've covered in these 10 weeks as far as how what happens here in Exodus chapter 20 through 32, what happens there resonates and reverberates throughout all of Scripture. And that when we share this story, we have to ask about the story. What were the Ten Commandments for? Why did God give them? And so we're going to dive into that. But in answering that, I really want two things to happen. First, I want God to stir our affection for Jesus this morning. I'm going to tell you right up front that the whole point of the service and the message this morning is that you leave here with more affection for Jesus than what you entered in with. That's my prayer for everybody, that simple prayer. The other thing about talking about the Ten Commandments and the law is properly understanding the law and the commandments helps us understand our Bible better. So I say often, as often as I can, A, I can't be the only source of Bible that you're getting in your life. 30 minutes a week of whatever Nate chooses to share is not enough. It's not sufficient to learn God's word for ourselves. And you'll learn it with my terrible slant and biases, and you'll be as off kilter as I am. So don't do that. The other thing that I say as often as I can is the best habit that anyone in the world can develop is to wake up every time, wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. To do that and to understand our Bibles better, we have got to understand the law because it shows up over and over and over again in the New Testament. Half the tension in the New Testament is these new believers trying to figure out what to do with the old law. So we might be tempted to kind of throw it away and be like, well, you know, a sermon about the Ten Commandments doesn't apply to me too much because those laws really don't apply to me too much anymore. I don't have to worry about those. That's for Old Testament people. But as a New Testament Christian, we're going to see today how the law turns and puts our affection on Jesus. And we're going to, I hope, have a deeper understanding of God's word as we read it with a proper understanding of the law and the intent behind it. So the story of the Ten Commandments takes place in Exodus chapter 20. And many of you probably think that you know the story. Moses goes up on the mountain. You might even know that it's Mount Sinai. Two points for you. You can get your free coffee on the way out the door today. But in Exodus chapter 20, Moses goes up on the mountain. God gives him the Ten Commandments on two tablets. He carries him back down the mountain. He's like, here's the rules now. This is what we have to do. Except a careful reading will tell you that that's not really what happened. What happened is in Exodus chapter 20, the presence of God rests on Mount Sinai and all the people of Israel, all the descendants of Abraham, the Hebrew people who have been wandering the desert and following this God, backed away from the mountain and said, we're terrified. Moses, you go. You do it. You go see what he wants. We're scared. And so Moses goes to the mountain, and from the mountain, the voice of God tells him the Ten Commandments in Exodus chapter 20, but he doesn't stop. He actually continues to give Moses laws for his people all the way through Exodus chapter 32. So for 12 chapters there, God is doling out laws. If you carefully study the Old Testament, you'll find that there's about 632 laws, and most of these show up in this discourse from Mount Sinai. And then when he gets to the end of it, at the end of chapter 32, he writes, God writes everything down. He said he gives them the meeting notes. He said, here's what we talked about. Here's the laws for the people. Carry these down to them. And so Moses goes back down the mountain with the stone tablets that do contain the Ten Commandments, but more than likely, because the Bible says things were written on the fronts and backs of them, more than likely is all of the discourse from those 12 chapters. And Moses carries those down the mountain. So if you don't learn anything for the rest of the sermon, maybe you've at least learned something about how the story of the Ten Commandments actually goes. Just to tie a bow on the story, Moses gets to the bottom of the mountain and sees that the people have made a golden calf out of earrings and jewelry, and he's ticked because they need this sign for their God, and he's so mad at them that he throws these freshly inscribed tablets on the ground and breaks them, which I don't know if he was supposed to do that or not, but Moses has a very clear anger issue throughout his life, and this is more evidence of that. God calls him back up on the mountain, and he says, okay, listen, I'm going to tell you all that stuff again, but this time you're writing it down. Okay, Moses has to write it down. God says, I'm not your secretary. All right, I did it before you once. Now you've got to copy it down. So Moses writes it down, brings those tablets back down the mountain, and those are the ones that existed in the Ark of the Covenant for the rest of the Old Testament. That's the story of the Ten Commandments. Now, whenever we cover the story of the Ten Commandments, the right question to ask is, what are they for? What are they for? Why did God give them? To what end? Especially now in New Testament, post-Christ era, or during Christ era, he's eternal, but after Christ was on earth and he's changed everything, and after the crucifixion and the resurrection, now how do we handle the law? Now what is it for? So this morning, we want to look at that story of the Ten Commandments, but then really ask, why did God give us those things? Because understanding this, again, will point us towards Christ and will help us understand our Bibles far better. The presumed purpose of the law, when it was given and when we encounter it, I believe, is to provide a path to spiritual sufficiency and in our sufficiency, earn God's approval. When the law is given, there's a very clear path forward. Okay, good. Now I've got a plan. Now I know how to move forward. These are the rules that God wants me to follow. These are the ways that I can relate to him. For his children, there's a very clear path forward. I can follow these 632 laws. I can learn to follow them really, really well. And as I learn to follow them well, I can be spiritually sufficient and I can earn my God's approval. God says, we say, God, how do I make you happy? He goes, here, here's all the rules. Follow these rules super well and you'll make me happy. And I will give you my approval. And we can, in a sense, behave our way into eternity. We can behave our way into harmony with our Creator if we will simply learn to follow these rules well. And this, to us, and to the Hebrew people at the time, had to feel like good news, great, clarity. Finally, we know what to do. Think about it this way. Think about if you could sit down and read the Bible on your own without any knowledge whatsoever of what's contained in those pages. You don't know who Jesus is. You don't know anything about the Bible. You don't know how the story ends. You're reading it from Genesis on, and you're just paying attention to the narrative, trying to figure out how it's going to go. And so in Genesis 1, you see this instruction, hey, don't eat the fruit of this tree. Why not? Don't worry about it. Just don't do that. And then they mess up and they sin. And sin curses the earth. And curses the earth so bad that as you read along, you realize that in Genesis chapter 6, God decides I need to hit the reset button. I regret the way that this is going. And so he sends the flood. And all that's left behind is Noah and his family. And all God does to Noah, his only instruction to him, he doesn't give him the rules. What does God say to Noah? Hey, man, I want you to build a boat. What's a boat? Well, it floats in water. Well, what for? Just trust me, man. Just build a boat. But he doesn't give Noah the rules. And so you're reading along, you're like, man, this God is mysterious. How does he, how is he speaking to Noah and not the other people? And then you get to Abraham. He's called out of Ur of the Chaldeans in the Sumerian dynasty. And God comes to him and he says, hey, man, I want you to give up the future that you thought you were going to have in your dad's estate and I'd like you to move. Okay? Where? Don't worry about it. I'll show you. Man, this guy's mysterious. And how do I know that he's talking to other people besides Abraham? Is he only talking to Abraham? Where is this God? What are his rules? And when does he need us to follow them? Where is the clarity? And yet, Abraham gets to where he he's supposed to go and he meets a king there named Melchizedek who knows the will of God just as well as Abraham does. And we see that God is speaking to people all through this time, but we don't know where and how. And then he doesn't really give any more clarity to his son Isaac or to Jacob or to Joseph. And then 400 years go by and this Moses guy shows up. And what does he tell Moses? I want you to free my people, okay? Where do you want me to take them? I'm gonna show you. I'm gonna be a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Just follow me. And you're reading along going, man, this God is tough to follow. And then out of nowhere, Exodus 20. Hey, hey, hey, here's the rules, guys. This is what I want you to do. And I think our knee jerk as people would be to go, good, finally, thank you. Now I've got a plan. Now you're not just this weird cloud that I follow around and try to hear or just trust that Moses is hearing your voice. I mean, how weird would that be? If I got up here and I said, listen guys, I'm the only one who can really hear God very well, so you just need to listen to what I have to say. But that was the situation. And so with the law, good clarity, I have a plan. I can move forward. And don't we love that as Americans? Don't we love a good plan? I know in my life that when things start to go bad, when I'm not happy about what I'm doing at church, or I don't feel like I'm doing my job over here, or I don't feel like this part of my life is going very well and it's caused some pain and I try to figure out the best thing to do, what do I do? I sit down and I come up with a plan and then I work the plan. And there's great comfort in a plan that you think is going to succeed. And then you can work the plan. And so here, God finally gives some clarity. You want to make me happy? Here, follow the rules. And I think our human brains go, great, finally, a plan. I can do this. But I've always wondered, why did it take God so long to give him this plan? Why did God wait so long into the history of his people, a couple thousand years, to give him the rules? I think it's because God wants a relationship with us. And if we go back and we follow those first rules, those first instructions that he gave the early saints, we see that that's all he was really looking for. Adam and Eve, just trust me, don't eat of that. Why? Don't worry about it, just trust me. Noah, build a boat. Why? Just build it. Trust me. Listen to me. Do what I ask you to do. You're safe with me. Abraham, I want you to move. Where? Don't worry about it. Just go. Trust me. Follow me. Abraham, I want you to sacrifice your only son. But why? How? Abraham, don't worry about it. Just go. Obey me. Moses, lead my people. Where? Just follow me. At every instance, the beckoning of God is to follow him. Trust me. Work into a relationship with me. Get to know me. Pursue my heart as I pursue yours. And I think the real reason, when we consider it, that God waited so long to give the rules is because he knew that we would make them into a code, that we would begin to codify our relationship with him. Instead of pursuing him, we would just codify it, make a code of laws out of it, and go, here, this is all I need to do. I don't need the relationship anymore. What God knew is that relationships become contracts when we reduce them to codes. Relationships become contractual arrangements when we reduce them to a code of laws. Imagine if we did this in our marriages. I did a wedding yesterday, and I got to the portion where I did the vows. And at the vows, you vow affection to one another. You make promises to one another to have and to hold, richer for poor, in shape and not. However, we promise we will always love one another. What if instead of exchanging vows, we exchange our contractual agreements that we had negotiated prior to our marriage? And then on our anniversary, we revisited our contracts to see if we wanted to update them at all as ways to maintain the approval and affection of one another. Can't you just hear the contract negotiations? I think I would open with, for weekends in the fall when football starts, from noon on Saturday until when I go to bed on Sunday night, I would like to be able to treat my children like a railroad tycoon from the early 1900s. I would like to sit in my parlor, unbothered by them. Occasionally, they come in, and I laugh at them, tousle their hair, tell them they're cute, and then send them back to the nanny and I watch my football. This would be where I would start. And my wife would inevitably say, okay, but on Fridays and for at least one hour a night, you will engage with imaginative play with your children. You will even do Barbies. Also, once a week, I need some mom time. I need to go to Target, and I need to have lunch with people, and I need to go waste money on Starbucks. I'm going to need to do this, and I would say, okay. Once a week, I would like fresh flowers on the table. What kinds of flowers? You've got to help me out here. Can you imagine if we just negotiated our relationships and went back and forth? You give me this and I'll give you that. It robs it of its heart. It robs it of the love and affection that we experience in those things. The joy of marriage, the depth of marriage is getting to know one another over the years, is knowing when I do this, she's going to feel loved. When I do this, she's going to feel aggravated. When she sees me do this, this is what stirs her affections for me. So that by the time we've been married 30, 40, 50 years, we know each other better than any other soul on the planet. And that connection there was not achieved by making rules and negotiating contracts with each in attempting to follow those rules, we would rob the relationship that we have with him of its heart. And we don't need to look very hard in Scripture to see that he was right and that this is true. There was 1,400 years between Moses receiving the law and the gospels beginning, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, where Jesus comes on the scene. And when we get to the gospels, we see Jesus address the Pharisees. The Pharisees are the rule keepers, man. It is their job to read the rules, to interpret the rules, and to tell everybody what the rules mean, and to tell everybody how you're going to follow them. Like, it says don't work on the Sabbath, okay? Well, some Pharisees interpreted that as don't go out and plow the field with your donkey on the Sabbath. That's not allowed. Others were so strict with it that they said, if your sandal has a nail in it, that's heavier than it needs to be because it's metal and you cannot wear those sandals on Sabbath because that's work. So they had to figure out what do the rules mean and how do we apply them and how do we tell people whether or not they're following them. They were the keepers of the rules, the watchers of the rule book, and they should have known as well as anybody how to follow them. And if you follow them well, the way that God intended, their hearts should be rendered to God. They should be some of the greatest, most trustworthy people on the planet, except you guys know, what does Jesus call the Pharisees? Whitewashed tombs. He calls them a brood of vipers. He says, You're a brood of vipers. You're a bunch of hypocrites who had taken the religious authority that they were given and leveraged it for personal gain and personal power and then set up a system around themselves to protect their personal gain and their personal power. And they were complete hypocrites and their heart was very far from the Lord. They have figured out how to heartlessly follow God's rules and maintain a facade of righteousness. And I just wonder if that sounds like any segments of the church that we have today, where men, and it's almost always men, are in charge and they've set up systems so that they stay in charge and they can personally profit from the spiritual authority that they have. And it's gross. And it happened then and it happens now. Whenever we set up a system around who follows the rules the best, what inevitably happens is people claim that they follow the rules best and that you should follow them, and then they cast judgment on you and they exact taxes from you. And it's disgusting. Which is why I hope that if Jesus saw me, he would at least say, well, you're a messy tomb. You're dirty. And I would be like, that's great, because you're going to wash me off. But that was the condition of the Pharisees. They were a brood of vipers and whitewashed tombs, because they had so perverted the law over the years as to make it this thing of if you can follow it well enough, you can behave your way into God's affection and approval. And we need to watch it because we do that too. I remember when I was in high school, there was certain rules you had to follow. Every church, every group of Christians has them. Some rules that if you follow these rules, now you're righteous, now God loves you, now you're a good Christian. When I was in high school, if you didn't drink or do drugs, if you didn't cuss, if you didn't do anything with your boyfriend or girlfriend that you're not supposed to do. And you're a good Christian. Congratulations. Are you a jerk to everyone in your life? Yes, but you follow those rules, so you're fine. Meanwhile, we take the person over here who has a genuinely good heart and is gentle with people, but doesn't check one of those boxes, and we tell them that they are apostate and they need to go to youth group and probably some camp where they pledge purity or something like that. Every community of faith has its rules that it wants to default to. And we have our rules too. And we have our things where I just need a plan. If I can do this and this and this, then I'll be a good Christian. And without realizing it, we begin to try to behave our way into God's affection and approval. The end of that road is the Pharisees. The end of that road of trying to behave our way into God's affection is frustration and hypocrisy and a heartless obedience to God. And what's more frustrating is, in this following of the rules, it is possible to do it completely heartlessly, to follow the rules and not even love the rule giver. I went to a Christian college. There was lots of rules at that Christian college. I thought they were all stupid. But I followed them. Well, a better example is Jen went to a Christian college. And they had a lot of rules. And she didn't agree with all of them. But she followed them. Not because we had this deep and abiding affection for Toccoa Falls College and just a sense of loyalty to it. Not because we loved the rules and thought they were great. But because that was what was asked of us. And so we did. We can do that with God too. We all know how to go through the motions and follow the rules so it looks like everything's together. Meanwhile, our hearts are empty. And then Jesus comes along and he makes this heartless obedience harder. Jesus makes the heartless obedience harder when he shows up because he starts to redefine the law, to correctly define the law, to fix people's understanding of it, to help them see it's really impossible to follow it without heart. You can't follow the essence of the law without following the heart of the law. And he comes along with what is the single most convicting two verses for any man who's ever lived. He says this in Matthew chapter 5, verses 27 and 28. You have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. What that means is, I can only speak for the dudes, every one of us is an adulterer based on what Jesus taught. Now, we should not back away from that and consider it figurative. He meant what he said, and it's true. But until Jesus said this, plenty of us are going through life going, if I just don't commit adultery, the physical act of it, with someone else's spouse, then I'm squared away. I'm righteous, I'm good. And Jesus says, no, no. If you even look at them with intent, you're guilty. And then we all go, well, then I'm guilty. He even says that you've heard it said that we shouldn't murder anybody. Thou shalt not kill. And all of us, I would hope, can check that box. Yeah, you know, 40, I'm going 41 years. I'm in my 42nd year so far, no murders. Really nailing that one. But if you've hated someone in your heart, then you're guilty of that as well. And you go, oh, well, then I guess I'm a murderer. And the more you examine the law, the more frustrated you should become. Those of you in your life who have tried to white knuckle your way to holiness, who have just tried through sheer determination, I'm going to be a good Christian. I'm going to follow the rules. I'm going to do what God asked me to do and behave our way into God's affection. What always happens? You fall on your face. And when you fall on your face, you pick yourself up, you dust yourself off, and you go, I wasn't holding on tight enough that time. Now, this is the time when I'm going to white knuckle my way to God's affection. And Jesus, in this gentle way, whispers in your ear, no, you're not. No, you're not. And so when we examine the law and we hold it up to ourselves, what we realize is this is impossible. It brings us to this inflection point of frustration where sooner or later, sooner or later when you've fallen off the horse enough times, when you've tried to follow the rules well enough, when you've tried to behave your way into God's affection and approval, and when you've disappointed him again and you've let him down, and you've got to pick yourself up again, sooner or later you're going to say, I don't want to do this anymore. And it's at that point that a lot of people walk away from the faith because they believe that faith is following rules well, and it's not. But the law has to get us to this point where we surrender. We say, I can't do this anymore. There's no possible way I can follow the law. And when we're there, when we understand that we cannot behave our way into heaven, and I know, I know, listen, I know that I say that, and all the Christians in the room go, yeah, no, it's God's grace. I cannot behave my way into heaven and into God's affection. And yet, you live out your faith like that's what you can do. You know intellectually that you can't behave your way into God's approval for you. And yet, boy, you try, don't you? I'm just talking to myself here. So lest we sweep aside, no, I don't do that. Yes, you do. We all do. But it's at that point when we realize that we can't, that we're ready to hear the message from Romans 8, 1 through 4, where Paul writes about this exact thing. And I'm going to read it to you, and it's going to be a little bit murky, but there's a couple phrases we can key in on to really help us understand what he's talking about. He writes this. He washed off our tombs. For God has done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do. By sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit. Paul says, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For those of us who trust in Jesus and his sufficiency, our tombs are clean. We are alive in Christ. He's taking care of us. Because God has done, by sending him to die on the cross, to live a perfect life and to die a perfect death and to have a perfect resurrection, God has done what the law, listen, weakened by the flesh. But he sent his son who condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us. He sent Jesus to live a perfect life and to perfectly follow the law, the only person in history who's ever done it, to die a perfect death, to have a perfect resurrection, to ascend back into heaven, and then begin, according to Romans and Hebrews, to advocate to the Father on our behalf. And in that action, he covers over our weakness, and we are restored into the life of the Spirit and into harmony with our Creator and into affection from our Father God. That's what Paul is saying in Romans. He's telling us the purpose of the law is to show us our need for Jesus. And so in light of that, I told you at the beginning, we presume the purpose of the law is to provide a path to spiritual sufficiency. And in our sufficiency, so earn God's approval. But what we see through a careful examination of ourselves, standing up against the law, what we see in the teachings of Jesus is that was never the purpose of the law. The purpose of the law is to provide a path to spiritual surrender and in Christ's sufficiency, receive God's affection. You see the difference? When we act like it's to achieve our own spiritual sufficiency, we butt our heads up against the wall until we reach a place of surrender. And we say, Jesus, I can't follow the law. You followed it perfectly. I'm totally reliant on you. I'm done trying. I'm done trying to behave my way into heaven. I'm done trying to behave my way into God's affection and into my Father's approval. And I surrender to you. I confess, you died, you lived a perfect life, you died a perfect death, and then you resurrected for me. And you are my path to harmony with my creator. And I am insufficient entirely to do that at all. I am completely and totally reliant upon the sufficiency of Christ and his death on the cross. That is my only path to affection with my father. And then in Christ's sufficiency, we receive, not earn, God's affection, which is far better than approval. We don't want our dads to simply nod in a condescending approval to us. Yeah, you're good. Yeah, you're okay. Yeah, you're allowed. We don't want a distant, heartless approval from our God. We want that affection. We want Him to love us. We want Him to take joy in our joy. We want Him to mourn when we mourn. We want Him to hurt when we hurt. We want Him to love when we love. We want to know that our Father God is right there. We want his affection. And to get that, all we have to do is surrender. Quit trying so dang hard. And what it looks like is this. How about, how about instead of deciding all the things you're going to do to live the life that you think God wants you to live and to be the person that you think God wants you to be and all the plans and all the rules and all the white knuckling that we're going to do, how about we scrap that? And how about we make our only plan is to wake up every day and remind ourselves of the love that Jesus has for us. I heard one pastor call this preach the gospel to yourself. Remind ourselves that we fall at the feet of Jesus, that we rely on his sufficiency, that we trust in his perfect life and in his perfect death, and that God, the Bible says that this is love, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Before we earned it, before we deserved it, before we had any claim to it whatsoever, God sent Jesus to live a perfect life and die a perfect death so that we could experience eternity in heaven with him, so that we could walk in the affection and the love of our Father, so that we could be at harmony with our Creator. Remind yourself of that every morning. Remind yourself every morning, Jesus loves me. My Father loves me. Not for who I'm going to be, not for how I'm going to behave, but He loves me because He sent His Son for me. And if anyone were to ask me, why does God love you? I would point to the cross and I would say, because of what Jesus did, not because of anything that I've done. And remind yourself of that overflowing love every day. I love that verse in the book of John that says, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. Remind yourself of that grace every day. And what you'll see happening is when we surrender to Christ and we remind ourselves of his love, that our affections for the people around us are stirred as well. We'll be more gracious with our husbands and our wives and our children and our friends and our co-workers and the bad drivers. When we daily remind ourselves to surrender to Christ's sufficiency, when we choose surrender over sufficiency, God stirs our affections for Jesus. When we simply remind ourselves, I am insufficient, I have nothing to offer, Jesus has everything to offer, and I rely on that. When we remind ourselves of that, God stirs our affection for Jesus. And in stirring our affection for Jesus, he stirs our affection for one another, which by the way, isn't that the whole point of the law anyways? Didn't Jesus say that loving God with all your heart, soul, and your mind, amen, and loving your neighbor as yourself sums up the whole law and the prophets? This is how it does it. Instead of trying to be a people who are worried about the rules and all the right behaviors for Christians, which, by the way, will stop us from looking at other Christians and saying on social media, well, it's pretty unchristian. I thought you said you were a Christian and now you're da-da-da-da-da. If we would move away from a rule-following Christianity and towards a daily surrender to that Christ, we will find waiting for us an affection for Jesus and an affection for others that will help us walk in harmony with the law anyways. So the whole point of the law and the whole point of this morning is to grab our faces and point them to Christ and help us remember that he alone is worthy of our affection, that he alone is worthy of our devotion. And if we would quit trying to follow the rules so darn well and fail and get up and try hard again, if we would just surrender instead of trying so hard, surrender to the sufficiency of Jesus, that he would fill our hearts with affection for him, that that affection would overflow to others, and then we would finally be people who keep the law and walk in devotion and affection to Jesus. So I said my prayer for you at the beginning was that you would leave here with your heart stirred more for affection to Jesus than when you came in. That you would leave here desiring Jesus more than you did when you entered in. And my further prayer is that that would be a sustained thing, that some of you, gosh, maybe a few of you, would finally quit trying so hard and just wake up tomorrow morning and say, Jesus, thank you for loving me, and see where that leads. In a minute, the band's going to come up, and we're going to sing a song called Jesus, We Love You. There's a chorus in there, our affection, our devotion poured out on the feet of Jesus. Let's stand and sing this song as one church with one voice and one agreement and one surrender to pour everything out at the feet of Jesus and let him stir our affections for him. Let's pray. Father God, we are grateful for you. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for giving us the law so that we can see how much we need you. God, I pray that we would want more of you, that we would simply want more of Jesus, that we would want to know you better, and that in that pursuit we would feel a freedom from the things that trip us up, from the things that seek to hold us back, that so easily entangle. But that maybe, God, by focusing on you, by focusing on your son, we can run the race that's set before us as we were finally, finally intended to run. Focus our eyes on you, Jesus. And let us trust you to take care of everything else. In Jesus' name, amen.
Oh, hey there, pals. Don't you just love this music? It's nostalgic, isn't it? Takes you back to a simpler time, when you were a kid and things were light and fun. I love times like that. I'll tell you what else makes me feel nostalgic. It's those old Bible stories. The ones that we learned in Sunday school or maybe just picked them up somewhere along the way. I love the heroes, David and Goliath, Noah and the Ark, Jonah and the whale. The list really does go on and on. And I wonder, pals, how long has it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kids stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along and that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, mailman Kyle. Oh, today, Moses and the Ten Commandments. That's enough of that. We are, we are. That was 10, 10 long weeks, friends. Once more time with feeling on that. If this is your first Sunday with us, this is the 10th part of our series, Kids Stories for Grownups. We've been showing that video or a portion of it every week, and I want to throw up in my mouth a little bit every time I see it. So I'm glad, I'm glad that that has run its its course and we've got more videos for you in the future. As we wrap up the series, we're going to wrap it up looking at the story of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. And though it is one of the shorter stories that we will tell in this series, I would argue that it is perhaps the most impactful one that we've covered in these 10 weeks as far as how what happens here in Exodus chapter 20 through 32, what happens there resonates and reverberates throughout all of Scripture. And that when we share this story, we have to ask about the story. What were the Ten Commandments for? Why did God give them? And so we're going to dive into that. But in answering that, I really want two things to happen. First, I want God to stir our affection for Jesus this morning. I'm going to tell you right up front that the whole point of the service and the message this morning is that you leave here with more affection for Jesus than what you entered in with. That's my prayer for everybody, that simple prayer. The other thing about talking about the Ten Commandments and the law is properly understanding the law and the commandments helps us understand our Bible better. So I say often, as often as I can, A, I can't be the only source of Bible that you're getting in your life. 30 minutes a week of whatever Nate chooses to share is not enough. It's not sufficient to learn God's word for ourselves. And you'll learn it with my terrible slant and biases, and you'll be as off kilter as I am. So don't do that. The other thing that I say as often as I can is the best habit that anyone in the world can develop is to wake up every time, wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. To do that and to understand our Bibles better, we have got to understand the law because it shows up over and over and over again in the New Testament. Half the tension in the New Testament is these new believers trying to figure out what to do with the old law. So we might be tempted to kind of throw it away and be like, well, you know, a sermon about the Ten Commandments doesn't apply to me too much because those laws really don't apply to me too much anymore. I don't have to worry about those. That's for Old Testament people. But as a New Testament Christian, we're going to see today how the law turns and puts our affection on Jesus. And we're going to, I hope, have a deeper understanding of God's word as we read it with a proper understanding of the law and the intent behind it. So the story of the Ten Commandments takes place in Exodus chapter 20. And many of you probably think that you know the story. Moses goes up on the mountain. You might even know that it's Mount Sinai. Two points for you. You can get your free coffee on the way out the door today. But in Exodus chapter 20, Moses goes up on the mountain. God gives him the Ten Commandments on two tablets. He carries him back down the mountain. He's like, here's the rules now. This is what we have to do. Except a careful reading will tell you that that's not really what happened. What happened is in Exodus chapter 20, the presence of God rests on Mount Sinai and all the people of Israel, all the descendants of Abraham, the Hebrew people who have been wandering the desert and following this God, backed away from the mountain and said, we're terrified. Moses, you go. You do it. You go see what he wants. We're scared. And so Moses goes to the mountain, and from the mountain, the voice of God tells him the Ten Commandments in Exodus chapter 20, but he doesn't stop. He actually continues to give Moses laws for his people all the way through Exodus chapter 32. So for 12 chapters there, God is doling out laws. If you carefully study the Old Testament, you'll find that there's about 632 laws, and most of these show up in this discourse from Mount Sinai. And then when he gets to the end of it, at the end of chapter 32, he writes, God writes everything down. He said he gives them the meeting notes. He said, here's what we talked about. Here's the laws for the people. Carry these down to them. And so Moses goes back down the mountain with the stone tablets that do contain the Ten Commandments, but more than likely, because the Bible says things were written on the fronts and backs of them, more than likely is all of the discourse from those 12 chapters. And Moses carries those down the mountain. So if you don't learn anything for the rest of the sermon, maybe you've at least learned something about how the story of the Ten Commandments actually goes. Just to tie a bow on the story, Moses gets to the bottom of the mountain and sees that the people have made a golden calf out of earrings and jewelry, and he's ticked because they need this sign for their God, and he's so mad at them that he throws these freshly inscribed tablets on the ground and breaks them, which I don't know if he was supposed to do that or not, but Moses has a very clear anger issue throughout his life, and this is more evidence of that. God calls him back up on the mountain, and he says, okay, listen, I'm going to tell you all that stuff again, but this time you're writing it down. Okay, Moses has to write it down. God says, I'm not your secretary. All right, I did it before you once. Now you've got to copy it down. So Moses writes it down, brings those tablets back down the mountain, and those are the ones that existed in the Ark of the Covenant for the rest of the Old Testament. That's the story of the Ten Commandments. Now, whenever we cover the story of the Ten Commandments, the right question to ask is, what are they for? What are they for? Why did God give them? To what end? Especially now in New Testament, post-Christ era, or during Christ era, he's eternal, but after Christ was on earth and he's changed everything, and after the crucifixion and the resurrection, now how do we handle the law? Now what is it for? So this morning, we want to look at that story of the Ten Commandments, but then really ask, why did God give us those things? Because understanding this, again, will point us towards Christ and will help us understand our Bibles far better. The presumed purpose of the law, when it was given and when we encounter it, I believe, is to provide a path to spiritual sufficiency and in our sufficiency, earn God's approval. When the law is given, there's a very clear path forward. Okay, good. Now I've got a plan. Now I know how to move forward. These are the rules that God wants me to follow. These are the ways that I can relate to him. For his children, there's a very clear path forward. I can follow these 632 laws. I can learn to follow them really, really well. And as I learn to follow them well, I can be spiritually sufficient and I can earn my God's approval. God says, we say, God, how do I make you happy? He goes, here, here's all the rules. Follow these rules super well and you'll make me happy. And I will give you my approval. And we can, in a sense, behave our way into eternity. We can behave our way into harmony with our Creator if we will simply learn to follow these rules well. And this, to us, and to the Hebrew people at the time, had to feel like good news, great, clarity. Finally, we know what to do. Think about it this way. Think about if you could sit down and read the Bible on your own without any knowledge whatsoever of what's contained in those pages. You don't know who Jesus is. You don't know anything about the Bible. You don't know how the story ends. You're reading it from Genesis on, and you're just paying attention to the narrative, trying to figure out how it's going to go. And so in Genesis 1, you see this instruction, hey, don't eat the fruit of this tree. Why not? Don't worry about it. Just don't do that. And then they mess up and they sin. And sin curses the earth. And curses the earth so bad that as you read along, you realize that in Genesis chapter 6, God decides I need to hit the reset button. I regret the way that this is going. And so he sends the flood. And all that's left behind is Noah and his family. And all God does to Noah, his only instruction to him, he doesn't give him the rules. What does God say to Noah? Hey, man, I want you to build a boat. What's a boat? Well, it floats in water. Well, what for? Just trust me, man. Just build a boat. But he doesn't give Noah the rules. And so you're reading along, you're like, man, this God is mysterious. How does he, how is he speaking to Noah and not the other people? And then you get to Abraham. He's called out of Ur of the Chaldeans in the Sumerian dynasty. And God comes to him and he says, hey, man, I want you to give up the future that you thought you were going to have in your dad's estate and I'd like you to move. Okay? Where? Don't worry about it. I'll show you. Man, this guy's mysterious. And how do I know that he's talking to other people besides Abraham? Is he only talking to Abraham? Where is this God? What are his rules? And when does he need us to follow them? Where is the clarity? And yet, Abraham gets to where he he's supposed to go and he meets a king there named Melchizedek who knows the will of God just as well as Abraham does. And we see that God is speaking to people all through this time, but we don't know where and how. And then he doesn't really give any more clarity to his son Isaac or to Jacob or to Joseph. And then 400 years go by and this Moses guy shows up. And what does he tell Moses? I want you to free my people, okay? Where do you want me to take them? I'm gonna show you. I'm gonna be a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Just follow me. And you're reading along going, man, this God is tough to follow. And then out of nowhere, Exodus 20. Hey, hey, hey, here's the rules, guys. This is what I want you to do. And I think our knee jerk as people would be to go, good, finally, thank you. Now I've got a plan. Now you're not just this weird cloud that I follow around and try to hear or just trust that Moses is hearing your voice. I mean, how weird would that be? If I got up here and I said, listen guys, I'm the only one who can really hear God very well, so you just need to listen to what I have to say. But that was the situation. And so with the law, good clarity, I have a plan. I can move forward. And don't we love that as Americans? Don't we love a good plan? I know in my life that when things start to go bad, when I'm not happy about what I'm doing at church, or I don't feel like I'm doing my job over here, or I don't feel like this part of my life is going very well and it's caused some pain and I try to figure out the best thing to do, what do I do? I sit down and I come up with a plan and then I work the plan. And there's great comfort in a plan that you think is going to succeed. And then you can work the plan. And so here, God finally gives some clarity. You want to make me happy? Here, follow the rules. And I think our human brains go, great, finally, a plan. I can do this. But I've always wondered, why did it take God so long to give him this plan? Why did God wait so long into the history of his people, a couple thousand years, to give him the rules? I think it's because God wants a relationship with us. And if we go back and we follow those first rules, those first instructions that he gave the early saints, we see that that's all he was really looking for. Adam and Eve, just trust me, don't eat of that. Why? Don't worry about it, just trust me. Noah, build a boat. Why? Just build it. Trust me. Listen to me. Do what I ask you to do. You're safe with me. Abraham, I want you to move. Where? Don't worry about it. Just go. Trust me. Follow me. Abraham, I want you to sacrifice your only son. But why? How? Abraham, don't worry about it. Just go. Obey me. Moses, lead my people. Where? Just follow me. At every instance, the beckoning of God is to follow him. Trust me. Work into a relationship with me. Get to know me. Pursue my heart as I pursue yours. And I think the real reason, when we consider it, that God waited so long to give the rules is because he knew that we would make them into a code, that we would begin to codify our relationship with him. Instead of pursuing him, we would just codify it, make a code of laws out of it, and go, here, this is all I need to do. I don't need the relationship anymore. What God knew is that relationships become contracts when we reduce them to codes. Relationships become contractual arrangements when we reduce them to a code of laws. Imagine if we did this in our marriages. I did a wedding yesterday, and I got to the portion where I did the vows. And at the vows, you vow affection to one another. You make promises to one another to have and to hold, richer for poor, in shape and not. However, we promise we will always love one another. What if instead of exchanging vows, we exchange our contractual agreements that we had negotiated prior to our marriage? And then on our anniversary, we revisited our contracts to see if we wanted to update them at all as ways to maintain the approval and affection of one another. Can't you just hear the contract negotiations? I think I would open with, for weekends in the fall when football starts, from noon on Saturday until when I go to bed on Sunday night, I would like to be able to treat my children like a railroad tycoon from the early 1900s. I would like to sit in my parlor, unbothered by them. Occasionally, they come in, and I laugh at them, tousle their hair, tell them they're cute, and then send them back to the nanny and I watch my football. This would be where I would start. And my wife would inevitably say, okay, but on Fridays and for at least one hour a night, you will engage with imaginative play with your children. You will even do Barbies. Also, once a week, I need some mom time. I need to go to Target, and I need to have lunch with people, and I need to go waste money on Starbucks. I'm going to need to do this, and I would say, okay. Once a week, I would like fresh flowers on the table. What kinds of flowers? You've got to help me out here. Can you imagine if we just negotiated our relationships and went back and forth? You give me this and I'll give you that. It robs it of its heart. It robs it of the love and affection that we experience in those things. The joy of marriage, the depth of marriage is getting to know one another over the years, is knowing when I do this, she's going to feel loved. When I do this, she's going to feel aggravated. When she sees me do this, this is what stirs her affections for me. So that by the time we've been married 30, 40, 50 years, we know each other better than any other soul on the planet. And that connection there was not achieved by making rules and negotiating contracts with each in attempting to follow those rules, we would rob the relationship that we have with him of its heart. And we don't need to look very hard in Scripture to see that he was right and that this is true. There was 1,400 years between Moses receiving the law and the gospels beginning, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, where Jesus comes on the scene. And when we get to the gospels, we see Jesus address the Pharisees. The Pharisees are the rule keepers, man. It is their job to read the rules, to interpret the rules, and to tell everybody what the rules mean, and to tell everybody how you're going to follow them. Like, it says don't work on the Sabbath, okay? Well, some Pharisees interpreted that as don't go out and plow the field with your donkey on the Sabbath. That's not allowed. Others were so strict with it that they said, if your sandal has a nail in it, that's heavier than it needs to be because it's metal and you cannot wear those sandals on Sabbath because that's work. So they had to figure out what do the rules mean and how do we apply them and how do we tell people whether or not they're following them. They were the keepers of the rules, the watchers of the rule book, and they should have known as well as anybody how to follow them. And if you follow them well, the way that God intended, their hearts should be rendered to God. They should be some of the greatest, most trustworthy people on the planet, except you guys know, what does Jesus call the Pharisees? Whitewashed tombs. He calls them a brood of vipers. He says, You're a brood of vipers. You're a bunch of hypocrites who had taken the religious authority that they were given and leveraged it for personal gain and personal power and then set up a system around themselves to protect their personal gain and their personal power. And they were complete hypocrites and their heart was very far from the Lord. They have figured out how to heartlessly follow God's rules and maintain a facade of righteousness. And I just wonder if that sounds like any segments of the church that we have today, where men, and it's almost always men, are in charge and they've set up systems so that they stay in charge and they can personally profit from the spiritual authority that they have. And it's gross. And it happened then and it happens now. Whenever we set up a system around who follows the rules the best, what inevitably happens is people claim that they follow the rules best and that you should follow them, and then they cast judgment on you and they exact taxes from you. And it's disgusting. Which is why I hope that if Jesus saw me, he would at least say, well, you're a messy tomb. You're dirty. And I would be like, that's great, because you're going to wash me off. But that was the condition of the Pharisees. They were a brood of vipers and whitewashed tombs, because they had so perverted the law over the years as to make it this thing of if you can follow it well enough, you can behave your way into God's affection and approval. And we need to watch it because we do that too. I remember when I was in high school, there was certain rules you had to follow. Every church, every group of Christians has them. Some rules that if you follow these rules, now you're righteous, now God loves you, now you're a good Christian. When I was in high school, if you didn't drink or do drugs, if you didn't cuss, if you didn't do anything with your boyfriend or girlfriend that you're not supposed to do. And you're a good Christian. Congratulations. Are you a jerk to everyone in your life? Yes, but you follow those rules, so you're fine. Meanwhile, we take the person over here who has a genuinely good heart and is gentle with people, but doesn't check one of those boxes, and we tell them that they are apostate and they need to go to youth group and probably some camp where they pledge purity or something like that. Every community of faith has its rules that it wants to default to. And we have our rules too. And we have our things where I just need a plan. If I can do this and this and this, then I'll be a good Christian. And without realizing it, we begin to try to behave our way into God's affection and approval. The end of that road is the Pharisees. The end of that road of trying to behave our way into God's affection is frustration and hypocrisy and a heartless obedience to God. And what's more frustrating is, in this following of the rules, it is possible to do it completely heartlessly, to follow the rules and not even love the rule giver. I went to a Christian college. There was lots of rules at that Christian college. I thought they were all stupid. But I followed them. Well, a better example is Jen went to a Christian college. And they had a lot of rules. And she didn't agree with all of them. But she followed them. Not because we had this deep and abiding affection for Toccoa Falls College and just a sense of loyalty to it. Not because we loved the rules and thought they were great. But because that was what was asked of us. And so we did. We can do that with God too. We all know how to go through the motions and follow the rules so it looks like everything's together. Meanwhile, our hearts are empty. And then Jesus comes along and he makes this heartless obedience harder. Jesus makes the heartless obedience harder when he shows up because he starts to redefine the law, to correctly define the law, to fix people's understanding of it, to help them see it's really impossible to follow it without heart. You can't follow the essence of the law without following the heart of the law. And he comes along with what is the single most convicting two verses for any man who's ever lived. He says this in Matthew chapter 5, verses 27 and 28. You have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. What that means is, I can only speak for the dudes, every one of us is an adulterer based on what Jesus taught. Now, we should not back away from that and consider it figurative. He meant what he said, and it's true. But until Jesus said this, plenty of us are going through life going, if I just don't commit adultery, the physical act of it, with someone else's spouse, then I'm squared away. I'm righteous, I'm good. And Jesus says, no, no. If you even look at them with intent, you're guilty. And then we all go, well, then I'm guilty. He even says that you've heard it said that we shouldn't murder anybody. Thou shalt not kill. And all of us, I would hope, can check that box. Yeah, you know, 40, I'm going 41 years. I'm in my 42nd year so far, no murders. Really nailing that one. But if you've hated someone in your heart, then you're guilty of that as well. And you go, oh, well, then I guess I'm a murderer. And the more you examine the law, the more frustrated you should become. Those of you in your life who have tried to white knuckle your way to holiness, who have just tried through sheer determination, I'm going to be a good Christian. I'm going to follow the rules. I'm going to do what God asked me to do and behave our way into God's affection. What always happens? You fall on your face. And when you fall on your face, you pick yourself up, you dust yourself off, and you go, I wasn't holding on tight enough that time. Now, this is the time when I'm going to white knuckle my way to God's affection. And Jesus, in this gentle way, whispers in your ear, no, you're not. No, you're not. And so when we examine the law and we hold it up to ourselves, what we realize is this is impossible. It brings us to this inflection point of frustration where sooner or later, sooner or later when you've fallen off the horse enough times, when you've tried to follow the rules well enough, when you've tried to behave your way into God's affection and approval, and when you've disappointed him again and you've let him down, and you've got to pick yourself up again, sooner or later you're going to say, I don't want to do this anymore. And it's at that point that a lot of people walk away from the faith because they believe that faith is following rules well, and it's not. But the law has to get us to this point where we surrender. We say, I can't do this anymore. There's no possible way I can follow the law. And when we're there, when we understand that we cannot behave our way into heaven, and I know, I know, listen, I know that I say that, and all the Christians in the room go, yeah, no, it's God's grace. I cannot behave my way into heaven and into God's affection. And yet, you live out your faith like that's what you can do. You know intellectually that you can't behave your way into God's approval for you. And yet, boy, you try, don't you? I'm just talking to myself here. So lest we sweep aside, no, I don't do that. Yes, you do. We all do. But it's at that point when we realize that we can't, that we're ready to hear the message from Romans 8, 1 through 4, where Paul writes about this exact thing. And I'm going to read it to you, and it's going to be a little bit murky, but there's a couple phrases we can key in on to really help us understand what he's talking about. He writes this. He washed off our tombs. For God has done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do. By sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit. Paul says, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For those of us who trust in Jesus and his sufficiency, our tombs are clean. We are alive in Christ. He's taking care of us. Because God has done, by sending him to die on the cross, to live a perfect life and to die a perfect death and to have a perfect resurrection, God has done what the law, listen, weakened by the flesh. But he sent his son who condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us. He sent Jesus to live a perfect life and to perfectly follow the law, the only person in history who's ever done it, to die a perfect death, to have a perfect resurrection, to ascend back into heaven, and then begin, according to Romans and Hebrews, to advocate to the Father on our behalf. And in that action, he covers over our weakness, and we are restored into the life of the Spirit and into harmony with our Creator and into affection from our Father God. That's what Paul is saying in Romans. He's telling us the purpose of the law is to show us our need for Jesus. And so in light of that, I told you at the beginning, we presume the purpose of the law is to provide a path to spiritual sufficiency. And in our sufficiency, so earn God's approval. But what we see through a careful examination of ourselves, standing up against the law, what we see in the teachings of Jesus is that was never the purpose of the law. The purpose of the law is to provide a path to spiritual surrender and in Christ's sufficiency, receive God's affection. You see the difference? When we act like it's to achieve our own spiritual sufficiency, we butt our heads up against the wall until we reach a place of surrender. And we say, Jesus, I can't follow the law. You followed it perfectly. I'm totally reliant on you. I'm done trying. I'm done trying to behave my way into heaven. I'm done trying to behave my way into God's affection and into my Father's approval. And I surrender to you. I confess, you died, you lived a perfect life, you died a perfect death, and then you resurrected for me. And you are my path to harmony with my creator. And I am insufficient entirely to do that at all. I am completely and totally reliant upon the sufficiency of Christ and his death on the cross. That is my only path to affection with my father. And then in Christ's sufficiency, we receive, not earn, God's affection, which is far better than approval. We don't want our dads to simply nod in a condescending approval to us. Yeah, you're good. Yeah, you're okay. Yeah, you're allowed. We don't want a distant, heartless approval from our God. We want that affection. We want Him to love us. We want Him to take joy in our joy. We want Him to mourn when we mourn. We want Him to hurt when we hurt. We want Him to love when we love. We want to know that our Father God is right there. We want his affection. And to get that, all we have to do is surrender. Quit trying so dang hard. And what it looks like is this. How about, how about instead of deciding all the things you're going to do to live the life that you think God wants you to live and to be the person that you think God wants you to be and all the plans and all the rules and all the white knuckling that we're going to do, how about we scrap that? And how about we make our only plan is to wake up every day and remind ourselves of the love that Jesus has for us. I heard one pastor call this preach the gospel to yourself. Remind ourselves that we fall at the feet of Jesus, that we rely on his sufficiency, that we trust in his perfect life and in his perfect death, and that God, the Bible says that this is love, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Before we earned it, before we deserved it, before we had any claim to it whatsoever, God sent Jesus to live a perfect life and die a perfect death so that we could experience eternity in heaven with him, so that we could walk in the affection and the love of our Father, so that we could be at harmony with our Creator. Remind yourself of that every morning. Remind yourself every morning, Jesus loves me. My Father loves me. Not for who I'm going to be, not for how I'm going to behave, but He loves me because He sent His Son for me. And if anyone were to ask me, why does God love you? I would point to the cross and I would say, because of what Jesus did, not because of anything that I've done. And remind yourself of that overflowing love every day. I love that verse in the book of John that says, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. Remind yourself of that grace every day. And what you'll see happening is when we surrender to Christ and we remind ourselves of his love, that our affections for the people around us are stirred as well. We'll be more gracious with our husbands and our wives and our children and our friends and our co-workers and the bad drivers. When we daily remind ourselves to surrender to Christ's sufficiency, when we choose surrender over sufficiency, God stirs our affections for Jesus. When we simply remind ourselves, I am insufficient, I have nothing to offer, Jesus has everything to offer, and I rely on that. When we remind ourselves of that, God stirs our affection for Jesus. And in stirring our affection for Jesus, he stirs our affection for one another, which by the way, isn't that the whole point of the law anyways? Didn't Jesus say that loving God with all your heart, soul, and your mind, amen, and loving your neighbor as yourself sums up the whole law and the prophets? This is how it does it. Instead of trying to be a people who are worried about the rules and all the right behaviors for Christians, which, by the way, will stop us from looking at other Christians and saying on social media, well, it's pretty unchristian. I thought you said you were a Christian and now you're da-da-da-da-da. If we would move away from a rule-following Christianity and towards a daily surrender to that Christ, we will find waiting for us an affection for Jesus and an affection for others that will help us walk in harmony with the law anyways. So the whole point of the law and the whole point of this morning is to grab our faces and point them to Christ and help us remember that he alone is worthy of our affection, that he alone is worthy of our devotion. And if we would quit trying to follow the rules so darn well and fail and get up and try hard again, if we would just surrender instead of trying so hard, surrender to the sufficiency of Jesus, that he would fill our hearts with affection for him, that that affection would overflow to others, and then we would finally be people who keep the law and walk in devotion and affection to Jesus. So I said my prayer for you at the beginning was that you would leave here with your heart stirred more for affection to Jesus than when you came in. That you would leave here desiring Jesus more than you did when you entered in. And my further prayer is that that would be a sustained thing, that some of you, gosh, maybe a few of you, would finally quit trying so hard and just wake up tomorrow morning and say, Jesus, thank you for loving me, and see where that leads. In a minute, the band's going to come up, and we're going to sing a song called Jesus, We Love You. There's a chorus in there, our affection, our devotion poured out on the feet of Jesus. Let's stand and sing this song as one church with one voice and one agreement and one surrender to pour everything out at the feet of Jesus and let him stir our affections for him. Let's pray. Father God, we are grateful for you. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for giving us the law so that we can see how much we need you. God, I pray that we would want more of you, that we would simply want more of Jesus, that we would want to know you better, and that in that pursuit we would feel a freedom from the things that trip us up, from the things that seek to hold us back, that so easily entangle. But that maybe, God, by focusing on you, by focusing on your son, we can run the race that's set before us as we were finally, finally intended to run. Focus our eyes on you, Jesus. And let us trust you to take care of everything else. In Jesus' name, amen.
Oh, hey there, pals. Don't you just love this music? It's nostalgic, isn't it? Takes you back to a simpler time, when you were a kid and things were light and fun. I love times like that. I'll tell you what else makes me feel nostalgic. It's those old Bible stories. The ones that we learned in Sunday school or maybe just picked them up somewhere along the way. I love the heroes, David and Goliath, Noah and the Ark, Jonah and the whale. The list really does go on and on. And I wonder, pals, how long has it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kids stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along and that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, mailman Kyle. Oh, today, Moses and the Ten Commandments. That's enough of that. We are, we are. That was 10, 10 long weeks, friends. Once more time with feeling on that. If this is your first Sunday with us, this is the 10th part of our series, Kids Stories for Grownups. We've been showing that video or a portion of it every week, and I want to throw up in my mouth a little bit every time I see it. So I'm glad, I'm glad that that has run its its course and we've got more videos for you in the future. As we wrap up the series, we're going to wrap it up looking at the story of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. And though it is one of the shorter stories that we will tell in this series, I would argue that it is perhaps the most impactful one that we've covered in these 10 weeks as far as how what happens here in Exodus chapter 20 through 32, what happens there resonates and reverberates throughout all of Scripture. And that when we share this story, we have to ask about the story. What were the Ten Commandments for? Why did God give them? And so we're going to dive into that. But in answering that, I really want two things to happen. First, I want God to stir our affection for Jesus this morning. I'm going to tell you right up front that the whole point of the service and the message this morning is that you leave here with more affection for Jesus than what you entered in with. That's my prayer for everybody, that simple prayer. The other thing about talking about the Ten Commandments and the law is properly understanding the law and the commandments helps us understand our Bible better. So I say often, as often as I can, A, I can't be the only source of Bible that you're getting in your life. 30 minutes a week of whatever Nate chooses to share is not enough. It's not sufficient to learn God's word for ourselves. And you'll learn it with my terrible slant and biases, and you'll be as off kilter as I am. So don't do that. The other thing that I say as often as I can is the best habit that anyone in the world can develop is to wake up every time, wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. To do that and to understand our Bibles better, we have got to understand the law because it shows up over and over and over again in the New Testament. Half the tension in the New Testament is these new believers trying to figure out what to do with the old law. So we might be tempted to kind of throw it away and be like, well, you know, a sermon about the Ten Commandments doesn't apply to me too much because those laws really don't apply to me too much anymore. I don't have to worry about those. That's for Old Testament people. But as a New Testament Christian, we're going to see today how the law turns and puts our affection on Jesus. And we're going to, I hope, have a deeper understanding of God's word as we read it with a proper understanding of the law and the intent behind it. So the story of the Ten Commandments takes place in Exodus chapter 20. And many of you probably think that you know the story. Moses goes up on the mountain. You might even know that it's Mount Sinai. Two points for you. You can get your free coffee on the way out the door today. But in Exodus chapter 20, Moses goes up on the mountain. God gives him the Ten Commandments on two tablets. He carries him back down the mountain. He's like, here's the rules now. This is what we have to do. Except a careful reading will tell you that that's not really what happened. What happened is in Exodus chapter 20, the presence of God rests on Mount Sinai and all the people of Israel, all the descendants of Abraham, the Hebrew people who have been wandering the desert and following this God, backed away from the mountain and said, we're terrified. Moses, you go. You do it. You go see what he wants. We're scared. And so Moses goes to the mountain, and from the mountain, the voice of God tells him the Ten Commandments in Exodus chapter 20, but he doesn't stop. He actually continues to give Moses laws for his people all the way through Exodus chapter 32. So for 12 chapters there, God is doling out laws. If you carefully study the Old Testament, you'll find that there's about 632 laws, and most of these show up in this discourse from Mount Sinai. And then when he gets to the end of it, at the end of chapter 32, he writes, God writes everything down. He said he gives them the meeting notes. He said, here's what we talked about. Here's the laws for the people. Carry these down to them. And so Moses goes back down the mountain with the stone tablets that do contain the Ten Commandments, but more than likely, because the Bible says things were written on the fronts and backs of them, more than likely is all of the discourse from those 12 chapters. And Moses carries those down the mountain. So if you don't learn anything for the rest of the sermon, maybe you've at least learned something about how the story of the Ten Commandments actually goes. Just to tie a bow on the story, Moses gets to the bottom of the mountain and sees that the people have made a golden calf out of earrings and jewelry, and he's ticked because they need this sign for their God, and he's so mad at them that he throws these freshly inscribed tablets on the ground and breaks them, which I don't know if he was supposed to do that or not, but Moses has a very clear anger issue throughout his life, and this is more evidence of that. God calls him back up on the mountain, and he says, okay, listen, I'm going to tell you all that stuff again, but this time you're writing it down. Okay, Moses has to write it down. God says, I'm not your secretary. All right, I did it before you once. Now you've got to copy it down. So Moses writes it down, brings those tablets back down the mountain, and those are the ones that existed in the Ark of the Covenant for the rest of the Old Testament. That's the story of the Ten Commandments. Now, whenever we cover the story of the Ten Commandments, the right question to ask is, what are they for? What are they for? Why did God give them? To what end? Especially now in New Testament, post-Christ era, or during Christ era, he's eternal, but after Christ was on earth and he's changed everything, and after the crucifixion and the resurrection, now how do we handle the law? Now what is it for? So this morning, we want to look at that story of the Ten Commandments, but then really ask, why did God give us those things? Because understanding this, again, will point us towards Christ and will help us understand our Bibles far better. The presumed purpose of the law, when it was given and when we encounter it, I believe, is to provide a path to spiritual sufficiency and in our sufficiency, earn God's approval. When the law is given, there's a very clear path forward. Okay, good. Now I've got a plan. Now I know how to move forward. These are the rules that God wants me to follow. These are the ways that I can relate to him. For his children, there's a very clear path forward. I can follow these 632 laws. I can learn to follow them really, really well. And as I learn to follow them well, I can be spiritually sufficient and I can earn my God's approval. God says, we say, God, how do I make you happy? He goes, here, here's all the rules. Follow these rules super well and you'll make me happy. And I will give you my approval. And we can, in a sense, behave our way into eternity. We can behave our way into harmony with our Creator if we will simply learn to follow these rules well. And this, to us, and to the Hebrew people at the time, had to feel like good news, great, clarity. Finally, we know what to do. Think about it this way. Think about if you could sit down and read the Bible on your own without any knowledge whatsoever of what's contained in those pages. You don't know who Jesus is. You don't know anything about the Bible. You don't know how the story ends. You're reading it from Genesis on, and you're just paying attention to the narrative, trying to figure out how it's going to go. And so in Genesis 1, you see this instruction, hey, don't eat the fruit of this tree. Why not? Don't worry about it. Just don't do that. And then they mess up and they sin. And sin curses the earth. And curses the earth so bad that as you read along, you realize that in Genesis chapter 6, God decides I need to hit the reset button. I regret the way that this is going. And so he sends the flood. And all that's left behind is Noah and his family. And all God does to Noah, his only instruction to him, he doesn't give him the rules. What does God say to Noah? Hey, man, I want you to build a boat. What's a boat? Well, it floats in water. Well, what for? Just trust me, man. Just build a boat. But he doesn't give Noah the rules. And so you're reading along, you're like, man, this God is mysterious. How does he, how is he speaking to Noah and not the other people? And then you get to Abraham. He's called out of Ur of the Chaldeans in the Sumerian dynasty. And God comes to him and he says, hey, man, I want you to give up the future that you thought you were going to have in your dad's estate and I'd like you to move. Okay? Where? Don't worry about it. I'll show you. Man, this guy's mysterious. And how do I know that he's talking to other people besides Abraham? Is he only talking to Abraham? Where is this God? What are his rules? And when does he need us to follow them? Where is the clarity? And yet, Abraham gets to where he he's supposed to go and he meets a king there named Melchizedek who knows the will of God just as well as Abraham does. And we see that God is speaking to people all through this time, but we don't know where and how. And then he doesn't really give any more clarity to his son Isaac or to Jacob or to Joseph. And then 400 years go by and this Moses guy shows up. And what does he tell Moses? I want you to free my people, okay? Where do you want me to take them? I'm gonna show you. I'm gonna be a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Just follow me. And you're reading along going, man, this God is tough to follow. And then out of nowhere, Exodus 20. Hey, hey, hey, here's the rules, guys. This is what I want you to do. And I think our knee jerk as people would be to go, good, finally, thank you. Now I've got a plan. Now you're not just this weird cloud that I follow around and try to hear or just trust that Moses is hearing your voice. I mean, how weird would that be? If I got up here and I said, listen guys, I'm the only one who can really hear God very well, so you just need to listen to what I have to say. But that was the situation. And so with the law, good clarity, I have a plan. I can move forward. And don't we love that as Americans? Don't we love a good plan? I know in my life that when things start to go bad, when I'm not happy about what I'm doing at church, or I don't feel like I'm doing my job over here, or I don't feel like this part of my life is going very well and it's caused some pain and I try to figure out the best thing to do, what do I do? I sit down and I come up with a plan and then I work the plan. And there's great comfort in a plan that you think is going to succeed. And then you can work the plan. And so here, God finally gives some clarity. You want to make me happy? Here, follow the rules. And I think our human brains go, great, finally, a plan. I can do this. But I've always wondered, why did it take God so long to give him this plan? Why did God wait so long into the history of his people, a couple thousand years, to give him the rules? I think it's because God wants a relationship with us. And if we go back and we follow those first rules, those first instructions that he gave the early saints, we see that that's all he was really looking for. Adam and Eve, just trust me, don't eat of that. Why? Don't worry about it, just trust me. Noah, build a boat. Why? Just build it. Trust me. Listen to me. Do what I ask you to do. You're safe with me. Abraham, I want you to move. Where? Don't worry about it. Just go. Trust me. Follow me. Abraham, I want you to sacrifice your only son. But why? How? Abraham, don't worry about it. Just go. Obey me. Moses, lead my people. Where? Just follow me. At every instance, the beckoning of God is to follow him. Trust me. Work into a relationship with me. Get to know me. Pursue my heart as I pursue yours. And I think the real reason, when we consider it, that God waited so long to give the rules is because he knew that we would make them into a code, that we would begin to codify our relationship with him. Instead of pursuing him, we would just codify it, make a code of laws out of it, and go, here, this is all I need to do. I don't need the relationship anymore. What God knew is that relationships become contracts when we reduce them to codes. Relationships become contractual arrangements when we reduce them to a code of laws. Imagine if we did this in our marriages. I did a wedding yesterday, and I got to the portion where I did the vows. And at the vows, you vow affection to one another. You make promises to one another to have and to hold, richer for poor, in shape and not. However, we promise we will always love one another. What if instead of exchanging vows, we exchange our contractual agreements that we had negotiated prior to our marriage? And then on our anniversary, we revisited our contracts to see if we wanted to update them at all as ways to maintain the approval and affection of one another. Can't you just hear the contract negotiations? I think I would open with, for weekends in the fall when football starts, from noon on Saturday until when I go to bed on Sunday night, I would like to be able to treat my children like a railroad tycoon from the early 1900s. I would like to sit in my parlor, unbothered by them. Occasionally, they come in, and I laugh at them, tousle their hair, tell them they're cute, and then send them back to the nanny and I watch my football. This would be where I would start. And my wife would inevitably say, okay, but on Fridays and for at least one hour a night, you will engage with imaginative play with your children. You will even do Barbies. Also, once a week, I need some mom time. I need to go to Target, and I need to have lunch with people, and I need to go waste money on Starbucks. I'm going to need to do this, and I would say, okay. Once a week, I would like fresh flowers on the table. What kinds of flowers? You've got to help me out here. Can you imagine if we just negotiated our relationships and went back and forth? You give me this and I'll give you that. It robs it of its heart. It robs it of the love and affection that we experience in those things. The joy of marriage, the depth of marriage is getting to know one another over the years, is knowing when I do this, she's going to feel loved. When I do this, she's going to feel aggravated. When she sees me do this, this is what stirs her affections for me. So that by the time we've been married 30, 40, 50 years, we know each other better than any other soul on the planet. And that connection there was not achieved by making rules and negotiating contracts with each in attempting to follow those rules, we would rob the relationship that we have with him of its heart. And we don't need to look very hard in Scripture to see that he was right and that this is true. There was 1,400 years between Moses receiving the law and the gospels beginning, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, where Jesus comes on the scene. And when we get to the gospels, we see Jesus address the Pharisees. The Pharisees are the rule keepers, man. It is their job to read the rules, to interpret the rules, and to tell everybody what the rules mean, and to tell everybody how you're going to follow them. Like, it says don't work on the Sabbath, okay? Well, some Pharisees interpreted that as don't go out and plow the field with your donkey on the Sabbath. That's not allowed. Others were so strict with it that they said, if your sandal has a nail in it, that's heavier than it needs to be because it's metal and you cannot wear those sandals on Sabbath because that's work. So they had to figure out what do the rules mean and how do we apply them and how do we tell people whether or not they're following them. They were the keepers of the rules, the watchers of the rule book, and they should have known as well as anybody how to follow them. And if you follow them well, the way that God intended, their hearts should be rendered to God. They should be some of the greatest, most trustworthy people on the planet, except you guys know, what does Jesus call the Pharisees? Whitewashed tombs. He calls them a brood of vipers. He says, You're a brood of vipers. You're a bunch of hypocrites who had taken the religious authority that they were given and leveraged it for personal gain and personal power and then set up a system around themselves to protect their personal gain and their personal power. And they were complete hypocrites and their heart was very far from the Lord. They have figured out how to heartlessly follow God's rules and maintain a facade of righteousness. And I just wonder if that sounds like any segments of the church that we have today, where men, and it's almost always men, are in charge and they've set up systems so that they stay in charge and they can personally profit from the spiritual authority that they have. And it's gross. And it happened then and it happens now. Whenever we set up a system around who follows the rules the best, what inevitably happens is people claim that they follow the rules best and that you should follow them, and then they cast judgment on you and they exact taxes from you. And it's disgusting. Which is why I hope that if Jesus saw me, he would at least say, well, you're a messy tomb. You're dirty. And I would be like, that's great, because you're going to wash me off. But that was the condition of the Pharisees. They were a brood of vipers and whitewashed tombs, because they had so perverted the law over the years as to make it this thing of if you can follow it well enough, you can behave your way into God's affection and approval. And we need to watch it because we do that too. I remember when I was in high school, there was certain rules you had to follow. Every church, every group of Christians has them. Some rules that if you follow these rules, now you're righteous, now God loves you, now you're a good Christian. When I was in high school, if you didn't drink or do drugs, if you didn't cuss, if you didn't do anything with your boyfriend or girlfriend that you're not supposed to do. And you're a good Christian. Congratulations. Are you a jerk to everyone in your life? Yes, but you follow those rules, so you're fine. Meanwhile, we take the person over here who has a genuinely good heart and is gentle with people, but doesn't check one of those boxes, and we tell them that they are apostate and they need to go to youth group and probably some camp where they pledge purity or something like that. Every community of faith has its rules that it wants to default to. And we have our rules too. And we have our things where I just need a plan. If I can do this and this and this, then I'll be a good Christian. And without realizing it, we begin to try to behave our way into God's affection and approval. The end of that road is the Pharisees. The end of that road of trying to behave our way into God's affection is frustration and hypocrisy and a heartless obedience to God. And what's more frustrating is, in this following of the rules, it is possible to do it completely heartlessly, to follow the rules and not even love the rule giver. I went to a Christian college. There was lots of rules at that Christian college. I thought they were all stupid. But I followed them. Well, a better example is Jen went to a Christian college. And they had a lot of rules. And she didn't agree with all of them. But she followed them. Not because we had this deep and abiding affection for Toccoa Falls College and just a sense of loyalty to it. Not because we loved the rules and thought they were great. But because that was what was asked of us. And so we did. We can do that with God too. We all know how to go through the motions and follow the rules so it looks like everything's together. Meanwhile, our hearts are empty. And then Jesus comes along and he makes this heartless obedience harder. Jesus makes the heartless obedience harder when he shows up because he starts to redefine the law, to correctly define the law, to fix people's understanding of it, to help them see it's really impossible to follow it without heart. You can't follow the essence of the law without following the heart of the law. And he comes along with what is the single most convicting two verses for any man who's ever lived. He says this in Matthew chapter 5, verses 27 and 28. You have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. What that means is, I can only speak for the dudes, every one of us is an adulterer based on what Jesus taught. Now, we should not back away from that and consider it figurative. He meant what he said, and it's true. But until Jesus said this, plenty of us are going through life going, if I just don't commit adultery, the physical act of it, with someone else's spouse, then I'm squared away. I'm righteous, I'm good. And Jesus says, no, no. If you even look at them with intent, you're guilty. And then we all go, well, then I'm guilty. He even says that you've heard it said that we shouldn't murder anybody. Thou shalt not kill. And all of us, I would hope, can check that box. Yeah, you know, 40, I'm going 41 years. I'm in my 42nd year so far, no murders. Really nailing that one. But if you've hated someone in your heart, then you're guilty of that as well. And you go, oh, well, then I guess I'm a murderer. And the more you examine the law, the more frustrated you should become. Those of you in your life who have tried to white knuckle your way to holiness, who have just tried through sheer determination, I'm going to be a good Christian. I'm going to follow the rules. I'm going to do what God asked me to do and behave our way into God's affection. What always happens? You fall on your face. And when you fall on your face, you pick yourself up, you dust yourself off, and you go, I wasn't holding on tight enough that time. Now, this is the time when I'm going to white knuckle my way to God's affection. And Jesus, in this gentle way, whispers in your ear, no, you're not. No, you're not. And so when we examine the law and we hold it up to ourselves, what we realize is this is impossible. It brings us to this inflection point of frustration where sooner or later, sooner or later when you've fallen off the horse enough times, when you've tried to follow the rules well enough, when you've tried to behave your way into God's affection and approval, and when you've disappointed him again and you've let him down, and you've got to pick yourself up again, sooner or later you're going to say, I don't want to do this anymore. And it's at that point that a lot of people walk away from the faith because they believe that faith is following rules well, and it's not. But the law has to get us to this point where we surrender. We say, I can't do this anymore. There's no possible way I can follow the law. And when we're there, when we understand that we cannot behave our way into heaven, and I know, I know, listen, I know that I say that, and all the Christians in the room go, yeah, no, it's God's grace. I cannot behave my way into heaven and into God's affection. And yet, you live out your faith like that's what you can do. You know intellectually that you can't behave your way into God's approval for you. And yet, boy, you try, don't you? I'm just talking to myself here. So lest we sweep aside, no, I don't do that. Yes, you do. We all do. But it's at that point when we realize that we can't, that we're ready to hear the message from Romans 8, 1 through 4, where Paul writes about this exact thing. And I'm going to read it to you, and it's going to be a little bit murky, but there's a couple phrases we can key in on to really help us understand what he's talking about. He writes this. He washed off our tombs. For God has done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do. By sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit. Paul says, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For those of us who trust in Jesus and his sufficiency, our tombs are clean. We are alive in Christ. He's taking care of us. Because God has done, by sending him to die on the cross, to live a perfect life and to die a perfect death and to have a perfect resurrection, God has done what the law, listen, weakened by the flesh. But he sent his son who condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us. He sent Jesus to live a perfect life and to perfectly follow the law, the only person in history who's ever done it, to die a perfect death, to have a perfect resurrection, to ascend back into heaven, and then begin, according to Romans and Hebrews, to advocate to the Father on our behalf. And in that action, he covers over our weakness, and we are restored into the life of the Spirit and into harmony with our Creator and into affection from our Father God. That's what Paul is saying in Romans. He's telling us the purpose of the law is to show us our need for Jesus. And so in light of that, I told you at the beginning, we presume the purpose of the law is to provide a path to spiritual sufficiency. And in our sufficiency, so earn God's approval. But what we see through a careful examination of ourselves, standing up against the law, what we see in the teachings of Jesus is that was never the purpose of the law. The purpose of the law is to provide a path to spiritual surrender and in Christ's sufficiency, receive God's affection. You see the difference? When we act like it's to achieve our own spiritual sufficiency, we butt our heads up against the wall until we reach a place of surrender. And we say, Jesus, I can't follow the law. You followed it perfectly. I'm totally reliant on you. I'm done trying. I'm done trying to behave my way into heaven. I'm done trying to behave my way into God's affection and into my Father's approval. And I surrender to you. I confess, you died, you lived a perfect life, you died a perfect death, and then you resurrected for me. And you are my path to harmony with my creator. And I am insufficient entirely to do that at all. I am completely and totally reliant upon the sufficiency of Christ and his death on the cross. That is my only path to affection with my father. And then in Christ's sufficiency, we receive, not earn, God's affection, which is far better than approval. We don't want our dads to simply nod in a condescending approval to us. Yeah, you're good. Yeah, you're okay. Yeah, you're allowed. We don't want a distant, heartless approval from our God. We want that affection. We want Him to love us. We want Him to take joy in our joy. We want Him to mourn when we mourn. We want Him to hurt when we hurt. We want Him to love when we love. We want to know that our Father God is right there. We want his affection. And to get that, all we have to do is surrender. Quit trying so dang hard. And what it looks like is this. How about, how about instead of deciding all the things you're going to do to live the life that you think God wants you to live and to be the person that you think God wants you to be and all the plans and all the rules and all the white knuckling that we're going to do, how about we scrap that? And how about we make our only plan is to wake up every day and remind ourselves of the love that Jesus has for us. I heard one pastor call this preach the gospel to yourself. Remind ourselves that we fall at the feet of Jesus, that we rely on his sufficiency, that we trust in his perfect life and in his perfect death, and that God, the Bible says that this is love, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Before we earned it, before we deserved it, before we had any claim to it whatsoever, God sent Jesus to live a perfect life and die a perfect death so that we could experience eternity in heaven with him, so that we could walk in the affection and the love of our Father, so that we could be at harmony with our Creator. Remind yourself of that every morning. Remind yourself every morning, Jesus loves me. My Father loves me. Not for who I'm going to be, not for how I'm going to behave, but He loves me because He sent His Son for me. And if anyone were to ask me, why does God love you? I would point to the cross and I would say, because of what Jesus did, not because of anything that I've done. And remind yourself of that overflowing love every day. I love that verse in the book of John that says, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. Remind yourself of that grace every day. And what you'll see happening is when we surrender to Christ and we remind ourselves of his love, that our affections for the people around us are stirred as well. We'll be more gracious with our husbands and our wives and our children and our friends and our co-workers and the bad drivers. When we daily remind ourselves to surrender to Christ's sufficiency, when we choose surrender over sufficiency, God stirs our affections for Jesus. When we simply remind ourselves, I am insufficient, I have nothing to offer, Jesus has everything to offer, and I rely on that. When we remind ourselves of that, God stirs our affection for Jesus. And in stirring our affection for Jesus, he stirs our affection for one another, which by the way, isn't that the whole point of the law anyways? Didn't Jesus say that loving God with all your heart, soul, and your mind, amen, and loving your neighbor as yourself sums up the whole law and the prophets? This is how it does it. Instead of trying to be a people who are worried about the rules and all the right behaviors for Christians, which, by the way, will stop us from looking at other Christians and saying on social media, well, it's pretty unchristian. I thought you said you were a Christian and now you're da-da-da-da-da. If we would move away from a rule-following Christianity and towards a daily surrender to that Christ, we will find waiting for us an affection for Jesus and an affection for others that will help us walk in harmony with the law anyways. So the whole point of the law and the whole point of this morning is to grab our faces and point them to Christ and help us remember that he alone is worthy of our affection, that he alone is worthy of our devotion. And if we would quit trying to follow the rules so darn well and fail and get up and try hard again, if we would just surrender instead of trying so hard, surrender to the sufficiency of Jesus, that he would fill our hearts with affection for him, that that affection would overflow to others, and then we would finally be people who keep the law and walk in devotion and affection to Jesus. So I said my prayer for you at the beginning was that you would leave here with your heart stirred more for affection to Jesus than when you came in. That you would leave here desiring Jesus more than you did when you entered in. And my further prayer is that that would be a sustained thing, that some of you, gosh, maybe a few of you, would finally quit trying so hard and just wake up tomorrow morning and say, Jesus, thank you for loving me, and see where that leads. In a minute, the band's going to come up, and we're going to sing a song called Jesus, We Love You. There's a chorus in there, our affection, our devotion poured out on the feet of Jesus. Let's stand and sing this song as one church with one voice and one agreement and one surrender to pour everything out at the feet of Jesus and let him stir our affections for him. Let's pray. Father God, we are grateful for you. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for giving us the law so that we can see how much we need you. God, I pray that we would want more of you, that we would simply want more of Jesus, that we would want to know you better, and that in that pursuit we would feel a freedom from the things that trip us up, from the things that seek to hold us back, that so easily entangle. But that maybe, God, by focusing on you, by focusing on your son, we can run the race that's set before us as we were finally, finally intended to run. Focus our eyes on you, Jesus. And let us trust you to take care of everything else. In Jesus' name, amen.
Oh, hey there, pals. Don't you just love this music? It's nostalgic, isn't it? Takes you back to a simpler time, when you were a kid and things were light and fun. I love times like that. I'll tell you what else makes me feel nostalgic. It's those old Bible stories. The ones that we learned in Sunday school or maybe just picked them up somewhere along the way. I love the heroes, David and Goliath, Noah and the Ark, Jonah and the whale. The list really does go on and on. And I wonder, pals, how long has it been since we heard those stories? I bet it's been a while. And if we could tell them again, I wonder if we would find out that those stories aren't really kids stories at all, but they were meant for grown-ups all along and that there's still lessons we can learn from them today. Let's find out together. Speedy delivery. For me? Thanks, mailman Kyle. Oh, today, Moses and the Ten Commandments. That's enough of that. We are, we are. That was 10, 10 long weeks, friends. Once more time with feeling on that. If this is your first Sunday with us, this is the 10th part of our series, Kids Stories for Grownups. We've been showing that video or a portion of it every week, and I want to throw up in my mouth a little bit every time I see it. So I'm glad, I'm glad that that has run its its course and we've got more videos for you in the future. As we wrap up the series, we're going to wrap it up looking at the story of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. And though it is one of the shorter stories that we will tell in this series, I would argue that it is perhaps the most impactful one that we've covered in these 10 weeks as far as how what happens here in Exodus chapter 20 through 32, what happens there resonates and reverberates throughout all of Scripture. And that when we share this story, we have to ask about the story. What were the Ten Commandments for? Why did God give them? And so we're going to dive into that. But in answering that, I really want two things to happen. First, I want God to stir our affection for Jesus this morning. I'm going to tell you right up front that the whole point of the service and the message this morning is that you leave here with more affection for Jesus than what you entered in with. That's my prayer for everybody, that simple prayer. The other thing about talking about the Ten Commandments and the law is properly understanding the law and the commandments helps us understand our Bible better. So I say often, as often as I can, A, I can't be the only source of Bible that you're getting in your life. 30 minutes a week of whatever Nate chooses to share is not enough. It's not sufficient to learn God's word for ourselves. And you'll learn it with my terrible slant and biases, and you'll be as off kilter as I am. So don't do that. The other thing that I say as often as I can is the best habit that anyone in the world can develop is to wake up every time, wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. To do that and to understand our Bibles better, we have got to understand the law because it shows up over and over and over again in the New Testament. Half the tension in the New Testament is these new believers trying to figure out what to do with the old law. So we might be tempted to kind of throw it away and be like, well, you know, a sermon about the Ten Commandments doesn't apply to me too much because those laws really don't apply to me too much anymore. I don't have to worry about those. That's for Old Testament people. But as a New Testament Christian, we're going to see today how the law turns and puts our affection on Jesus. And we're going to, I hope, have a deeper understanding of God's word as we read it with a proper understanding of the law and the intent behind it. So the story of the Ten Commandments takes place in Exodus chapter 20. And many of you probably think that you know the story. Moses goes up on the mountain. You might even know that it's Mount Sinai. Two points for you. You can get your free coffee on the way out the door today. But in Exodus chapter 20, Moses goes up on the mountain. God gives him the Ten Commandments on two tablets. He carries him back down the mountain. He's like, here's the rules now. This is what we have to do. Except a careful reading will tell you that that's not really what happened. What happened is in Exodus chapter 20, the presence of God rests on Mount Sinai and all the people of Israel, all the descendants of Abraham, the Hebrew people who have been wandering the desert and following this God, backed away from the mountain and said, we're terrified. Moses, you go. You do it. You go see what he wants. We're scared. And so Moses goes to the mountain, and from the mountain, the voice of God tells him the Ten Commandments in Exodus chapter 20, but he doesn't stop. He actually continues to give Moses laws for his people all the way through Exodus chapter 32. So for 12 chapters there, God is doling out laws. If you carefully study the Old Testament, you'll find that there's about 632 laws, and most of these show up in this discourse from Mount Sinai. And then when he gets to the end of it, at the end of chapter 32, he writes, God writes everything down. He said he gives them the meeting notes. He said, here's what we talked about. Here's the laws for the people. Carry these down to them. And so Moses goes back down the mountain with the stone tablets that do contain the Ten Commandments, but more than likely, because the Bible says things were written on the fronts and backs of them, more than likely is all of the discourse from those 12 chapters. And Moses carries those down the mountain. So if you don't learn anything for the rest of the sermon, maybe you've at least learned something about how the story of the Ten Commandments actually goes. Just to tie a bow on the story, Moses gets to the bottom of the mountain and sees that the people have made a golden calf out of earrings and jewelry, and he's ticked because they need this sign for their God, and he's so mad at them that he throws these freshly inscribed tablets on the ground and breaks them, which I don't know if he was supposed to do that or not, but Moses has a very clear anger issue throughout his life, and this is more evidence of that. God calls him back up on the mountain, and he says, okay, listen, I'm going to tell you all that stuff again, but this time you're writing it down. Okay, Moses has to write it down. God says, I'm not your secretary. All right, I did it before you once. Now you've got to copy it down. So Moses writes it down, brings those tablets back down the mountain, and those are the ones that existed in the Ark of the Covenant for the rest of the Old Testament. That's the story of the Ten Commandments. Now, whenever we cover the story of the Ten Commandments, the right question to ask is, what are they for? What are they for? Why did God give them? To what end? Especially now in New Testament, post-Christ era, or during Christ era, he's eternal, but after Christ was on earth and he's changed everything, and after the crucifixion and the resurrection, now how do we handle the law? Now what is it for? So this morning, we want to look at that story of the Ten Commandments, but then really ask, why did God give us those things? Because understanding this, again, will point us towards Christ and will help us understand our Bibles far better. The presumed purpose of the law, when it was given and when we encounter it, I believe, is to provide a path to spiritual sufficiency and in our sufficiency, earn God's approval. When the law is given, there's a very clear path forward. Okay, good. Now I've got a plan. Now I know how to move forward. These are the rules that God wants me to follow. These are the ways that I can relate to him. For his children, there's a very clear path forward. I can follow these 632 laws. I can learn to follow them really, really well. And as I learn to follow them well, I can be spiritually sufficient and I can earn my God's approval. God says, we say, God, how do I make you happy? He goes, here, here's all the rules. Follow these rules super well and you'll make me happy. And I will give you my approval. And we can, in a sense, behave our way into eternity. We can behave our way into harmony with our Creator if we will simply learn to follow these rules well. And this, to us, and to the Hebrew people at the time, had to feel like good news, great, clarity. Finally, we know what to do. Think about it this way. Think about if you could sit down and read the Bible on your own without any knowledge whatsoever of what's contained in those pages. You don't know who Jesus is. You don't know anything about the Bible. You don't know how the story ends. You're reading it from Genesis on, and you're just paying attention to the narrative, trying to figure out how it's going to go. And so in Genesis 1, you see this instruction, hey, don't eat the fruit of this tree. Why not? Don't worry about it. Just don't do that. And then they mess up and they sin. And sin curses the earth. And curses the earth so bad that as you read along, you realize that in Genesis chapter 6, God decides I need to hit the reset button. I regret the way that this is going. And so he sends the flood. And all that's left behind is Noah and his family. And all God does to Noah, his only instruction to him, he doesn't give him the rules. What does God say to Noah? Hey, man, I want you to build a boat. What's a boat? Well, it floats in water. Well, what for? Just trust me, man. Just build a boat. But he doesn't give Noah the rules. And so you're reading along, you're like, man, this God is mysterious. How does he, how is he speaking to Noah and not the other people? And then you get to Abraham. He's called out of Ur of the Chaldeans in the Sumerian dynasty. And God comes to him and he says, hey, man, I want you to give up the future that you thought you were going to have in your dad's estate and I'd like you to move. Okay? Where? Don't worry about it. I'll show you. Man, this guy's mysterious. And how do I know that he's talking to other people besides Abraham? Is he only talking to Abraham? Where is this God? What are his rules? And when does he need us to follow them? Where is the clarity? And yet, Abraham gets to where he he's supposed to go and he meets a king there named Melchizedek who knows the will of God just as well as Abraham does. And we see that God is speaking to people all through this time, but we don't know where and how. And then he doesn't really give any more clarity to his son Isaac or to Jacob or to Joseph. And then 400 years go by and this Moses guy shows up. And what does he tell Moses? I want you to free my people, okay? Where do you want me to take them? I'm gonna show you. I'm gonna be a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Just follow me. And you're reading along going, man, this God is tough to follow. And then out of nowhere, Exodus 20. Hey, hey, hey, here's the rules, guys. This is what I want you to do. And I think our knee jerk as people would be to go, good, finally, thank you. Now I've got a plan. Now you're not just this weird cloud that I follow around and try to hear or just trust that Moses is hearing your voice. I mean, how weird would that be? If I got up here and I said, listen guys, I'm the only one who can really hear God very well, so you just need to listen to what I have to say. But that was the situation. And so with the law, good clarity, I have a plan. I can move forward. And don't we love that as Americans? Don't we love a good plan? I know in my life that when things start to go bad, when I'm not happy about what I'm doing at church, or I don't feel like I'm doing my job over here, or I don't feel like this part of my life is going very well and it's caused some pain and I try to figure out the best thing to do, what do I do? I sit down and I come up with a plan and then I work the plan. And there's great comfort in a plan that you think is going to succeed. And then you can work the plan. And so here, God finally gives some clarity. You want to make me happy? Here, follow the rules. And I think our human brains go, great, finally, a plan. I can do this. But I've always wondered, why did it take God so long to give him this plan? Why did God wait so long into the history of his people, a couple thousand years, to give him the rules? I think it's because God wants a relationship with us. And if we go back and we follow those first rules, those first instructions that he gave the early saints, we see that that's all he was really looking for. Adam and Eve, just trust me, don't eat of that. Why? Don't worry about it, just trust me. Noah, build a boat. Why? Just build it. Trust me. Listen to me. Do what I ask you to do. You're safe with me. Abraham, I want you to move. Where? Don't worry about it. Just go. Trust me. Follow me. Abraham, I want you to sacrifice your only son. But why? How? Abraham, don't worry about it. Just go. Obey me. Moses, lead my people. Where? Just follow me. At every instance, the beckoning of God is to follow him. Trust me. Work into a relationship with me. Get to know me. Pursue my heart as I pursue yours. And I think the real reason, when we consider it, that God waited so long to give the rules is because he knew that we would make them into a code, that we would begin to codify our relationship with him. Instead of pursuing him, we would just codify it, make a code of laws out of it, and go, here, this is all I need to do. I don't need the relationship anymore. What God knew is that relationships become contracts when we reduce them to codes. Relationships become contractual arrangements when we reduce them to a code of laws. Imagine if we did this in our marriages. I did a wedding yesterday, and I got to the portion where I did the vows. And at the vows, you vow affection to one another. You make promises to one another to have and to hold, richer for poor, in shape and not. However, we promise we will always love one another. What if instead of exchanging vows, we exchange our contractual agreements that we had negotiated prior to our marriage? And then on our anniversary, we revisited our contracts to see if we wanted to update them at all as ways to maintain the approval and affection of one another. Can't you just hear the contract negotiations? I think I would open with, for weekends in the fall when football starts, from noon on Saturday until when I go to bed on Sunday night, I would like to be able to treat my children like a railroad tycoon from the early 1900s. I would like to sit in my parlor, unbothered by them. Occasionally, they come in, and I laugh at them, tousle their hair, tell them they're cute, and then send them back to the nanny and I watch my football. This would be where I would start. And my wife would inevitably say, okay, but on Fridays and for at least one hour a night, you will engage with imaginative play with your children. You will even do Barbies. Also, once a week, I need some mom time. I need to go to Target, and I need to have lunch with people, and I need to go waste money on Starbucks. I'm going to need to do this, and I would say, okay. Once a week, I would like fresh flowers on the table. What kinds of flowers? You've got to help me out here. Can you imagine if we just negotiated our relationships and went back and forth? You give me this and I'll give you that. It robs it of its heart. It robs it of the love and affection that we experience in those things. The joy of marriage, the depth of marriage is getting to know one another over the years, is knowing when I do this, she's going to feel loved. When I do this, she's going to feel aggravated. When she sees me do this, this is what stirs her affections for me. So that by the time we've been married 30, 40, 50 years, we know each other better than any other soul on the planet. And that connection there was not achieved by making rules and negotiating contracts with each in attempting to follow those rules, we would rob the relationship that we have with him of its heart. And we don't need to look very hard in Scripture to see that he was right and that this is true. There was 1,400 years between Moses receiving the law and the gospels beginning, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, where Jesus comes on the scene. And when we get to the gospels, we see Jesus address the Pharisees. The Pharisees are the rule keepers, man. It is their job to read the rules, to interpret the rules, and to tell everybody what the rules mean, and to tell everybody how you're going to follow them. Like, it says don't work on the Sabbath, okay? Well, some Pharisees interpreted that as don't go out and plow the field with your donkey on the Sabbath. That's not allowed. Others were so strict with it that they said, if your sandal has a nail in it, that's heavier than it needs to be because it's metal and you cannot wear those sandals on Sabbath because that's work. So they had to figure out what do the rules mean and how do we apply them and how do we tell people whether or not they're following them. They were the keepers of the rules, the watchers of the rule book, and they should have known as well as anybody how to follow them. And if you follow them well, the way that God intended, their hearts should be rendered to God. They should be some of the greatest, most trustworthy people on the planet, except you guys know, what does Jesus call the Pharisees? Whitewashed tombs. He calls them a brood of vipers. He says, You're a brood of vipers. You're a bunch of hypocrites who had taken the religious authority that they were given and leveraged it for personal gain and personal power and then set up a system around themselves to protect their personal gain and their personal power. And they were complete hypocrites and their heart was very far from the Lord. They have figured out how to heartlessly follow God's rules and maintain a facade of righteousness. And I just wonder if that sounds like any segments of the church that we have today, where men, and it's almost always men, are in charge and they've set up systems so that they stay in charge and they can personally profit from the spiritual authority that they have. And it's gross. And it happened then and it happens now. Whenever we set up a system around who follows the rules the best, what inevitably happens is people claim that they follow the rules best and that you should follow them, and then they cast judgment on you and they exact taxes from you. And it's disgusting. Which is why I hope that if Jesus saw me, he would at least say, well, you're a messy tomb. You're dirty. And I would be like, that's great, because you're going to wash me off. But that was the condition of the Pharisees. They were a brood of vipers and whitewashed tombs, because they had so perverted the law over the years as to make it this thing of if you can follow it well enough, you can behave your way into God's affection and approval. And we need to watch it because we do that too. I remember when I was in high school, there was certain rules you had to follow. Every church, every group of Christians has them. Some rules that if you follow these rules, now you're righteous, now God loves you, now you're a good Christian. When I was in high school, if you didn't drink or do drugs, if you didn't cuss, if you didn't do anything with your boyfriend or girlfriend that you're not supposed to do. And you're a good Christian. Congratulations. Are you a jerk to everyone in your life? Yes, but you follow those rules, so you're fine. Meanwhile, we take the person over here who has a genuinely good heart and is gentle with people, but doesn't check one of those boxes, and we tell them that they are apostate and they need to go to youth group and probably some camp where they pledge purity or something like that. Every community of faith has its rules that it wants to default to. And we have our rules too. And we have our things where I just need a plan. If I can do this and this and this, then I'll be a good Christian. And without realizing it, we begin to try to behave our way into God's affection and approval. The end of that road is the Pharisees. The end of that road of trying to behave our way into God's affection is frustration and hypocrisy and a heartless obedience to God. And what's more frustrating is, in this following of the rules, it is possible to do it completely heartlessly, to follow the rules and not even love the rule giver. I went to a Christian college. There was lots of rules at that Christian college. I thought they were all stupid. But I followed them. Well, a better example is Jen went to a Christian college. And they had a lot of rules. And she didn't agree with all of them. But she followed them. Not because we had this deep and abiding affection for Toccoa Falls College and just a sense of loyalty to it. Not because we loved the rules and thought they were great. But because that was what was asked of us. And so we did. We can do that with God too. We all know how to go through the motions and follow the rules so it looks like everything's together. Meanwhile, our hearts are empty. And then Jesus comes along and he makes this heartless obedience harder. Jesus makes the heartless obedience harder when he shows up because he starts to redefine the law, to correctly define the law, to fix people's understanding of it, to help them see it's really impossible to follow it without heart. You can't follow the essence of the law without following the heart of the law. And he comes along with what is the single most convicting two verses for any man who's ever lived. He says this in Matthew chapter 5, verses 27 and 28. You have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery. But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. What that means is, I can only speak for the dudes, every one of us is an adulterer based on what Jesus taught. Now, we should not back away from that and consider it figurative. He meant what he said, and it's true. But until Jesus said this, plenty of us are going through life going, if I just don't commit adultery, the physical act of it, with someone else's spouse, then I'm squared away. I'm righteous, I'm good. And Jesus says, no, no. If you even look at them with intent, you're guilty. And then we all go, well, then I'm guilty. He even says that you've heard it said that we shouldn't murder anybody. Thou shalt not kill. And all of us, I would hope, can check that box. Yeah, you know, 40, I'm going 41 years. I'm in my 42nd year so far, no murders. Really nailing that one. But if you've hated someone in your heart, then you're guilty of that as well. And you go, oh, well, then I guess I'm a murderer. And the more you examine the law, the more frustrated you should become. Those of you in your life who have tried to white knuckle your way to holiness, who have just tried through sheer determination, I'm going to be a good Christian. I'm going to follow the rules. I'm going to do what God asked me to do and behave our way into God's affection. What always happens? You fall on your face. And when you fall on your face, you pick yourself up, you dust yourself off, and you go, I wasn't holding on tight enough that time. Now, this is the time when I'm going to white knuckle my way to God's affection. And Jesus, in this gentle way, whispers in your ear, no, you're not. No, you're not. And so when we examine the law and we hold it up to ourselves, what we realize is this is impossible. It brings us to this inflection point of frustration where sooner or later, sooner or later when you've fallen off the horse enough times, when you've tried to follow the rules well enough, when you've tried to behave your way into God's affection and approval, and when you've disappointed him again and you've let him down, and you've got to pick yourself up again, sooner or later you're going to say, I don't want to do this anymore. And it's at that point that a lot of people walk away from the faith because they believe that faith is following rules well, and it's not. But the law has to get us to this point where we surrender. We say, I can't do this anymore. There's no possible way I can follow the law. And when we're there, when we understand that we cannot behave our way into heaven, and I know, I know, listen, I know that I say that, and all the Christians in the room go, yeah, no, it's God's grace. I cannot behave my way into heaven and into God's affection. And yet, you live out your faith like that's what you can do. You know intellectually that you can't behave your way into God's approval for you. And yet, boy, you try, don't you? I'm just talking to myself here. So lest we sweep aside, no, I don't do that. Yes, you do. We all do. But it's at that point when we realize that we can't, that we're ready to hear the message from Romans 8, 1 through 4, where Paul writes about this exact thing. And I'm going to read it to you, and it's going to be a little bit murky, but there's a couple phrases we can key in on to really help us understand what he's talking about. He writes this. He washed off our tombs. For God has done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do. By sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit. Paul says, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For those of us who trust in Jesus and his sufficiency, our tombs are clean. We are alive in Christ. He's taking care of us. Because God has done, by sending him to die on the cross, to live a perfect life and to die a perfect death and to have a perfect resurrection, God has done what the law, listen, weakened by the flesh. But he sent his son who condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us. He sent Jesus to live a perfect life and to perfectly follow the law, the only person in history who's ever done it, to die a perfect death, to have a perfect resurrection, to ascend back into heaven, and then begin, according to Romans and Hebrews, to advocate to the Father on our behalf. And in that action, he covers over our weakness, and we are restored into the life of the Spirit and into harmony with our Creator and into affection from our Father God. That's what Paul is saying in Romans. He's telling us the purpose of the law is to show us our need for Jesus. And so in light of that, I told you at the beginning, we presume the purpose of the law is to provide a path to spiritual sufficiency. And in our sufficiency, so earn God's approval. But what we see through a careful examination of ourselves, standing up against the law, what we see in the teachings of Jesus is that was never the purpose of the law. The purpose of the law is to provide a path to spiritual surrender and in Christ's sufficiency, receive God's affection. You see the difference? When we act like it's to achieve our own spiritual sufficiency, we butt our heads up against the wall until we reach a place of surrender. And we say, Jesus, I can't follow the law. You followed it perfectly. I'm totally reliant on you. I'm done trying. I'm done trying to behave my way into heaven. I'm done trying to behave my way into God's affection and into my Father's approval. And I surrender to you. I confess, you died, you lived a perfect life, you died a perfect death, and then you resurrected for me. And you are my path to harmony with my creator. And I am insufficient entirely to do that at all. I am completely and totally reliant upon the sufficiency of Christ and his death on the cross. That is my only path to affection with my father. And then in Christ's sufficiency, we receive, not earn, God's affection, which is far better than approval. We don't want our dads to simply nod in a condescending approval to us. Yeah, you're good. Yeah, you're okay. Yeah, you're allowed. We don't want a distant, heartless approval from our God. We want that affection. We want Him to love us. We want Him to take joy in our joy. We want Him to mourn when we mourn. We want Him to hurt when we hurt. We want Him to love when we love. We want to know that our Father God is right there. We want his affection. And to get that, all we have to do is surrender. Quit trying so dang hard. And what it looks like is this. How about, how about instead of deciding all the things you're going to do to live the life that you think God wants you to live and to be the person that you think God wants you to be and all the plans and all the rules and all the white knuckling that we're going to do, how about we scrap that? And how about we make our only plan is to wake up every day and remind ourselves of the love that Jesus has for us. I heard one pastor call this preach the gospel to yourself. Remind ourselves that we fall at the feet of Jesus, that we rely on his sufficiency, that we trust in his perfect life and in his perfect death, and that God, the Bible says that this is love, that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Before we earned it, before we deserved it, before we had any claim to it whatsoever, God sent Jesus to live a perfect life and die a perfect death so that we could experience eternity in heaven with him, so that we could walk in the affection and the love of our Father, so that we could be at harmony with our Creator. Remind yourself of that every morning. Remind yourself every morning, Jesus loves me. My Father loves me. Not for who I'm going to be, not for how I'm going to behave, but He loves me because He sent His Son for me. And if anyone were to ask me, why does God love you? I would point to the cross and I would say, because of what Jesus did, not because of anything that I've done. And remind yourself of that overflowing love every day. I love that verse in the book of John that says, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. Remind yourself of that grace every day. And what you'll see happening is when we surrender to Christ and we remind ourselves of his love, that our affections for the people around us are stirred as well. We'll be more gracious with our husbands and our wives and our children and our friends and our co-workers and the bad drivers. When we daily remind ourselves to surrender to Christ's sufficiency, when we choose surrender over sufficiency, God stirs our affections for Jesus. When we simply remind ourselves, I am insufficient, I have nothing to offer, Jesus has everything to offer, and I rely on that. When we remind ourselves of that, God stirs our affection for Jesus. And in stirring our affection for Jesus, he stirs our affection for one another, which by the way, isn't that the whole point of the law anyways? Didn't Jesus say that loving God with all your heart, soul, and your mind, amen, and loving your neighbor as yourself sums up the whole law and the prophets? This is how it does it. Instead of trying to be a people who are worried about the rules and all the right behaviors for Christians, which, by the way, will stop us from looking at other Christians and saying on social media, well, it's pretty unchristian. I thought you said you were a Christian and now you're da-da-da-da-da. If we would move away from a rule-following Christianity and towards a daily surrender to that Christ, we will find waiting for us an affection for Jesus and an affection for others that will help us walk in harmony with the law anyways. So the whole point of the law and the whole point of this morning is to grab our faces and point them to Christ and help us remember that he alone is worthy of our affection, that he alone is worthy of our devotion. And if we would quit trying to follow the rules so darn well and fail and get up and try hard again, if we would just surrender instead of trying so hard, surrender to the sufficiency of Jesus, that he would fill our hearts with affection for him, that that affection would overflow to others, and then we would finally be people who keep the law and walk in devotion and affection to Jesus. So I said my prayer for you at the beginning was that you would leave here with your heart stirred more for affection to Jesus than when you came in. That you would leave here desiring Jesus more than you did when you entered in. And my further prayer is that that would be a sustained thing, that some of you, gosh, maybe a few of you, would finally quit trying so hard and just wake up tomorrow morning and say, Jesus, thank you for loving me, and see where that leads. In a minute, the band's going to come up, and we're going to sing a song called Jesus, We Love You. There's a chorus in there, our affection, our devotion poured out on the feet of Jesus. Let's stand and sing this song as one church with one voice and one agreement and one surrender to pour everything out at the feet of Jesus and let him stir our affections for him. Let's pray. Father God, we are grateful for you. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for giving us the law so that we can see how much we need you. God, I pray that we would want more of you, that we would simply want more of Jesus, that we would want to know you better, and that in that pursuit we would feel a freedom from the things that trip us up, from the things that seek to hold us back, that so easily entangle. But that maybe, God, by focusing on you, by focusing on your son, we can run the race that's set before us as we were finally, finally intended to run. Focus our eyes on you, Jesus. And let us trust you to take care of everything else. In Jesus' name, amen.
