Well, good morning, everyone. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. Thanks for braving the treacherous roads to be here. We hope that we will make it worth your while. Just a point of clarity, when Michelle said that Nate and Aaron are going to be sharing some stuff with the parents at the end of the month, that's Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, not Aaron Gibson, our worship leader. No one cares. So it's the Aaron with some heft. So like Michelle said, this is the second part of our series called Prayers for You. I keep calling it Prayers for Grace. It's called Prayers for You, where we're opening up the year with some prayers over different aspects of our life. Last week, we talked about just grace in general. We looked at a prayer in the book of Colossians, and I invited you to kind of make that your prayer over yourselves and your families for this year. We're making it the prayer of grace this year. And this week, we're going to, and so now for the next three weeks, we're going to look at different aspects of our life and see if we can find a prayer in scripture that we can pray this year over that area of our life. And so this week, I want us to look at a prayer for our families and in particular, a prayer for our children and for their children. And so just up front, as I say that, and I tell you what the topic is this morning, I understand that not everybody in the room has genetic children. I understand that. And I know that for some of you, it's because you don't want them. For some of you, it's because you haven't had the opportunity. You'd love to have the opportunity. You really want kids. And so this might be a painful topic to bring up. And for that, I'm sorry. But I hope that those of you who do not have genetic children have some people in your life somewhere that you can love on and pour into and think about what kind of legacy you can leave for them. But for a lot of us, we have kids or we have plans to have them and we have every reason to believe that we can and we will. So this sermon is for you guys. As I think about families, I wanted to start off by sharing with you probably the greatest way that my parents have disappointed me in my life. And full disclosure, I'm going to have to mention them a couple of times today because of the nature of the topic, but I scheduled this sermon on this week and then wrote this sermon not knowing that they were going to be here. They're right over there. There's like no one even next to them. They're just sitting there. It's like there's a spotlight on them. They're in town this week for my daughter Lily's birthday. But I would say my biggest disappointment in you guys is that you're not billionaires. I really am envious of billionaire trust fund babies. I mean, what a life to be born into where you just get everything you want. You're rich as all heck. You can do whatever you want, you get the nicest of everything. I think that sounds amazing. And some of you may be like, no, that doesn't sound amazing. I want to pick myself up by my bootstraps. I don't. I want my grandfather to have picked himself up by his bootstraps and left me enough money to buy bootstraps that up themselves. That's what I want. Like, I love, like, if I'm scrolling just mindlessly, and someone wants to give me a tour of their yacht, I'll take a yacht tour. Let's see it. Let's go. A real estate agent wants to show me a $26 million penthouse in Manhattan, yeah, I'm in. Let's take a look at the fountain in the middle of the bathroom. I want to see it. I think that sounds like a really amazing life, and there'd be a lot of things that would be good about that to never have to worry about money one day in your life. But I tell you what I really want. If I were rich, I don't really care about having a yacht that seems wildly impractical and whatever. But I do think if I won the lottery, if I was just independently wealthy and I could buy whatever I wanted, you know what I'd do? This is true. Jen will tell you if I'm lying. Tomorrow morning, maybe even this afternoon, I would go to Leith Honda, and I would say, I want the nicest Odyssey you have. I want it to have everything. Everything. And I don't want there to be a single mile on it. I want someone to push it onto the truck from the factory, and I want you to back it into my driveway. That's more than anything. That would be sweet. That's what I wish. And so, thanks for nothing, Dale and Donna. Because I'm not rich. I'm not rich in that way. But I say all that to say this. I'm incredibly wealthy in another way. I'm not showing you how many Bibles I can purchase. These Bibles sit in my office. They sit in the corner, and I see them every day. And I see them, they're right next to the whiteboard that I write sermons on. This Bible is my papa's Bible, Don Green. This Bible is my dad's Bible that he was given for being some sort of star student or something like that at his high school. Nobody cares. But this is the Bible that he got for doing that. This is my dad's Bible. This is mine. Every time I look at these Bibles in the corner of my office, I'm reminded of the shoulders that I stand on. I'm reminded of my spiritual inheritance. And that's what I want us to focus on today. In some ways, nobody in here stands to inherit, I don't think, stands to inherit tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and be incredibly wealthy in our financial inheritances. If you are, good for you. But how often do we think about our spiritual health and our spiritual wealth and the kind of spiritual legacy that we've been left and the shoulders that we stand on and the shoes that we walk in? In some ways, I don't, in earthly standards, I'll probably get some sort of inheritance, but it's not going to be anything that's, I'm not buying a yacht with it. But in a much more important way, I am the recipient of a deep and rich spiritual inheritance. In a much more important way, I am the recipient of generational wealth. And it shows up for me in different times and in different places. One of the things that makes me think about it is I have a Tuesday morning men's group. And we'll have anywhere from 10 to sometimes 20 guys in there. And all we do is read through the Bible. We just pick a book of the Bible, we talk about it. It's a very simple format. And guys who are older than me will ask questions. What about this? What does this mean? What are we talking about here? And I learned the answer to those questions in first grade. That's my generational wealth. It's not their ignorance. It's their lack of exposure because maybe they didn't grow up with the generational spiritual wealth that I did. But each of us this morning has an opportunity to think about what we're going to pass on to the generations that follow. And it's a much more valuable inheritance than anything financial that you could leave them. In my son's room, we have this frame. My son is named John. He's named after Jen's dad, John Vinson. John Vinson got to celebrate with us the fact that we were pregnant and that it was a boy and that we were going to name it after him. But John has never met John. He passed before John was born. But I have absolute certainty that if we raise up John the way that we're supposed to, that one day he will come to know Jesus. And in doing so, he will have the opportunity to meet his namesake one day. They will meet. But we keep that in his room because of the name that he inherits. His middle name is Robert. That's my dad's middle name. John's name is John Robert Rector. To remind us and to remind him of the spiritual shoulders on which he sits. And Jen is the happy, grateful recipient of the legacy of John and Terry. Her parents grew up going to church. Terry grew up in Memphis going to church with an old Southern Baptist pastor, Adrian Rogers, who she still loves. John grew up with the son of Porter and Bernice. Porter fought in World War II. We've got his footlocker in my workbench in the garage. He loved Jesus. And he showed John what it was to be a godly man. And Bernice showed his sister Mary what it was to be a godly woman. And they passed that on to their children. And Jen grew up in a home, going to church every Sunday. Mom and dad serving in the church. Jesus spoken about in the home. Christianity prioritized. Quiet times happening. Being poured into. Her mom showing her how to be a godly woman. Her dad showing her what to expect from her husband. That guy is not as good when it comes to the spiritual wealth that we've inherited and some of you are too some of you are too some of you were blessed and grew up in homes that modeled faith to you some of you your dad or your mom is the most godly person you know. If not that, they at least, they prioritized church, they brought you to church, they were human and they made mistakes, but they made those right, and they always pointed you towards Christ. And in doing that, when you had kids, you knew, I always want to point them towards Christ. And you exist in this kind of, in this flow, as a general wealth cascades down through the generations, you just exist as a rung on the ladder, and that's great. And to those of you who are like us, Jen and I, who are spiritually wealthy because of the generational wealth that you've inherited, you have a deep and sacred responsibility to pass that on. To not squander it. To not mess it up. To pursue Jesus. To model to your children what it is to make him the center of your home. And to send them out into the world as better, more capable believers than you. Best case scenario, your kids know more scripture than you do. Best case scenario, they're better than you. Best case scenario, they're better dads and better moms and better spouses than you are. That's what we want for our children. So if you are the proud and grateful recipient of generational spiritual wealth, if you have Bibles you could stack together to remind you of the shoulders that you stand on, then you have a sacred responsibility to pass that on to your children and to their children and not squander it. Now some of you do not have spiritual wealth. Some of you were not born into a spiritually wealthy family. And you have an amazing opportunity. Some of you are what I consider spiritual orphans. You didn't have a mom or a dad teaching you about faith. You came to faith as a child, but there was no one there to help you, the church people, but no one that you lived with. Or you came to faith in adulthood. And now you're just trying to figure this thing out. You have a profound opportunity. If that's you, you have a profound opportunity. That opportunity is to draw a line in the sand and say, my family and my name has not built up any spiritual wealth. I did not have a spiritual inheritance, and my dad didn't, and his dad didn't, and his dad didn't. That's not a part of our family tree. I did not get to inherit that. I was born spiritually impoverished. Well, you have the opportunity to draw the line in the sand and say, but that will not be the case for my children. That will not be what they inherit. And you can change what it means to inherit your name. You can change what it means for your grandkid to be named after you. You can change what your name means. If you make the decision now to draw a line in the sand and not allow the generational trends that led to your poverty impoverish those who would come after you. And if you can tell I'm emotional about this, it's because that's what my parents did. My mom got bused to church when she was eight. It was the 60s and they did weird stuff like that. Some guy just showed up and said, hey little girl, you want to get on this bus? And she was like, yep, I do. And then she went. And she got saved. It was great. Best case scenario, you get on the bus with a stranger. You go to church and meet Jesus. She came to faith. She brought, she was what God used to bring her parents to faith. So this Pawpaw's Bible that I have, it wasn't him teaching her. It was her showing him. My dad? My dad basically grew up without a dad. His grandfather was the closest thing he had to a dad. He had a stepdad. He had a dad that ran away and he had a stepdad that didn't care about him. He found faith pretty much on his own. He was loved on by his grandfather, but that's distant. And so he made that decision. I did not, I was born spiritually impoverished, but my children will not be. And he drew that line in the sand, and mom drew that line in the sand. And in their faithfulness, changed what it means for me to be a rector. Changed what it is for Lily to be born into our family. If you are not generationally wealthy spiritually, you have a remarkable opportunity with your life to change what your name means. And I don't think there's anything that we could do that's more important than that. There is nothing that my parents can ever do for me that will make me more grateful for them than allowing me to be born into a family that was spiritually wealthy. Then impart their spiritual wealth on me. There's nothing they could ever give me that I'll be more grateful for than my spiritual inheritance from them. And we have the opportunity to us greatly the kind of legacy we leave behind. We should hope and pray, not to aggrandize it too much, but we should hope and pray that we live the kind of lives that one day my grandkid is going to sit in their office and my Bible is going to be somewhere in a stack of Bibles reminding them that I existed and I pointed them towards Christ. It should be important to us to want to leave that legacy. And so as I thought about this, and I thought about this comparison between a material inheritance and a spiritual inheritance, I thought about the material inheritance and what that currency is. We deal in material inheritance with dollars. That's the currency that we're trying to leave behind if that matters to us. And so I thought, what is the currency of a spiritual inheritance? What are we spending? What are we allocating? What are we saving up? What are we investing in our lives if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance? I think the currency of a spiritual inheritance is love. I think the currency of a spiritual inheritance is love. If we want our kids to be spiritually wealthy, then we spend our love on them and our love on God and our love on one another and we invest that love into the things of God and into our children every chance we get. And to put a finer point on it, this love is often manifested through time and presence. If we say, how do I invest my love in my children? How do I invest my love in God in my children? How does that work? I think that love is most often manifested through time and presence. And I mean time and presence in three different ways. I mean time with God and in God's presence. I mean time doing God's work and in the presence of people doing God's work and being served by God's work. And I mean time and presence with our children. Time and presence in all three of those ways. I won't hit this hard this week because I just mentioned it last week. But if you want to leave your child a spiritual inheritance, if you want them to be spiritually wealthy with what they receive from you, if you want to change what it means to receive your name or simply honor the wonderful name that you've inherited, if you want to do that, very first step, be a person of devotion. Wake up every day, spend time in God's presence, spend time in prayer. Be a person who reads your Bible every day. And parents, I'm telling you, let your children see you do it. I've mentioned before, I can remember in middle school and high school coming down the stairs and walking past the chair where my mom would sit in the morning and her Bible would be out. And this was the 90s. So it was, I don't know if you guys remember, the Bibles were thicker and they had these cases that went around them, these knit cases for old ladies with handles and you could keep pens and stuff and reading glasses in there. And her case was open, and there's usually a cup of coffee with some lipstick on it. And so every day, mom got on, she put her face on, she got up, put on her face, and then she came downstairs and she spent time in God's word and time in prayer. That's how you build legacy. You become a person of devotion. You become a person that your people see spending time with, that your children see spending time with God. You make church a priority. You go every week. I saw a good friend back there, and he's got his grandson with him. Grandson was trying to decide, am I going to go to class or am I going to have to go suffer through Nate? I hope he made the right choice. But when you grow up with grandparents that take you to church every time you're at their house, that's a legacy. And this isn't just for parents with young kids. You folks with grandkids, you're still leaving a legacy to your children. You're still influencing them. I'm 43 years old. I lead a church. I don't need nothing from nobody. I need my mom and my dad. I still need my parents. And as long as your parents are around, you do too. I was on the phone with Mike Harris this morning. His mom passed away last night. And she was in her 90s. He's still crying. There's just something about a mama and a daddy. I don't care how old you are and how old your kids are. They need you. You can still continue to build that legacy by being a person who loves them. And we love through our time and through our presence first with God. Then we love through our time and presence in God's work and what the people around us see us do. Growing up, I can remember mom was the Awana mama. We had this program called Awanas and she was in charge of it. She ran it. Dad was on the deacon board. And what it taught me is church is important. What it taught me is this matters to us. We prioritize this. And so you mamas that do all the work and show up and do all the things and bring your kids to decorate for Summer Extreme, and they're all running around while you're putting up under the sea foam stuff and making my drum kit messy for nine months. When you're doing that, your kids see you doing it. They're going to remember that. They remember prioritizing church. They're going to see you volunteering places. They're going to know what's important to you with your time and with your checkbook. They're going to notice those things. So if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance, we love through our time and presence in doing God's work. They learn from that. And we're never done doing that work. And then we show them that love through time and presence with them. And this one, I'm really preaching to myself, too. Because it's so easy when they're young to turn on a screen, to tell them to go play, to pacify them. It's a bad habit at my house. Whenever John talks all the time, he's three and a half, he's talking always. And so eventually, I start tuning him out, and he'll say say something and I go, uh-huh. And he'll be like, yeah. Then the dragon threw the marshmallow at the bear and boy, the pig was upset. And I'll go, uh-huh. And then he'll get mad and he goes, dad, why do you say uh-huh? Shoot. Okay. I got to come up with another response that seems like I'm engaged. It's difficult, and I'm not the best at it. But we love our children through time and through presence. Showing up for them. Being there for them. Allowing the extended bedtime because this might be the time when they talk. Just simply being in the room with them, finding different activities that we can do together. And that doesn't change as we get older. As we get older and our kids morph and our relationships change with them and they move out and they do their own thing, they still need time and presence with their parents. It just looks different. Your grandchildren need time and presence from you. That's how we invest in them. And so I think if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance, we live a life of love with time and presence with God, with God's work, and with our people, with our children that we love. And those requirements never stop. And as I thought about this idea of leaving a spiritual inheritance for our children, it occurred to me that selfishness is the enemy of inheritance. Selfishness really is the enemy of inheritance. Let's say, if we think about it financially, what you have to do if you have a goal to leave an inheritance behind, and you may not, and that's okay, I'm not pressing that on you, although Proverbs does, so you should think about it. If that's your goal to leave a financial inheritance behind, then what you have to do is make decisions in your working years, in your 20s and your 30s and your 40s. I'm making this amount of money, but I'm going to take this part and I'm going to set it over here and I'm going to let it grow. And I'm not going to use that for me. I'm going to use that for them. That's not for me. That's for my children. That's not for me. That's for the things that that's for the people who come after me. So I'm not going to spend it all on myself every time I get a paycheck. We have to choose to be unselfish and set some of our resources aside. We have to allocate them for others. We can't spend it all on ourselves. Likewise, if we get older and we do receive an inheritance, we do have wealth. Our granddad did pick himself up by his bootstraps and he left something for us. And now we've got this. Selfishness is the enemy of that inheritance because you could choose at that season of your life to squander it. You could buy the yacht. You could get rid of all, you could drain it dry and leave nothing for your children because you acted completely selfishly. In the same way, selfishness is the enemy of a spiritual inheritance. The reason we're not people of devotion, like we know we should be sometimes, is because we're selfish. We want to sleep more. We want to linger longer on our phone. We want to get to work sooner. There's other things we prioritize over spending time in God's word, and so we're selfish and we don't do it. There's other things we prioritize. We're selfish with our time, just like we're given a limited amount of money in our paychecks every month, and we have to decide how we want to allocate those resources. We're given a limited amount of time each day, each week, each year. And we have to decide how we want to allocate that resource. And if we're selfish with our time, and we only do what we want to do or what we have to do, and we do not intentionally take that time and allocate it for others and for the things of God, then we are selfish with our resource and we don't leave behind an inheritance. Our selfishness is the enemy of our inheritance. And it reminds me of this principle that Jesus teaches in Matthew chapter 6. Where he says. If you're leaving a spiritual inheritance, if your children are spiritually wealthy, that's a treasure in heaven. And Moth and Rust did not destroy that. If we live our lives selfishly, if we decide, if we're the generation tasked with drawing a line in the sand and saying, it's going to mean something different to have my name. I'm changing that for the generations that come after. Let me tell you something. That's hard. That's challenging. It's discouraging. And you're going to want to quit. And you're going to want to bail. And you're going to want to say, I'll leave it up to them. I figured it out. They can figure it out. But ultimately, that's selfish. And that's building up for yourself treasures on earth. My ardent prayer for the families of grace is that your children would be spiritual billionaires. That your children would be spiritually wealthy. I genuinely don't care what you leave them financially. I am going to invest all the years God gives me at Grace into partnering with you, parents and grandparents, to make sure that the generations that come after you are spiritually wealthy, to make sure that your children get a name that they honor and are proud of. I want to do everything I can so that one day your kid names their child after you because they understand that the name that you've given them is the most valuable thing you could ever do for them. That's my prayer for you. So as I wrap up, we have this simple question. What kind of inheritance do you want to leave? What do you want to leave behind for your kids? With the years remaining and the time remaining with them, what kind of inheritance do you want them to receive? How spiritually wealthy can you make them? What kind of name can you hand to them? Every week of this series, every week of this series, we're going to finish the sermon with a prayer. We're going to finish the, not the sermon, but the service with a prayer. Last week, Mikey closed us out and read a prayer, a summary of the prayer of Colossians. This week, there is a prayer that we are going to pray over our families, but it's not, we're not going to speak it. Jordan and Aaron are going to come up and Jordan is going to sing this prayer over us. And when you think about what prayer should we pray for our families, you don't have to think very hard because there's a passage in Numbers that tells us exactly what we should pray. God tells Moses and Moses tells Aaron, the high priest, his brother, go and tell the families to pray this over there, over one another. This is the prayer that we should pray for our families. So Jordan and Aaron are going to come up as I read this verse. And I want you to think about what kind of legacy you want to leave. Here's the prayer that's going to be sung over us from Numbers chapter 6. The Lord said to Moses, tell Aaron and his sons this is how you are to bless the Israelites. Say to them, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face towards you and give you peace. Jordan is going to sing that over us as a prayer. As you are prayed over, as you sit, rather than feeling an impetus to stand and sing along, what I would much rather you do is take a quiet minute here at the end of the service as you are prayed over and consider what kind of legacy you want to leave. Consider what kind of spiritual wealth you want to hand to your children. Consider what you want it to mean to inherit your name. And if you are someone who has to draw a line in the sand and change what your name means, pray so hard that you would do that. And if you trust me enough to tell me that, that that's what you're doing, I promise I will write you down and pray for you every day. Let's let them pray over us and let's pray while they're praying and then we'll go have a good week.
Well, good morning, everyone. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. Thanks for braving the treacherous roads to be here. We hope that we will make it worth your while. Just a point of clarity, when Michelle said that Nate and Aaron are going to be sharing some stuff with the parents at the end of the month, that's Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, not Aaron Gibson, our worship leader. No one cares. So it's the Aaron with some heft. So like Michelle said, this is the second part of our series called Prayers for You. I keep calling it Prayers for Grace. It's called Prayers for You, where we're opening up the year with some prayers over different aspects of our life. Last week, we talked about just grace in general. We looked at a prayer in the book of Colossians, and I invited you to kind of make that your prayer over yourselves and your families for this year. We're making it the prayer of grace this year. And this week, we're going to, and so now for the next three weeks, we're going to look at different aspects of our life and see if we can find a prayer in scripture that we can pray this year over that area of our life. And so this week, I want us to look at a prayer for our families and in particular, a prayer for our children and for their children. And so just up front, as I say that, and I tell you what the topic is this morning, I understand that not everybody in the room has genetic children. I understand that. And I know that for some of you, it's because you don't want them. For some of you, it's because you haven't had the opportunity. You'd love to have the opportunity. You really want kids. And so this might be a painful topic to bring up. And for that, I'm sorry. But I hope that those of you who do not have genetic children have some people in your life somewhere that you can love on and pour into and think about what kind of legacy you can leave for them. But for a lot of us, we have kids or we have plans to have them and we have every reason to believe that we can and we will. So this sermon is for you guys. As I think about families, I wanted to start off by sharing with you probably the greatest way that my parents have disappointed me in my life. And full disclosure, I'm going to have to mention them a couple of times today because of the nature of the topic, but I scheduled this sermon on this week and then wrote this sermon not knowing that they were going to be here. They're right over there. There's like no one even next to them. They're just sitting there. It's like there's a spotlight on them. They're in town this week for my daughter Lily's birthday. But I would say my biggest disappointment in you guys is that you're not billionaires. I really am envious of billionaire trust fund babies. I mean, what a life to be born into where you just get everything you want. You're rich as all heck. You can do whatever you want, you get the nicest of everything. I think that sounds amazing. And some of you may be like, no, that doesn't sound amazing. I want to pick myself up by my bootstraps. I don't. I want my grandfather to have picked himself up by his bootstraps and left me enough money to buy bootstraps that up themselves. That's what I want. Like, I love, like, if I'm scrolling just mindlessly, and someone wants to give me a tour of their yacht, I'll take a yacht tour. Let's see it. Let's go. A real estate agent wants to show me a $26 million penthouse in Manhattan, yeah, I'm in. Let's take a look at the fountain in the middle of the bathroom. I want to see it. I think that sounds like a really amazing life, and there'd be a lot of things that would be good about that to never have to worry about money one day in your life. But I tell you what I really want. If I were rich, I don't really care about having a yacht that seems wildly impractical and whatever. But I do think if I won the lottery, if I was just independently wealthy and I could buy whatever I wanted, you know what I'd do? This is true. Jen will tell you if I'm lying. Tomorrow morning, maybe even this afternoon, I would go to Leith Honda, and I would say, I want the nicest Odyssey you have. I want it to have everything. Everything. And I don't want there to be a single mile on it. I want someone to push it onto the truck from the factory, and I want you to back it into my driveway. That's more than anything. That would be sweet. That's what I wish. And so, thanks for nothing, Dale and Donna. Because I'm not rich. I'm not rich in that way. But I say all that to say this. I'm incredibly wealthy in another way. I'm not showing you how many Bibles I can purchase. These Bibles sit in my office. They sit in the corner, and I see them every day. And I see them, they're right next to the whiteboard that I write sermons on. This Bible is my papa's Bible, Don Green. This Bible is my dad's Bible that he was given for being some sort of star student or something like that at his high school. Nobody cares. But this is the Bible that he got for doing that. This is my dad's Bible. This is mine. Every time I look at these Bibles in the corner of my office, I'm reminded of the shoulders that I stand on. I'm reminded of my spiritual inheritance. And that's what I want us to focus on today. In some ways, nobody in here stands to inherit, I don't think, stands to inherit tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and be incredibly wealthy in our financial inheritances. If you are, good for you. But how often do we think about our spiritual health and our spiritual wealth and the kind of spiritual legacy that we've been left and the shoulders that we stand on and the shoes that we walk in? In some ways, I don't, in earthly standards, I'll probably get some sort of inheritance, but it's not going to be anything that's, I'm not buying a yacht with it. But in a much more important way, I am the recipient of a deep and rich spiritual inheritance. In a much more important way, I am the recipient of generational wealth. And it shows up for me in different times and in different places. One of the things that makes me think about it is I have a Tuesday morning men's group. And we'll have anywhere from 10 to sometimes 20 guys in there. And all we do is read through the Bible. We just pick a book of the Bible, we talk about it. It's a very simple format. And guys who are older than me will ask questions. What about this? What does this mean? What are we talking about here? And I learned the answer to those questions in first grade. That's my generational wealth. It's not their ignorance. It's their lack of exposure because maybe they didn't grow up with the generational spiritual wealth that I did. But each of us this morning has an opportunity to think about what we're going to pass on to the generations that follow. And it's a much more valuable inheritance than anything financial that you could leave them. In my son's room, we have this frame. My son is named John. He's named after Jen's dad, John Vinson. John Vinson got to celebrate with us the fact that we were pregnant and that it was a boy and that we were going to name it after him. But John has never met John. He passed before John was born. But I have absolute certainty that if we raise up John the way that we're supposed to, that one day he will come to know Jesus. And in doing so, he will have the opportunity to meet his namesake one day. They will meet. But we keep that in his room because of the name that he inherits. His middle name is Robert. That's my dad's middle name. John's name is John Robert Rector. To remind us and to remind him of the spiritual shoulders on which he sits. And Jen is the happy, grateful recipient of the legacy of John and Terry. Her parents grew up going to church. Terry grew up in Memphis going to church with an old Southern Baptist pastor, Adrian Rogers, who she still loves. John grew up with the son of Porter and Bernice. Porter fought in World War II. We've got his footlocker in my workbench in the garage. He loved Jesus. And he showed John what it was to be a godly man. And Bernice showed his sister Mary what it was to be a godly woman. And they passed that on to their children. And Jen grew up in a home, going to church every Sunday. Mom and dad serving in the church. Jesus spoken about in the home. Christianity prioritized. Quiet times happening. Being poured into. Her mom showing her how to be a godly woman. Her dad showing her what to expect from her husband. That guy is not as good when it comes to the spiritual wealth that we've inherited and some of you are too some of you are too some of you were blessed and grew up in homes that modeled faith to you some of you your dad or your mom is the most godly person you know. If not that, they at least, they prioritized church, they brought you to church, they were human and they made mistakes, but they made those right, and they always pointed you towards Christ. And in doing that, when you had kids, you knew, I always want to point them towards Christ. And you exist in this kind of, in this flow, as a general wealth cascades down through the generations, you just exist as a rung on the ladder, and that's great. And to those of you who are like us, Jen and I, who are spiritually wealthy because of the generational wealth that you've inherited, you have a deep and sacred responsibility to pass that on. To not squander it. To not mess it up. To pursue Jesus. To model to your children what it is to make him the center of your home. And to send them out into the world as better, more capable believers than you. Best case scenario, your kids know more scripture than you do. Best case scenario, they're better than you. Best case scenario, they're better dads and better moms and better spouses than you are. That's what we want for our children. So if you are the proud and grateful recipient of generational spiritual wealth, if you have Bibles you could stack together to remind you of the shoulders that you stand on, then you have a sacred responsibility to pass that on to your children and to their children and not squander it. Now some of you do not have spiritual wealth. Some of you were not born into a spiritually wealthy family. And you have an amazing opportunity. Some of you are what I consider spiritual orphans. You didn't have a mom or a dad teaching you about faith. You came to faith as a child, but there was no one there to help you, the church people, but no one that you lived with. Or you came to faith in adulthood. And now you're just trying to figure this thing out. You have a profound opportunity. If that's you, you have a profound opportunity. That opportunity is to draw a line in the sand and say, my family and my name has not built up any spiritual wealth. I did not have a spiritual inheritance, and my dad didn't, and his dad didn't, and his dad didn't. That's not a part of our family tree. I did not get to inherit that. I was born spiritually impoverished. Well, you have the opportunity to draw the line in the sand and say, but that will not be the case for my children. That will not be what they inherit. And you can change what it means to inherit your name. You can change what it means for your grandkid to be named after you. You can change what your name means. If you make the decision now to draw a line in the sand and not allow the generational trends that led to your poverty impoverish those who would come after you. And if you can tell I'm emotional about this, it's because that's what my parents did. My mom got bused to church when she was eight. It was the 60s and they did weird stuff like that. Some guy just showed up and said, hey little girl, you want to get on this bus? And she was like, yep, I do. And then she went. And she got saved. It was great. Best case scenario, you get on the bus with a stranger. You go to church and meet Jesus. She came to faith. She brought, she was what God used to bring her parents to faith. So this Pawpaw's Bible that I have, it wasn't him teaching her. It was her showing him. My dad? My dad basically grew up without a dad. His grandfather was the closest thing he had to a dad. He had a stepdad. He had a dad that ran away and he had a stepdad that didn't care about him. He found faith pretty much on his own. He was loved on by his grandfather, but that's distant. And so he made that decision. I did not, I was born spiritually impoverished, but my children will not be. And he drew that line in the sand, and mom drew that line in the sand. And in their faithfulness, changed what it means for me to be a rector. Changed what it is for Lily to be born into our family. If you are not generationally wealthy spiritually, you have a remarkable opportunity with your life to change what your name means. And I don't think there's anything that we could do that's more important than that. There is nothing that my parents can ever do for me that will make me more grateful for them than allowing me to be born into a family that was spiritually wealthy. Then impart their spiritual wealth on me. There's nothing they could ever give me that I'll be more grateful for than my spiritual inheritance from them. And we have the opportunity to us greatly the kind of legacy we leave behind. We should hope and pray, not to aggrandize it too much, but we should hope and pray that we live the kind of lives that one day my grandkid is going to sit in their office and my Bible is going to be somewhere in a stack of Bibles reminding them that I existed and I pointed them towards Christ. It should be important to us to want to leave that legacy. And so as I thought about this, and I thought about this comparison between a material inheritance and a spiritual inheritance, I thought about the material inheritance and what that currency is. We deal in material inheritance with dollars. That's the currency that we're trying to leave behind if that matters to us. And so I thought, what is the currency of a spiritual inheritance? What are we spending? What are we allocating? What are we saving up? What are we investing in our lives if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance? I think the currency of a spiritual inheritance is love. I think the currency of a spiritual inheritance is love. If we want our kids to be spiritually wealthy, then we spend our love on them and our love on God and our love on one another and we invest that love into the things of God and into our children every chance we get. And to put a finer point on it, this love is often manifested through time and presence. If we say, how do I invest my love in my children? How do I invest my love in God in my children? How does that work? I think that love is most often manifested through time and presence. And I mean time and presence in three different ways. I mean time with God and in God's presence. I mean time doing God's work and in the presence of people doing God's work and being served by God's work. And I mean time and presence with our children. Time and presence in all three of those ways. I won't hit this hard this week because I just mentioned it last week. But if you want to leave your child a spiritual inheritance, if you want them to be spiritually wealthy with what they receive from you, if you want to change what it means to receive your name or simply honor the wonderful name that you've inherited, if you want to do that, very first step, be a person of devotion. Wake up every day, spend time in God's presence, spend time in prayer. Be a person who reads your Bible every day. And parents, I'm telling you, let your children see you do it. I've mentioned before, I can remember in middle school and high school coming down the stairs and walking past the chair where my mom would sit in the morning and her Bible would be out. And this was the 90s. So it was, I don't know if you guys remember, the Bibles were thicker and they had these cases that went around them, these knit cases for old ladies with handles and you could keep pens and stuff and reading glasses in there. And her case was open, and there's usually a cup of coffee with some lipstick on it. And so every day, mom got on, she put her face on, she got up, put on her face, and then she came downstairs and she spent time in God's word and time in prayer. That's how you build legacy. You become a person of devotion. You become a person that your people see spending time with, that your children see spending time with God. You make church a priority. You go every week. I saw a good friend back there, and he's got his grandson with him. Grandson was trying to decide, am I going to go to class or am I going to have to go suffer through Nate? I hope he made the right choice. But when you grow up with grandparents that take you to church every time you're at their house, that's a legacy. And this isn't just for parents with young kids. You folks with grandkids, you're still leaving a legacy to your children. You're still influencing them. I'm 43 years old. I lead a church. I don't need nothing from nobody. I need my mom and my dad. I still need my parents. And as long as your parents are around, you do too. I was on the phone with Mike Harris this morning. His mom passed away last night. And she was in her 90s. He's still crying. There's just something about a mama and a daddy. I don't care how old you are and how old your kids are. They need you. You can still continue to build that legacy by being a person who loves them. And we love through our time and through our presence first with God. Then we love through our time and presence in God's work and what the people around us see us do. Growing up, I can remember mom was the Awana mama. We had this program called Awanas and she was in charge of it. She ran it. Dad was on the deacon board. And what it taught me is church is important. What it taught me is this matters to us. We prioritize this. And so you mamas that do all the work and show up and do all the things and bring your kids to decorate for Summer Extreme, and they're all running around while you're putting up under the sea foam stuff and making my drum kit messy for nine months. When you're doing that, your kids see you doing it. They're going to remember that. They remember prioritizing church. They're going to see you volunteering places. They're going to know what's important to you with your time and with your checkbook. They're going to notice those things. So if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance, we love through our time and presence in doing God's work. They learn from that. And we're never done doing that work. And then we show them that love through time and presence with them. And this one, I'm really preaching to myself, too. Because it's so easy when they're young to turn on a screen, to tell them to go play, to pacify them. It's a bad habit at my house. Whenever John talks all the time, he's three and a half, he's talking always. And so eventually, I start tuning him out, and he'll say say something and I go, uh-huh. And he'll be like, yeah. Then the dragon threw the marshmallow at the bear and boy, the pig was upset. And I'll go, uh-huh. And then he'll get mad and he goes, dad, why do you say uh-huh? Shoot. Okay. I got to come up with another response that seems like I'm engaged. It's difficult, and I'm not the best at it. But we love our children through time and through presence. Showing up for them. Being there for them. Allowing the extended bedtime because this might be the time when they talk. Just simply being in the room with them, finding different activities that we can do together. And that doesn't change as we get older. As we get older and our kids morph and our relationships change with them and they move out and they do their own thing, they still need time and presence with their parents. It just looks different. Your grandchildren need time and presence from you. That's how we invest in them. And so I think if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance, we live a life of love with time and presence with God, with God's work, and with our people, with our children that we love. And those requirements never stop. And as I thought about this idea of leaving a spiritual inheritance for our children, it occurred to me that selfishness is the enemy of inheritance. Selfishness really is the enemy of inheritance. Let's say, if we think about it financially, what you have to do if you have a goal to leave an inheritance behind, and you may not, and that's okay, I'm not pressing that on you, although Proverbs does, so you should think about it. If that's your goal to leave a financial inheritance behind, then what you have to do is make decisions in your working years, in your 20s and your 30s and your 40s. I'm making this amount of money, but I'm going to take this part and I'm going to set it over here and I'm going to let it grow. And I'm not going to use that for me. I'm going to use that for them. That's not for me. That's for my children. That's not for me. That's for the things that that's for the people who come after me. So I'm not going to spend it all on myself every time I get a paycheck. We have to choose to be unselfish and set some of our resources aside. We have to allocate them for others. We can't spend it all on ourselves. Likewise, if we get older and we do receive an inheritance, we do have wealth. Our granddad did pick himself up by his bootstraps and he left something for us. And now we've got this. Selfishness is the enemy of that inheritance because you could choose at that season of your life to squander it. You could buy the yacht. You could get rid of all, you could drain it dry and leave nothing for your children because you acted completely selfishly. In the same way, selfishness is the enemy of a spiritual inheritance. The reason we're not people of devotion, like we know we should be sometimes, is because we're selfish. We want to sleep more. We want to linger longer on our phone. We want to get to work sooner. There's other things we prioritize over spending time in God's word, and so we're selfish and we don't do it. There's other things we prioritize. We're selfish with our time, just like we're given a limited amount of money in our paychecks every month, and we have to decide how we want to allocate those resources. We're given a limited amount of time each day, each week, each year. And we have to decide how we want to allocate that resource. And if we're selfish with our time, and we only do what we want to do or what we have to do, and we do not intentionally take that time and allocate it for others and for the things of God, then we are selfish with our resource and we don't leave behind an inheritance. Our selfishness is the enemy of our inheritance. And it reminds me of this principle that Jesus teaches in Matthew chapter 6. Where he says. If you're leaving a spiritual inheritance, if your children are spiritually wealthy, that's a treasure in heaven. And Moth and Rust did not destroy that. If we live our lives selfishly, if we decide, if we're the generation tasked with drawing a line in the sand and saying, it's going to mean something different to have my name. I'm changing that for the generations that come after. Let me tell you something. That's hard. That's challenging. It's discouraging. And you're going to want to quit. And you're going to want to bail. And you're going to want to say, I'll leave it up to them. I figured it out. They can figure it out. But ultimately, that's selfish. And that's building up for yourself treasures on earth. My ardent prayer for the families of grace is that your children would be spiritual billionaires. That your children would be spiritually wealthy. I genuinely don't care what you leave them financially. I am going to invest all the years God gives me at Grace into partnering with you, parents and grandparents, to make sure that the generations that come after you are spiritually wealthy, to make sure that your children get a name that they honor and are proud of. I want to do everything I can so that one day your kid names their child after you because they understand that the name that you've given them is the most valuable thing you could ever do for them. That's my prayer for you. So as I wrap up, we have this simple question. What kind of inheritance do you want to leave? What do you want to leave behind for your kids? With the years remaining and the time remaining with them, what kind of inheritance do you want them to receive? How spiritually wealthy can you make them? What kind of name can you hand to them? Every week of this series, every week of this series, we're going to finish the sermon with a prayer. We're going to finish the, not the sermon, but the service with a prayer. Last week, Mikey closed us out and read a prayer, a summary of the prayer of Colossians. This week, there is a prayer that we are going to pray over our families, but it's not, we're not going to speak it. Jordan and Aaron are going to come up and Jordan is going to sing this prayer over us. And when you think about what prayer should we pray for our families, you don't have to think very hard because there's a passage in Numbers that tells us exactly what we should pray. God tells Moses and Moses tells Aaron, the high priest, his brother, go and tell the families to pray this over there, over one another. This is the prayer that we should pray for our families. So Jordan and Aaron are going to come up as I read this verse. And I want you to think about what kind of legacy you want to leave. Here's the prayer that's going to be sung over us from Numbers chapter 6. The Lord said to Moses, tell Aaron and his sons this is how you are to bless the Israelites. Say to them, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face towards you and give you peace. Jordan is going to sing that over us as a prayer. As you are prayed over, as you sit, rather than feeling an impetus to stand and sing along, what I would much rather you do is take a quiet minute here at the end of the service as you are prayed over and consider what kind of legacy you want to leave. Consider what kind of spiritual wealth you want to hand to your children. Consider what you want it to mean to inherit your name. And if you are someone who has to draw a line in the sand and change what your name means, pray so hard that you would do that. And if you trust me enough to tell me that, that that's what you're doing, I promise I will write you down and pray for you every day. Let's let them pray over us and let's pray while they're praying and then we'll go have a good week.
Well, good morning, everyone. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. Thanks for braving the treacherous roads to be here. We hope that we will make it worth your while. Just a point of clarity, when Michelle said that Nate and Aaron are going to be sharing some stuff with the parents at the end of the month, that's Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, not Aaron Gibson, our worship leader. No one cares. So it's the Aaron with some heft. So like Michelle said, this is the second part of our series called Prayers for You. I keep calling it Prayers for Grace. It's called Prayers for You, where we're opening up the year with some prayers over different aspects of our life. Last week, we talked about just grace in general. We looked at a prayer in the book of Colossians, and I invited you to kind of make that your prayer over yourselves and your families for this year. We're making it the prayer of grace this year. And this week, we're going to, and so now for the next three weeks, we're going to look at different aspects of our life and see if we can find a prayer in scripture that we can pray this year over that area of our life. And so this week, I want us to look at a prayer for our families and in particular, a prayer for our children and for their children. And so just up front, as I say that, and I tell you what the topic is this morning, I understand that not everybody in the room has genetic children. I understand that. And I know that for some of you, it's because you don't want them. For some of you, it's because you haven't had the opportunity. You'd love to have the opportunity. You really want kids. And so this might be a painful topic to bring up. And for that, I'm sorry. But I hope that those of you who do not have genetic children have some people in your life somewhere that you can love on and pour into and think about what kind of legacy you can leave for them. But for a lot of us, we have kids or we have plans to have them and we have every reason to believe that we can and we will. So this sermon is for you guys. As I think about families, I wanted to start off by sharing with you probably the greatest way that my parents have disappointed me in my life. And full disclosure, I'm going to have to mention them a couple of times today because of the nature of the topic, but I scheduled this sermon on this week and then wrote this sermon not knowing that they were going to be here. They're right over there. There's like no one even next to them. They're just sitting there. It's like there's a spotlight on them. They're in town this week for my daughter Lily's birthday. But I would say my biggest disappointment in you guys is that you're not billionaires. I really am envious of billionaire trust fund babies. I mean, what a life to be born into where you just get everything you want. You're rich as all heck. You can do whatever you want, you get the nicest of everything. I think that sounds amazing. And some of you may be like, no, that doesn't sound amazing. I want to pick myself up by my bootstraps. I don't. I want my grandfather to have picked himself up by his bootstraps and left me enough money to buy bootstraps that up themselves. That's what I want. Like, I love, like, if I'm scrolling just mindlessly, and someone wants to give me a tour of their yacht, I'll take a yacht tour. Let's see it. Let's go. A real estate agent wants to show me a $26 million penthouse in Manhattan, yeah, I'm in. Let's take a look at the fountain in the middle of the bathroom. I want to see it. I think that sounds like a really amazing life, and there'd be a lot of things that would be good about that to never have to worry about money one day in your life. But I tell you what I really want. If I were rich, I don't really care about having a yacht that seems wildly impractical and whatever. But I do think if I won the lottery, if I was just independently wealthy and I could buy whatever I wanted, you know what I'd do? This is true. Jen will tell you if I'm lying. Tomorrow morning, maybe even this afternoon, I would go to Leith Honda, and I would say, I want the nicest Odyssey you have. I want it to have everything. Everything. And I don't want there to be a single mile on it. I want someone to push it onto the truck from the factory, and I want you to back it into my driveway. That's more than anything. That would be sweet. That's what I wish. And so, thanks for nothing, Dale and Donna. Because I'm not rich. I'm not rich in that way. But I say all that to say this. I'm incredibly wealthy in another way. I'm not showing you how many Bibles I can purchase. These Bibles sit in my office. They sit in the corner, and I see them every day. And I see them, they're right next to the whiteboard that I write sermons on. This Bible is my papa's Bible, Don Green. This Bible is my dad's Bible that he was given for being some sort of star student or something like that at his high school. Nobody cares. But this is the Bible that he got for doing that. This is my dad's Bible. This is mine. Every time I look at these Bibles in the corner of my office, I'm reminded of the shoulders that I stand on. I'm reminded of my spiritual inheritance. And that's what I want us to focus on today. In some ways, nobody in here stands to inherit, I don't think, stands to inherit tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and be incredibly wealthy in our financial inheritances. If you are, good for you. But how often do we think about our spiritual health and our spiritual wealth and the kind of spiritual legacy that we've been left and the shoulders that we stand on and the shoes that we walk in? In some ways, I don't, in earthly standards, I'll probably get some sort of inheritance, but it's not going to be anything that's, I'm not buying a yacht with it. But in a much more important way, I am the recipient of a deep and rich spiritual inheritance. In a much more important way, I am the recipient of generational wealth. And it shows up for me in different times and in different places. One of the things that makes me think about it is I have a Tuesday morning men's group. And we'll have anywhere from 10 to sometimes 20 guys in there. And all we do is read through the Bible. We just pick a book of the Bible, we talk about it. It's a very simple format. And guys who are older than me will ask questions. What about this? What does this mean? What are we talking about here? And I learned the answer to those questions in first grade. That's my generational wealth. It's not their ignorance. It's their lack of exposure because maybe they didn't grow up with the generational spiritual wealth that I did. But each of us this morning has an opportunity to think about what we're going to pass on to the generations that follow. And it's a much more valuable inheritance than anything financial that you could leave them. In my son's room, we have this frame. My son is named John. He's named after Jen's dad, John Vinson. John Vinson got to celebrate with us the fact that we were pregnant and that it was a boy and that we were going to name it after him. But John has never met John. He passed before John was born. But I have absolute certainty that if we raise up John the way that we're supposed to, that one day he will come to know Jesus. And in doing so, he will have the opportunity to meet his namesake one day. They will meet. But we keep that in his room because of the name that he inherits. His middle name is Robert. That's my dad's middle name. John's name is John Robert Rector. To remind us and to remind him of the spiritual shoulders on which he sits. And Jen is the happy, grateful recipient of the legacy of John and Terry. Her parents grew up going to church. Terry grew up in Memphis going to church with an old Southern Baptist pastor, Adrian Rogers, who she still loves. John grew up with the son of Porter and Bernice. Porter fought in World War II. We've got his footlocker in my workbench in the garage. He loved Jesus. And he showed John what it was to be a godly man. And Bernice showed his sister Mary what it was to be a godly woman. And they passed that on to their children. And Jen grew up in a home, going to church every Sunday. Mom and dad serving in the church. Jesus spoken about in the home. Christianity prioritized. Quiet times happening. Being poured into. Her mom showing her how to be a godly woman. Her dad showing her what to expect from her husband. That guy is not as good when it comes to the spiritual wealth that we've inherited and some of you are too some of you are too some of you were blessed and grew up in homes that modeled faith to you some of you your dad or your mom is the most godly person you know. If not that, they at least, they prioritized church, they brought you to church, they were human and they made mistakes, but they made those right, and they always pointed you towards Christ. And in doing that, when you had kids, you knew, I always want to point them towards Christ. And you exist in this kind of, in this flow, as a general wealth cascades down through the generations, you just exist as a rung on the ladder, and that's great. And to those of you who are like us, Jen and I, who are spiritually wealthy because of the generational wealth that you've inherited, you have a deep and sacred responsibility to pass that on. To not squander it. To not mess it up. To pursue Jesus. To model to your children what it is to make him the center of your home. And to send them out into the world as better, more capable believers than you. Best case scenario, your kids know more scripture than you do. Best case scenario, they're better than you. Best case scenario, they're better dads and better moms and better spouses than you are. That's what we want for our children. So if you are the proud and grateful recipient of generational spiritual wealth, if you have Bibles you could stack together to remind you of the shoulders that you stand on, then you have a sacred responsibility to pass that on to your children and to their children and not squander it. Now some of you do not have spiritual wealth. Some of you were not born into a spiritually wealthy family. And you have an amazing opportunity. Some of you are what I consider spiritual orphans. You didn't have a mom or a dad teaching you about faith. You came to faith as a child, but there was no one there to help you, the church people, but no one that you lived with. Or you came to faith in adulthood. And now you're just trying to figure this thing out. You have a profound opportunity. If that's you, you have a profound opportunity. That opportunity is to draw a line in the sand and say, my family and my name has not built up any spiritual wealth. I did not have a spiritual inheritance, and my dad didn't, and his dad didn't, and his dad didn't. That's not a part of our family tree. I did not get to inherit that. I was born spiritually impoverished. Well, you have the opportunity to draw the line in the sand and say, but that will not be the case for my children. That will not be what they inherit. And you can change what it means to inherit your name. You can change what it means for your grandkid to be named after you. You can change what your name means. If you make the decision now to draw a line in the sand and not allow the generational trends that led to your poverty impoverish those who would come after you. And if you can tell I'm emotional about this, it's because that's what my parents did. My mom got bused to church when she was eight. It was the 60s and they did weird stuff like that. Some guy just showed up and said, hey little girl, you want to get on this bus? And she was like, yep, I do. And then she went. And she got saved. It was great. Best case scenario, you get on the bus with a stranger. You go to church and meet Jesus. She came to faith. She brought, she was what God used to bring her parents to faith. So this Pawpaw's Bible that I have, it wasn't him teaching her. It was her showing him. My dad? My dad basically grew up without a dad. His grandfather was the closest thing he had to a dad. He had a stepdad. He had a dad that ran away and he had a stepdad that didn't care about him. He found faith pretty much on his own. He was loved on by his grandfather, but that's distant. And so he made that decision. I did not, I was born spiritually impoverished, but my children will not be. And he drew that line in the sand, and mom drew that line in the sand. And in their faithfulness, changed what it means for me to be a rector. Changed what it is for Lily to be born into our family. If you are not generationally wealthy spiritually, you have a remarkable opportunity with your life to change what your name means. And I don't think there's anything that we could do that's more important than that. There is nothing that my parents can ever do for me that will make me more grateful for them than allowing me to be born into a family that was spiritually wealthy. Then impart their spiritual wealth on me. There's nothing they could ever give me that I'll be more grateful for than my spiritual inheritance from them. And we have the opportunity to us greatly the kind of legacy we leave behind. We should hope and pray, not to aggrandize it too much, but we should hope and pray that we live the kind of lives that one day my grandkid is going to sit in their office and my Bible is going to be somewhere in a stack of Bibles reminding them that I existed and I pointed them towards Christ. It should be important to us to want to leave that legacy. And so as I thought about this, and I thought about this comparison between a material inheritance and a spiritual inheritance, I thought about the material inheritance and what that currency is. We deal in material inheritance with dollars. That's the currency that we're trying to leave behind if that matters to us. And so I thought, what is the currency of a spiritual inheritance? What are we spending? What are we allocating? What are we saving up? What are we investing in our lives if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance? I think the currency of a spiritual inheritance is love. I think the currency of a spiritual inheritance is love. If we want our kids to be spiritually wealthy, then we spend our love on them and our love on God and our love on one another and we invest that love into the things of God and into our children every chance we get. And to put a finer point on it, this love is often manifested through time and presence. If we say, how do I invest my love in my children? How do I invest my love in God in my children? How does that work? I think that love is most often manifested through time and presence. And I mean time and presence in three different ways. I mean time with God and in God's presence. I mean time doing God's work and in the presence of people doing God's work and being served by God's work. And I mean time and presence with our children. Time and presence in all three of those ways. I won't hit this hard this week because I just mentioned it last week. But if you want to leave your child a spiritual inheritance, if you want them to be spiritually wealthy with what they receive from you, if you want to change what it means to receive your name or simply honor the wonderful name that you've inherited, if you want to do that, very first step, be a person of devotion. Wake up every day, spend time in God's presence, spend time in prayer. Be a person who reads your Bible every day. And parents, I'm telling you, let your children see you do it. I've mentioned before, I can remember in middle school and high school coming down the stairs and walking past the chair where my mom would sit in the morning and her Bible would be out. And this was the 90s. So it was, I don't know if you guys remember, the Bibles were thicker and they had these cases that went around them, these knit cases for old ladies with handles and you could keep pens and stuff and reading glasses in there. And her case was open, and there's usually a cup of coffee with some lipstick on it. And so every day, mom got on, she put her face on, she got up, put on her face, and then she came downstairs and she spent time in God's word and time in prayer. That's how you build legacy. You become a person of devotion. You become a person that your people see spending time with, that your children see spending time with God. You make church a priority. You go every week. I saw a good friend back there, and he's got his grandson with him. Grandson was trying to decide, am I going to go to class or am I going to have to go suffer through Nate? I hope he made the right choice. But when you grow up with grandparents that take you to church every time you're at their house, that's a legacy. And this isn't just for parents with young kids. You folks with grandkids, you're still leaving a legacy to your children. You're still influencing them. I'm 43 years old. I lead a church. I don't need nothing from nobody. I need my mom and my dad. I still need my parents. And as long as your parents are around, you do too. I was on the phone with Mike Harris this morning. His mom passed away last night. And she was in her 90s. He's still crying. There's just something about a mama and a daddy. I don't care how old you are and how old your kids are. They need you. You can still continue to build that legacy by being a person who loves them. And we love through our time and through our presence first with God. Then we love through our time and presence in God's work and what the people around us see us do. Growing up, I can remember mom was the Awana mama. We had this program called Awanas and she was in charge of it. She ran it. Dad was on the deacon board. And what it taught me is church is important. What it taught me is this matters to us. We prioritize this. And so you mamas that do all the work and show up and do all the things and bring your kids to decorate for Summer Extreme, and they're all running around while you're putting up under the sea foam stuff and making my drum kit messy for nine months. When you're doing that, your kids see you doing it. They're going to remember that. They remember prioritizing church. They're going to see you volunteering places. They're going to know what's important to you with your time and with your checkbook. They're going to notice those things. So if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance, we love through our time and presence in doing God's work. They learn from that. And we're never done doing that work. And then we show them that love through time and presence with them. And this one, I'm really preaching to myself, too. Because it's so easy when they're young to turn on a screen, to tell them to go play, to pacify them. It's a bad habit at my house. Whenever John talks all the time, he's three and a half, he's talking always. And so eventually, I start tuning him out, and he'll say say something and I go, uh-huh. And he'll be like, yeah. Then the dragon threw the marshmallow at the bear and boy, the pig was upset. And I'll go, uh-huh. And then he'll get mad and he goes, dad, why do you say uh-huh? Shoot. Okay. I got to come up with another response that seems like I'm engaged. It's difficult, and I'm not the best at it. But we love our children through time and through presence. Showing up for them. Being there for them. Allowing the extended bedtime because this might be the time when they talk. Just simply being in the room with them, finding different activities that we can do together. And that doesn't change as we get older. As we get older and our kids morph and our relationships change with them and they move out and they do their own thing, they still need time and presence with their parents. It just looks different. Your grandchildren need time and presence from you. That's how we invest in them. And so I think if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance, we live a life of love with time and presence with God, with God's work, and with our people, with our children that we love. And those requirements never stop. And as I thought about this idea of leaving a spiritual inheritance for our children, it occurred to me that selfishness is the enemy of inheritance. Selfishness really is the enemy of inheritance. Let's say, if we think about it financially, what you have to do if you have a goal to leave an inheritance behind, and you may not, and that's okay, I'm not pressing that on you, although Proverbs does, so you should think about it. If that's your goal to leave a financial inheritance behind, then what you have to do is make decisions in your working years, in your 20s and your 30s and your 40s. I'm making this amount of money, but I'm going to take this part and I'm going to set it over here and I'm going to let it grow. And I'm not going to use that for me. I'm going to use that for them. That's not for me. That's for my children. That's not for me. That's for the things that that's for the people who come after me. So I'm not going to spend it all on myself every time I get a paycheck. We have to choose to be unselfish and set some of our resources aside. We have to allocate them for others. We can't spend it all on ourselves. Likewise, if we get older and we do receive an inheritance, we do have wealth. Our granddad did pick himself up by his bootstraps and he left something for us. And now we've got this. Selfishness is the enemy of that inheritance because you could choose at that season of your life to squander it. You could buy the yacht. You could get rid of all, you could drain it dry and leave nothing for your children because you acted completely selfishly. In the same way, selfishness is the enemy of a spiritual inheritance. The reason we're not people of devotion, like we know we should be sometimes, is because we're selfish. We want to sleep more. We want to linger longer on our phone. We want to get to work sooner. There's other things we prioritize over spending time in God's word, and so we're selfish and we don't do it. There's other things we prioritize. We're selfish with our time, just like we're given a limited amount of money in our paychecks every month, and we have to decide how we want to allocate those resources. We're given a limited amount of time each day, each week, each year. And we have to decide how we want to allocate that resource. And if we're selfish with our time, and we only do what we want to do or what we have to do, and we do not intentionally take that time and allocate it for others and for the things of God, then we are selfish with our resource and we don't leave behind an inheritance. Our selfishness is the enemy of our inheritance. And it reminds me of this principle that Jesus teaches in Matthew chapter 6. Where he says. If you're leaving a spiritual inheritance, if your children are spiritually wealthy, that's a treasure in heaven. And Moth and Rust did not destroy that. If we live our lives selfishly, if we decide, if we're the generation tasked with drawing a line in the sand and saying, it's going to mean something different to have my name. I'm changing that for the generations that come after. Let me tell you something. That's hard. That's challenging. It's discouraging. And you're going to want to quit. And you're going to want to bail. And you're going to want to say, I'll leave it up to them. I figured it out. They can figure it out. But ultimately, that's selfish. And that's building up for yourself treasures on earth. My ardent prayer for the families of grace is that your children would be spiritual billionaires. That your children would be spiritually wealthy. I genuinely don't care what you leave them financially. I am going to invest all the years God gives me at Grace into partnering with you, parents and grandparents, to make sure that the generations that come after you are spiritually wealthy, to make sure that your children get a name that they honor and are proud of. I want to do everything I can so that one day your kid names their child after you because they understand that the name that you've given them is the most valuable thing you could ever do for them. That's my prayer for you. So as I wrap up, we have this simple question. What kind of inheritance do you want to leave? What do you want to leave behind for your kids? With the years remaining and the time remaining with them, what kind of inheritance do you want them to receive? How spiritually wealthy can you make them? What kind of name can you hand to them? Every week of this series, every week of this series, we're going to finish the sermon with a prayer. We're going to finish the, not the sermon, but the service with a prayer. Last week, Mikey closed us out and read a prayer, a summary of the prayer of Colossians. This week, there is a prayer that we are going to pray over our families, but it's not, we're not going to speak it. Jordan and Aaron are going to come up and Jordan is going to sing this prayer over us. And when you think about what prayer should we pray for our families, you don't have to think very hard because there's a passage in Numbers that tells us exactly what we should pray. God tells Moses and Moses tells Aaron, the high priest, his brother, go and tell the families to pray this over there, over one another. This is the prayer that we should pray for our families. So Jordan and Aaron are going to come up as I read this verse. And I want you to think about what kind of legacy you want to leave. Here's the prayer that's going to be sung over us from Numbers chapter 6. The Lord said to Moses, tell Aaron and his sons this is how you are to bless the Israelites. Say to them, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face towards you and give you peace. Jordan is going to sing that over us as a prayer. As you are prayed over, as you sit, rather than feeling an impetus to stand and sing along, what I would much rather you do is take a quiet minute here at the end of the service as you are prayed over and consider what kind of legacy you want to leave. Consider what kind of spiritual wealth you want to hand to your children. Consider what you want it to mean to inherit your name. And if you are someone who has to draw a line in the sand and change what your name means, pray so hard that you would do that. And if you trust me enough to tell me that, that that's what you're doing, I promise I will write you down and pray for you every day. Let's let them pray over us and let's pray while they're praying and then we'll go have a good week.
Thanks so much for being here this morning. It's good to be back with you. I missed last week on a little trip. You may have seen on social media that I had a mustache for that trip, which is why my beard is so thin today. I promise you, I'm trying to grow my beard back just as quickly as I possibly can so I don't look like the new youth pastor giving you sermons. Speaking of the youth pastor giving sermons, Kyle did an excellent job last week. I'm so grateful for him and his ability to fill in. He's on a fall retreat right now, so your applause means nothing with the students. So we're praying for a safe return and for life change there. I'm so excited to step into the Christmas season with you guys. I love that we're decorated, that we're singing the Christmas carols, that we're getting ready for Christmas. Of course, I love the Christmas season, the reminders and the time that we get to spend with friends and family. For me, it means going back home to Atlanta and getting extended time with friends and family there. And so Christmas is really a reminder of blessings. It's a celebratory time, and it's a time that we really, really enjoy and look forward to. But for those same reasons, Christmas for many people is hard. For those same reasons, because it's a time of family, because it's a time to reflect on blessings, because it's a time to celebrate, for many of us, Christmas is difficult. We know that Christmas and the holiday season is one of the most difficult seasons of the year for some folks. And so before we just jump into Christmas and everything that it is and all the joy of Christmas and rah-rah around here, I wanted to stop and take a minute and acknowledge that for some people, December is hard. For some people, this month is difficult because of old wounds or maybe new ones. This is going to be a difficult season for you. And if it is a difficult season for you, in a room this size with this many people, there are inevitably folks who are not looking forward to Christmas and all the reminders that it brings. And if that's you, I want you to know that we're praying for you, that we care about you, and that we see you. And let's not, in our own lives, just plow through with joy while we ignore the fact that this may be a difficult season for those around us. I would hate to do that as a church. For that reason, because this can be a little bit of a difficult season for some folks, I wanted to talk this morning about the joy of forgiveness because I believe that forgiveness can actually be a key that unlocks a more joyful holiday for the rest of us. I'll tell you where I had this idea. I thought about it in a way that I hadn't thought about it before. A couple weeks ago, I went and saw that new Mr. Rogers movie with Tom Hanks. I'm not going to ruin it for anybody, but you should really go see that movie. It was a really great movie. And forgiveness plays an integral role in that movie. And I began to think about it in ways that I hadn't thought of it before. And it actually made holiday seasons better for the people in the movie because forgiveness was extended. And so it occurs to me with a church family our size, it's entirely possible that some forgiveness received or some forgiveness extended could reunite some families, could help redeem some relationships, could very well be the key to unlocking a more joyful and reflective and grateful holiday season for many of us in the church. If not that, as we move forward, forgiveness is a principle that we all have to deal with. So this week is the joy of forgiveness. Next week is the joy of gratitude. And then after that, we're going to do the joy of Christmas. And then the last Sunday of the year is the joy of skipping church together because there is no church, okay? So we all get to experience that joy at the same time and in the same way. But I wanted to talk about forgiveness, not just because I feel like it's helpful for the holidays, but because the Bible makes a pretty big deal out of forgiveness. The Bible has a lot to say about this idea. There's actually almost 90 verses in the Bible that have the word forgive or forgiveness. And a lot of those talk about how God forgives us. A lot of those talk about why we are supposed to give others. And we're going to get to those verses that are represented here in a minute. But as I was looking into the topic of forgiveness, one of the things that I had not considered before is that forgiveness is such a big deal to God. It's so important to God, that he makes it a daily prayerful exercise for us. I had not really thought about forgiveness in that way until I got into what the Bible had to say on the topic, and I see in the Lord's Prayer that it says forgiveness should be a part of what we do every day. If you have a Bible, you can turn it over to Matthew 6, and you can see there Jesus is praying. The disciples have asked him, how do you pray? Like, we know how to pray, but you're praying, and clearly you know how to do it differently than we do, so how do you pray? This is not, we don't just recite these words every day. This is a model for how we should pray. And there's different elements of the prayer. It's very much worth exploring and discussing what are the different things that Jesus includes in this pattern of prayer. But one of the things that he includes is to acknowledge that we are forgiven by God and then to daily and prayerfully forgive those who have hurt us. And I never thought about it that way. I'm not sure that I would have somebody to forgive every day. I don't know that people are offending me or hurting me every day. But as I sat down and I thought about it and I tried to apply this this week, It's a worthwhile exercise to ask ourselves, what hurts am I holding on to? What things am I still grabbing on to? Who do I need to extend forgiveness to? Who am I still dragging through the mud? Who am I still keeping attached to myself in that moment when they weren't at their best? What things do I have to forgive? To God, forgiveness is such a big deal that he makes it a daily prayerful exercise because we'll see later, I believe that there's freedom found in forgiveness. And I actually think it would be a worthwhile exercise for us. It would make the sermon more practical and less ethereal if we would all in our heads kind of think, okay, if I were going to forgive somebody, who could I forgive? If somebody has hurt me, if I needed to walk up to somebody or write an email or make a phone call today and say, hey, listen, I just want you to know that this happened. It hurt me. I forgive you. Who would that be for you? Or would they just say, like, if you said, hey, I forgive you, would they be like, for what? That does not count. You got to have somebody that has hurt you in some way, and you can think about, man, if I were to call them and say, listen, I want you to know I'm not holding this against you anymore, who would that person be for you? I think that's a helpful exercise. As we think about that and we reflect on God's commandment, God's instruction to daily and prayerfully forgive others, it's important to note the motivation that the Bible gives. Because it doesn't just tell us that we should forgive, but it supplies us with a why. I said earlier there's about 90 verses that mention forgive or forgiveness. Most of those, a lot of those are verses about how God forgives us. But a lot of them are encouraging us to forgive others. And most of the time they have a motive there to forgive others that's common amongst all these verses. So we're going to look in our Bibles at Colossians 3.13. But as we look there, I want you to know that that is the archetypal verse on forgiveness. Colossians 3.13 is the archetypal verse on forgiveness. It is the verse. If you want to know, like, what does the Bible say about why we should forgive, that we should forgive, and why we should do it, turn to Colossians 3.13, and it's pretty much the summary verse of what the Bible has to say about this. And Colossians 3.13 says this. I'm going to start in 12. Put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another, and if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive. So if you wanted to ask, what does the Bible have to say about forgiveness? It tells me to forgive, but why should I do it? That's the verse. That's the archetypal verse that will tell us why we need to forgive. We forgive because God forgave us. You should forgive somebody else because God forgave you. And this isn't an unfamiliar principle for us. Even for those of us in the room who might not call themselves Christians. If you were here this morning, you wouldn't call yourself a believer. You're just kind of kicking the tires around. You're a spiritual person. Someone else invited you to come and you wanted to be nice and so you came. If that's you and you might not believe in the same God that we believe in, you can at least intellectually concede that if there is a God and that God is perfect, they are likely offended by our imperfection, right? That's not that big of a jump. If a God exists that is perfect, we have, in our imperfection, likely offended that God. And so that God has extended forgiveness to us. Now, for Christians, we know the story. We know the drill. We know that God sent His son to die for us because of our imperfection. And we know at times with our life and with our choices that we have trampled on that death, that we have presumed upon it. We all in the room, if you're a believer, I would be willing to bet everything I have that we've had this thought process. I shouldn't do this thing because it's not right, but I know God's going to forgive me anyways, so let's go. We've all had that thought. Even the nicest among us, even the sweetest, littlest old ladies have had this thought of, I know I shouldn't do this thing, but I know God's going to forgive me, so here I go. We've all presumed upon God's goodness and grace in that way, and in that way, disrespected the death of the Son that He sent for us. So the idea that we have offended God and that God has extended to us forgiveness is not a foreign one to a Christian. This is why, this is the reason we're told to forgive others, that we should forgive others. Why? Because God forgave us. There's even a parable about this. Jesus told a whole story about this that most of us know. There was a guy that owed the king, we'll say $500,000. He goes to the king and the king says, listen, I know you can't pay $500,000, so you're good. Like you don't owe me anything. The guy's relieved. He thought he was gonna get killed or put in prison. He's incredibly relieved. He goes and as he's leaving, he bumps into another guy that owes him 50 bucks. And he says, hey, you owe me 50 bucks. And the guy says, I'm sorry, I don't have $50 right now. And he said, you're going to jail. And he calls the cops and he puts them in jail. The king finds out about this guy and he throws the guy that owed him $500,000 in jail. It's a very quick version of the parable. And the parable, the point of the parable is this guy was forgiven for a $500,000 debt. And because he was forgiven of so great a debt, he should have been willing to forgive this guy 50 bucks. And so we forgive the $50 offenses because we recognize that our offenses are more than that. And I would say that this motivation is the right motivation for most offenses. I want to talk about two different kinds of forgiveness today. I want to call this kind of forgiveness immediate forgiveness. Immediate forgiveness is the right response for most offenses. Immediate, thoughtful, daily, prayerful forgiveness is the right response for most offenses. When people do something to harm us, they do something to wrong us, they say something mean when they lash out, they act gruff. I had a guy in traffic yesterday that flipped me off. I have no idea why. I legitimately don't. I was just driving along and I came up behind him and then I went around him and he was doing five miles an hour under the speed limit and I went around him and he hung me the bird. And I thought, I don't understand what just happened. I really wanted to stop my car and talk to him. Be like, bro, like I'm not even mad. Just what's going on? That situation, immediate forgiveness. Don't care about that guy. There was something going on in his day that wasn't happening in my day. I hope it helped him out to relieve his stress in that manner. It doesn't matter to me. Most offenses can be forgiven immediately. As a matter of fact, if you think of the people that have hurt you or hurts that you might be carrying right now, I bet if you see what they did to you, the hurt that they caused you in light of the hurt that you've caused others, that you could probably extend them grace. I think about our spouses. If you're married, there are so many, you're not going to believe this. You're not going to believe it when I tell you this. Some of y'all know Sweet Jen, and you know how great she is. There are some things that she does that get on my nerves, and I have to just give her grace for, I have to forgive her. But every time I do, I try to think of all the things that she's forgiving me for that she doesn't even tell me about. And it makes it much easier to forgive. And so this idea that grace and forgiveness have been extended to us, and if we'll just be empathetic with whoever hurt us, we can extend grace and forgiveness to them too. That's the right response for most offenses. And I would say to you this morning, if it's possible for you in your life with the people who have hurt you, if it's possible to extend immediate forgiveness to them, then it's right and good for you to do it. And you should. Scripture tells us you should. But even as I say that, I think that there are some people here who would say, buddy, you don't understand the way that I've been hurt. You don't understand what's happened to me. What's happened to me was not a $50 offense. There are some of you that when I started talking about the idea of forgiveness, it popped right into your head who has hurt you and how they've hurt you. And it's entirely possible that you can hear me talking up here and be like, that's well and good to just immediately forgive somebody, but buddy, I'm not there yet. Nate, I can't handle that. If you knew what had happened to me, you might even think it's well and good for you to preach that. That's not fair for you to say that I should just go and forgive someone. You don't know what happened. You can't relate. You don't understand. And to that, I would say you're right. I have to admit that I can't relate. There are no great offenses in my life. I've never been faced with a challenge of difficult forgiveness. I've never been faced with the challenge of what I'm calling having to offer processed forgiveness. Some offenses require processed forgiveness. Immediate forgiveness is just not practical. It's just not going to happen. The hurt is too deep. The wound is too profound. I just can't turn around and go, you know what? I forgive you. My life is wrecked, but I forgive you because God tells me to. That's just not a practical thing to do. And I want to acknowledge this morning that some offenses require processed forgiveness. I think of a friend of mine who, when he was eight years old, his dad left the house, left him and his brother and his sister and his mom. He grew up without that dad. He was saddled with a stepdad who didn't care about him. In adulthood, his dad passed away early. He was the only one of his siblings who went to the funeral. And he had to sit there and look at this man who caused him a life of pain and abuse and neglect, who had never said a kind word to him, but he showed up at his funeral anyways, and he had to find a way to forgive that man so that he could move on with his life. That's a lifetime of neglect. I've never had to forgive like that. And I admit that. Some of y'all have. Some of y'all are walking through that process. And I want you to know that I think the Bible makes space for this process forgiveness. If you look in Luke 17, Jesus is telling us that we should forgive our brother or our sister who offends us. But he says, pay attention to yourselves. If your brother sins, rebuke him. Let him know, hey, that's wrong. And if he repents, forgiven. There's this admission in the text and in the teaching of Jesus that sometimes we're not ready to forgive right away. Sometimes there's reasons to withhold forgiveness. Sometimes we're waiting on something before we offer the forgiveness that we're instructed. And I want to be a voice that tells you, that's all right. If you can't get over it right away, that's all right. If the hurt is too deep or too profound, that's okay. You're allowed some processed forgiveness, but we should arrive there eventually. And because I've never had to walk through that deep of a challenge in my own forgiveness, I turned in my research to some people who had and tried to read stories and listen to talks about people who had overcome things in their life. And I ran across a girl, oddly enough, named Sarah Montana. That's a real name. I thought it was fake when I saw it. It's legit. Her name is Sarah Montana, and she gave a TED Talk. The details of that TED Talk are on your bulletin. So if you want to go home and watch it, you can. If you are one that is carrying a deep pain and is struggling through the idea of forgiveness, I think you'll find it incredibly helpful. But in that talk, she shares her story. And her story is, at the age of 22, she had just graduated college, and she was about to start her job and her career working at a hedge fund when she received word that a kid that she had grown up around in their neighborhood had come into their home and murdered her brother and her mom. Instant, deep, and profound hurt. And it was his fault. And so she shared her story and the process of forgiveness. And one of the things she said was that because she believed it to be the right thing, because she thought it would bring her some sort of healing, because she felt pressure from other people to go ahead and do this, she forgave him right away. She said publicly that she forgave him. She came out on the news and said that she forgave him. But she realized years later, she said the words, but she never really forgave him. And in that way, she kept him tethered to her and her life stayed tethered to that moment. And she desperately wanted to be able to forgive him. She even noted that she searched the Bible and she said, the Bible seems real high on forgiveness. It seems to talk really highly of it, but there's not a lot on how to do it. And so she began this exploration on how do I actually forgive? Like, what are the things that I have to do or say? What are the magic words? And in her exploration, she came upon this truth. It's actually an old Jewish truth. It's a teaching of Judaism that you cannot forgive a murderer for the murder because that murder didn't happen to you. It happened to whoever it was that you love. So you have to forgive them. You have to actually name the things that they took from you and forgive them for those. And so for her, she was able to start listing them off. That day, that kid took from her a friendship that she wanted to enjoy for her whole life with her brother that you cannot replicate. You cannot replicate. If siblings are close, you cannot replicate that relationship. And he took that from her. She had to forgive him of that. He took wedding pictures from her. He took the joy of her mom seeing her walk down the aisle. He took from her the joy of her mom experiencing her kids and becoming a grandmother. She had to name the things that he took from her because she couldn't just blanket forgive him for the murders because those didn't happen to her. She had to actually name the things that he took from her. And as she was talking and as I was sitting in this research, it occurred to me this idea about forgiveness that I had never thought of before, that withheld forgiveness exists because a debt is owed. Forgiveness is withheld because a debt is owed. I never considered that before. But isn't that what we do? And our petty little arguments, when we're mad at somebody, when they said something offensive to us, when our spouse hurt our feelings, when somebody we work with hurt our feelings and we give them the silent treatment, what are we waiting on? Waiting on an I'm sorry. The I'm sorry is the debt owed. You've offended me in this way. I will forgive you, but I'm gonna hold on to my forgiveness and I'm gonna hold on to this hurt until you salve it with an I'm sorry. That's the debt they owe. Isn't that so true? This person that murdered her mom and her brother took from her things. He owed her a debt and she couldn't offer the forgiveness until he reconciled that debt. Somebody owes us money, we can't really forgive them until they give us the money back. Someone hurt us in some profound way, we are withholding our forgiveness until they can make it right. When someone hurts us, they take from us our confidence or our security, our sense of self-worth or our innocence. We withhold that forgiveness until they can somehow offer the healing to make it right. And it makes sense to us to say, now you are forgiven. We withhold forgiveness because we are waiting on a payment for a debt that is owed. And isn't it interesting? I never thought about it before, but isn't it interesting how that's how Jesus words it in the Lord's prayer? In the versions that are more accurate word for word, it says, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. The language has been there all along. Before we can forgive someone, we have to acknowledge what the debt is that they owe us. What have you taken from me that I am trying to get back? What pain have you caused me that I need you to heal before I can offer you this forgiveness? That's why it was revolutionary for me to finally understand the freedom found in forgiveness and what biblical forgiveness really is. Biblical forgiveness says you are released from your debt because I trust Jesus to pay it for you. Biblical forgiveness says you are released from the debt that you owe me because I trust Jesus to pay it for you. You don't have to say you're sorry for the thing. You don't have to make me feel better. You don't have to heal my soul because I believe that Jesus is going to pay it better than you ever could. We withhold forgiveness for somebody. We're waiting for them to make us right, to make us whole, to make us feel better again, to give us back the confidence that they stole, to give us back the innocence that they took, to give us back the self-worth that they took from us. And when we forgive, we say, listen, I'm not going to hold you accountable for that debt anymore because I acknowledge that you can't even pay it and that Jesus is going to be way better at paying it than you are. And when Scripture says that we should forgive as God forgave us, isn't that how God forgave us? We offended Almighty God with something that we did, and we owed Him a death, that we owed Him a debt for our offense. And He says, no, no, no, you're released from that debt. You do not have to pay that because I have trusted my son Jesus to pay it on your behalf. And so when we forgive others, isn't it the same thing? When we can look at somebody who represents a life of hurt and pain and neglect and say, you know what? What you did was wrong. The way you treated me was not all right. And you have hurt me profoundly with the choices that you've made. And you owe me for that. But you're off the hook. I release you from that debt because I believe that my Savior can pay it better than you ever could. I don't need you to heal me because Jesus is going to do it for you. I don't need you to make me whole anymore because Jesus is going to make me whole. I think that there is freedom and power in forgiveness because we can finally acknowledge the things that I've been clinging to that I feel like you owe me to make me better again. I acknowledge you can never do that in the first place. So you're off the hook and Jesus is going to pay your debt because he's better at it anyways. That is biblical forgiveness. And my hope and prayer is that as a church and the different families and relationships represented here, that we would walk in that freedom of forgiveness. That we would acknowledge the person who hurt me, it was wrong. And they do owe me. No one's arguing that they don't. But they can never pay me in a way that's going to make me whole. And because of that, they're forgiven. And I'm going to trust Jesus to pay the debt that they owe me for that offense. So as we move into Christmas together, when you think about your lives and your families, first of all, if you're the one that needs to be forgiven because you were dumb, admit it. Make it easier for them. Go to them and say, you know, listen, I want to acknowledge that I owe you a debt and I'm gonna do everything I can to pay it, but I know it's not gonna be good enough and I'm sorry. More importantly, believers, if it is within your power to reconcile a relationship by picking up the phone or writing an email or grabbing a coffee and sitting down and saying, you know what? You hurt me and it's not right and it's not okay, but I've been waiting for you to pay a debt that you can't pay and you don't owe it to me anymore. I'm gonna go to Jesus for the healing that I need for this and I'm gonna love you and your own health too. Then let's do that. Let's have some reconciliations going on this month. Let's have some good conversations that happen this month. Let's pursue forgiveness as a church. And let's experience together the joy and the freedom of forgiveness. Let's pray. Father, we love you so much and are so grateful for you. For the way that you love us, for the way that you forgive us, for the way that you set us free from the things that we have done and the offenses that we have brought. Lord, for those in the room who are hurting, who have somebody in their life that it will just be a challenge to forgive, I pray they would first know and see and feel that you see them, that you are with them, and that you are walking in that pain with them. Give them the strength and the courage and the vision to see that the healing that they are waiting on can only ever come from you. And in your way and in your will, give them the strength to forgive. Reconcile relationships even in this room this morning, God. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen.
Thanks so much for being here this morning. It's good to be back with you. I missed last week on a little trip. You may have seen on social media that I had a mustache for that trip, which is why my beard is so thin today. I promise you, I'm trying to grow my beard back just as quickly as I possibly can so I don't look like the new youth pastor giving you sermons. Speaking of the youth pastor giving sermons, Kyle did an excellent job last week. I'm so grateful for him and his ability to fill in. He's on a fall retreat right now, so your applause means nothing with the students. So we're praying for a safe return and for life change there. I'm so excited to step into the Christmas season with you guys. I love that we're decorated, that we're singing the Christmas carols, that we're getting ready for Christmas. Of course, I love the Christmas season, the reminders and the time that we get to spend with friends and family. For me, it means going back home to Atlanta and getting extended time with friends and family there. And so Christmas is really a reminder of blessings. It's a celebratory time, and it's a time that we really, really enjoy and look forward to. But for those same reasons, Christmas for many people is hard. For those same reasons, because it's a time of family, because it's a time to reflect on blessings, because it's a time to celebrate, for many of us, Christmas is difficult. We know that Christmas and the holiday season is one of the most difficult seasons of the year for some folks. And so before we just jump into Christmas and everything that it is and all the joy of Christmas and rah-rah around here, I wanted to stop and take a minute and acknowledge that for some people, December is hard. For some people, this month is difficult because of old wounds or maybe new ones. This is going to be a difficult season for you. And if it is a difficult season for you, in a room this size with this many people, there are inevitably folks who are not looking forward to Christmas and all the reminders that it brings. And if that's you, I want you to know that we're praying for you, that we care about you, and that we see you. And let's not, in our own lives, just plow through with joy while we ignore the fact that this may be a difficult season for those around us. I would hate to do that as a church. For that reason, because this can be a little bit of a difficult season for some folks, I wanted to talk this morning about the joy of forgiveness because I believe that forgiveness can actually be a key that unlocks a more joyful holiday for the rest of us. I'll tell you where I had this idea. I thought about it in a way that I hadn't thought about it before. A couple weeks ago, I went and saw that new Mr. Rogers movie with Tom Hanks. I'm not going to ruin it for anybody, but you should really go see that movie. It was a really great movie. And forgiveness plays an integral role in that movie. And I began to think about it in ways that I hadn't thought of it before. And it actually made holiday seasons better for the people in the movie because forgiveness was extended. And so it occurs to me with a church family our size, it's entirely possible that some forgiveness received or some forgiveness extended could reunite some families, could help redeem some relationships, could very well be the key to unlocking a more joyful and reflective and grateful holiday season for many of us in the church. If not that, as we move forward, forgiveness is a principle that we all have to deal with. So this week is the joy of forgiveness. Next week is the joy of gratitude. And then after that, we're going to do the joy of Christmas. And then the last Sunday of the year is the joy of skipping church together because there is no church, okay? So we all get to experience that joy at the same time and in the same way. But I wanted to talk about forgiveness, not just because I feel like it's helpful for the holidays, but because the Bible makes a pretty big deal out of forgiveness. The Bible has a lot to say about this idea. There's actually almost 90 verses in the Bible that have the word forgive or forgiveness. And a lot of those talk about how God forgives us. A lot of those talk about why we are supposed to give others. And we're going to get to those verses that are represented here in a minute. But as I was looking into the topic of forgiveness, one of the things that I had not considered before is that forgiveness is such a big deal to God. It's so important to God, that he makes it a daily prayerful exercise for us. I had not really thought about forgiveness in that way until I got into what the Bible had to say on the topic, and I see in the Lord's Prayer that it says forgiveness should be a part of what we do every day. If you have a Bible, you can turn it over to Matthew 6, and you can see there Jesus is praying. The disciples have asked him, how do you pray? Like, we know how to pray, but you're praying, and clearly you know how to do it differently than we do, so how do you pray? This is not, we don't just recite these words every day. This is a model for how we should pray. And there's different elements of the prayer. It's very much worth exploring and discussing what are the different things that Jesus includes in this pattern of prayer. But one of the things that he includes is to acknowledge that we are forgiven by God and then to daily and prayerfully forgive those who have hurt us. And I never thought about it that way. I'm not sure that I would have somebody to forgive every day. I don't know that people are offending me or hurting me every day. But as I sat down and I thought about it and I tried to apply this this week, It's a worthwhile exercise to ask ourselves, what hurts am I holding on to? What things am I still grabbing on to? Who do I need to extend forgiveness to? Who am I still dragging through the mud? Who am I still keeping attached to myself in that moment when they weren't at their best? What things do I have to forgive? To God, forgiveness is such a big deal that he makes it a daily prayerful exercise because we'll see later, I believe that there's freedom found in forgiveness. And I actually think it would be a worthwhile exercise for us. It would make the sermon more practical and less ethereal if we would all in our heads kind of think, okay, if I were going to forgive somebody, who could I forgive? If somebody has hurt me, if I needed to walk up to somebody or write an email or make a phone call today and say, hey, listen, I just want you to know that this happened. It hurt me. I forgive you. Who would that be for you? Or would they just say, like, if you said, hey, I forgive you, would they be like, for what? That does not count. You got to have somebody that has hurt you in some way, and you can think about, man, if I were to call them and say, listen, I want you to know I'm not holding this against you anymore, who would that person be for you? I think that's a helpful exercise. As we think about that and we reflect on God's commandment, God's instruction to daily and prayerfully forgive others, it's important to note the motivation that the Bible gives. Because it doesn't just tell us that we should forgive, but it supplies us with a why. I said earlier there's about 90 verses that mention forgive or forgiveness. Most of those, a lot of those are verses about how God forgives us. But a lot of them are encouraging us to forgive others. And most of the time they have a motive there to forgive others that's common amongst all these verses. So we're going to look in our Bibles at Colossians 3.13. But as we look there, I want you to know that that is the archetypal verse on forgiveness. Colossians 3.13 is the archetypal verse on forgiveness. It is the verse. If you want to know, like, what does the Bible say about why we should forgive, that we should forgive, and why we should do it, turn to Colossians 3.13, and it's pretty much the summary verse of what the Bible has to say about this. And Colossians 3.13 says this. I'm going to start in 12. Put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another, and if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive. So if you wanted to ask, what does the Bible have to say about forgiveness? It tells me to forgive, but why should I do it? That's the verse. That's the archetypal verse that will tell us why we need to forgive. We forgive because God forgave us. You should forgive somebody else because God forgave you. And this isn't an unfamiliar principle for us. Even for those of us in the room who might not call themselves Christians. If you were here this morning, you wouldn't call yourself a believer. You're just kind of kicking the tires around. You're a spiritual person. Someone else invited you to come and you wanted to be nice and so you came. If that's you and you might not believe in the same God that we believe in, you can at least intellectually concede that if there is a God and that God is perfect, they are likely offended by our imperfection, right? That's not that big of a jump. If a God exists that is perfect, we have, in our imperfection, likely offended that God. And so that God has extended forgiveness to us. Now, for Christians, we know the story. We know the drill. We know that God sent His son to die for us because of our imperfection. And we know at times with our life and with our choices that we have trampled on that death, that we have presumed upon it. We all in the room, if you're a believer, I would be willing to bet everything I have that we've had this thought process. I shouldn't do this thing because it's not right, but I know God's going to forgive me anyways, so let's go. We've all had that thought. Even the nicest among us, even the sweetest, littlest old ladies have had this thought of, I know I shouldn't do this thing, but I know God's going to forgive me, so here I go. We've all presumed upon God's goodness and grace in that way, and in that way, disrespected the death of the Son that He sent for us. So the idea that we have offended God and that God has extended to us forgiveness is not a foreign one to a Christian. This is why, this is the reason we're told to forgive others, that we should forgive others. Why? Because God forgave us. There's even a parable about this. Jesus told a whole story about this that most of us know. There was a guy that owed the king, we'll say $500,000. He goes to the king and the king says, listen, I know you can't pay $500,000, so you're good. Like you don't owe me anything. The guy's relieved. He thought he was gonna get killed or put in prison. He's incredibly relieved. He goes and as he's leaving, he bumps into another guy that owes him 50 bucks. And he says, hey, you owe me 50 bucks. And the guy says, I'm sorry, I don't have $50 right now. And he said, you're going to jail. And he calls the cops and he puts them in jail. The king finds out about this guy and he throws the guy that owed him $500,000 in jail. It's a very quick version of the parable. And the parable, the point of the parable is this guy was forgiven for a $500,000 debt. And because he was forgiven of so great a debt, he should have been willing to forgive this guy 50 bucks. And so we forgive the $50 offenses because we recognize that our offenses are more than that. And I would say that this motivation is the right motivation for most offenses. I want to talk about two different kinds of forgiveness today. I want to call this kind of forgiveness immediate forgiveness. Immediate forgiveness is the right response for most offenses. Immediate, thoughtful, daily, prayerful forgiveness is the right response for most offenses. When people do something to harm us, they do something to wrong us, they say something mean when they lash out, they act gruff. I had a guy in traffic yesterday that flipped me off. I have no idea why. I legitimately don't. I was just driving along and I came up behind him and then I went around him and he was doing five miles an hour under the speed limit and I went around him and he hung me the bird. And I thought, I don't understand what just happened. I really wanted to stop my car and talk to him. Be like, bro, like I'm not even mad. Just what's going on? That situation, immediate forgiveness. Don't care about that guy. There was something going on in his day that wasn't happening in my day. I hope it helped him out to relieve his stress in that manner. It doesn't matter to me. Most offenses can be forgiven immediately. As a matter of fact, if you think of the people that have hurt you or hurts that you might be carrying right now, I bet if you see what they did to you, the hurt that they caused you in light of the hurt that you've caused others, that you could probably extend them grace. I think about our spouses. If you're married, there are so many, you're not going to believe this. You're not going to believe it when I tell you this. Some of y'all know Sweet Jen, and you know how great she is. There are some things that she does that get on my nerves, and I have to just give her grace for, I have to forgive her. But every time I do, I try to think of all the things that she's forgiving me for that she doesn't even tell me about. And it makes it much easier to forgive. And so this idea that grace and forgiveness have been extended to us, and if we'll just be empathetic with whoever hurt us, we can extend grace and forgiveness to them too. That's the right response for most offenses. And I would say to you this morning, if it's possible for you in your life with the people who have hurt you, if it's possible to extend immediate forgiveness to them, then it's right and good for you to do it. And you should. Scripture tells us you should. But even as I say that, I think that there are some people here who would say, buddy, you don't understand the way that I've been hurt. You don't understand what's happened to me. What's happened to me was not a $50 offense. There are some of you that when I started talking about the idea of forgiveness, it popped right into your head who has hurt you and how they've hurt you. And it's entirely possible that you can hear me talking up here and be like, that's well and good to just immediately forgive somebody, but buddy, I'm not there yet. Nate, I can't handle that. If you knew what had happened to me, you might even think it's well and good for you to preach that. That's not fair for you to say that I should just go and forgive someone. You don't know what happened. You can't relate. You don't understand. And to that, I would say you're right. I have to admit that I can't relate. There are no great offenses in my life. I've never been faced with a challenge of difficult forgiveness. I've never been faced with the challenge of what I'm calling having to offer processed forgiveness. Some offenses require processed forgiveness. Immediate forgiveness is just not practical. It's just not going to happen. The hurt is too deep. The wound is too profound. I just can't turn around and go, you know what? I forgive you. My life is wrecked, but I forgive you because God tells me to. That's just not a practical thing to do. And I want to acknowledge this morning that some offenses require processed forgiveness. I think of a friend of mine who, when he was eight years old, his dad left the house, left him and his brother and his sister and his mom. He grew up without that dad. He was saddled with a stepdad who didn't care about him. In adulthood, his dad passed away early. He was the only one of his siblings who went to the funeral. And he had to sit there and look at this man who caused him a life of pain and abuse and neglect, who had never said a kind word to him, but he showed up at his funeral anyways, and he had to find a way to forgive that man so that he could move on with his life. That's a lifetime of neglect. I've never had to forgive like that. And I admit that. Some of y'all have. Some of y'all are walking through that process. And I want you to know that I think the Bible makes space for this process forgiveness. If you look in Luke 17, Jesus is telling us that we should forgive our brother or our sister who offends us. But he says, pay attention to yourselves. If your brother sins, rebuke him. Let him know, hey, that's wrong. And if he repents, forgiven. There's this admission in the text and in the teaching of Jesus that sometimes we're not ready to forgive right away. Sometimes there's reasons to withhold forgiveness. Sometimes we're waiting on something before we offer the forgiveness that we're instructed. And I want to be a voice that tells you, that's all right. If you can't get over it right away, that's all right. If the hurt is too deep or too profound, that's okay. You're allowed some processed forgiveness, but we should arrive there eventually. And because I've never had to walk through that deep of a challenge in my own forgiveness, I turned in my research to some people who had and tried to read stories and listen to talks about people who had overcome things in their life. And I ran across a girl, oddly enough, named Sarah Montana. That's a real name. I thought it was fake when I saw it. It's legit. Her name is Sarah Montana, and she gave a TED Talk. The details of that TED Talk are on your bulletin. So if you want to go home and watch it, you can. If you are one that is carrying a deep pain and is struggling through the idea of forgiveness, I think you'll find it incredibly helpful. But in that talk, she shares her story. And her story is, at the age of 22, she had just graduated college, and she was about to start her job and her career working at a hedge fund when she received word that a kid that she had grown up around in their neighborhood had come into their home and murdered her brother and her mom. Instant, deep, and profound hurt. And it was his fault. And so she shared her story and the process of forgiveness. And one of the things she said was that because she believed it to be the right thing, because she thought it would bring her some sort of healing, because she felt pressure from other people to go ahead and do this, she forgave him right away. She said publicly that she forgave him. She came out on the news and said that she forgave him. But she realized years later, she said the words, but she never really forgave him. And in that way, she kept him tethered to her and her life stayed tethered to that moment. And she desperately wanted to be able to forgive him. She even noted that she searched the Bible and she said, the Bible seems real high on forgiveness. It seems to talk really highly of it, but there's not a lot on how to do it. And so she began this exploration on how do I actually forgive? Like, what are the things that I have to do or say? What are the magic words? And in her exploration, she came upon this truth. It's actually an old Jewish truth. It's a teaching of Judaism that you cannot forgive a murderer for the murder because that murder didn't happen to you. It happened to whoever it was that you love. So you have to forgive them. You have to actually name the things that they took from you and forgive them for those. And so for her, she was able to start listing them off. That day, that kid took from her a friendship that she wanted to enjoy for her whole life with her brother that you cannot replicate. You cannot replicate. If siblings are close, you cannot replicate that relationship. And he took that from her. She had to forgive him of that. He took wedding pictures from her. He took the joy of her mom seeing her walk down the aisle. He took from her the joy of her mom experiencing her kids and becoming a grandmother. She had to name the things that he took from her because she couldn't just blanket forgive him for the murders because those didn't happen to her. She had to actually name the things that he took from her. And as she was talking and as I was sitting in this research, it occurred to me this idea about forgiveness that I had never thought of before, that withheld forgiveness exists because a debt is owed. Forgiveness is withheld because a debt is owed. I never considered that before. But isn't that what we do? And our petty little arguments, when we're mad at somebody, when they said something offensive to us, when our spouse hurt our feelings, when somebody we work with hurt our feelings and we give them the silent treatment, what are we waiting on? Waiting on an I'm sorry. The I'm sorry is the debt owed. You've offended me in this way. I will forgive you, but I'm gonna hold on to my forgiveness and I'm gonna hold on to this hurt until you salve it with an I'm sorry. That's the debt they owe. Isn't that so true? This person that murdered her mom and her brother took from her things. He owed her a debt and she couldn't offer the forgiveness until he reconciled that debt. Somebody owes us money, we can't really forgive them until they give us the money back. Someone hurt us in some profound way, we are withholding our forgiveness until they can make it right. When someone hurts us, they take from us our confidence or our security, our sense of self-worth or our innocence. We withhold that forgiveness until they can somehow offer the healing to make it right. And it makes sense to us to say, now you are forgiven. We withhold forgiveness because we are waiting on a payment for a debt that is owed. And isn't it interesting? I never thought about it before, but isn't it interesting how that's how Jesus words it in the Lord's prayer? In the versions that are more accurate word for word, it says, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. The language has been there all along. Before we can forgive someone, we have to acknowledge what the debt is that they owe us. What have you taken from me that I am trying to get back? What pain have you caused me that I need you to heal before I can offer you this forgiveness? That's why it was revolutionary for me to finally understand the freedom found in forgiveness and what biblical forgiveness really is. Biblical forgiveness says you are released from your debt because I trust Jesus to pay it for you. Biblical forgiveness says you are released from the debt that you owe me because I trust Jesus to pay it for you. You don't have to say you're sorry for the thing. You don't have to make me feel better. You don't have to heal my soul because I believe that Jesus is going to pay it better than you ever could. We withhold forgiveness for somebody. We're waiting for them to make us right, to make us whole, to make us feel better again, to give us back the confidence that they stole, to give us back the innocence that they took, to give us back the self-worth that they took from us. And when we forgive, we say, listen, I'm not going to hold you accountable for that debt anymore because I acknowledge that you can't even pay it and that Jesus is going to be way better at paying it than you are. And when Scripture says that we should forgive as God forgave us, isn't that how God forgave us? We offended Almighty God with something that we did, and we owed Him a death, that we owed Him a debt for our offense. And He says, no, no, no, you're released from that debt. You do not have to pay that because I have trusted my son Jesus to pay it on your behalf. And so when we forgive others, isn't it the same thing? When we can look at somebody who represents a life of hurt and pain and neglect and say, you know what? What you did was wrong. The way you treated me was not all right. And you have hurt me profoundly with the choices that you've made. And you owe me for that. But you're off the hook. I release you from that debt because I believe that my Savior can pay it better than you ever could. I don't need you to heal me because Jesus is going to do it for you. I don't need you to make me whole anymore because Jesus is going to make me whole. I think that there is freedom and power in forgiveness because we can finally acknowledge the things that I've been clinging to that I feel like you owe me to make me better again. I acknowledge you can never do that in the first place. So you're off the hook and Jesus is going to pay your debt because he's better at it anyways. That is biblical forgiveness. And my hope and prayer is that as a church and the different families and relationships represented here, that we would walk in that freedom of forgiveness. That we would acknowledge the person who hurt me, it was wrong. And they do owe me. No one's arguing that they don't. But they can never pay me in a way that's going to make me whole. And because of that, they're forgiven. And I'm going to trust Jesus to pay the debt that they owe me for that offense. So as we move into Christmas together, when you think about your lives and your families, first of all, if you're the one that needs to be forgiven because you were dumb, admit it. Make it easier for them. Go to them and say, you know, listen, I want to acknowledge that I owe you a debt and I'm gonna do everything I can to pay it, but I know it's not gonna be good enough and I'm sorry. More importantly, believers, if it is within your power to reconcile a relationship by picking up the phone or writing an email or grabbing a coffee and sitting down and saying, you know what? You hurt me and it's not right and it's not okay, but I've been waiting for you to pay a debt that you can't pay and you don't owe it to me anymore. I'm gonna go to Jesus for the healing that I need for this and I'm gonna love you and your own health too. Then let's do that. Let's have some reconciliations going on this month. Let's have some good conversations that happen this month. Let's pursue forgiveness as a church. And let's experience together the joy and the freedom of forgiveness. Let's pray. Father, we love you so much and are so grateful for you. For the way that you love us, for the way that you forgive us, for the way that you set us free from the things that we have done and the offenses that we have brought. Lord, for those in the room who are hurting, who have somebody in their life that it will just be a challenge to forgive, I pray they would first know and see and feel that you see them, that you are with them, and that you are walking in that pain with them. Give them the strength and the courage and the vision to see that the healing that they are waiting on can only ever come from you. And in your way and in your will, give them the strength to forgive. Reconcile relationships even in this room this morning, God. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen.
Thanks so much for being here this morning. It's good to be back with you. I missed last week on a little trip. You may have seen on social media that I had a mustache for that trip, which is why my beard is so thin today. I promise you, I'm trying to grow my beard back just as quickly as I possibly can so I don't look like the new youth pastor giving you sermons. Speaking of the youth pastor giving sermons, Kyle did an excellent job last week. I'm so grateful for him and his ability to fill in. He's on a fall retreat right now, so your applause means nothing with the students. So we're praying for a safe return and for life change there. I'm so excited to step into the Christmas season with you guys. I love that we're decorated, that we're singing the Christmas carols, that we're getting ready for Christmas. Of course, I love the Christmas season, the reminders and the time that we get to spend with friends and family. For me, it means going back home to Atlanta and getting extended time with friends and family there. And so Christmas is really a reminder of blessings. It's a celebratory time, and it's a time that we really, really enjoy and look forward to. But for those same reasons, Christmas for many people is hard. For those same reasons, because it's a time of family, because it's a time to reflect on blessings, because it's a time to celebrate, for many of us, Christmas is difficult. We know that Christmas and the holiday season is one of the most difficult seasons of the year for some folks. And so before we just jump into Christmas and everything that it is and all the joy of Christmas and rah-rah around here, I wanted to stop and take a minute and acknowledge that for some people, December is hard. For some people, this month is difficult because of old wounds or maybe new ones. This is going to be a difficult season for you. And if it is a difficult season for you, in a room this size with this many people, there are inevitably folks who are not looking forward to Christmas and all the reminders that it brings. And if that's you, I want you to know that we're praying for you, that we care about you, and that we see you. And let's not, in our own lives, just plow through with joy while we ignore the fact that this may be a difficult season for those around us. I would hate to do that as a church. For that reason, because this can be a little bit of a difficult season for some folks, I wanted to talk this morning about the joy of forgiveness because I believe that forgiveness can actually be a key that unlocks a more joyful holiday for the rest of us. I'll tell you where I had this idea. I thought about it in a way that I hadn't thought about it before. A couple weeks ago, I went and saw that new Mr. Rogers movie with Tom Hanks. I'm not going to ruin it for anybody, but you should really go see that movie. It was a really great movie. And forgiveness plays an integral role in that movie. And I began to think about it in ways that I hadn't thought of it before. And it actually made holiday seasons better for the people in the movie because forgiveness was extended. And so it occurs to me with a church family our size, it's entirely possible that some forgiveness received or some forgiveness extended could reunite some families, could help redeem some relationships, could very well be the key to unlocking a more joyful and reflective and grateful holiday season for many of us in the church. If not that, as we move forward, forgiveness is a principle that we all have to deal with. So this week is the joy of forgiveness. Next week is the joy of gratitude. And then after that, we're going to do the joy of Christmas. And then the last Sunday of the year is the joy of skipping church together because there is no church, okay? So we all get to experience that joy at the same time and in the same way. But I wanted to talk about forgiveness, not just because I feel like it's helpful for the holidays, but because the Bible makes a pretty big deal out of forgiveness. The Bible has a lot to say about this idea. There's actually almost 90 verses in the Bible that have the word forgive or forgiveness. And a lot of those talk about how God forgives us. A lot of those talk about why we are supposed to give others. And we're going to get to those verses that are represented here in a minute. But as I was looking into the topic of forgiveness, one of the things that I had not considered before is that forgiveness is such a big deal to God. It's so important to God, that he makes it a daily prayerful exercise for us. I had not really thought about forgiveness in that way until I got into what the Bible had to say on the topic, and I see in the Lord's Prayer that it says forgiveness should be a part of what we do every day. If you have a Bible, you can turn it over to Matthew 6, and you can see there Jesus is praying. The disciples have asked him, how do you pray? Like, we know how to pray, but you're praying, and clearly you know how to do it differently than we do, so how do you pray? This is not, we don't just recite these words every day. This is a model for how we should pray. And there's different elements of the prayer. It's very much worth exploring and discussing what are the different things that Jesus includes in this pattern of prayer. But one of the things that he includes is to acknowledge that we are forgiven by God and then to daily and prayerfully forgive those who have hurt us. And I never thought about it that way. I'm not sure that I would have somebody to forgive every day. I don't know that people are offending me or hurting me every day. But as I sat down and I thought about it and I tried to apply this this week, It's a worthwhile exercise to ask ourselves, what hurts am I holding on to? What things am I still grabbing on to? Who do I need to extend forgiveness to? Who am I still dragging through the mud? Who am I still keeping attached to myself in that moment when they weren't at their best? What things do I have to forgive? To God, forgiveness is such a big deal that he makes it a daily prayerful exercise because we'll see later, I believe that there's freedom found in forgiveness. And I actually think it would be a worthwhile exercise for us. It would make the sermon more practical and less ethereal if we would all in our heads kind of think, okay, if I were going to forgive somebody, who could I forgive? If somebody has hurt me, if I needed to walk up to somebody or write an email or make a phone call today and say, hey, listen, I just want you to know that this happened. It hurt me. I forgive you. Who would that be for you? Or would they just say, like, if you said, hey, I forgive you, would they be like, for what? That does not count. You got to have somebody that has hurt you in some way, and you can think about, man, if I were to call them and say, listen, I want you to know I'm not holding this against you anymore, who would that person be for you? I think that's a helpful exercise. As we think about that and we reflect on God's commandment, God's instruction to daily and prayerfully forgive others, it's important to note the motivation that the Bible gives. Because it doesn't just tell us that we should forgive, but it supplies us with a why. I said earlier there's about 90 verses that mention forgive or forgiveness. Most of those, a lot of those are verses about how God forgives us. But a lot of them are encouraging us to forgive others. And most of the time they have a motive there to forgive others that's common amongst all these verses. So we're going to look in our Bibles at Colossians 3.13. But as we look there, I want you to know that that is the archetypal verse on forgiveness. Colossians 3.13 is the archetypal verse on forgiveness. It is the verse. If you want to know, like, what does the Bible say about why we should forgive, that we should forgive, and why we should do it, turn to Colossians 3.13, and it's pretty much the summary verse of what the Bible has to say about this. And Colossians 3.13 says this. I'm going to start in 12. Put on then as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another, and if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other as the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive. So if you wanted to ask, what does the Bible have to say about forgiveness? It tells me to forgive, but why should I do it? That's the verse. That's the archetypal verse that will tell us why we need to forgive. We forgive because God forgave us. You should forgive somebody else because God forgave you. And this isn't an unfamiliar principle for us. Even for those of us in the room who might not call themselves Christians. If you were here this morning, you wouldn't call yourself a believer. You're just kind of kicking the tires around. You're a spiritual person. Someone else invited you to come and you wanted to be nice and so you came. If that's you and you might not believe in the same God that we believe in, you can at least intellectually concede that if there is a God and that God is perfect, they are likely offended by our imperfection, right? That's not that big of a jump. If a God exists that is perfect, we have, in our imperfection, likely offended that God. And so that God has extended forgiveness to us. Now, for Christians, we know the story. We know the drill. We know that God sent His son to die for us because of our imperfection. And we know at times with our life and with our choices that we have trampled on that death, that we have presumed upon it. We all in the room, if you're a believer, I would be willing to bet everything I have that we've had this thought process. I shouldn't do this thing because it's not right, but I know God's going to forgive me anyways, so let's go. We've all had that thought. Even the nicest among us, even the sweetest, littlest old ladies have had this thought of, I know I shouldn't do this thing, but I know God's going to forgive me, so here I go. We've all presumed upon God's goodness and grace in that way, and in that way, disrespected the death of the Son that He sent for us. So the idea that we have offended God and that God has extended to us forgiveness is not a foreign one to a Christian. This is why, this is the reason we're told to forgive others, that we should forgive others. Why? Because God forgave us. There's even a parable about this. Jesus told a whole story about this that most of us know. There was a guy that owed the king, we'll say $500,000. He goes to the king and the king says, listen, I know you can't pay $500,000, so you're good. Like you don't owe me anything. The guy's relieved. He thought he was gonna get killed or put in prison. He's incredibly relieved. He goes and as he's leaving, he bumps into another guy that owes him 50 bucks. And he says, hey, you owe me 50 bucks. And the guy says, I'm sorry, I don't have $50 right now. And he said, you're going to jail. And he calls the cops and he puts them in jail. The king finds out about this guy and he throws the guy that owed him $500,000 in jail. It's a very quick version of the parable. And the parable, the point of the parable is this guy was forgiven for a $500,000 debt. And because he was forgiven of so great a debt, he should have been willing to forgive this guy 50 bucks. And so we forgive the $50 offenses because we recognize that our offenses are more than that. And I would say that this motivation is the right motivation for most offenses. I want to talk about two different kinds of forgiveness today. I want to call this kind of forgiveness immediate forgiveness. Immediate forgiveness is the right response for most offenses. Immediate, thoughtful, daily, prayerful forgiveness is the right response for most offenses. When people do something to harm us, they do something to wrong us, they say something mean when they lash out, they act gruff. I had a guy in traffic yesterday that flipped me off. I have no idea why. I legitimately don't. I was just driving along and I came up behind him and then I went around him and he was doing five miles an hour under the speed limit and I went around him and he hung me the bird. And I thought, I don't understand what just happened. I really wanted to stop my car and talk to him. Be like, bro, like I'm not even mad. Just what's going on? That situation, immediate forgiveness. Don't care about that guy. There was something going on in his day that wasn't happening in my day. I hope it helped him out to relieve his stress in that manner. It doesn't matter to me. Most offenses can be forgiven immediately. As a matter of fact, if you think of the people that have hurt you or hurts that you might be carrying right now, I bet if you see what they did to you, the hurt that they caused you in light of the hurt that you've caused others, that you could probably extend them grace. I think about our spouses. If you're married, there are so many, you're not going to believe this. You're not going to believe it when I tell you this. Some of y'all know Sweet Jen, and you know how great she is. There are some things that she does that get on my nerves, and I have to just give her grace for, I have to forgive her. But every time I do, I try to think of all the things that she's forgiving me for that she doesn't even tell me about. And it makes it much easier to forgive. And so this idea that grace and forgiveness have been extended to us, and if we'll just be empathetic with whoever hurt us, we can extend grace and forgiveness to them too. That's the right response for most offenses. And I would say to you this morning, if it's possible for you in your life with the people who have hurt you, if it's possible to extend immediate forgiveness to them, then it's right and good for you to do it. And you should. Scripture tells us you should. But even as I say that, I think that there are some people here who would say, buddy, you don't understand the way that I've been hurt. You don't understand what's happened to me. What's happened to me was not a $50 offense. There are some of you that when I started talking about the idea of forgiveness, it popped right into your head who has hurt you and how they've hurt you. And it's entirely possible that you can hear me talking up here and be like, that's well and good to just immediately forgive somebody, but buddy, I'm not there yet. Nate, I can't handle that. If you knew what had happened to me, you might even think it's well and good for you to preach that. That's not fair for you to say that I should just go and forgive someone. You don't know what happened. You can't relate. You don't understand. And to that, I would say you're right. I have to admit that I can't relate. There are no great offenses in my life. I've never been faced with a challenge of difficult forgiveness. I've never been faced with the challenge of what I'm calling having to offer processed forgiveness. Some offenses require processed forgiveness. Immediate forgiveness is just not practical. It's just not going to happen. The hurt is too deep. The wound is too profound. I just can't turn around and go, you know what? I forgive you. My life is wrecked, but I forgive you because God tells me to. That's just not a practical thing to do. And I want to acknowledge this morning that some offenses require processed forgiveness. I think of a friend of mine who, when he was eight years old, his dad left the house, left him and his brother and his sister and his mom. He grew up without that dad. He was saddled with a stepdad who didn't care about him. In adulthood, his dad passed away early. He was the only one of his siblings who went to the funeral. And he had to sit there and look at this man who caused him a life of pain and abuse and neglect, who had never said a kind word to him, but he showed up at his funeral anyways, and he had to find a way to forgive that man so that he could move on with his life. That's a lifetime of neglect. I've never had to forgive like that. And I admit that. Some of y'all have. Some of y'all are walking through that process. And I want you to know that I think the Bible makes space for this process forgiveness. If you look in Luke 17, Jesus is telling us that we should forgive our brother or our sister who offends us. But he says, pay attention to yourselves. If your brother sins, rebuke him. Let him know, hey, that's wrong. And if he repents, forgiven. There's this admission in the text and in the teaching of Jesus that sometimes we're not ready to forgive right away. Sometimes there's reasons to withhold forgiveness. Sometimes we're waiting on something before we offer the forgiveness that we're instructed. And I want to be a voice that tells you, that's all right. If you can't get over it right away, that's all right. If the hurt is too deep or too profound, that's okay. You're allowed some processed forgiveness, but we should arrive there eventually. And because I've never had to walk through that deep of a challenge in my own forgiveness, I turned in my research to some people who had and tried to read stories and listen to talks about people who had overcome things in their life. And I ran across a girl, oddly enough, named Sarah Montana. That's a real name. I thought it was fake when I saw it. It's legit. Her name is Sarah Montana, and she gave a TED Talk. The details of that TED Talk are on your bulletin. So if you want to go home and watch it, you can. If you are one that is carrying a deep pain and is struggling through the idea of forgiveness, I think you'll find it incredibly helpful. But in that talk, she shares her story. And her story is, at the age of 22, she had just graduated college, and she was about to start her job and her career working at a hedge fund when she received word that a kid that she had grown up around in their neighborhood had come into their home and murdered her brother and her mom. Instant, deep, and profound hurt. And it was his fault. And so she shared her story and the process of forgiveness. And one of the things she said was that because she believed it to be the right thing, because she thought it would bring her some sort of healing, because she felt pressure from other people to go ahead and do this, she forgave him right away. She said publicly that she forgave him. She came out on the news and said that she forgave him. But she realized years later, she said the words, but she never really forgave him. And in that way, she kept him tethered to her and her life stayed tethered to that moment. And she desperately wanted to be able to forgive him. She even noted that she searched the Bible and she said, the Bible seems real high on forgiveness. It seems to talk really highly of it, but there's not a lot on how to do it. And so she began this exploration on how do I actually forgive? Like, what are the things that I have to do or say? What are the magic words? And in her exploration, she came upon this truth. It's actually an old Jewish truth. It's a teaching of Judaism that you cannot forgive a murderer for the murder because that murder didn't happen to you. It happened to whoever it was that you love. So you have to forgive them. You have to actually name the things that they took from you and forgive them for those. And so for her, she was able to start listing them off. That day, that kid took from her a friendship that she wanted to enjoy for her whole life with her brother that you cannot replicate. You cannot replicate. If siblings are close, you cannot replicate that relationship. And he took that from her. She had to forgive him of that. He took wedding pictures from her. He took the joy of her mom seeing her walk down the aisle. He took from her the joy of her mom experiencing her kids and becoming a grandmother. She had to name the things that he took from her because she couldn't just blanket forgive him for the murders because those didn't happen to her. She had to actually name the things that he took from her. And as she was talking and as I was sitting in this research, it occurred to me this idea about forgiveness that I had never thought of before, that withheld forgiveness exists because a debt is owed. Forgiveness is withheld because a debt is owed. I never considered that before. But isn't that what we do? And our petty little arguments, when we're mad at somebody, when they said something offensive to us, when our spouse hurt our feelings, when somebody we work with hurt our feelings and we give them the silent treatment, what are we waiting on? Waiting on an I'm sorry. The I'm sorry is the debt owed. You've offended me in this way. I will forgive you, but I'm gonna hold on to my forgiveness and I'm gonna hold on to this hurt until you salve it with an I'm sorry. That's the debt they owe. Isn't that so true? This person that murdered her mom and her brother took from her things. He owed her a debt and she couldn't offer the forgiveness until he reconciled that debt. Somebody owes us money, we can't really forgive them until they give us the money back. Someone hurt us in some profound way, we are withholding our forgiveness until they can make it right. When someone hurts us, they take from us our confidence or our security, our sense of self-worth or our innocence. We withhold that forgiveness until they can somehow offer the healing to make it right. And it makes sense to us to say, now you are forgiven. We withhold forgiveness because we are waiting on a payment for a debt that is owed. And isn't it interesting? I never thought about it before, but isn't it interesting how that's how Jesus words it in the Lord's prayer? In the versions that are more accurate word for word, it says, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. The language has been there all along. Before we can forgive someone, we have to acknowledge what the debt is that they owe us. What have you taken from me that I am trying to get back? What pain have you caused me that I need you to heal before I can offer you this forgiveness? That's why it was revolutionary for me to finally understand the freedom found in forgiveness and what biblical forgiveness really is. Biblical forgiveness says you are released from your debt because I trust Jesus to pay it for you. Biblical forgiveness says you are released from the debt that you owe me because I trust Jesus to pay it for you. You don't have to say you're sorry for the thing. You don't have to make me feel better. You don't have to heal my soul because I believe that Jesus is going to pay it better than you ever could. We withhold forgiveness for somebody. We're waiting for them to make us right, to make us whole, to make us feel better again, to give us back the confidence that they stole, to give us back the innocence that they took, to give us back the self-worth that they took from us. And when we forgive, we say, listen, I'm not going to hold you accountable for that debt anymore because I acknowledge that you can't even pay it and that Jesus is going to be way better at paying it than you are. And when Scripture says that we should forgive as God forgave us, isn't that how God forgave us? We offended Almighty God with something that we did, and we owed Him a death, that we owed Him a debt for our offense. And He says, no, no, no, you're released from that debt. You do not have to pay that because I have trusted my son Jesus to pay it on your behalf. And so when we forgive others, isn't it the same thing? When we can look at somebody who represents a life of hurt and pain and neglect and say, you know what? What you did was wrong. The way you treated me was not all right. And you have hurt me profoundly with the choices that you've made. And you owe me for that. But you're off the hook. I release you from that debt because I believe that my Savior can pay it better than you ever could. I don't need you to heal me because Jesus is going to do it for you. I don't need you to make me whole anymore because Jesus is going to make me whole. I think that there is freedom and power in forgiveness because we can finally acknowledge the things that I've been clinging to that I feel like you owe me to make me better again. I acknowledge you can never do that in the first place. So you're off the hook and Jesus is going to pay your debt because he's better at it anyways. That is biblical forgiveness. And my hope and prayer is that as a church and the different families and relationships represented here, that we would walk in that freedom of forgiveness. That we would acknowledge the person who hurt me, it was wrong. And they do owe me. No one's arguing that they don't. But they can never pay me in a way that's going to make me whole. And because of that, they're forgiven. And I'm going to trust Jesus to pay the debt that they owe me for that offense. So as we move into Christmas together, when you think about your lives and your families, first of all, if you're the one that needs to be forgiven because you were dumb, admit it. Make it easier for them. Go to them and say, you know, listen, I want to acknowledge that I owe you a debt and I'm gonna do everything I can to pay it, but I know it's not gonna be good enough and I'm sorry. More importantly, believers, if it is within your power to reconcile a relationship by picking up the phone or writing an email or grabbing a coffee and sitting down and saying, you know what? You hurt me and it's not right and it's not okay, but I've been waiting for you to pay a debt that you can't pay and you don't owe it to me anymore. I'm gonna go to Jesus for the healing that I need for this and I'm gonna love you and your own health too. Then let's do that. Let's have some reconciliations going on this month. Let's have some good conversations that happen this month. Let's pursue forgiveness as a church. And let's experience together the joy and the freedom of forgiveness. Let's pray. Father, we love you so much and are so grateful for you. For the way that you love us, for the way that you forgive us, for the way that you set us free from the things that we have done and the offenses that we have brought. Lord, for those in the room who are hurting, who have somebody in their life that it will just be a challenge to forgive, I pray they would first know and see and feel that you see them, that you are with them, and that you are walking in that pain with them. Give them the strength and the courage and the vision to see that the healing that they are waiting on can only ever come from you. And in your way and in your will, give them the strength to forgive. Reconcile relationships even in this room this morning, God. It's in your son's name we ask. Amen.
Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning. We'll be reading from Matthew chapter 6 this morning. This, then, is how you should pray. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we have also forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you get to be the senior pastor here. Congratulations to Tar Heel fans. Please be humble about it, lest you become unbearable to your Christian brothers and sisters. That was a heck of a game last night. Yes, yes. That's good. That was some very tepid applause there. I know you feel bigger than that, but you're being humble as we speak. We have been going through our Lent series. This is, I believe, part six of the series, and I hope that you have been keeping up with the devotionals, as I say, every week and reading and being encouraged by those and by the other folks in the church as you've gone through those. This week, we arrive at the topic of forgiveness, and we've been kind of walking through that all week. Hopefully, as you've read the devotionals, you've thought about forgiveness in your own life. I think when we arrive at the topic of forgiveness, we can't help but wonder, do we owe some forgiveness? Whenever I encounter that topic of forgiveness, whenever I see the word, whenever I'm challenged by scripture, whenever I'm talked about how God has forgiven me so I should forgive others, I immediately think, who in my life am I holding a grudge against? Who am I withholding forgiveness from? And I would bet that most of us, when we hear that idea, begin to think about who in our life have we had to forgive? Where have we had a difficult path to forgiveness? Is there anybody in my life that I need to work towards forgiving now? And so with that in mind, I wanted to kind of talk about the challenge of forgiveness and the instructions that we find in the Bible concerning forgiveness. And the best place, I think, to start is with the very words of Jesus. We're going to allow Jesus to frame up our discussion on forgiveness this morning. The Bible in the Old Testament, New Testament, all throughout it has a ton to say about forgiveness. But again, I think if we can go to Jesus and read his very words and what he has to say about it, that that's the best framework for the discussion that you and I need to have about forgiveness as we rest on that topic this morning. So I would first look at two different passages, two different things that Jesus says about forgiveness that are really in harmony with a lot of other teachings throughout scripture about forgiveness. The first is the one that Jacob just so eloquently read a few minutes ago. I don't know if you've noticed it before. Most of us know the Lord's Prayer, and you identified that as the Lord's Prayer as soon as he started to read, right? But in Matthew, when Jesus finishes the Lord's prayer, which is where Jacob was reading from, he does a little bit of commentary. He has some comments to make about it. And we read those this morning, but I'm not sure if we heard it or if you've paid attention to those before. So I would call our attention back to the way that Jesus comments on the prayer that he just prayed. Because part of that prayer is, Father, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. At least that's how I memorized it growing up in the King's English. But sometimes forgive us and then help us forgive other people. So Jesus says this after that in verse 14, for if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your father will not forgive your sins. So this is a pretty stark and interesting teaching. And I'll be honest with you, I don't know how this works theologically necessarily and intertwines with the doctrine of salvation. I just know that when, that Jesus himself says that if we will not forgive other people, then our Father in heaven will not forgive us, which is pretty stark. That leaves us very little option, right? So forgiveness immediately we see is required. It is not optional. And then later in the passage, or later in that same book, Jesus is having a conversation with his disciple Peter. And Peter asks about this forgiveness. Surely by now Peter knows that forgiveness is not optional, that if we do not forgive other people in our life, then God does not forgive us. And that seems like a place that we don't want to be in. But Peter asks, certainly there has to be a limit to the forgiveness that we are instructed to offer to others. But to that, Jesus says this in Matthew 18, verses 21 and 22. Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times? Jesus answered, I tell you, not seven times, but 77 times. Some translations say, but 70 times seven. And see, we need to give Peter a little bit of credit. He says, Jesus, how many times should I forgive someone for sinning against me, for wronging me, for harming me? Up to seven times? Which feels very generous, if we're being honest about it. Someone slaps you in the face seven times in a row. You're just going to keep forgiving them? A business partner steals from you. Maybe you can forgive them once. You're going to, up to seven times, you're going to do that? Your neighbor backs into your mailbox. One is a whoopsie, but three, come on, man, knock it off. Like seven times is pretty generous. And Jesus says, no, no, not seven times, but up to 70 times seven, up to 77 times, which is a figurative way of saying as often as they require it. No, you forgive others as often as they require your forgiveness. And when we look at these two teachings from Jesus on forgiveness, these two statements, we have no choice but to conclude this, that unlimited forgiveness for the Christian is not optional. If you're here this morning and you wouldn't call yourself a believer, I would say that the good part of that is that you don't have to forgive anybody if you don't want to. You can just hold grudges, which may be nice. But for the believer, unlimited forgiveness is not optional. And I think that that's important to say out loud and to acknowledge. Because so often, we Christians have a habit of kind of viewing instructions that we're given as things that maybe we're supposed to do. Maybe we can try to do. Maybe one day I'll get there. Maybe one day I'll work up to forgiveness. Or we will think of it as optional. Someone hurt me. I don't want to forgive them. I don't need to. That's in the past and we've never done the work to do that. Or someone did something to us and we have every right to withhold our forgiveness from them. And so we do because it hurts so deeply. And what the Christian ethic is on this is to say, hey, we're instructed to offer unlimited forgiveness, and it is not optional. Now, to some of us, to many of us, that sounds like a challenge. That sounds difficult. If you think about some of the people who have hurt you in your life, some of the things that would require your forgiveness, to simply pithily say, well, God tells you to offer unlimited forgiveness, it's not optional. That's tough. And so I thought it best to have this conversation kind of in light of different groups of people in life that we will feel called to or pressed on to forgive. So I've got three categories of folks, three categories of situations that require forgiveness from us. And I want to talk about how we should kind of address those things because some are different than the others when we get into forgiveness. So the first and maybe the easiest category of people to forgive are those who have apologized and sought restitution. Your neighbor backs into your mailbox. They knock on your door. They say, hey, I'm so sorry. I just knocked over your mailbox. That's my bad. How can I pay for it? Okay. If you withhold forgiveness from your neighbor in that scenario, you've got issues, right? Like you've got problems. Someone stole 50 bucks from you 10 years ago. You still haven't forgiven them. Simple, everyday offenses. Your spouse said something that had a bad day. Just yesterday, I was kind of just being snippy in the morning, and Jen just looked at me. She goes, are you grumpy? Like, did you wake up grumpy? And I'm like, yeah. Sorry. I'll fix it. And, you know, thankfully, I got a little bit more chipper, but I had to apologize. Sorry. Sorry I woke up. I don't know why. I had slept eight hours. It was a great night. I had a great night last night, a good day. I don't know what my deal is, but I'll fix it, right? So there's sometimes just these run-of-the-mill things. Someone wrongs us. They apologize and seek restitution. And the right thing to do is to forgive them and move on. And if in these scenarios, you can't simply forgive them and move on, that's a you problem. You should do that. If you are holding grudges and can't just forgive people when they apologize to you, listen, I sent that email and you shouldn't have been copied on it. And I know I said those negative things about you in front of our coworkers, and I'm very sorry. and I will not do that again. Okay, that one stings a little bit, but still, you're a grown-up. Get over it. Forgive. So in these situations where someone has wronged us, but they've apologized, admitted their fault, they're seeking restitution, we should forgive. And we all know that. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought like, yeah, that's pretty easy. You're all adjusted adults. If you can't do that by now, you need a different sermon. Okay, this isn't for that. Let's just suck it up and forgive. The second one is a little bit more challenging. The second one is when we are tasked to forgive those who do not know they need to or simply refuse to apologize. That's a little bit more difficult. When someone has wronged you and they refuse to apologize for the wrong or acknowledge that it was wrong, and yet you find yourself in a position where you need to forgive them. Spouses get into a fight. They argue. They each say hurtful things. They go to their separate corners of the room, and they sit there like children with their arms folded. I mean, are you going to forgive him? I'm not going to forgive him until he says he's sorry. Okay, well, you sure are teaching him a lesson. Congratulations on being a grown-up. I always say in those situations that children are concerned with whose fault it is, and grown-ups are worried about making things right. So as adjusted adults, as people who love Jesus, we seek to make things right. Now, it's more challenging when someone has hurt you and they won't admit it. They refuse to admit that that was their fault. They refuse to admit that what they did was wrong, but we need to find it in ourselves to forgive them. It's a more difficult task, and yet we should simply extend forgiveness. Another one that I thought of this week is, you know, in this category too, is when people don't know that you even need to forgive them. When people don't know that they've hurt you. And so when you forgive them, you just forgive in silence and they'll never know that you forgave them. And I don't know if this is appropriate for me to share or not, but one of the difficult things in my position is when people choose to no longer be at grace, when people choose to move on from grace. The longer they've come to grace, the more difficult it is when they choose to leave. And I understand that we're not all going to go to the same church for our whole life. Like, I get that, and not everybody leaves poorly, and not everybody hurts when they leave, and some people leave really, really gracefully. But sometimes people leave, and as they're leaving, they say things that hurt. They say things that are insensitive to me, and they'll hurt my feelings. And I understand that I operate in a world where most of the people around me don't think I have those. But I do. I do have feelings. I don't have as much as you all. That would be rough. But I have some. And sometimes they get hurt. But they don't know that they hurt me. They don't know that that's difficult for me. They don't know that I haven't forgiven them. They don't know that I need to. And I'm not going to call them up and say, hey, you hurt me. I just want you to know you hurt me, but I forgive you, so we're good. So I just have to forgive in silence. We don't get any credit for that. But God calls us to forgive nonetheless. And in both of these situations, those where people have wronged us, they've apologized and sought restitution, and then those where people have wronged us and they don't know they have or they refuse to admit that they have, I think it's very helpful for us to refer back to Jesus' instructions and say, to the Lord's prayer, and say, Father, forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Forgive us our debts. Forgive us our sins as we forgive the people who have sinned against us. It's this reciprocity. It's this awareness of the more I focus on Christ, the more I allow the reality of his forgiveness to wash over me. The more I see myself as the happy recipient, undeserving recipient of his grace and of his goodness and of his mercy and of his kindness and of his forgiveness, the easier it is for me to be a conduit of that forgiveness to others. When I reflect on what God has forgiven me of, the fact that he has forgiven me before I even know that I needed to admit fault. Before I was willing to admit that I had wronged him, God in his goodness still offers me and extends to me forgiveness as soon as I'm ready to accept it. And so particularly for these first two categories, when someone's wronged you and apologized, or when someone's wronged you and they haven't apologized yet, but it's your run-of-the-mill average amount of frustration or hurt, it helps us to reflect on Jesus and who he is and how he's loved us and how he's forgiven us and say, yeah, how could I possibly hold a grudge in light of all that love? And so in most situations where you need to offer forgiveness to someone else because they've wronged you, in a vast majority of them, 95% of situations that require our obedience, My official pastoral counsel to you would be, just suck it up and forgive them, man. Figure it out. That would be my counsel to you. Now, I might arrive there in a gentler way. I might say it like, well, you know, and we'll pray about it and wait for you to call me back and realize that's what you need to do. But at the end of the day, the advice would be just suck it up and forgive them and move on. God forgave you. You forgive other people. He empowers you to forgive. We have no right to hold grudges. We've all messed up. Let's move on. But there is a third category where I would never, never give that clumsy of advice. And it's really where I want to spend the bulk of our time today because I feel like it's probably the most helpful for us. And that's those of us who have this group of people to forgive. Those from whom you have every right to withhold your forgiveness. If there is somebody in your life who has hurt you so profoundly and so deeply that you have every right to never forgive them. No one could come to you with an argument and say, you know they deserve your forgiveness, right? Because they don't. No one could come to you and be like, you know, you just need to kind of eventually, it's been 20 years, eventually you got to figure out how to suck it up and forgive. No, no, no, you don't. No, you don't. I have a very good friend who used to be married to another really good friend of mine. Their names are Kevin and Lacey. They live in another state, so I can use their names. If you know Kevin and Lacey, just shut up about this. About seven or eight years ago, Lacey had invited me and another friend of mine, Tyler, to their house to surprise Kevin for his 40th birthday. And we went up for a couple of days to celebrate the birthday. And it was a little weird. There was a little bit of tension. But Kevin and Lacey also had an adult daughter who was engaged. And then five children aged like 10 to 12 and younger. So the oldest was like 10 or 12 and then they had four younger ones and one of those was adopted. So their life was crazy. So to go to their house and for it to feel a little bit crazy or a little bit stressful wasn't totally out of the ordinary. So I didn't really have any red flags going off. It just felt a little tense, right? So we spent a couple of days there, Tyler and I do, and then we hit the road to drive back to, at the time I lived in Atlanta, so we're driving back to Atlanta. And we get about 45 minutes away, and Lacey calls me. I answer the phone, and she said, hey, her voice was shaking. She said, hey, can you come back? I said, sure, what's up? She said, I think he did it again. Three, four years prior to that, Kevin had admitted to an affair with a friend of theirs. And, you know, we kind of all walked through that together, and they had sought restitution and made things right and worked on their marriage, and she had extended forgiveness and yada, yada, yada. But when she said, I think he did it again, I knew immediately what she meant. So we turn back around, go back to Lacey's house. She kind of explained why she thought what she thought. We get into Kevin's computer and read text messages, and she's right. It was a woman in their church small group of all things. And they had made plans in a couple of weeks to tell their families because she had three young kids too. They had made plans to tell their families and somehow existed in this fantasy world where everything was eventually going to work out okay. They just had to get over this difficult challenge at first. But Lacey had figured things out too soon. So Kevin had gone over to her house, picked her up, and they ran off together. And we didn't know where they were, and he wasn't answering his phone. But see, Kevin and Lacey only had one car and Kevin had it. And they only had one bank account and Lacey, they had one bank account and Kevin had moved everything to his business account. So she had no car, no resources and she had five kids. And I spent the next two days convincing my friend Kevin to let Lacey have a car and a couple thousand dollars. And I sat in that house as Lacey gathered up the kids with some close friends of hers and explained to them that sometimes people make poor choices and your daddy's been making poor choices. That is pain. That is hurt. That is being wronged. And I would never, never look at Lacey in those moments and say, you know that offering unlimited forgiveness is not optional, right? You're a believer. And yet that's still true. And I don't know everyone's story, but I'm confident that we have some Lacey's in this room. Some women who have been hurt in that way. Some men who have had to walk through that pain. I know in a congregation our size, we have people who grew up in abusive homes. We have people whose parents victimized them. I know that we have folks in our midst who have walked through being a victim, who have been abused by a parent or by a grandparent or by a spouse or by a partner, and your hurt is deep, and that wrong is big, and that chasm is wide. And what I wanted to know when I was looking at the topic of forgiveness is, what do we tell those folks? How do we help you, those of you with the deepest hurt and the deepest lies and the most challenging path to forgiveness, what can we offer you? So frankly, if your issue is someone hurt my feelings or someone hurt me and they apologize and they've sought restitution but I'm choosing to hold this grudge, figure it out. Figure it out. Forgive them. But for those who sit in profound hurt, what do we do? How do we even start towards forgiveness? The thing that kind of played in my head as I thought about deep hurt is kind of this question, is how could the father look at his victimized children and instruct them to forgive? How could our good heavenly father take Lacey, pull her in, hug her and hold her and tell her, you know, eventually you're going to need to let go of this. Eventually I'm going to move you to a place where I'm going to ask you to forgive Kevin. How can God do that? If we've been hurt in that way, how can we hope to do that? And listen, listen, listen. If you're like me and the path to forgiveness in your life, you're lucky, you're blessed. It's never been that difficult. When I think of, gosh, what are my challenges in forgiveness? They're not a lot. I've not had to walk the road that Lacey's had to walk. So if that's you, I would still encourage you to lean in to what we're talking about this morning. I would still encourage you to listen to what I'm about to share with you that Lacey told me this week, because you might find yourself one day in that room when your friend's life is falling apart, and you might want to counsel them well, or God forbid, you might walk through this too. And let me also say this. Last week, talked about repentance, walking away from the things in our life that don't need to be in our life and walking towards Jesus. If you are doing things that have the potential to require someone to forgive you the way that Lacey is working to forgive Kevin, please stop doing those things before they require the forgiveness that you do not want to force on anyone. But I picked up the phone this week realizing my ignorance, realizing I have not much to offer for deep hurt. And I called Lacey. And I basically asked her that question. How can the Father look at you and love you and yet still push you towards forgiveness? How have you processed forgiveness over the course of the last seven to eight years? What would you say to this topic? And it really, it kind of made me sad. I'll just be honest with you guys. We talked for about 45 minutes, and at the end of it, I realized how badly I wish that I would write sermons several weeks out because it would have been so much more beneficial to have Lacey here and to let us just have a conversation and let you guys listen to it and listen to her perspective. And I told her that. I said, I wish that we could just play this phone call for the people of grace, for the folks in the church. I wish that they could hear these come out of your mouth and not just me bloviating for 30 minutes trying to repeat what you said that was so, so great. I wish you could hear that conversation. But since you can't, I wanted to share with you some of the more helpful things that she shared with me about how she's moved through this profound season of hurt and tried to walk in obedience to offering unlimited forgiveness in the way that she is called to do. And so a couple of things that she said about forgiveness were particularly insightful. And I wanted to share those with you as well, particularly those of you who are walking through profound hurt. And you could say, I have every right to withhold forgiveness from this person. Okay, a couple things for you to know. First, that she pointed out to me, forgiveness does not require trust or affection. To forgive someone, you don't have to reinstitute them into the position that they were in. You don't have to drum up some artificial affection for this person. Lacey has forgiven the other woman, the woman that was in her small group that claimed to be her friend that Kevin left her for. She has forgiven her. She feels no affection for her and she feels no calling to do it. So if one of the things holding you back is, I don't know how I could ever like that person, I don't think you need to. Forgiveness looks like loving somebody. Biblical love, we're instructed, is that we should love others as we love ourselves. How do we love ourselves? We want what's best for ourselves. So how do we love others? To offer biblical love to someone else is to simply desire what is best for them. It is possible to desire what is best for them without actually liking them. Last night, I desired that Duke would win because it's a more interesting story. It was best for Coach K. I do not like the man. I don't have any affection for him. It was just an interesting story, right? We can want what's best for someone without having feelings of affection towards them. And if that helps you get over that hump, so that's good. We also don't have to reinstall them into trust, right? If you have a business partner who steals from you, you can forgive that business partner. You do not have to go back into business with them. If you do, the next one's on you, man. That's your bad. We do not have to reinstall trust. If someone cheats on you, you can forgive them. You do not have to go back and stay with them. So if that's helpful for you, just understand that forgiveness, as I understand it, does not require a reinstatement of trust or affection. It's simply wanting what's best for them and moving on. This one was helpful too. Forgiveness doesn't get to be an arrival. For deep, profound hurt like that, someone lied to you for years, someone hurt you in an incredible way, it doesn't get to be an arrival. Lacey told me she kept expecting to kind of cross this finish line, that she would have one day where God had worked in her heart, with through enough prayer and enough counseling and enough time and enough space that she would be able to say, okay, he's forgiven. I'm moved on. That's done. Except the ripple effects of his actions show up again and again and again in her life. The weekly task of just coordinating the kids with him, where to pick them up and where to drop them off and what are you going to pay for and what are going to pay for, and all the crap that you have to deal with when there's a divorce now, and you have to shuttle kids around, and it's just fresh aggravation every week. Right now, she's got a couple kids going into college, and she has to fill out all of that paperwork on her own, and it's difficult when there's two different parents and two different families, and she's experiencing fresh frustration at the reality of her divorce because of choices that he made and she didn't. That's fresh frustration that she has to then forgive him for again and again. One of the most profound things she ever said to me as we were kind of talking through it, and I was asking what are the hard parts, she said one of the hardest parts is watching your kids grow up alone. Because they do that thing that they do and they make you smile or they make you laugh. And you get to look over at your husband or your wife and you both acknowledge what they just did and you get to experience that intimate joy together that no one else gets to see. And now she has to do that alone. That requires fresh forgiveness. And so it made me think that maybe this is what Jesus was talking about. When he said, no, no, no, not seven times. As many times as they require it. Because maybe Jesus understands that profound hurt has ripple effects. And they show up again and again and again and again. And if you're not prepared to offer ongoing forgiveness, then you're not yet prepared for forgiveness. Because those ripples show up over and over again in your life. And so if you're facing profound hurt like that, just understand, you don't get to cross the finish line. It's more of a mindset of forgiveness. And really the thing that she said that I wanted to finish with is she said, you know, Nate, this would all be impossible without Jesus anyways. She said, I don't know how people walk through hurt like this without Jesus and then try to forgive without Jesus. He's the only reason I can even ever forgive. And she said, in this really funny way, everything that's happened has pushed me more to him, has pushed me closer ever forgive without him. And it reminded me of this verse in 1 Corinthians. And I thought, oh, how appropriate and how much sense does that make in the context of forgiveness when he says to Paul, Jesus says this to Paul, my grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in your weakness. Or rather, that's God the Father saying that to Paul. We are insufficient to offer the forgiveness that we need to for some of the offenses that have been committed against us. It is only through Jesus that we are able to offer that forgiveness. His strength is made perfect in our weakness. It is only through him that we are able to forgive. So if you're one of those people who's carrying that profound hurt, just know that I don't believe you will ever find true forgiveness outside of Christ empowering you to offer it, compelling you to offer it. And when we do that, and when we allow Jesus to empower and compel us towards forgiveness, I think this really great thing happens. By empowering us to forgive, Jesus untethers us from our hurtful past. By empowering us to forgive, Jesus untethers us from our hurtful past. Lacey described it like this. She would just be going through her day, having a perfectly fine day, and then she would see something. She would see a store that Kevin liked to shop at, or a place that they used to go to, or just something that would trigger her and remind her. And then instantly, because she was holding all that hurt, and because she had not yet moved to a place of forgiveness, it was like there was this tether attached to the back of her head that would just jerk her attention into years in the past and jerk her right back into that hurt of those days following the decisions that he made. And she said it was terrible to go through days not knowing when or how my attention was going to be jerked back into the past and I was going to experience that pain fresh. And so really and truly, and we know this about grudges, and we know this about hurt, and we know this about pain, when you are walking through life carrying hurt, when you are walking through life carrying anger, when you are walking through life holding a grudge, that's not hurting them. It's not hurting them for you to be angry at them, not nearly as badly as it's hurting you. And so when Jesus empowers us to forgive, he cuts that tether and he gives us the freedom to walk forward into our future, not being constantly jerked back into our painful past. And I think that there is some freedom there. He unburdens us from the hurt and the pain that we carry every day. And he says, here, let me take that from you so that you can walk in freedom. And so I would say to you this, very carefully, very gently, if there is deep and profound pain in your life, if forgiveness for you is hard, and that person or those people have no right to ask it of you, okay. But when you're ready, Jesus offers you freedom from that hurt. When you're ready, Jesus offers to untether you from that past. When you're ready, you can move into a more free and loving future where you can't get snapped back into your pain at a moment's notice. But it requires you to forgive. It requires you to offer that. But when you do, you find a freedom in Jesus that you can't find anywhere else. I don't know how deep your hurt is, but I do know that life is better when you're not holding it. I don't know how hard forgiveness is for you, but I do know that the reason the Father would hold you and call you to him and say, you know that I'm going to ask you to forgive that person is not so that you can be morally right and morally exemplar and so that he can push you into this uncomfortable situation just so that you feel like a good human. He's telling you to do that because he loves you and he knows that freedom and love are going to be found on the other side of untethering yourself from that. He holds his victimized children and encourages them towards forgiveness precisely because he loves them and wants them to experience the freedom of life on the other side of that pain and he knows he's the only one that can make it go away. Which incidentally is why if your pain is in the first two categories, and I flippantly say, just get over it and forgive, because the same promise is extended to you, that Jesus will empower you to do it and that you will walk in love on the other side of it. So I would encourage you this morning, wherever you are on the spectrum, however you've been hurt, if it's possible to forgive, do it. Allow Jesus to empower that. If you're not there yet, if you say, I hear you, Nate. I know, I understand. Hopefully you don't disagree with what I've said. I haven't said anything clumsy. But you're simply not there yet. It's okay. Maybe just pray this prayer. And say, Father, I know you call me to forgive. I'm not ready. Will you please work in my heart so that I want to forgive? Just pray that prayer. I know I'm supposed to forgive. I don't want to. But I'm asking you and giving you permission to work in my heart to change that so that I do. And just take that step towards forgiveness. But I hope and I pray that as I pray in a second, that if there are people in your life who have hurt you, who you do need to extend forgiveness to, maybe just take a second while I'm praying right now and go ahead and offer that. And let's move out these doors free from some of the pain that we carried in with us this morning. And if you can't do that, let's take a step. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for modeling forgiveness to us. God, we know that we have offended, that we have hurt, that we have trampled with our actions, and yet you offer us unlimited forgiveness. So God, first, I pray that we would be grateful for that and overwhelmed by that. Second, Father, I pray that in turn we would offer forgiveness to others. And Lord, I pray in particular for those who have walked through deep hurt, through a hard betrayal, through abuse, through manipulation, through whatever kinds of awful things we people can do to one another. God, I pray that you would give them the courage to take a step towards forgiveness, to simply maybe even just pray that you would help their heart move, that you would soften their heart. Father, if we do offer forgiveness and obedience to your instructions, I pray that you would meet us there, that we would find you there, and that we would experience a peace there that maybe we haven't had in a long time. In the meantime, God, thank you for loving us so well. In Jesus' name, amen.
Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning. We'll be reading from Matthew chapter 6 this morning. This, then, is how you should pray. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we have also forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you get to be the senior pastor here. Congratulations to Tar Heel fans. Please be humble about it, lest you become unbearable to your Christian brothers and sisters. That was a heck of a game last night. Yes, yes. That's good. That was some very tepid applause there. I know you feel bigger than that, but you're being humble as we speak. We have been going through our Lent series. This is, I believe, part six of the series, and I hope that you have been keeping up with the devotionals, as I say, every week and reading and being encouraged by those and by the other folks in the church as you've gone through those. This week, we arrive at the topic of forgiveness, and we've been kind of walking through that all week. Hopefully, as you've read the devotionals, you've thought about forgiveness in your own life. I think when we arrive at the topic of forgiveness, we can't help but wonder, do we owe some forgiveness? Whenever I encounter that topic of forgiveness, whenever I see the word, whenever I'm challenged by scripture, whenever I'm talked about how God has forgiven me so I should forgive others, I immediately think, who in my life am I holding a grudge against? Who am I withholding forgiveness from? And I would bet that most of us, when we hear that idea, begin to think about who in our life have we had to forgive? Where have we had a difficult path to forgiveness? Is there anybody in my life that I need to work towards forgiving now? And so with that in mind, I wanted to kind of talk about the challenge of forgiveness and the instructions that we find in the Bible concerning forgiveness. And the best place, I think, to start is with the very words of Jesus. We're going to allow Jesus to frame up our discussion on forgiveness this morning. The Bible in the Old Testament, New Testament, all throughout it has a ton to say about forgiveness. But again, I think if we can go to Jesus and read his very words and what he has to say about it, that that's the best framework for the discussion that you and I need to have about forgiveness as we rest on that topic this morning. So I would first look at two different passages, two different things that Jesus says about forgiveness that are really in harmony with a lot of other teachings throughout scripture about forgiveness. The first is the one that Jacob just so eloquently read a few minutes ago. I don't know if you've noticed it before. Most of us know the Lord's Prayer, and you identified that as the Lord's Prayer as soon as he started to read, right? But in Matthew, when Jesus finishes the Lord's prayer, which is where Jacob was reading from, he does a little bit of commentary. He has some comments to make about it. And we read those this morning, but I'm not sure if we heard it or if you've paid attention to those before. So I would call our attention back to the way that Jesus comments on the prayer that he just prayed. Because part of that prayer is, Father, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. At least that's how I memorized it growing up in the King's English. But sometimes forgive us and then help us forgive other people. So Jesus says this after that in verse 14, for if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your father will not forgive your sins. So this is a pretty stark and interesting teaching. And I'll be honest with you, I don't know how this works theologically necessarily and intertwines with the doctrine of salvation. I just know that when, that Jesus himself says that if we will not forgive other people, then our Father in heaven will not forgive us, which is pretty stark. That leaves us very little option, right? So forgiveness immediately we see is required. It is not optional. And then later in the passage, or later in that same book, Jesus is having a conversation with his disciple Peter. And Peter asks about this forgiveness. Surely by now Peter knows that forgiveness is not optional, that if we do not forgive other people in our life, then God does not forgive us. And that seems like a place that we don't want to be in. But Peter asks, certainly there has to be a limit to the forgiveness that we are instructed to offer to others. But to that, Jesus says this in Matthew 18, verses 21 and 22. Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times? Jesus answered, I tell you, not seven times, but 77 times. Some translations say, but 70 times seven. And see, we need to give Peter a little bit of credit. He says, Jesus, how many times should I forgive someone for sinning against me, for wronging me, for harming me? Up to seven times? Which feels very generous, if we're being honest about it. Someone slaps you in the face seven times in a row. You're just going to keep forgiving them? A business partner steals from you. Maybe you can forgive them once. You're going to, up to seven times, you're going to do that? Your neighbor backs into your mailbox. One is a whoopsie, but three, come on, man, knock it off. Like seven times is pretty generous. And Jesus says, no, no, not seven times, but up to 70 times seven, up to 77 times, which is a figurative way of saying as often as they require it. No, you forgive others as often as they require your forgiveness. And when we look at these two teachings from Jesus on forgiveness, these two statements, we have no choice but to conclude this, that unlimited forgiveness for the Christian is not optional. If you're here this morning and you wouldn't call yourself a believer, I would say that the good part of that is that you don't have to forgive anybody if you don't want to. You can just hold grudges, which may be nice. But for the believer, unlimited forgiveness is not optional. And I think that that's important to say out loud and to acknowledge. Because so often, we Christians have a habit of kind of viewing instructions that we're given as things that maybe we're supposed to do. Maybe we can try to do. Maybe one day I'll get there. Maybe one day I'll work up to forgiveness. Or we will think of it as optional. Someone hurt me. I don't want to forgive them. I don't need to. That's in the past and we've never done the work to do that. Or someone did something to us and we have every right to withhold our forgiveness from them. And so we do because it hurts so deeply. And what the Christian ethic is on this is to say, hey, we're instructed to offer unlimited forgiveness, and it is not optional. Now, to some of us, to many of us, that sounds like a challenge. That sounds difficult. If you think about some of the people who have hurt you in your life, some of the things that would require your forgiveness, to simply pithily say, well, God tells you to offer unlimited forgiveness, it's not optional. That's tough. And so I thought it best to have this conversation kind of in light of different groups of people in life that we will feel called to or pressed on to forgive. So I've got three categories of folks, three categories of situations that require forgiveness from us. And I want to talk about how we should kind of address those things because some are different than the others when we get into forgiveness. So the first and maybe the easiest category of people to forgive are those who have apologized and sought restitution. Your neighbor backs into your mailbox. They knock on your door. They say, hey, I'm so sorry. I just knocked over your mailbox. That's my bad. How can I pay for it? Okay. If you withhold forgiveness from your neighbor in that scenario, you've got issues, right? Like you've got problems. Someone stole 50 bucks from you 10 years ago. You still haven't forgiven them. Simple, everyday offenses. Your spouse said something that had a bad day. Just yesterday, I was kind of just being snippy in the morning, and Jen just looked at me. She goes, are you grumpy? Like, did you wake up grumpy? And I'm like, yeah. Sorry. I'll fix it. And, you know, thankfully, I got a little bit more chipper, but I had to apologize. Sorry. Sorry I woke up. I don't know why. I had slept eight hours. It was a great night. I had a great night last night, a good day. I don't know what my deal is, but I'll fix it, right? So there's sometimes just these run-of-the-mill things. Someone wrongs us. They apologize and seek restitution. And the right thing to do is to forgive them and move on. And if in these scenarios, you can't simply forgive them and move on, that's a you problem. You should do that. If you are holding grudges and can't just forgive people when they apologize to you, listen, I sent that email and you shouldn't have been copied on it. And I know I said those negative things about you in front of our coworkers, and I'm very sorry. and I will not do that again. Okay, that one stings a little bit, but still, you're a grown-up. Get over it. Forgive. So in these situations where someone has wronged us, but they've apologized, admitted their fault, they're seeking restitution, we should forgive. And we all know that. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought like, yeah, that's pretty easy. You're all adjusted adults. If you can't do that by now, you need a different sermon. Okay, this isn't for that. Let's just suck it up and forgive. The second one is a little bit more challenging. The second one is when we are tasked to forgive those who do not know they need to or simply refuse to apologize. That's a little bit more difficult. When someone has wronged you and they refuse to apologize for the wrong or acknowledge that it was wrong, and yet you find yourself in a position where you need to forgive them. Spouses get into a fight. They argue. They each say hurtful things. They go to their separate corners of the room, and they sit there like children with their arms folded. I mean, are you going to forgive him? I'm not going to forgive him until he says he's sorry. Okay, well, you sure are teaching him a lesson. Congratulations on being a grown-up. I always say in those situations that children are concerned with whose fault it is, and grown-ups are worried about making things right. So as adjusted adults, as people who love Jesus, we seek to make things right. Now, it's more challenging when someone has hurt you and they won't admit it. They refuse to admit that that was their fault. They refuse to admit that what they did was wrong, but we need to find it in ourselves to forgive them. It's a more difficult task, and yet we should simply extend forgiveness. Another one that I thought of this week is, you know, in this category too, is when people don't know that you even need to forgive them. When people don't know that they've hurt you. And so when you forgive them, you just forgive in silence and they'll never know that you forgave them. And I don't know if this is appropriate for me to share or not, but one of the difficult things in my position is when people choose to no longer be at grace, when people choose to move on from grace. The longer they've come to grace, the more difficult it is when they choose to leave. And I understand that we're not all going to go to the same church for our whole life. Like, I get that, and not everybody leaves poorly, and not everybody hurts when they leave, and some people leave really, really gracefully. But sometimes people leave, and as they're leaving, they say things that hurt. They say things that are insensitive to me, and they'll hurt my feelings. And I understand that I operate in a world where most of the people around me don't think I have those. But I do. I do have feelings. I don't have as much as you all. That would be rough. But I have some. And sometimes they get hurt. But they don't know that they hurt me. They don't know that that's difficult for me. They don't know that I haven't forgiven them. They don't know that I need to. And I'm not going to call them up and say, hey, you hurt me. I just want you to know you hurt me, but I forgive you, so we're good. So I just have to forgive in silence. We don't get any credit for that. But God calls us to forgive nonetheless. And in both of these situations, those where people have wronged us, they've apologized and sought restitution, and then those where people have wronged us and they don't know they have or they refuse to admit that they have, I think it's very helpful for us to refer back to Jesus' instructions and say, to the Lord's prayer, and say, Father, forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Forgive us our debts. Forgive us our sins as we forgive the people who have sinned against us. It's this reciprocity. It's this awareness of the more I focus on Christ, the more I allow the reality of his forgiveness to wash over me. The more I see myself as the happy recipient, undeserving recipient of his grace and of his goodness and of his mercy and of his kindness and of his forgiveness, the easier it is for me to be a conduit of that forgiveness to others. When I reflect on what God has forgiven me of, the fact that he has forgiven me before I even know that I needed to admit fault. Before I was willing to admit that I had wronged him, God in his goodness still offers me and extends to me forgiveness as soon as I'm ready to accept it. And so particularly for these first two categories, when someone's wronged you and apologized, or when someone's wronged you and they haven't apologized yet, but it's your run-of-the-mill average amount of frustration or hurt, it helps us to reflect on Jesus and who he is and how he's loved us and how he's forgiven us and say, yeah, how could I possibly hold a grudge in light of all that love? And so in most situations where you need to offer forgiveness to someone else because they've wronged you, in a vast majority of them, 95% of situations that require our obedience, My official pastoral counsel to you would be, just suck it up and forgive them, man. Figure it out. That would be my counsel to you. Now, I might arrive there in a gentler way. I might say it like, well, you know, and we'll pray about it and wait for you to call me back and realize that's what you need to do. But at the end of the day, the advice would be just suck it up and forgive them and move on. God forgave you. You forgive other people. He empowers you to forgive. We have no right to hold grudges. We've all messed up. Let's move on. But there is a third category where I would never, never give that clumsy of advice. And it's really where I want to spend the bulk of our time today because I feel like it's probably the most helpful for us. And that's those of us who have this group of people to forgive. Those from whom you have every right to withhold your forgiveness. If there is somebody in your life who has hurt you so profoundly and so deeply that you have every right to never forgive them. No one could come to you with an argument and say, you know they deserve your forgiveness, right? Because they don't. No one could come to you and be like, you know, you just need to kind of eventually, it's been 20 years, eventually you got to figure out how to suck it up and forgive. No, no, no, you don't. No, you don't. I have a very good friend who used to be married to another really good friend of mine. Their names are Kevin and Lacey. They live in another state, so I can use their names. If you know Kevin and Lacey, just shut up about this. About seven or eight years ago, Lacey had invited me and another friend of mine, Tyler, to their house to surprise Kevin for his 40th birthday. And we went up for a couple of days to celebrate the birthday. And it was a little weird. There was a little bit of tension. But Kevin and Lacey also had an adult daughter who was engaged. And then five children aged like 10 to 12 and younger. So the oldest was like 10 or 12 and then they had four younger ones and one of those was adopted. So their life was crazy. So to go to their house and for it to feel a little bit crazy or a little bit stressful wasn't totally out of the ordinary. So I didn't really have any red flags going off. It just felt a little tense, right? So we spent a couple of days there, Tyler and I do, and then we hit the road to drive back to, at the time I lived in Atlanta, so we're driving back to Atlanta. And we get about 45 minutes away, and Lacey calls me. I answer the phone, and she said, hey, her voice was shaking. She said, hey, can you come back? I said, sure, what's up? She said, I think he did it again. Three, four years prior to that, Kevin had admitted to an affair with a friend of theirs. And, you know, we kind of all walked through that together, and they had sought restitution and made things right and worked on their marriage, and she had extended forgiveness and yada, yada, yada. But when she said, I think he did it again, I knew immediately what she meant. So we turn back around, go back to Lacey's house. She kind of explained why she thought what she thought. We get into Kevin's computer and read text messages, and she's right. It was a woman in their church small group of all things. And they had made plans in a couple of weeks to tell their families because she had three young kids too. They had made plans to tell their families and somehow existed in this fantasy world where everything was eventually going to work out okay. They just had to get over this difficult challenge at first. But Lacey had figured things out too soon. So Kevin had gone over to her house, picked her up, and they ran off together. And we didn't know where they were, and he wasn't answering his phone. But see, Kevin and Lacey only had one car and Kevin had it. And they only had one bank account and Lacey, they had one bank account and Kevin had moved everything to his business account. So she had no car, no resources and she had five kids. And I spent the next two days convincing my friend Kevin to let Lacey have a car and a couple thousand dollars. And I sat in that house as Lacey gathered up the kids with some close friends of hers and explained to them that sometimes people make poor choices and your daddy's been making poor choices. That is pain. That is hurt. That is being wronged. And I would never, never look at Lacey in those moments and say, you know that offering unlimited forgiveness is not optional, right? You're a believer. And yet that's still true. And I don't know everyone's story, but I'm confident that we have some Lacey's in this room. Some women who have been hurt in that way. Some men who have had to walk through that pain. I know in a congregation our size, we have people who grew up in abusive homes. We have people whose parents victimized them. I know that we have folks in our midst who have walked through being a victim, who have been abused by a parent or by a grandparent or by a spouse or by a partner, and your hurt is deep, and that wrong is big, and that chasm is wide. And what I wanted to know when I was looking at the topic of forgiveness is, what do we tell those folks? How do we help you, those of you with the deepest hurt and the deepest lies and the most challenging path to forgiveness, what can we offer you? So frankly, if your issue is someone hurt my feelings or someone hurt me and they apologize and they've sought restitution but I'm choosing to hold this grudge, figure it out. Figure it out. Forgive them. But for those who sit in profound hurt, what do we do? How do we even start towards forgiveness? The thing that kind of played in my head as I thought about deep hurt is kind of this question, is how could the father look at his victimized children and instruct them to forgive? How could our good heavenly father take Lacey, pull her in, hug her and hold her and tell her, you know, eventually you're going to need to let go of this. Eventually I'm going to move you to a place where I'm going to ask you to forgive Kevin. How can God do that? If we've been hurt in that way, how can we hope to do that? And listen, listen, listen. If you're like me and the path to forgiveness in your life, you're lucky, you're blessed. It's never been that difficult. When I think of, gosh, what are my challenges in forgiveness? They're not a lot. I've not had to walk the road that Lacey's had to walk. So if that's you, I would still encourage you to lean in to what we're talking about this morning. I would still encourage you to listen to what I'm about to share with you that Lacey told me this week, because you might find yourself one day in that room when your friend's life is falling apart, and you might want to counsel them well, or God forbid, you might walk through this too. And let me also say this. Last week, talked about repentance, walking away from the things in our life that don't need to be in our life and walking towards Jesus. If you are doing things that have the potential to require someone to forgive you the way that Lacey is working to forgive Kevin, please stop doing those things before they require the forgiveness that you do not want to force on anyone. But I picked up the phone this week realizing my ignorance, realizing I have not much to offer for deep hurt. And I called Lacey. And I basically asked her that question. How can the Father look at you and love you and yet still push you towards forgiveness? How have you processed forgiveness over the course of the last seven to eight years? What would you say to this topic? And it really, it kind of made me sad. I'll just be honest with you guys. We talked for about 45 minutes, and at the end of it, I realized how badly I wish that I would write sermons several weeks out because it would have been so much more beneficial to have Lacey here and to let us just have a conversation and let you guys listen to it and listen to her perspective. And I told her that. I said, I wish that we could just play this phone call for the people of grace, for the folks in the church. I wish that they could hear these come out of your mouth and not just me bloviating for 30 minutes trying to repeat what you said that was so, so great. I wish you could hear that conversation. But since you can't, I wanted to share with you some of the more helpful things that she shared with me about how she's moved through this profound season of hurt and tried to walk in obedience to offering unlimited forgiveness in the way that she is called to do. And so a couple of things that she said about forgiveness were particularly insightful. And I wanted to share those with you as well, particularly those of you who are walking through profound hurt. And you could say, I have every right to withhold forgiveness from this person. Okay, a couple things for you to know. First, that she pointed out to me, forgiveness does not require trust or affection. To forgive someone, you don't have to reinstitute them into the position that they were in. You don't have to drum up some artificial affection for this person. Lacey has forgiven the other woman, the woman that was in her small group that claimed to be her friend that Kevin left her for. She has forgiven her. She feels no affection for her and she feels no calling to do it. So if one of the things holding you back is, I don't know how I could ever like that person, I don't think you need to. Forgiveness looks like loving somebody. Biblical love, we're instructed, is that we should love others as we love ourselves. How do we love ourselves? We want what's best for ourselves. So how do we love others? To offer biblical love to someone else is to simply desire what is best for them. It is possible to desire what is best for them without actually liking them. Last night, I desired that Duke would win because it's a more interesting story. It was best for Coach K. I do not like the man. I don't have any affection for him. It was just an interesting story, right? We can want what's best for someone without having feelings of affection towards them. And if that helps you get over that hump, so that's good. We also don't have to reinstall them into trust, right? If you have a business partner who steals from you, you can forgive that business partner. You do not have to go back into business with them. If you do, the next one's on you, man. That's your bad. We do not have to reinstall trust. If someone cheats on you, you can forgive them. You do not have to go back and stay with them. So if that's helpful for you, just understand that forgiveness, as I understand it, does not require a reinstatement of trust or affection. It's simply wanting what's best for them and moving on. This one was helpful too. Forgiveness doesn't get to be an arrival. For deep, profound hurt like that, someone lied to you for years, someone hurt you in an incredible way, it doesn't get to be an arrival. Lacey told me she kept expecting to kind of cross this finish line, that she would have one day where God had worked in her heart, with through enough prayer and enough counseling and enough time and enough space that she would be able to say, okay, he's forgiven. I'm moved on. That's done. Except the ripple effects of his actions show up again and again and again in her life. The weekly task of just coordinating the kids with him, where to pick them up and where to drop them off and what are you going to pay for and what are going to pay for, and all the crap that you have to deal with when there's a divorce now, and you have to shuttle kids around, and it's just fresh aggravation every week. Right now, she's got a couple kids going into college, and she has to fill out all of that paperwork on her own, and it's difficult when there's two different parents and two different families, and she's experiencing fresh frustration at the reality of her divorce because of choices that he made and she didn't. That's fresh frustration that she has to then forgive him for again and again. One of the most profound things she ever said to me as we were kind of talking through it, and I was asking what are the hard parts, she said one of the hardest parts is watching your kids grow up alone. Because they do that thing that they do and they make you smile or they make you laugh. And you get to look over at your husband or your wife and you both acknowledge what they just did and you get to experience that intimate joy together that no one else gets to see. And now she has to do that alone. That requires fresh forgiveness. And so it made me think that maybe this is what Jesus was talking about. When he said, no, no, no, not seven times. As many times as they require it. Because maybe Jesus understands that profound hurt has ripple effects. And they show up again and again and again and again. And if you're not prepared to offer ongoing forgiveness, then you're not yet prepared for forgiveness. Because those ripples show up over and over again in your life. And so if you're facing profound hurt like that, just understand, you don't get to cross the finish line. It's more of a mindset of forgiveness. And really the thing that she said that I wanted to finish with is she said, you know, Nate, this would all be impossible without Jesus anyways. She said, I don't know how people walk through hurt like this without Jesus and then try to forgive without Jesus. He's the only reason I can even ever forgive. And she said, in this really funny way, everything that's happened has pushed me more to him, has pushed me closer ever forgive without him. And it reminded me of this verse in 1 Corinthians. And I thought, oh, how appropriate and how much sense does that make in the context of forgiveness when he says to Paul, Jesus says this to Paul, my grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in your weakness. Or rather, that's God the Father saying that to Paul. We are insufficient to offer the forgiveness that we need to for some of the offenses that have been committed against us. It is only through Jesus that we are able to offer that forgiveness. His strength is made perfect in our weakness. It is only through him that we are able to forgive. So if you're one of those people who's carrying that profound hurt, just know that I don't believe you will ever find true forgiveness outside of Christ empowering you to offer it, compelling you to offer it. And when we do that, and when we allow Jesus to empower and compel us towards forgiveness, I think this really great thing happens. By empowering us to forgive, Jesus untethers us from our hurtful past. By empowering us to forgive, Jesus untethers us from our hurtful past. Lacey described it like this. She would just be going through her day, having a perfectly fine day, and then she would see something. She would see a store that Kevin liked to shop at, or a place that they used to go to, or just something that would trigger her and remind her. And then instantly, because she was holding all that hurt, and because she had not yet moved to a place of forgiveness, it was like there was this tether attached to the back of her head that would just jerk her attention into years in the past and jerk her right back into that hurt of those days following the decisions that he made. And she said it was terrible to go through days not knowing when or how my attention was going to be jerked back into the past and I was going to experience that pain fresh. And so really and truly, and we know this about grudges, and we know this about hurt, and we know this about pain, when you are walking through life carrying hurt, when you are walking through life carrying anger, when you are walking through life holding a grudge, that's not hurting them. It's not hurting them for you to be angry at them, not nearly as badly as it's hurting you. And so when Jesus empowers us to forgive, he cuts that tether and he gives us the freedom to walk forward into our future, not being constantly jerked back into our painful past. And I think that there is some freedom there. He unburdens us from the hurt and the pain that we carry every day. And he says, here, let me take that from you so that you can walk in freedom. And so I would say to you this, very carefully, very gently, if there is deep and profound pain in your life, if forgiveness for you is hard, and that person or those people have no right to ask it of you, okay. But when you're ready, Jesus offers you freedom from that hurt. When you're ready, Jesus offers to untether you from that past. When you're ready, you can move into a more free and loving future where you can't get snapped back into your pain at a moment's notice. But it requires you to forgive. It requires you to offer that. But when you do, you find a freedom in Jesus that you can't find anywhere else. I don't know how deep your hurt is, but I do know that life is better when you're not holding it. I don't know how hard forgiveness is for you, but I do know that the reason the Father would hold you and call you to him and say, you know that I'm going to ask you to forgive that person is not so that you can be morally right and morally exemplar and so that he can push you into this uncomfortable situation just so that you feel like a good human. He's telling you to do that because he loves you and he knows that freedom and love are going to be found on the other side of untethering yourself from that. He holds his victimized children and encourages them towards forgiveness precisely because he loves them and wants them to experience the freedom of life on the other side of that pain and he knows he's the only one that can make it go away. Which incidentally is why if your pain is in the first two categories, and I flippantly say, just get over it and forgive, because the same promise is extended to you, that Jesus will empower you to do it and that you will walk in love on the other side of it. So I would encourage you this morning, wherever you are on the spectrum, however you've been hurt, if it's possible to forgive, do it. Allow Jesus to empower that. If you're not there yet, if you say, I hear you, Nate. I know, I understand. Hopefully you don't disagree with what I've said. I haven't said anything clumsy. But you're simply not there yet. It's okay. Maybe just pray this prayer. And say, Father, I know you call me to forgive. I'm not ready. Will you please work in my heart so that I want to forgive? Just pray that prayer. I know I'm supposed to forgive. I don't want to. But I'm asking you and giving you permission to work in my heart to change that so that I do. And just take that step towards forgiveness. But I hope and I pray that as I pray in a second, that if there are people in your life who have hurt you, who you do need to extend forgiveness to, maybe just take a second while I'm praying right now and go ahead and offer that. And let's move out these doors free from some of the pain that we carried in with us this morning. And if you can't do that, let's take a step. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for modeling forgiveness to us. God, we know that we have offended, that we have hurt, that we have trampled with our actions, and yet you offer us unlimited forgiveness. So God, first, I pray that we would be grateful for that and overwhelmed by that. Second, Father, I pray that in turn we would offer forgiveness to others. And Lord, I pray in particular for those who have walked through deep hurt, through a hard betrayal, through abuse, through manipulation, through whatever kinds of awful things we people can do to one another. God, I pray that you would give them the courage to take a step towards forgiveness, to simply maybe even just pray that you would help their heart move, that you would soften their heart. Father, if we do offer forgiveness and obedience to your instructions, I pray that you would meet us there, that we would find you there, and that we would experience a peace there that maybe we haven't had in a long time. In the meantime, God, thank you for loving us so well. In Jesus' name, amen.
Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. Happy New Year, and thank you for choosing to spend your first Sunday of the year in church here at Grace. I'm excited for this year, for all that it holds for our church and all the things that hopefully God has for us this year. I think 2020 is going to be a huge year in the life of Grace. As we launched the year, I wanted to start with a series that would be helpful for everybody. So if you're here this morning, wherever you are on the spiritual spectrum, if you're one who would say, you know what, I'm not even really sure that I'm a believer or that I want to be, but I want to try the church thing. I want to try to understand faith a little bit more. If you're here as a representative of a New Year's resolution to attend more regularly or whatever, or if you're somebody who has really highly prioritized your relationship with God for a long time, my goal for this series is that it would be practically useful for all of us, that you'd be able to take things home every week and really kind of assess, how do I implement these things in my life? I'm hopeful that this can be a very helpful series. That's why it's called I Want a Better Life. I don't think anybody, if we said like, how's your life right now? Is there anything that you want to be better? Very few of us would say like, I'm killing it. I mean, there's nothing else that I could find. Like, Kyle Tolbert's the only person I know who'd be like, nope, totally happy with everything in my life right now. This is fantastic. Kyle's our super energetic student pastor, for those who don't know. So we all want a better life, and so next week, we're going to look at, I want better kids. We're going to look at parenting. Then the week after that, I want a better marriage, which I know that there's only a couple of marriages in here that really want to be better. The rest of you are doing great. For those few, we're going to talk about wanting a better marriage. Then the last Sunday of the month, I'm really excited about, we're going to talk about, I want a better me. Mental health has come to the fore of our culture, and I think as a culture we have an increasing awareness of that. And so I want to take a week and look at mental health and what it means for a believer to be mentally healthy and how the church can accept and embrace and rally around the mental health of us individually and of the people in our lives. So I'm excited for that week. This morning, I wanted to start 2020 by talking about our schedules. So this morning is I want a better schedule. I wanted to talk about our schedules because I feel like as a culture, we are busier now than we've ever been. I feel like there are so many pulls and so many pressures and so many different things and obligations and senses of ought that pull us into things that we just give our days and our mornings and our evenings away to, that as a group of people, as a culture, a society, I think we are very likely busier than ever. I remember when I was a kid, which was in the 80s, which for me feels like a long time ago, I saw somebody tweet the other day, or I guess it was on January 1st, that we are now as far away from 2050 as we are from 1990, which is super depressing. But in the 80s, when I was growing up, man, Sundays, I just saw somebody over there doing the math like, they're very slow. I saw, in the 80s, you didn't schedule anything on Sundays. Sundays was a blackout day. There's no nothing on Sundays because Sundays was church day. I even remember growing up, you didn't have practice on Wednesday night. Nothing was scheduled on Wednesdays. That was a sacred day too. And now, man, like all gloves are off. Everything can be scheduled at any time. And people will obligate you to things so quickly. We took Lily to preschool to start that. And on orientation night, there's a large sign-up sheet that everybody just stares at you as you stare at it. And they're watching you. Where are you going to write your name? Surely you're not going to walk out of here without writing your name on something. And I thought, bad news for you guys. I'm not volunteering for anything. And I didn't. But my wife is sweet. Jen is so nice. So she signs up to be library mom, not knowing that it means like once a week she has to pick up books from the classroom and then take them to the library and then check out all the other books that the preschool now wants, which is funny because the amount of money we give the preschool every month seems like they can afford books, but what do I know? So that's what Jen does like every other day, but she loves it and she's continued to do it, but there are opportunities and things that get our time so frequently. I actually hold, I don't think that there is a busier season of life than that of parents of elementary and middle school kids. From a pastor's perspective, I get to see kind of all seasons of life and which groups of people can engage in which activities in the church. And the hardest ones to grab a hold to are parents who have kids in elementary and middle school. And it's not because they don't care about spiritual things. It's because they legit don't have time for anything. I had some of the moms in the church who have kids in that demographic. I emailed them and I said, hey, can I have your schedules? I just want to get a sense for how busy your lives are. Y'all, it was crazy. It was crazy. As I read through their schedules, literally stem to stern every day. The thing that stuck out to me most was one of the moms who has three kids put, I'm just reading her schedule every week. These are the consistent things every week. And it was all the time. And then she said, there's an asterisk, and the asterisk says, these are the activities that we can predict. There are unpredictable activities such as all these things, right? Swim meets and committee meetings and mom things and dance recitals and all the other stuff that fill up all the time. And she had a note on Friday afternoon. The schedule on Friday afternoon was from four to six o'clock, free time, nothing to do, smiley face emoji. For two hours on a Friday. That's it. That's the free time that the whole family has together. And I thought, my goodness, that's so busy. And some of us can relate to that. So listen, I'm not here this morning to demonize busyness. It's not inherently wrong to be busy. As a matter of fact, in defense of the moms that sent me their schedules, they made each of those decisions as a family. And sometimes you're just in a busy season or a season of hustle, and that's all right. So I don't want to demonize busy, but I do want us at the beginning of this year to think critically about how we assemble our schedules. How is it that we allow things to be put on our schedule? I also want to say up front that in our culture a little bit, we wear our busyness on our sleeve like a badge of honor, like being exhausted is a thing to be respected. That's stupid, right? That's all I have to say about that. That's a dumb thing. We shouldn't be proud of how busy we are. We should accept it if we choose to be busy, but it's not a thing to be admired that someone else is so busy that they can't wake up and look in the mirror and think, I feel rested. That's too busy maybe. But I think a bigger reason why we end up so busy with our time so obligated is that we tend to build our schedules like Hardee's builds a menu. Okay, we tend to build our schedules like Hardee's, the restaurant, builds a menu. Now, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know how much fast food is a part of your world. Fast food is a large part of my world. It always has been. It is near and dear to me. I'm in a weight loss bet with my dad and my sister right now, and so it is not a part of my world, but I think I'm going to lose the weight by about March, which means come April, back to Hardee's, baby. But if fast food is not a part of your world, then you don't know that in the early 2000s, Hardee's, as a restaurant, just completely forgot who they were. They did breakfast. They did biscuits. We know about biscuits. The rise and shine biscuits or whatever they are. Those are delicious. But then they said, let's get into burgers and let's do roast beef sandwiches and let's have curly fries and let's do chicken tenders and let's serve fried chicken. And how about soups? I'm pretty sure at one point there was an experimental deli counter at a Hardee's somewhere. I would have loved to have been in the boardroom just listening to these meetings where some intern says, you know, I think Arby's is making some real hay with that roast beef sandwich and curly fries. We need to get into that market share. And the rest of the really smart executives around the successful restaurant board went, yeah, sounds good. Let's do a roast beef sandwich. Let's figure it out. And they just started adding things to the menu. If you were paying attention, it was just this total hodgepodge. They did everything. I can't imagine what their inventory looked like. And then when that failed, they just went to, let's just do really ridiculous attention-grabbing commercials, and nothing worked. And the thing is with the Hardee's menu is none of the things were bad, right? Roast beef sandwich, that's good, but let's just let Arby's do it. Fried chicken, that's great. Let's leave that to Popeye's. They didn't do that. They just kept adding all the things. Anytime anybody suggested a good thing, boom, got put on the menu. And it led to disorganization, and it's not a very good restaurant. So I think that what we need to do is we need to build our schedules a little bit more like Chick-fil-A and less like Hardee's. We need to build our schedules more like Chick-fil-A and less like Hardee's because I think that we do what Hardee's does sometimes. Somebody suggests something that seems like a good idea, and we're like, yeah, I mean, I guess I should. We go to preschool, and there's a sign-up sheet, and everyone's staring at you, and my sense of awe is going to make me sign up for something. I can't leave here disappointing these strangers that I don't know again. Or we do the same thing with PTA, or it's time to coach ball, or it's time to be on the committee, or Nate called me and asked me to do this thing, and I really don't want to do it, but it's the pastor. I feel like I have to. So we just, when we get good ideas, we put that on the calendar, we figure it out, and we build it like Hardee's builds their menu, and maybe we need to build our schedule more like Chick-fil-A. Now, we know about Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A does one thing, chicken. That's it, chicken sandwich. And then they grilled it. And then with an act of Congress, they made it spicy. That's it. That's all they do. And you know that there's been some pretty good ideas in the boardroom at Chick-fil-A over the history of the restaurant. You know people have suggested some really good stuff. Why don't we do rotisserie chicken? No. We do chicken sandwiches. This is all we do. And the other thing I love about Chick-fil-A, if they put something on the menu and it's not working, get it out of here, man. They're ruthless about it. They really streamline what they allow there. They don't have a chicken salad sandwich anymore because they got away from the old one that was mashed down and in the warm bag and was delicious and they tried to go fancy and that didn't sell. And so now they don't have one because if it's not doing what it's supposed to do, get it out of here. They really streamline their menu. And I think that we need to build our schedules like that. So the question becomes, how do we build our schedules like Chick-fil-A builds a menu? How do we streamline it according to what's important to us, so that we don't live our life by default, so that we don't look back on the last year and go, how in the world did I invest my time? How do we do that? Well, I think that there's a biblical principle to help us, and we can find it in Matthew chapter 6. If you have a Bible and you want to turn there, go ahead. The words will be up on the screen in a minute. Matthew chapter 6 is the Sermon on the Mount. It's in the middle of it. It's Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. It's Jesus' first recorded public address. I love it so much that we did a whole series on the Sermon on the Mount one time. And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is just dispensing wisdom and instruction for life. And in chapter 6, he says this. Verse 19, the words on the screen are going to start in verse 20 don't matter, that are temporary. And the purpose of this morning, don't invest your lives, don't invest your time, don't invest your effort and your energy and your talent and your resources in things that don't matter, but rather treasure up for yourselves, make priorities of the things that will matter for eternity, of the things that will matter after you're gone. Orchestrate your life around those things, treasure those things. And so, to me, the very obvious question in light of, in thinking about our schedules and in light of this passage and this principle is what are my treasures? What are my treasures? And normally when I do a note like this, I say, what are your treasures? It's me talking to you, but I really want you to internalize it this morning and think through what are my treasures? What are the things that are most important to me? What are my biggest priorities? And I was always told growing up, if you want to know what someone treasures, look at their bank account and look at their calendar. Look at how they invest their resources. How do we spend our time and how do we spend our money? And so if we think about time, if I were to go home with you or grab your phone and look through your calendar from 2019, what would your calendar say about what your treasures are? Because you can't fake that, right? We can say, oh, God's most important to me, my family's most important to me, or my friends, or whatever it is, my job's most important to me. We can say whatever we want is most important to us, but all we have to do is look through our appointments and the way that we spent our time, and we'll know what we really value. If we could follow each other around on the weekends, what would we learn about each other that we value? If we could see each other in the evenings during our discretionary time, that one family in the hours of 4 to 6 p.m. on Friday, what would we learn about what they value? If we were to look at our schedules and our calendars from 2019, what is it that we treasure? And so what I want us to do this morning is a little bit of homework. In your bulletin there, there's the question, what are my treasures? And there's five blanks, okay? I don't want you to fill those out here. What I'd love to invite you to do is take the bulletin home with you and prayerfully think through, God, what are the things in my life that you want to be most important to me? A better way to ask the question is, God, what are my God-ordained treasures? What would you have be important to me in 2020? How would you have me prioritize my life? I think it's a worthwhile exercise at the beginning of the year to take that home and sit down and prayerfully say, God, what do you want to be important to me? What have you placed on my heart that I need to value? And it's actually a helpful exercise. I did it this week. I just sat down and I thought, if I'm going to ask everybody to do this, I need to do this for myself. I haven't written down my priorities anywhere. I just kind of go. And a lot like Hardee's, my schedule by default just kind of happens. And so if I were to be intentional about building my schedule and listing my priorities, how would I list them? And so I'm going to share them with you this morning, not because they need to be yours and not because you need to copy my list, but just as an exercise of trying to figure out what should be important to us. And then how do we organize our life around those things? So these are my top five priorities in my life as I thought through them this week. You see, the very first thing up there is spiritual health, my relationship with God. The Bible has a lot to say about pursuing God. David writes in Psalms that as the deer pants for the water, so his soul longs after God, that that's how much we should long for God. I almost preached out of a passage where Jesus is interacting with Martha and Mary in Luke, I believe chapter 10. And in that story, Jesus is going to Martha and Mary's house. And Martha is doing what most of us would do and is scrambling around getting everything right, making sure the table's set correctly and that the napkins are folded and that the room that Jesus is never going to go in in a million years is vacuumed and that the curtains are just right. She's doing all the things that you're supposed to do. This is the Messiah, after all, and he's coming to my house. I'd like for it to look nice. And she gets upset because Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus. Mary's just sitting there soaking in Jesus's presence. And Martha thinks she's lazy and she gets on to her. Hey, you should help me. And Jesus actually defends Mary and says, Martha, Martha, you are concerned about all of these things, but only one thing matters, and Mary's figured it out. So I believe that if you're a believer, this is the one where I would say you should really write this down too as your top priority. But don't do it unless you mean it. Our spiritual health has got to be our most important thing to us. Because here's what I know about myself. I don't know what you've learned about yourself as you've pursued spiritual health over the years or as you've considered it, but for me, I'm a better everything when I'm walking with the Lord. I am more gracious with my time. I'm more magnanimous with other people. I'm more patient with inconveniences. I'm more considerate of Jen, my wife. I'm more present with Lily, my daughter. I behave better in elder meetings. I'm nicer to the staff and don't want to get out of meetings as quickly. I leave my door open a little bit more often so I can chit-chat, which is not really a thing that Nate loves to do. But when I'm walking with the Lord and he's filling me up, I become a more gracious and more kind version of myself. And I become a better husband and I become a better father and I become a better pastor and I'm walking in a sense of joy and contentment and completeness that I cannot experience away from the Father. So I would be a very strong advocate to putting as your number one priority your spiritual health. Even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, you're thinking things through, I would still submit to you that probably the most important thing in your life is being spiritually healthy. I think if you go down that path, it will lead you to serve the same God that I do. But I think for all of us, this is a pretty compelling top spot. Next for me is Jen. It's my wife. In Ephesians 5, Paul talks about marriage, and he says that husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who gave himself up for her. So if we look at Jesus, his first priority was to God and being obedient to him, and then his next priority was the church. And husbands, that's how we are to love our wives. We're going to talk about this in a couple weeks, so I'm not going to step on that too much. But my Bible tells me that I am to sacrifice my life for my wife. I'm going to lay myself down for her, and I will, listen, I'm up here preaching this to you. She's sitting right there. She knows I don't do this all the time, all right? So let's not act like you should be like me in your marriages. No, we should work on this together, right? No, we don't want any liars up here. We're doing our best. But I know that this is how I should prioritize that. And what does it look like to prioritize these things? If we're to say that spiritual health is my number one priority, then what does it look like as far as building our schedule to do that? Well, first we have to identify the things that make us healthy. I think it's time in God's Word and time in prayer. And so for a lot of us, that might mean adjusting our schedule and going to bed a little earlier so we can get up a little earlier. Cutting out that last episode of whatever it is. Being willing to not see the end of the game, which by the way, go Titans last night. So that we can get up earlier the next day and invest in spiritual health. Maybe it means next week signing up for a small group and prioritizing that in our schedule. Maybe it means not committing to the things that are going to require our time on Sunday morning or some other time where it can be spiritually helpful to us. Maybe it means paring down some of the things in our schedule so that we can have more time for God. And if we think about prioritizing our marriages, I think anybody who's in here who's married, their spouse would be in the top at least three, okay? If that's not it, come see me. But how do we practically schedule for that? I know for us, it's going to mean me being more intentional about finding babysitters and getting out to spend time together. It's intentional about getting home for meals, not stopping by in the middle of the day if it's a full day. We can't just say that these are our priorities. We have to think practically about, okay, if those are my priorities, then how does my schedule mirror that? After Jen is my daughter Lily. I think she has to be after Jen. And if parents, if we're not careful, we'll let the kids sneak up over our spouse, won't we? But I think one of the best things I can possibly do for Lily is to love her mom in such a way that she wants what we have when she grows up. What a thing to say about your parents that they might want that. I think one of the best things for Lily is to grow up in a house where her parents love each other. And listen, we don't have a perfect life or a perfect marriage. I'm just saying that this is what Lily is supposed to see. And it's what I want to give to her. I want to love Lily so well that when guys try to date her, she knows. You're not going to love me anywhere like my dad does. Forget it. I want to love her so well that she doesn't put up with dummies when she's in high school and college. I really do. And I have her listed above the church. And I'm just going to tell you guys this right now because I want her to know as she grows up and we lead this church together that she means more to me than you guys do. I want her to know that. I want her to never think, man, my dad loved those church people, and sometimes it felt like he didn't love me as much. I don't want her to feel that. I don't want her to feel like she's taking a back seat to my job. I do want her to feel like she takes a back seat to my wife because I want her to marry a guy that does that too. And we're going to talk about this next week, but Lily's got to be on there because God's called me to disciple her and to train her in spiritual health as well. After that, for me, are my family and friends. My immediate family and my friends, I lump those together because for me, friendships are super valuable. I believe what Solomon says in Proverbs when he says, the companion of the fools will suffer harm, but the companion of the wise will become wise. I believe in the adage, you show me your friends, I'll show you your future. We believe passionately that you need people in your life who love you and love Jesus and have permission to tell you the truth. And so for me, I prioritize friendships. And I prioritize them sometimes over my job because I believe that we all need safe spaces where we can be completely ourselves and completely vulnerable and still completely loved and accepted. That's a picture of godly biblical love. It keeps us sane. For me personally, I want to be your pastor for 30 years, not three years. And part of that and the help for me is having good friendships both inside and outside of the church that give me life where I can just be myself. So for me, I prioritize those. And then my job. You guys. I put it there because I think the tendency is, for any of us who have careers that we care about, is to allow that to leapfrog everything else in our life. Is to allow that to steal time from other things. And I hear often from people who are retired that one of their biggest regrets is working too much. And I don't want to say that. So on the front end, I try to constantly remind myself because it will eat me up. You guys know how it is with work. There's always more to do. There's always more to think about. There's always something else to be done. There's always the next hill to climb. There's always something urgent. There's always the phone call and always the email and always the thing to respond to. It's not going to go away just because you choose to respond to this one. The next wave is coming. So at one point or another, you have to draw a line and you have to say, these are my God-ordained treasures, and I'm not going to let this one overtake ones that it shouldn't. So we have to measure how highly we prioritize our jobs or whatever else may go there that tends to eat away at your time. So my hope is that you'll go home and you'll say, God, what are my treasures? What are my God-ordained treasures in my life? That you'll physically write them out and then ask this question, what would it look like for us to radically reprioritize our lives around God-ordained treasures? What would it look like for us to radically reprioritize our lives around God-ordained treasures? If I say these are the most important things to me in 2020, then what's it going to take to organize my life around those things? What am I going to have to give up? What am I going to have to reprioritize? Who am I going to have to willingly disappoint and say, I can't do this thing anymore because I'm going to prioritize these things? And if we ask that question, what's it going to look like if we radically reprioritize our life around these God-ordained treasures, I actually have an example of what that could look like. As I was thinking through this this week, there's a family in our church, Wynn and Elisa Dunn, and they've got two kids, one in elementary school, one in middle school. I think the daughter might be in middle school now too. I got to figure that out before they come in the second service and I offend her. But I noticed on their Facebook feed is a lot of pictures like this. I think, Lynn, we have a picture of their family. Yeah, that's them doing something involving harnesses. It seems very fun. They do stuff like this all the time, all the time. They are forever going on little family outings and vacations and retreats. As a matter of fact, listen, I don't check up on you when you don't come on Facebook, but often if I don't see them on Sunday, on Sunday afternoon or Monday, I'll see a picture of their family together somewhere. Family time is big for the Dunns. And so I called Wynn. I said, hey man, this might sound weird, but I'm doing a sermon on this. I kind of explained it to him. And I said, you guys seem to be hanging out as a family all the time. Your kids are in middle school, and they seem to still like you and want to be seen in public with you, which is a big win for Wynn. And so I asked him, like, what's your philosophy around family? Like, what led you to value it this way? And he goes, well, do you know my full story? I said, I guess I don't. And he told me that years ago, he had a really lucrative job. It was a very high-paying job, but it was a high-stress job. And it consumed him. This was in the days of Blackberries, and he was forever on it. It was ever-present. Dinners, weekends, vacations, it was always, when can you do this one more thing? When can you just take this call real quick? Can you just close this out? Can you just put out this fire? It was always a part of him. And he says it was causing a lot of stress in his marriage, particularly as they invited kids into this marriage. And now his wife is home caring for the baby and he's never present. And it was causing tension and it made things difficult. And the kids began to notice how committed he was to his phone and his job too. So much so that he told me that, I think it was about 10 years ago, they went to Busch Gardens as a family. And as he was getting out of the car, he said, you know what I'm going to do? And he took his BlackBerry out and he put it in the car and he shut the doors and he locked it. And he said, when he did that, everybody in his family started crying because we've got our dad. He's going to be present with us today. I'd love to be the ticket taker at Busch Gardens that day. What's the matter with you guys? Like no one made you come. You can go back home. But his family cried because now we get dad. And it didn't take too much longer after that until he looked at his life and he said, man, I'm prioritizing things that I just don't want to prioritize right now. And so he changed careers. He called an audible, left the very high paying job, changed careers and chose a career, chose an industry that would allow him to have more time with his family. Made an intentional choice to radically reprioritize his life around what he believed to be God-ordained treasures. He said that was nine years ago. I said, as you look back on that, do you have any regrets? Or was it just best decision you ever made? And he said, you know, I'm not going to lie. Sometimes I think about the money and what would be possible if I had it. But no, there are no regrets. I love my kids. My kids love me. I have a good family, and it's so much more valuable to me than any resources that I could have. And so I'm praying that for some of us, this is just the nudge that you needed because there have been things going on in your life and you're too busy and you're too caught up and you see things slipping away from you that are important to you. And maybe the Holy Spirit's just working in your heart right now to say, hey, why don't you let some things go? Maybe this needs to be the year that you get okay with disappointing people. Where you realize, you know what? If the stranger's disappointed in me for not doing the thing that they want me to do, I'm going to be okay. Maybe we need to step away from things. I'll even say this. I want to be your pastor before I run the business of the church. If you need to step away from church things, sorry Aaron, for your own health, do it. Claim your schedule around your priorities. And in 2020, let's make some changes and reprioritize our lives around these God-ordained treasures so that when we get to the end of this year and look back on our schedule and we look back at how we invested our time, we go, yeah, I invested these things in treasures that matter for eternity so that we had a better year this year than we did last year. So I hope you'll do that. I hope you'll take the list home. I hope you'll pray through your priorities, and I hope that you'll have the courage to reprioritize your schedule around the things that you and God agree are super important to you in 2020. All right, I'm going to pray. And as I pray, I'm going to pray over the year, too, as we kick it off together, and then I'm going to dismiss and we'll go out into the world. All right, let's pray. Father, thank you so much for you, for your presence, for your goodness, for how big and marvelous and miraculous you are, for how much you care about us, for how much you care about how we fill our time. Lord, I pray that we would be courageous in naming our priorities. I pray that we would be courageous in building our schedule around those. God, if we have to say no to some things, then give us the audacity to do that. If we need to say yes to some things, give us the discipline to do that. God, we know that decisions that we make and things that we resolve to do often falter and flutter. God, I pray that you would be with us and give us your strength to see these things through so that our lives might change in profound ways, God, if that's what you would have. Lord, I pray over this year, may all the events of this year conspire to draw every one of us closer to you. Will you overcome doubts? Will you overcome fears? Will you overcome hesitation? Will you overcome hurt? Will you speak to us in the triumphs so that we don't take credit for those? Will you speak to us in the tragedy, God, so that we don't get overly angry at those? Will you please conspire everything in our life to draw us more closely to you so that we might know what it is to walk with you? For many of us, God, make this the year where we finally break the chains of the old habits and walk in new habits. God, please bless this year and bless us as we walk in it. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.
Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. Happy New Year, and thank you for choosing to spend your first Sunday of the year in church here at Grace. I'm excited for this year, for all that it holds for our church and all the things that hopefully God has for us this year. I think 2020 is going to be a huge year in the life of Grace. As we launched the year, I wanted to start with a series that would be helpful for everybody. So if you're here this morning, wherever you are on the spiritual spectrum, if you're one who would say, you know what, I'm not even really sure that I'm a believer or that I want to be, but I want to try the church thing. I want to try to understand faith a little bit more. If you're here as a representative of a New Year's resolution to attend more regularly or whatever, or if you're somebody who has really highly prioritized your relationship with God for a long time, my goal for this series is that it would be practically useful for all of us, that you'd be able to take things home every week and really kind of assess, how do I implement these things in my life? I'm hopeful that this can be a very helpful series. That's why it's called I Want a Better Life. I don't think anybody, if we said like, how's your life right now? Is there anything that you want to be better? Very few of us would say like, I'm killing it. I mean, there's nothing else that I could find. Like, Kyle Tolbert's the only person I know who'd be like, nope, totally happy with everything in my life right now. This is fantastic. Kyle's our super energetic student pastor, for those who don't know. So we all want a better life, and so next week, we're going to look at, I want better kids. We're going to look at parenting. Then the week after that, I want a better marriage, which I know that there's only a couple of marriages in here that really want to be better. The rest of you are doing great. For those few, we're going to talk about wanting a better marriage. Then the last Sunday of the month, I'm really excited about, we're going to talk about, I want a better me. Mental health has come to the fore of our culture, and I think as a culture we have an increasing awareness of that. And so I want to take a week and look at mental health and what it means for a believer to be mentally healthy and how the church can accept and embrace and rally around the mental health of us individually and of the people in our lives. So I'm excited for that week. This morning, I wanted to start 2020 by talking about our schedules. So this morning is I want a better schedule. I wanted to talk about our schedules because I feel like as a culture, we are busier now than we've ever been. I feel like there are so many pulls and so many pressures and so many different things and obligations and senses of ought that pull us into things that we just give our days and our mornings and our evenings away to, that as a group of people, as a culture, a society, I think we are very likely busier than ever. I remember when I was a kid, which was in the 80s, which for me feels like a long time ago, I saw somebody tweet the other day, or I guess it was on January 1st, that we are now as far away from 2050 as we are from 1990, which is super depressing. But in the 80s, when I was growing up, man, Sundays, I just saw somebody over there doing the math like, they're very slow. I saw, in the 80s, you didn't schedule anything on Sundays. Sundays was a blackout day. There's no nothing on Sundays because Sundays was church day. I even remember growing up, you didn't have practice on Wednesday night. Nothing was scheduled on Wednesdays. That was a sacred day too. And now, man, like all gloves are off. Everything can be scheduled at any time. And people will obligate you to things so quickly. We took Lily to preschool to start that. And on orientation night, there's a large sign-up sheet that everybody just stares at you as you stare at it. And they're watching you. Where are you going to write your name? Surely you're not going to walk out of here without writing your name on something. And I thought, bad news for you guys. I'm not volunteering for anything. And I didn't. But my wife is sweet. Jen is so nice. So she signs up to be library mom, not knowing that it means like once a week she has to pick up books from the classroom and then take them to the library and then check out all the other books that the preschool now wants, which is funny because the amount of money we give the preschool every month seems like they can afford books, but what do I know? So that's what Jen does like every other day, but she loves it and she's continued to do it, but there are opportunities and things that get our time so frequently. I actually hold, I don't think that there is a busier season of life than that of parents of elementary and middle school kids. From a pastor's perspective, I get to see kind of all seasons of life and which groups of people can engage in which activities in the church. And the hardest ones to grab a hold to are parents who have kids in elementary and middle school. And it's not because they don't care about spiritual things. It's because they legit don't have time for anything. I had some of the moms in the church who have kids in that demographic. I emailed them and I said, hey, can I have your schedules? I just want to get a sense for how busy your lives are. Y'all, it was crazy. It was crazy. As I read through their schedules, literally stem to stern every day. The thing that stuck out to me most was one of the moms who has three kids put, I'm just reading her schedule every week. These are the consistent things every week. And it was all the time. And then she said, there's an asterisk, and the asterisk says, these are the activities that we can predict. There are unpredictable activities such as all these things, right? Swim meets and committee meetings and mom things and dance recitals and all the other stuff that fill up all the time. And she had a note on Friday afternoon. The schedule on Friday afternoon was from four to six o'clock, free time, nothing to do, smiley face emoji. For two hours on a Friday. That's it. That's the free time that the whole family has together. And I thought, my goodness, that's so busy. And some of us can relate to that. So listen, I'm not here this morning to demonize busyness. It's not inherently wrong to be busy. As a matter of fact, in defense of the moms that sent me their schedules, they made each of those decisions as a family. And sometimes you're just in a busy season or a season of hustle, and that's all right. So I don't want to demonize busy, but I do want us at the beginning of this year to think critically about how we assemble our schedules. How is it that we allow things to be put on our schedule? I also want to say up front that in our culture a little bit, we wear our busyness on our sleeve like a badge of honor, like being exhausted is a thing to be respected. That's stupid, right? That's all I have to say about that. That's a dumb thing. We shouldn't be proud of how busy we are. We should accept it if we choose to be busy, but it's not a thing to be admired that someone else is so busy that they can't wake up and look in the mirror and think, I feel rested. That's too busy maybe. But I think a bigger reason why we end up so busy with our time so obligated is that we tend to build our schedules like Hardee's builds a menu. Okay, we tend to build our schedules like Hardee's, the restaurant, builds a menu. Now, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know how much fast food is a part of your world. Fast food is a large part of my world. It always has been. It is near and dear to me. I'm in a weight loss bet with my dad and my sister right now, and so it is not a part of my world, but I think I'm going to lose the weight by about March, which means come April, back to Hardee's, baby. But if fast food is not a part of your world, then you don't know that in the early 2000s, Hardee's, as a restaurant, just completely forgot who they were. They did breakfast. They did biscuits. We know about biscuits. The rise and shine biscuits or whatever they are. Those are delicious. But then they said, let's get into burgers and let's do roast beef sandwiches and let's have curly fries and let's do chicken tenders and let's serve fried chicken. And how about soups? I'm pretty sure at one point there was an experimental deli counter at a Hardee's somewhere. I would have loved to have been in the boardroom just listening to these meetings where some intern says, you know, I think Arby's is making some real hay with that roast beef sandwich and curly fries. We need to get into that market share. And the rest of the really smart executives around the successful restaurant board went, yeah, sounds good. Let's do a roast beef sandwich. Let's figure it out. And they just started adding things to the menu. If you were paying attention, it was just this total hodgepodge. They did everything. I can't imagine what their inventory looked like. And then when that failed, they just went to, let's just do really ridiculous attention-grabbing commercials, and nothing worked. And the thing is with the Hardee's menu is none of the things were bad, right? Roast beef sandwich, that's good, but let's just let Arby's do it. Fried chicken, that's great. Let's leave that to Popeye's. They didn't do that. They just kept adding all the things. Anytime anybody suggested a good thing, boom, got put on the menu. And it led to disorganization, and it's not a very good restaurant. So I think that what we need to do is we need to build our schedules a little bit more like Chick-fil-A and less like Hardee's. We need to build our schedules more like Chick-fil-A and less like Hardee's because I think that we do what Hardee's does sometimes. Somebody suggests something that seems like a good idea, and we're like, yeah, I mean, I guess I should. We go to preschool, and there's a sign-up sheet, and everyone's staring at you, and my sense of awe is going to make me sign up for something. I can't leave here disappointing these strangers that I don't know again. Or we do the same thing with PTA, or it's time to coach ball, or it's time to be on the committee, or Nate called me and asked me to do this thing, and I really don't want to do it, but it's the pastor. I feel like I have to. So we just, when we get good ideas, we put that on the calendar, we figure it out, and we build it like Hardee's builds their menu, and maybe we need to build our schedule more like Chick-fil-A. Now, we know about Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A does one thing, chicken. That's it, chicken sandwich. And then they grilled it. And then with an act of Congress, they made it spicy. That's it. That's all they do. And you know that there's been some pretty good ideas in the boardroom at Chick-fil-A over the history of the restaurant. You know people have suggested some really good stuff. Why don't we do rotisserie chicken? No. We do chicken sandwiches. This is all we do. And the other thing I love about Chick-fil-A, if they put something on the menu and it's not working, get it out of here, man. They're ruthless about it. They really streamline what they allow there. They don't have a chicken salad sandwich anymore because they got away from the old one that was mashed down and in the warm bag and was delicious and they tried to go fancy and that didn't sell. And so now they don't have one because if it's not doing what it's supposed to do, get it out of here. They really streamline their menu. And I think that we need to build our schedules like that. So the question becomes, how do we build our schedules like Chick-fil-A builds a menu? How do we streamline it according to what's important to us, so that we don't live our life by default, so that we don't look back on the last year and go, how in the world did I invest my time? How do we do that? Well, I think that there's a biblical principle to help us, and we can find it in Matthew chapter 6. If you have a Bible and you want to turn there, go ahead. The words will be up on the screen in a minute. Matthew chapter 6 is the Sermon on the Mount. It's in the middle of it. It's Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. It's Jesus' first recorded public address. I love it so much that we did a whole series on the Sermon on the Mount one time. And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is just dispensing wisdom and instruction for life. And in chapter 6, he says this. Verse 19, the words on the screen are going to start in verse 20 don't matter, that are temporary. And the purpose of this morning, don't invest your lives, don't invest your time, don't invest your effort and your energy and your talent and your resources in things that don't matter, but rather treasure up for yourselves, make priorities of the things that will matter for eternity, of the things that will matter after you're gone. Orchestrate your life around those things, treasure those things. And so, to me, the very obvious question in light of, in thinking about our schedules and in light of this passage and this principle is what are my treasures? What are my treasures? And normally when I do a note like this, I say, what are your treasures? It's me talking to you, but I really want you to internalize it this morning and think through what are my treasures? What are the things that are most important to me? What are my biggest priorities? And I was always told growing up, if you want to know what someone treasures, look at their bank account and look at their calendar. Look at how they invest their resources. How do we spend our time and how do we spend our money? And so if we think about time, if I were to go home with you or grab your phone and look through your calendar from 2019, what would your calendar say about what your treasures are? Because you can't fake that, right? We can say, oh, God's most important to me, my family's most important to me, or my friends, or whatever it is, my job's most important to me. We can say whatever we want is most important to us, but all we have to do is look through our appointments and the way that we spent our time, and we'll know what we really value. If we could follow each other around on the weekends, what would we learn about each other that we value? If we could see each other in the evenings during our discretionary time, that one family in the hours of 4 to 6 p.m. on Friday, what would we learn about what they value? If we were to look at our schedules and our calendars from 2019, what is it that we treasure? And so what I want us to do this morning is a little bit of homework. In your bulletin there, there's the question, what are my treasures? And there's five blanks, okay? I don't want you to fill those out here. What I'd love to invite you to do is take the bulletin home with you and prayerfully think through, God, what are the things in my life that you want to be most important to me? A better way to ask the question is, God, what are my God-ordained treasures? What would you have be important to me in 2020? How would you have me prioritize my life? I think it's a worthwhile exercise at the beginning of the year to take that home and sit down and prayerfully say, God, what do you want to be important to me? What have you placed on my heart that I need to value? And it's actually a helpful exercise. I did it this week. I just sat down and I thought, if I'm going to ask everybody to do this, I need to do this for myself. I haven't written down my priorities anywhere. I just kind of go. And a lot like Hardee's, my schedule by default just kind of happens. And so if I were to be intentional about building my schedule and listing my priorities, how would I list them? And so I'm going to share them with you this morning, not because they need to be yours and not because you need to copy my list, but just as an exercise of trying to figure out what should be important to us. And then how do we organize our life around those things? So these are my top five priorities in my life as I thought through them this week. You see, the very first thing up there is spiritual health, my relationship with God. The Bible has a lot to say about pursuing God. David writes in Psalms that as the deer pants for the water, so his soul longs after God, that that's how much we should long for God. I almost preached out of a passage where Jesus is interacting with Martha and Mary in Luke, I believe chapter 10. And in that story, Jesus is going to Martha and Mary's house. And Martha is doing what most of us would do and is scrambling around getting everything right, making sure the table's set correctly and that the napkins are folded and that the room that Jesus is never going to go in in a million years is vacuumed and that the curtains are just right. She's doing all the things that you're supposed to do. This is the Messiah, after all, and he's coming to my house. I'd like for it to look nice. And she gets upset because Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus. Mary's just sitting there soaking in Jesus's presence. And Martha thinks she's lazy and she gets on to her. Hey, you should help me. And Jesus actually defends Mary and says, Martha, Martha, you are concerned about all of these things, but only one thing matters, and Mary's figured it out. So I believe that if you're a believer, this is the one where I would say you should really write this down too as your top priority. But don't do it unless you mean it. Our spiritual health has got to be our most important thing to us. Because here's what I know about myself. I don't know what you've learned about yourself as you've pursued spiritual health over the years or as you've considered it, but for me, I'm a better everything when I'm walking with the Lord. I am more gracious with my time. I'm more magnanimous with other people. I'm more patient with inconveniences. I'm more considerate of Jen, my wife. I'm more present with Lily, my daughter. I behave better in elder meetings. I'm nicer to the staff and don't want to get out of meetings as quickly. I leave my door open a little bit more often so I can chit-chat, which is not really a thing that Nate loves to do. But when I'm walking with the Lord and he's filling me up, I become a more gracious and more kind version of myself. And I become a better husband and I become a better father and I become a better pastor and I'm walking in a sense of joy and contentment and completeness that I cannot experience away from the Father. So I would be a very strong advocate to putting as your number one priority your spiritual health. Even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, you're thinking things through, I would still submit to you that probably the most important thing in your life is being spiritually healthy. I think if you go down that path, it will lead you to serve the same God that I do. But I think for all of us, this is a pretty compelling top spot. Next for me is Jen. It's my wife. In Ephesians 5, Paul talks about marriage, and he says that husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church, who gave himself up for her. So if we look at Jesus, his first priority was to God and being obedient to him, and then his next priority was the church. And husbands, that's how we are to love our wives. We're going to talk about this in a couple weeks, so I'm not going to step on that too much. But my Bible tells me that I am to sacrifice my life for my wife. I'm going to lay myself down for her, and I will, listen, I'm up here preaching this to you. She's sitting right there. She knows I don't do this all the time, all right? So let's not act like you should be like me in your marriages. No, we should work on this together, right? No, we don't want any liars up here. We're doing our best. But I know that this is how I should prioritize that. And what does it look like to prioritize these things? If we're to say that spiritual health is my number one priority, then what does it look like as far as building our schedule to do that? Well, first we have to identify the things that make us healthy. I think it's time in God's Word and time in prayer. And so for a lot of us, that might mean adjusting our schedule and going to bed a little earlier so we can get up a little earlier. Cutting out that last episode of whatever it is. Being willing to not see the end of the game, which by the way, go Titans last night. So that we can get up earlier the next day and invest in spiritual health. Maybe it means next week signing up for a small group and prioritizing that in our schedule. Maybe it means not committing to the things that are going to require our time on Sunday morning or some other time where it can be spiritually helpful to us. Maybe it means paring down some of the things in our schedule so that we can have more time for God. And if we think about prioritizing our marriages, I think anybody who's in here who's married, their spouse would be in the top at least three, okay? If that's not it, come see me. But how do we practically schedule for that? I know for us, it's going to mean me being more intentional about finding babysitters and getting out to spend time together. It's intentional about getting home for meals, not stopping by in the middle of the day if it's a full day. We can't just say that these are our priorities. We have to think practically about, okay, if those are my priorities, then how does my schedule mirror that? After Jen is my daughter Lily. I think she has to be after Jen. And if parents, if we're not careful, we'll let the kids sneak up over our spouse, won't we? But I think one of the best things I can possibly do for Lily is to love her mom in such a way that she wants what we have when she grows up. What a thing to say about your parents that they might want that. I think one of the best things for Lily is to grow up in a house where her parents love each other. And listen, we don't have a perfect life or a perfect marriage. I'm just saying that this is what Lily is supposed to see. And it's what I want to give to her. I want to love Lily so well that when guys try to date her, she knows. You're not going to love me anywhere like my dad does. Forget it. I want to love her so well that she doesn't put up with dummies when she's in high school and college. I really do. And I have her listed above the church. And I'm just going to tell you guys this right now because I want her to know as she grows up and we lead this church together that she means more to me than you guys do. I want her to know that. I want her to never think, man, my dad loved those church people, and sometimes it felt like he didn't love me as much. I don't want her to feel that. I don't want her to feel like she's taking a back seat to my job. I do want her to feel like she takes a back seat to my wife because I want her to marry a guy that does that too. And we're going to talk about this next week, but Lily's got to be on there because God's called me to disciple her and to train her in spiritual health as well. After that, for me, are my family and friends. My immediate family and my friends, I lump those together because for me, friendships are super valuable. I believe what Solomon says in Proverbs when he says, the companion of the fools will suffer harm, but the companion of the wise will become wise. I believe in the adage, you show me your friends, I'll show you your future. We believe passionately that you need people in your life who love you and love Jesus and have permission to tell you the truth. And so for me, I prioritize friendships. And I prioritize them sometimes over my job because I believe that we all need safe spaces where we can be completely ourselves and completely vulnerable and still completely loved and accepted. That's a picture of godly biblical love. It keeps us sane. For me personally, I want to be your pastor for 30 years, not three years. And part of that and the help for me is having good friendships both inside and outside of the church that give me life where I can just be myself. So for me, I prioritize those. And then my job. You guys. I put it there because I think the tendency is, for any of us who have careers that we care about, is to allow that to leapfrog everything else in our life. Is to allow that to steal time from other things. And I hear often from people who are retired that one of their biggest regrets is working too much. And I don't want to say that. So on the front end, I try to constantly remind myself because it will eat me up. You guys know how it is with work. There's always more to do. There's always more to think about. There's always something else to be done. There's always the next hill to climb. There's always something urgent. There's always the phone call and always the email and always the thing to respond to. It's not going to go away just because you choose to respond to this one. The next wave is coming. So at one point or another, you have to draw a line and you have to say, these are my God-ordained treasures, and I'm not going to let this one overtake ones that it shouldn't. So we have to measure how highly we prioritize our jobs or whatever else may go there that tends to eat away at your time. So my hope is that you'll go home and you'll say, God, what are my treasures? What are my God-ordained treasures in my life? That you'll physically write them out and then ask this question, what would it look like for us to radically reprioritize our lives around God-ordained treasures? What would it look like for us to radically reprioritize our lives around God-ordained treasures? If I say these are the most important things to me in 2020, then what's it going to take to organize my life around those things? What am I going to have to give up? What am I going to have to reprioritize? Who am I going to have to willingly disappoint and say, I can't do this thing anymore because I'm going to prioritize these things? And if we ask that question, what's it going to look like if we radically reprioritize our life around these God-ordained treasures, I actually have an example of what that could look like. As I was thinking through this this week, there's a family in our church, Wynn and Elisa Dunn, and they've got two kids, one in elementary school, one in middle school. I think the daughter might be in middle school now too. I got to figure that out before they come in the second service and I offend her. But I noticed on their Facebook feed is a lot of pictures like this. I think, Lynn, we have a picture of their family. Yeah, that's them doing something involving harnesses. It seems very fun. They do stuff like this all the time, all the time. They are forever going on little family outings and vacations and retreats. As a matter of fact, listen, I don't check up on you when you don't come on Facebook, but often if I don't see them on Sunday, on Sunday afternoon or Monday, I'll see a picture of their family together somewhere. Family time is big for the Dunns. And so I called Wynn. I said, hey man, this might sound weird, but I'm doing a sermon on this. I kind of explained it to him. And I said, you guys seem to be hanging out as a family all the time. Your kids are in middle school, and they seem to still like you and want to be seen in public with you, which is a big win for Wynn. And so I asked him, like, what's your philosophy around family? Like, what led you to value it this way? And he goes, well, do you know my full story? I said, I guess I don't. And he told me that years ago, he had a really lucrative job. It was a very high-paying job, but it was a high-stress job. And it consumed him. This was in the days of Blackberries, and he was forever on it. It was ever-present. Dinners, weekends, vacations, it was always, when can you do this one more thing? When can you just take this call real quick? Can you just close this out? Can you just put out this fire? It was always a part of him. And he says it was causing a lot of stress in his marriage, particularly as they invited kids into this marriage. And now his wife is home caring for the baby and he's never present. And it was causing tension and it made things difficult. And the kids began to notice how committed he was to his phone and his job too. So much so that he told me that, I think it was about 10 years ago, they went to Busch Gardens as a family. And as he was getting out of the car, he said, you know what I'm going to do? And he took his BlackBerry out and he put it in the car and he shut the doors and he locked it. And he said, when he did that, everybody in his family started crying because we've got our dad. He's going to be present with us today. I'd love to be the ticket taker at Busch Gardens that day. What's the matter with you guys? Like no one made you come. You can go back home. But his family cried because now we get dad. And it didn't take too much longer after that until he looked at his life and he said, man, I'm prioritizing things that I just don't want to prioritize right now. And so he changed careers. He called an audible, left the very high paying job, changed careers and chose a career, chose an industry that would allow him to have more time with his family. Made an intentional choice to radically reprioritize his life around what he believed to be God-ordained treasures. He said that was nine years ago. I said, as you look back on that, do you have any regrets? Or was it just best decision you ever made? And he said, you know, I'm not going to lie. Sometimes I think about the money and what would be possible if I had it. But no, there are no regrets. I love my kids. My kids love me. I have a good family, and it's so much more valuable to me than any resources that I could have. And so I'm praying that for some of us, this is just the nudge that you needed because there have been things going on in your life and you're too busy and you're too caught up and you see things slipping away from you that are important to you. And maybe the Holy Spirit's just working in your heart right now to say, hey, why don't you let some things go? Maybe this needs to be the year that you get okay with disappointing people. Where you realize, you know what? If the stranger's disappointed in me for not doing the thing that they want me to do, I'm going to be okay. Maybe we need to step away from things. I'll even say this. I want to be your pastor before I run the business of the church. If you need to step away from church things, sorry Aaron, for your own health, do it. Claim your schedule around your priorities. And in 2020, let's make some changes and reprioritize our lives around these God-ordained treasures so that when we get to the end of this year and look back on our schedule and we look back at how we invested our time, we go, yeah, I invested these things in treasures that matter for eternity so that we had a better year this year than we did last year. So I hope you'll do that. I hope you'll take the list home. I hope you'll pray through your priorities, and I hope that you'll have the courage to reprioritize your schedule around the things that you and God agree are super important to you in 2020. All right, I'm going to pray. And as I pray, I'm going to pray over the year, too, as we kick it off together, and then I'm going to dismiss and we'll go out into the world. All right, let's pray. Father, thank you so much for you, for your presence, for your goodness, for how big and marvelous and miraculous you are, for how much you care about us, for how much you care about how we fill our time. Lord, I pray that we would be courageous in naming our priorities. I pray that we would be courageous in building our schedule around those. God, if we have to say no to some things, then give us the audacity to do that. If we need to say yes to some things, give us the discipline to do that. God, we know that decisions that we make and things that we resolve to do often falter and flutter. God, I pray that you would be with us and give us your strength to see these things through so that our lives might change in profound ways, God, if that's what you would have. Lord, I pray over this year, may all the events of this year conspire to draw every one of us closer to you. Will you overcome doubts? Will you overcome fears? Will you overcome hesitation? Will you overcome hurt? Will you speak to us in the triumphs so that we don't take credit for those? Will you speak to us in the tragedy, God, so that we don't get overly angry at those? Will you please conspire everything in our life to draw us more closely to you so that we might know what it is to walk with you? For many of us, God, make this the year where we finally break the chains of the old habits and walk in new habits. God, please bless this year and bless us as we walk in it. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.
