Matthew 6

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, This morning's reading is from Philipp earthly things, but our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly await for a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body. All right. Thank you, Alex. Do you guys, just before we get started, have you guys ever experienced spending the better part of two weeks, really just most of all of your time of the last two weeks, to prepare a sermon on fasting, and then the person who's supposed to be singing decides she's going to say something that is far more elegant and far more beautiful than anything that you have to say about fasting? I don't know if you guys have experienced that, but I am currently resting within that experience, right, as we speak. But no, for those who don't know me, my name is Kyle. I'd love to meet you if I don't know you, so please come up and say hello. I'm the student pastor here at Grace, and as always, I am just so thankful for the opportunity to be able to just share a little bit of my heart for the Lord with you guys this morning. Last week, we began in our Holy Pause series, a series that we are going through through the entirety of Lent. Last Sunday, Nate basically gave an introduction to, hey, here's the background of Lent. Here's what Lent is. Here is why it's important. And here is why, Nate, we as a church feel like it can be important and it can be beneficial for us as a church to walk through Lent together, to give up something, to fast of something, to spend some time in devotionals written by the grace body together. And he did a great job. He did an awesome job. And so for the next few weeks, leading all the way up into Easter, we are going to be looking at a different spiritual discipline. And we're going to be just talking about and focusing on how might that spiritual discipline allow us and our hearts to be more connected to the heart of Christ. And so this morning, I have the joy of being able to talk to you guys about fasting. And so naturally, I'd like to begin by telling you guys my history with coffee. So for a long time, I've been around a lot of people who really like, who really love coffee. They drink it all the time. I think it's disgusting. I did think it's disgusting. Let me go ahead and say that because honestly, I'm not a big acquired taste guy. I don't know. Some people are great about like, oh, I should probably do this. I should probably drink this. I should probably eat this. It's healthy, whatever. So I'm just going to do it. That's not really me. You know, if I don't like something, I'm not really trying to eat it. I'm not really trying to drink it. And so, you know, I tried coffee and I was like, cool, there's dirt in this water. That's awesome. You know, like, and it's great. And then you also, you deal with like, for any of you guys, for every, all of us don't like something. And all of us have been promised by someone who does like that something, hey, I promise you, when you try this one, it'll be better. And I don't think I've heard that any more than I've heard it with everybody and their coffee. It's like, hey, guess what? Every other coffee in the entire land is garbage except for this cup right here. So why don't you go ahead and give this a try? I was like, okay, cool. It's still dirt and water. Like, as you guys can see, I prefer my water without dirt. But what made coffee a little different is because I was like, man, it smells so good. You know, like with vegetables, it's like vegetables smell as gross as they taste. You know, they smell gross, they taste gross. There's no reason to consume vegetables, which is not true. I'm actually coming around on those, so you guys should be proud of me. Like, no need to applaud, but I mean, I'm eating some vegetables now at the ripe age of 28. But for coffee, it just smells so good, man. And like, when I would go to my grandparents' house and my granddad would make coffee or my brother would make coffee in the morning, I'm like, gosh, that smells so good. Like I know it tastes like garbage, but man, it just seems really nice to be able to make some coffee in the morning and then just sip along with it. And as we all know, it's fun drinking hot drinks with friends, you know? And not only that, but there's only a number of times that you can go to a cool coffee shop and everyone's ordering their fancy black coffees, and then you order your fancy brown hot chocolates that you don't feel a little bit embarrassed. And so at about 26, I decided I'm going to try to give coffee a shot. And honestly, those are goofy, funny reasons. But the real reason is because I realized that my health needed it. Because if I had a long car trip, if I woke up early in the morning and I need to get energized and get going for the day, or if there was a time where I needed to stay up late or whatever, I mean, from high school on, what I turned to was Mountain Dew. I mean, just absolutely pounding Mountain Dews so that I could stay awake for whatever I needed to do. Like, if you look at the marketing data for Mountain Dew, Kyle needing to stay awake always increased heavily the sales of Mountain Dew. There was like this innate sense of me, I need to keep them in business because I have to wake up right now. And honestly, as you guys know, Mountain Dew is straight up poison. Not only is it disgusting, but it is poison and it is terrible for you. And so at some point I looked in the mirror and I said, Kyle, it's time to get off the Mountain Dews, brother. And so I decided to turn to coffee as a healthier alternative. So I drank it a little bit, and as you acquire tastes, as you start eating or drinking something more, you start enjoying it a little bit better. You start liking it a little bit more. And so that was happening. I would go on a trip, a long trip, and I'd maybe get a couple cups of coffee. And I wasn't drinking it real fast. I didn't love it, but it was what it was. And so obviously my family was elated. They all love coffee and I always just roasted them about it. And now they are allowing me to roast coffee. Because for Christmas, because they were so excited, they got me a Keurig thing, coffee maker. And so I was like, well, you know what? If they're going to make me this, then why don't I just start drinking it? Like, you know, I was kind of just drinking it when I needed it because it's like helps me stay up, gives me some good caffeine, all of that stuff. But maybe if I start drinking it more often, then like these other people who really do actually really like coffee, enjoy the taste, all that stuff, maybe, just maybe, I'll feel the same way. So I started making it more on my own. Well, fast forward into quarantine. And in quarantine, I don't know, for those of you who don't know me, I'm a big rules guy. If you give me a rule, I'm just going to say, okay, I'm going to follow it. So like early quarantine was like, hey, you should not leave your front door. Like you should not go outside at all, if humanly possible. Like there was a time where it was, like, banned to walk on sidewalks. Like, it was insane, you know? And so, being a single guy who lives in an apartment alone, I was just not doing very many things. I mean, I was, like, you know, we would do our streams, and I would FaceTime the kids or whatever, but mostly I'm, like, watching TVs, and I'm playing TVs. I'm watching TV. I'm, like, watching TVs. I'm watching TV. I'm playing Xbox, all that stuff. But there is literally nothing to do except for those two to three times a day where I was like, you know what I could do? I could make some coffee right now. And so for all of you who know Keurigs, you know, you walk over and you got to turn it on because you got to heat up that water. So you got to turn it on first. And as you're heating it up, sometimes you have to add water. That was like a joyous occasion when I got to even add the water to it. So you'd add the water, you'd heat it up, and then it would just drizzle down. And all this whole process, getting it into the cup, takes like five minutes. And then you got to blow it. And that was another thing I got to do. Blowing the coffee because it's too hot, you know. And then for about five more minutes, it's still too hot to like just chug down. So you drink it, you know, you sip it or whatever, and that was 10 to 15 minutes where I felt like I was actually doing a thing, and it was joyous, but all that to say that as I started doing that, I started really liking coffee a lot. I enjoyed it a lot more. I started drinking a lot more. As stuff started opening up, as we came back into the office, I got a membership over at Panera to where I could get free. And so I'd stop by, I'd grab a free coffee, head over here, maybe get iced coffee for lunch, whatever it was. And it was like, great, this is awesome. I'm finally at the place where it's like, ah, it's not just something I have to do because I need it. It's like, I don't even need this anymore. Like, I don't really feel the caffeine doing much. It just tastes good. So I like doing it. Well, fast forward again to a few months ago when I was set to preach on a Sunday. And on Monday, I had an ear infection. And it didn't feel great. So I went to the doctor, got an antibiotic. Next morning, take the antibiotic, head over to Panera, get like a scone and a coffee and do that stuff. About an hour later, I started feeling super sick. I felt terrible. My stomach felt awful. I didn't know what was going on. I was like, is this COVID? You know, like first the ear infection, now I have COVID. This is awful. And I went home. And as I went home, I'm like, well, I do at least feel a little hungry. And so I start eating. And as I start eating, I start feeling better. So all you guys now are now, all you parents are now nodding. You're like, yeah, you just need to eat more when you take antibiotics, dummy. And that was it. Literally the only thing that made me sick was the antibiotic. But as any of you know, if you get sick around something that you eat or something that you drink, you're not really excited to eat or drink that thing the next day. And so on Wednesday, after I had just survived two ailments, on Wednesday, I do not at all want scones. I don't want any coffee. I had no taste for coffee anymore, which had become foreign to me to not have a taste for. And I go about half the day, and ailment number three comes as my head starts pounding. Like it hurts so bad. My eyes are just like, like it just, I don't want, I don't want my eyes to be open. It just, all of it. And I'm just like, am I dying? You know, like I just, because it's now three times where I have no idea what's going on. It's the third different type of sick I was or whatever until I finally realized, as all of you veteran coffee savants know, is my body had grown so accustomed to having that coffee that when it didn't have it and when that caffeine intake didn't come, my head was pounding because my body was trying to let me know, Kyle, we need this. And it was the first time where I'm like, oh, my coffee intake has not been healthy. Something that I thought was like good, and I thought was actually a healthy alternative, and therefore I was doing something smart and right, had turned into something that I was completely abusing. Something that literally was giving my body a negative, painful reaction if I went a day without it. And the crazy thing was, I had no idea. I just thought I liked coffee, so I was drinking it. But until that first day that I didn't have a coffee that morning, I had no idea the hold that it had over me and the hold that it had over my body. And if you'll permit me, I'm going to pause there. I'm not going to finish that point because I want to backtrack a little bit, and I want to talk a little bit more about Lent. Wednesday is when Lent started. If you guys have joined us in our devotionals, you know that. If you've joined us by deciding that you want to fast of something and replace that with focusing on and loving Jesus more and growing closer to Him, then you know that Lent started Wednesday. Here's my trivia question for you. Do you know what that Wednesday is called, the first Wednesday of Lent? Ash Wednesday, yes. Points to everyone who said that. Congrats. I saw all of you, so I've made a mental note of everyone who has points now. It's called Ash Wednesday. I'm not going to take the time to talk to you about all of the history of Ash Wednesday and to tell you all about the service of Ash Wednesday, but I would say if you've never been a part of an Ash Wednesday service, it's worth it. Check it out next year. Obviously, it is come and gone at this point, but check it out next year because it is really interesting and it's a cool service to be a part of. But Ash Wednesday partly derives its name from the words of God in Genesis when he says, from dust you came and to dust you shall return. If you've been a part of an Ash Wednesday service, you've heard that repeated over and over. And if you've ever seen someone who's been a part of an Ash Wednesday service, you've probably seen them with a cross drawn with ashes on their forehead. And when that cross is drawn on their forehead, they say, from dust you came, and to dust you shall return. The point of an Ash Wednesday service, and the point of Ash Wednesday is this. It's to remind us of our humanity and to remind us of our mortality. That just as one day we're here, one day we'll be gone. That one day our bodies will return once again to Ash just as they came. One day the things that we have, everything that we've built up in this life, the good things, the bad things, the neutral things, all of the things one day will pass away and they will return to dust. And as that reminder is set in, we kick off a 40-day fast. And that 40-day fast, as we talked about last week, and as Nate talked about, and as Carter read about, comes from the 40-day fast that we find in Matthew 4, from Jesus. Before Jesus sets off on his journey and on his time on earth where he is ministering and he's healing and he's loving and he's serving, he spends 40 days fasting in a desert. And after those days, Satan comes to him. And when he does, he tempts him. He tempts him three times. And the first one is he basically says, Jesus, I know you're hungry, and I know that you can turn that rock right there to bread. So why not go ahead and do so? You're super hungry. Just do it. The fast doesn't, it's not that important. It's not that meaningful. And Jesus's response, I think, is within the same vein as the response of Ash Wednesday, the response of God to the people of, dust you came and to dust you will return. And in Matthew 4, he says, man does not live on bread alone, but by every word spoken from the Father, from God. And I believe that those two reminders are coupled to remind us, one, not only that one day we will be gone, not only one day we will return to dust, but to remind us that while we're here, what ultimately is the most important and the most beneficial thing that we can intake is the word of God. And as we transition, obviously Jesus says this, but then Jesus, we know, goes on. He lives a life and he goes on and he takes the cross for us. And when he does so, what that means is now we, our souls, our hearts, get to rest upon the knowledge and the truth that Jesus did this for us, that we are freely able to experience a relationship with our Creator and our Father because He died and was raised to life for us. And so through Lent, we take time. We fast, we give something up. With the whole and sole purpose and mission of setting our hearts a little bit better on the Father, setting our hearts on the things above, taking to heart the reminder that Jesus gives when he talks to Satan by saying, hey, as much as our bodies need food, that much more our souls need the word of God. But as Paul writes, as a lot of us know and a lot of us see, and as Paul writes, this is something that's gone on forever. There are a lot of people alive. There are a lot of people around that have missed this truth, have missed this goodness of God, have missed this good news of Jesus as our Savior, because they're ignorant of the fact that it's offered to them. And they're so, as he taught, I'll just read it. As Alex read out of Philippians 3, the first half of what he read is talking about, and he refers to these people as enemies of the cross. It literally brings him to tears to talk about that these enemies of the cross are people whose stomachs are their gods and also whose minds and hearts are consumed by earthly things. There are people around that have not been able to experience the truth and the joy of the realization that we have this Jesus Christ who came to live and to die for us. And if they live their lives ignorant of this fact, if they live their lives not being able to recognize and understand and come to know this Savior for themselves, then they end up being an enemy of the cross. And while I don't read that and I don't want to talk about that scripture to say, hey, all of you guys who are Christians, if you ever allow yourself to care more about earthly things than about heavenly things, it means you're an enemy of the cross. That, I don't think, is the point, because if our hearts belong to God, then our hearts belong to God. But I do think that if we allow distractions to enter in, if the worldly becomes our ultimate, if it becomes everything that is in front of us, everything that surrounds us, what I do think happens is we hold God and we hold Christ at arm's length. As God and as Christ is trying to bring us into their embrace, trying to rain down the blessing and the joy of who they are in a relationship with them, we become so consumed by the things of this world. Our belly becomes our gods, our minds and our hearts are set to the earthly things, and we hold God's promises, and we hold the Word of God at arm's length. And so the goal of fasting is to shift that. To paraphrase Brad Gwynn's devotional from Wednesday of the Grace devotional, he talks about fasting as basically we have these things, these things that get in our way, these things that distract us from the goodness and the glory of God, we find and we take hold of those things and we replace them with the presence of Jesus, submitting to him and letting him sustain us. And I know that fasting seems and is maybe a bit of a big step to take, you know, like, hey, like, if there are distractions, if there are things that are around me that are distracting me, then I'm just gonna, you know, switch it up. I'm just gonna, like, you know, just let God take over that. But why I would argue that fasting might be the best and ultimate way that we are able to eliminate distractions and things getting in the way of us and God is because I don't really think that we understand the way that distractions take us away from God. I don't think we really understand the full scope and the full grasp that these things, these things of the world, these distractions that are all around us, the full grasp that they have on our lives. As an example, I would say most of us would probably say that at times we allow our phones to be a bit of a distraction. We pull them out. It's very easy to scroll, to continue to be on them, all that stuff. And when we do so, ultimately, we're saying, hey, Lord, I don't, like right now, I just want this to be my time. But I would contend that most of you aren't making that choice in your head. I would say that for the most part, you're not like, man, you know what, God? You're not worth my time right now because I got to check Instagram again. I don't think we're making those decisions. I don't think we're trying to be maniacal about like, God, you're not getting this amount of time. You're not getting this ride home because there's a podcast to listen to. I don't think any of us are making those decisions, but those decisions get made for us because they're so readily available and because we're so used to them. The author David Matthews says it this way. He says, That's about the best quote I'm going to read today, so I'm going to read it again. I had no idea it was a negative. I had no idea I was addicted to it. I had no idea that my body literally needed it or else it was going to go haywire and really turn on me while I'm trying to write a sermon. I had no idea of any of those things until I took a day and I didn't drink it. In the same way. Look at the distractions of our life. I bet a lot of you guys gave something up for Lent. I bet if you gave up your phone, you probably grabbed your phone a lot of times and was like, oh. Or if you gave up social media, you grabbed your phone and looked and couldn't find the Instagram app a lot of times. I actually last week decided to fast from food, to take a day with no food. Honestly, I don't know if I could tell you that I've done it before. I hate to admit, but it is what it is. And I don't know about you guys, but in my life, I never allow myself to experience hunger. I mean, if I'm at home, I'm eating. I've got snacks in between if I need. When I'm here, when I'm at church, I'll eat breakfast and then I get to church, I'm like, I could eat something. Julie's got Fig Newton stocked. I can have a Figgy Newton literally whenever I want a Figgy Newton. And so one, we love Julie for that. Shout out to Julie for being the realist MVP for always having Fig Newtons for me. But I say all that to say that literally, like, I just, I have built a life that never allows my body to need food, never allows my body to actually hunger for food, because I just scratch it before it gets there. And so when I fasted, you can imagine that my body was not thrilled. I was really hungry. My stomach hurt. My chest hurt. My body got like actual achy, actually achy. And I was astounded as I thought about because I was fasting after doing a lot of research. And so luckily I was kind of aware of what I should be looking for, and I was astounded at the thought that we're called to hunger for the Lord in that way. When we are called to hunger and to yearn for God, it is a literal hunger, a literal yearning for God. In the Beatitudes, it says, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. It is a literal hunger, a literal life support thirst for God. I don't think I even knew what that felt like until I took time to fast from food. If we're honest, outside of food, I would say there's a thousand other things that we could fast from as well that would give us similar experiences. So I would say that food is far from the only thing that we turn to that distracts us from God's glory. As Pastor John Piper says about fasting, he says, fasting reveals not only food's mastery over us, but also televisions, computers, phones, or whatever else we submit to again and again to conceal the weakness of our hunger for God. Every single thing that conceals the weakness for our hunger for God. That's the point of Lent. To find that one big thing, to find those 10 small things, to get rid of them, to replace them, to realize the hold that they have on our body and to somehow shift our mindset and to shift the way that we live of like, instead of every time I grab my phone, it's every time I look here and say, God, I'm just going to pray for this person now. I gave up social media for Lent. I gave up social media and I kind of just gave up, I told my small group, like excess. There's, I would say, zero seconds in a day that I'm not like intaking. In the morning, I wake up, I play Wordle very well. And then post-Wordle, I scroll Instagram, I scroll Twitter, I do all that stuff. And then as I finally get up after I've laid in my bed for an hour looking at my phone, I go and I make breakfast. And when I make breakfast, like, I can't just be making breakfast until I have the TV on, because obviously. I make my breakfast and I eat it while I'm still watching TV, then I get in the car and I turn on a podcast. And then for the rest of the day, it's all of that. If I'm sitting, I'm working, every single time I take a quick second, like if my hands move away from my computer or something, then boom, boom, got it. Got to go to the bathroom, got to grab my phone. Like literally like, I know we've all done it before. I know we've all gone to the bathroom and then go, oh, and then run back. It's like, hey, I promise you it's not like a physical necessity to have your phone. Like you can still go to the bathroom without it, which I guess I promised you. I don't even remember the last time I tried. But every second of every day is consumption for me. And almost none of that consumption is being consumed by Christ. And if you're like me, there's a lot of those things. And then I have the audacity at the end of the day as I take stock of the day or those times where I get a little bit mindful of what's going on. And I have the audacity to say, well, I didn't spend much time with Jesus today, but I was pretty busy. I think we all have that. And not that we're always lying to ourselves. There are days where we are so busy. But fasting allows us to realize that there are a lot of natural reactions that we have. Natural times that we turn to so many other things that make the shield around us to where we hold God's promises and we hold God's truths and we hold the joys of Christ at arm's length because we're so invested into these small little things. And these trivial distractions have just become so a part of our day we don't even realize them. Until we take some time where we don't deal with them. Until we take time where we cut them off and we begin to turn our affections to God instead. John Piper continues and he says, fasting remedies by intensifying the earnestness of our prayer and saying with our whole bodies what prayer says with our heart, I long to be satisfied in God alone. So through fasting and through that prayer, that intense prayer that follows with our whole hearts and our whole bodies, we allow Jesus to rightly adjust our priorities. And as Katie Davis reminds us in Thursday's devotional from Matthew 6.33, we're reminded to seek first God's kingdom, seek first God's righteousness, and then we allow him to fill in all the details. And we allow him to faithfully provide for us, just as he always has. As the Lord becomes more and more part of our days, as our fasting continues through Lent, and the Lord becomes ever and ever present in our days. As our hearts experience his glory and his goodness more and more, our hearts begin to grow closer to and to resemble his. We're better able to worship. We're better, excuse me, we're better able to find rest in him. and our hearts are more tuned to see and to sing his grace. That's not it. Because as Gary Green reminds us in Friday's Lent devotional, that as Isaiah 58 talks about, which I'm just going to step away for a second. Gary Green's devotional was awesome. He talks about a set number of verses within Isaiah 58. If you didn't take the time to read all of Isaiah 58, I don't think that there's anything better written about fasting than Isaiah 58. So one, thank you, Gary, for letting me realize how awesome that is. Two, that's your homework assignment. Go home and read all of Isaiah 58. Let me come back over here. In Isaiah 58, as Gary reminds us, our hearts begin to reflect Christ not only inwardly, but outwardly. Our natural posture becomes one of love and of service for the people around us, and especially, especially those that are in need. The orphans, the widows, the sick, the homeless, the oppressed. The people who live, the people whose lives are in hunger of the luxuries, are in hunger of the needs, that we are taking a small amount of time to give up. The last time I got to preach, I was asked to simply answer the question, why should our lives be consumed by Christ? And the answer that we arrived at is because Christ's life is consumed with us. Not only in the past where he literally lived a life, lived a perfect life, took on the cross, and died so that we could have a relationship with him, and so that we don't have to settle for dust we shall return as our ending, but we now have a soul that is able to enter into a perfect eternity. Not only did Christ provide that for us in the past, but he is now living, sitting on the right hand of God as our high priest. And he's praying for us. And his whole goal, every second of every day, is to draw us closer and closer into the love of God and to bring us further and further into this perfect redemption that he offers us. And when we fast, we get to experience that just a little bit more. And I don't know if I know any other better reason than that. So will you bow with me as we pray. Lord, fasting is weird. It's a little bit foreign. It takes on many meanings. It takes on many definitions. But Lord, ultimately, fasting allows us to rid ourselves of distractions, to see and understand need a little bit better, and to allow us to witness you a little bit more. Lord, I just pray that anyone who has embarked on fasting through Lent, Lord, that you bring them strength and you allow them to see your goodness just as you have promised that you would. For those who are pondering, Lord, I pray that you would work in their hearts and maybe offer them too. And Lord, if anyone in here says, you know what, I want to take it to the next step. I want to try a food fast. Just to experience a little bit more of you. And Lord, I pray that you give them the strength to do that. Lord, we are so thankful for your goodness, always and forever. Amen.

If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else and what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day, they're not nearly as big of a deal. What are our big rocks? And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. A little confession, after we shot that video in the back corner, I was on my hands and knees for about 15 minutes picking up all those rocks. So I'm really glad we got it there on that first take, and I didn't have to do that again. Thank you for being here. Like I said, I'm the senior pastor here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. We got a full crew here this morning. That is exciting and good. So thanks for being here. Thanks for joining us online, particularly if you're on vacation and you're still choosing to make this a part of your Sunday. We are grateful for that. I'm really looking forward to the rest of this series as we talk about exactly what I addressed in the video. This idea of coming kind of back to life, the world feeling normal again, or at least approaching it. If we can avoid this Delta variant, but that's a whole different conversation. But it feels like we're approaching that. And as we do it, we have this unique opportunity to kind of reconstruct our life around the things that are most important to us. And really, we have this opportunity to reconstruct our life around Jesus. So for the next four weeks, we're going to talk about what our big rocks are. What are the things that are the most important to us and how do we orchestrate those things around Jesus and around this pursuit of God the Father. And I said specifically that I'm looking forward to the rest of the weeks of the series because I'm not looking forward to this morning in this series. I did not wake up this morning excited for this sermon. Some Sundays I wake up and I'm really, really, I can't wait to share with you what God has laid on my heart. Last Sunday is a great example of that. This Sunday, I'm preaching about money. So when I got up this morning, it wasn't like, yes, the tithe, here we come. Nor did you get up hoping that this would be the Sunday that I talked about money. So listen, I'll just confess up front. I'm no more interested in preaching this than you are in hearing it. Okay, but we're here now. So this is what we're going to do. And really, the reason that we're talking about this is first of all, first and foremost, I don't talk about this very much at Grace. The last time we talked about this was in February of 2020, and I didn't even do it. It was Doug Bergeson, all right? So we don't do it a whole lot, but this topic is all throughout the Bible. Scripture is replete with instructions on giving about big rocks in life, if we're going to talk about the things that matter most to us and how to prioritize those around Jesus, then we have to talk about finances. We have to ask the question, what does God want us to do with our resources and with our money? And the Bible talks about it so much that it would be irresponsible as a church and I'd be irresponsible as a pastor if we didn't revisit it with some regularity. So we arrive at it this morning and as we arrive at it, I'm kind of approaching it like this. This is why I'm sitting down for this one at a table instead of standing and gesticulating and walking around wildly and trying to keep calm and not yell at you because I'm approaching this as if you and I could have a conversation about it. If you and I were able to meet for lunch or if you could come to the office or we meet somewhere and we could talk and your question was, what does the Bible have to say about giving anyways? Or maybe even, why does God want me to give? Then this is the conversation that I would want to have with you. So I'm staying seated to remind me that this is what I would like to say to each of you if we had the opportunity to sit down and talk about this together. And as we do that, I would even say to you this, that as I wrote and approached this sermon, I really had in mind the person who is new to church. Maybe you are someone who, for the first time in a long time, church is important to you again. For the first time in a long time, spiritual health is important to you again. And so maybe you're kind of trying to get reengaged spiritually. Maybe you haven't been in church a lot for the past five, 10 years, and so you're kind of starting to re-engage and maybe have never really thought critically about giving and what the Bible has to say about it. This is for the new and the non-believers, for those of us who hear that we should give in church, who probably understand that the Bible tells us to do it, but maybe we don't know all the whys around it and maybe we don't have a developed theology of why we should be generous. So this sermon in particular is for you. Now I know that at Grace, and I see the evidence of it over and over again, we have plenty of you who have a really good theology of giving, who understand tithing and being generous and why we do it. And so for you, I hope that we hit on some things that are encouraging, particularly the first point that I make. I think we should apply it to everything, not just giving. And so I hope that there's some encouraging ways to think about it. But this is really for folks who, if I sat you down and I said, what does the Bible say about giving or why should we give? This is for you if you feel like, gosh, I'm not sure how well I would answer that. So like I said, I'm approaching it as a conversation and I want to approach the conversation with what the Bible even has to say about it. And as I sought that out this week, you know, the Old Testament has a lot of very specific instructions that we are to give. The Old Testament introduces this idea of giving in generosity like a new idea. Leave the corners of your field for the sojourners, for the poor, for the widow, for the aliens, for the people who don't yet have a home. We're told to bring our tithe to the storehouse in the Old Testament. We're told there's a whole portion in Leviticus that tells us exactly, tells the children of Israel exactly how they are to give. So in the Old Testament, it's given as an instruction. It's introduced almost as a new idea. But what you find in the New Testament, if you want to read New Testament verses about giving, and the New Testament is simply the part of the Bible that comes during Jesus's life and after. And Jesus kind of changes everything. So what does the Bible have to say about giving once Jesus gets on the scene? Well, once Jesus arrives, the instructions about giving become a little bit presumptive, as if this is a thing that we already know. This is actually what Jesus says about it in the Sermon on the Mount. If you have a Bible, you can turn to Matthew chapter 6. I'm going to read you verses 1 through 4. The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus' first recorded public address. It's the first time he talks. And he has performed miracles and those people began to follow them and then he begins to preach to them and he hits on myriad topics. But then he lands on giving for a different directions. But the interesting part to me about this verse, if you want to ask what does the New Testament teach about giving, is the two uses of the word when. When you give. When you give to the needy. Jesus is talking to the huddled masses. Talking to thousands of people in the middle of the day, presumably jobless folks for the most part. And he still assumes that they know, without ever introducing giving as a new idea, he assumes that they know that they should give. He assumes that they know that God expects them to be generous people. And so he says, when you do it, do it in such a way that you're not doing it in a showy way. Do it in secret. Be discreet about it. And there's a whole teaching there. But again, what's interesting to me is when you give, when you do it. And I bring that up because I think that that's how familiar a lot of us are with giving. We might not know why we're supposed to do it. We might not know what for. We might not know how we should be compelled to do it. We just know that we are supposed to. And so the interesting question is why? Why are we supposed to give? Why does God ask us in the Old Testament when he's setting everything up and then just assume of us that we know that we ought to in the New Testament? Why does God do that? And so we're going to spend the rest of the morning kind of answering that question, and this is the conversational piece of it. Why does God want me to give? The most important reason, the most important reason and most underrated reason we give is because God tells us to. The most important, and this is key, most underrated reason that we give is because God tells us to. Now, listen, here's why I say this. When my mom was growing up, she grew up in the 60s and 70s, and Linda, her mom, my mom, all wonderful woman, she ruled with an iron fist, man. This was back in the good old days, all right, when it was nice to be a parent. You rule with an iron fist. That was a funny slip. You ruled with an iron fist. Kids are to be seen and not heard. When the company comes over, you go upstairs. You do not interrupt. And when my mom would get out of line when she was told to do something, and she said, why? She had the audacity to say, why do I have to clean your room? Why? Because I told you to. Fire would burn in Linda's eyes, right? And mom would know. She better do whatever it was she was asked to do, even if it makes no sense at all to her, because there is going to be some serious repercussions if she doesn't. She saw the fire, and so she got right. And so when my mom grew up, because I told you to, was all the reason that a child needed. Well, when that's the only reason you get, that develops in you a little bit of resentment, right? This heart of resentment because my mom is kind and sweet and not rebellious like me and really was asking genuinely why I don't understand. Why do you want me to do that right now? It seems like I should be doing something else. Why do you want me to do that? But she wasn't allowed to ask that. And so that left her frustrated and resentful. So when she had children, she decided that because I said so is never a reason. I will always take the time to explain to my children why I'm asking them to do something. And to her credit, she did that. But when you're raising Nate, that becomes a real hassle. And I was always allowed to ask why. And I love that quote. There's some quote I picked up years ago that a reason is an invitation for an argument. And that's very true. And so I was always invited into that argument. Why? Go clean your room. Why do I have to do that right now? Go mow the grass. Why? And listen, if the why wasn't good enough, well, I didn't have to do it. In my head, if the why is not good enough, if it can't justify the request, well, then your request is dumb. And so what I learned in that environment is asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It does. Asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It does. Asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It manifests this idea of, okay, I understand what you want me to do, but I'm not going to do that until your reason justifies your request. And if it doesn't, if it falls short of King Nate's gauntlet of reasons, then you can forget it, buddy. So in our house, our response with Lily and then with John, which John can't talk yet. And I remember when Lily couldn't talk and people were like, just be grateful for these times. And I thought, you're jerks. You're not jerks. That makes sense to me now. John can't talk yet, but Lily can, and she likes to ask why. Lily's my daughter, for those of you who don't know me, not just some girl I talk about. But she likes to ask why. But the policy that we've adopted in our house is, first you obey, then you ask why. And this is gonna be what solves it forever. She'll have no issues when she's a parent. She'll replicate this exactly, right? But first you obey and then you ask why. First show that you're gonna be obedient. First show that you're going to submit. First show that the question is genuine and not an attempt to get out of it. And then come and we'll talk to you forever when you have a good attitude about the whys of why we should do something. And I bring this up because I think it's really important as we think about how we respond to the instructions of God. I know that very often when we are met with a teaching from Scripture that we should give, that we should read the Bible, that we should be selfless, that we should forgive as we are forgiven, that we should be generous to others, that we should turn the other cheek, that whenever it is possible for us, as far as it concerns us, that we should seek peace in others when peace is just not the thing that we want right now. Often in my life, and maybe yours too, we want to know the why before we offer our obedience. We want it to make sense to us before King Nate deigns to obey the instructions that I find here. And I will confess to you this, as I thought about this this week. This is not so much an indictment on your attitude, that's up to you, as it is sometimes an indictment on my preaching. Because when I preach and I give us instructions from the word, I always start with a why. Because I don't want to paint God as this ruthless dictator who sits in heaven giving you rules. I always want you to understand why it's what's best for you. But when we jump straight to the why before obedience, I think that begats in us this sense of entitlement. That if God's whys don't stack up for me, then I'm not going to engage in that behavior until they do. And I think it's important for us as believers to accept that the most important and underrated reason why we give is because our Father in heaven told us to. And I think this applies to everything. I think this applies to our quiet times. This applies to our grace with other people. This applies to any challenge that we would face. Anytime God's word tells us to do something, the first and most important reason we do it is because God told us to. Proverbs tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And I think that sometimes for me, I walk through life entitled as if I am owed a why, and God does not owe us that. So an important reason to apply to everything in our life is because our Father in Heaven told us to. Now once we accept that, and we adopt that posture of obedience, and I also want to be very clear, when I say that, I'm talking only to the Christians in the room. If you're here this morning and you're not a Christian, you've never signed up for this. You've never said, I submit my life to God. You've never said, you're the Lord of my life. I'm second. I'm going to do what you want. You've never said that. And so to you, I wouldn't say that you even need to give. And I definitely wouldn't say it's because God told you to. You haven't signed up for this yet and said, I'm going to submit myself to God's word. But if you are a Christian, then you have. So first we adopt a posture of obedience. And what we understand in that posture of obedience is that God wants what's best for us. This is what we talked about last week. What we believe is the verse I preached last week, that God actually leads us to paths of life, that in his presence there is fullness of joy. At his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. We actually believe that our God in heaven wants what's best for us and takes us to the best possible places. And so if he tells us to do something, it must be what's best for us. So we trust that about giving too. So the question really becomes this morning, not why does God want me to give, but why is giving best for me? That's really the question that we are asking this morning. Once we adopt this posture of obedience and say, yes, Father, I am a Christian, and because I am, I am submitted to you, and I will be a person who is a giving, generous person. But I also understand that as I do that, it's what's best for me, and I'd love to understand why it's what's best for me. So I've got a few reasons for you that we're just going to kind of go through. The first thing I would say to you when you ask why is giving what's best for me, I would say it's because God is generous to the generous. God is generous to generous people. Now, I have to be careful with this because this is how you get to health and wealth, right? This is how you get to me preaching to you. If you give, God's going to give back to you a hundredfold. If you give to the church this much, God's going to give you this much. Meanwhile, I'm asking you to fund my private jet and you can't figure out how to pay for a civic, okay? So that's, I don't want to go there. I'm not preaching health and wealth. I'm not telling you that the more you give to God, the more money he's going to give to you. However, this principle that God is generous to the generous is unavoidable in scripture. Jesus talks about this in Luke chapter 6, verse 38, when he says this, give and it will be given to you. Good measure pressed down, shaken together, running over will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. Corinthians says, he who sows little reaps little and he who sows much reaps much. There is a principle in the Bible that is unavoidable, that God is generous to the generous. And I'm lying to you and dishonest as a pastor if I don't say that's one of the reasons it's what's best for you. Because when we're generous to others, God is generous to us. Now what it doesn't say anywhere is that God is generous to us monetarily. What it doesn't say anywhere is that the blessings that God is going to be generous with are ones that are going to fill up our bank account. It does not say that. It just says God will be generous to you. And God's generosity comes in forms that is so much better than money. You understand? When you are generous with your resources, God is generous with his. It's an unavoidable truth of scripture. So God's generosity looks like good, rich, and deep, spiritually nourishing, life-giving friendships. God's generosity looks like a marriage that's seen some seasons but is hanging in there and loving one another. God's generosity is good relationships with your children. God's generosity is a place to go every day that you don't hate. God's generosity is when you're walking through a hard season but you know that there is a good season coming because your God is good and you know that every day won't feel like this day. God's generosity doesn't always come in the form of money. I know a family, I know a couple who they have living with them right now, a family member, and this is a family member that should not be living with them, okay? They shouldn't be there. They should be able to live on their own, but they're not. And it is really, they are expressing a great deal of generosity to this family member. And one of their friends learned about this and happens to have a cabin, a nice one, and said, go, stay at our cabin for a weekend. You need that. That's God's generosity being expressed to someone who's being generous. Do you see that? It's not always a one-for-one reciprocal return of money, but God is generous towards the generous, and so it behooves us to be generous. The next thing I would tell you is that giving acknowledges stewardship. Why is giving what's best for me? Well, because when we give, we acknowledge this concept of stewardship. Stewardship, the whole sermon could be about stewardship. The whole sermon could be about all four of the points that I'm making. But stewardship in particular is this idea that once we are believers, we understand that the things that we have in our life are not our own. They're God's. And he's entrusted them to us. To use them for the purposes of advancing his kingdom in the most effective way possible. Back in May on Mother's Day, we did a child dedication. And we had 11 children that we dedicated that day. It was great, super exciting day for Grace. And part of the dedication of the children is for the parents to acknowledge, both literally and symbolically, that this child is not mine. He is yours. She is yours. We are raising them in our home, but they belong to you, God. They are your children, Jesus. And we are raising them the best we can in the way that they should go according to your standards. But these children are not my children. John and Lily do not belong to Nate and Jen. They belong to God. And he has entrusted them to us because he believes that we have a unique capacity to form them and shape them into who they need to be for Jesus so that they move through life advancing his kingdom. They're not our kids. They're God's kids. Your house is not your house. It's God's house. Your finances are not your finances. They're God's finances. And once we realize that, that we are stewards of the things that God has given to us, then it becomes incredibly important. The primary question we ask about all the things with which we have been entrusted is, Jesus, how do I use these to further your name? How do I use these things to bring attention to you? How would you have me organize this part of my life? And so when we give, when we write the check weekly or we click the button monthly or we set it up or whatever it is we do, when we are generous and we give, it reminds us. Every time we see that come out of our account or hit our credit card, whatever it is, that's a reminder. None of this is mine anyways. It's God's. It's God's to use as he sees fit. And if he wants more, he can have more. So giving reminds us that we are stewards, not just with our money, but in everything in our life. Another thing I would say to you is that giving allows us to participate in what God is doing by being a part of the body of Christ. Giving allows us to participate in what is happening in the church, in the kingdom, in the body of Christ by being a part of the body of Christ. I love 1 Corinthians 12. I've never preached on it here, and I need to do a whole series on it because I think it's just an amazing teaching. But in 1 Corinthians 12, Paul lays out this idea that the church is a body and that everyone who's a part of the church has a part to play. The body has arms and legs and feet and hands and it has all kinds of things that are incredibly important. It has lungs that nobody ever sees, but if we don't have lungs, then the rest of it doesn't work. And it all intricately works together to get things accomplished. And I love this teaching because it reminds me as a pastor, I'm just the mouth. That's it. But y'all are the hands that touch people who need it. Y'all are the arms that are wrapped around folks who are struggling. Y'all are the feet that take the good news of the gospel into work. Y'all are the lungs that make this thing go. None of us, none of us, not me, not an elder, not somebody who's been here 30 years, none of us are more important to what's happening at Grace than anybody else. We simply have our part to play. My part is to run my mouth. Sometimes I wish somebody else would take that part. Because maybe I'd like to be the ear sometimes. But everybody has a part. And I think our part of being in the body of Christ, a church in an affluent suburb is to use our resources to serve the greater body of Christ. And when we do that as a church, we get to participate in things going on just outside of grace as well. And so to me, it's a wonderful picture of why as a church we should want to have a generous heart. Right now, we give 10% of everything that we get to ministries going on outside the walls of grace. It is one of my big long-term goals for the church to see that percentage increase a lot so that we play our part in God's greater body and who we are. But not just as we think about reaching outside of the walls of grace, but as we think about what happens within grace and how when we give, we are part of the celebrations that God allows for us here. We are part of the victories that Jesus wins here. We participate in that by giving and doing our part and being a part of the body of Christ. I think back to October of 2017. That was the first time I got to go down to Reynosa to go see the folks at Faith Ministry. Colleen of Faith Ministry fame is with us this morning. Hello, Colleen. That's a ministry in Mexico that builds houses for people who otherwise would not be able to have them. And Grace has been partners with them since before Grace existed. So more than 20 years. And I got to go down there in October of 2017 to see it for the first time. And it was a really great experience. And I'll never forget, we're sitting there and I wanted to say it's the parking lot, but that's generous. It's the place where the cars go. And we're sitting in the van and we're waiting to pull out. And I hear a car crank up and and it was as if that poor thing was being tortured. Like, it did not, every noise it made was, please, please don't make me do this. Like, and I turn around, and the bumper is in shatters. It's being held with bungee cords, and to say that it was a beater is generous to beaters, and it was being driven by the pastor down there, a younger guy named Pastor Carlos. And Pastor Carlos, he works 10 times harder than me. I could not do what he does. I asked him one time what his weekly schedule was and just the Bible studies that he has and the different towns and stuff that he touches on and the different people in his orbit. He needs a good car. He's shuttling kids back and forth. He works so hard. This is not what he should be driving. And so I kind of leaned over to some folks that were on the trip and I said, hey, I think Grace could raise enough money to buy him a truck. Can we do that? And I talked to the folks at Faith Ministry. Would it be cool if we bought him a truck? He seems to need it. And everybody was good with it. And so I came back to Grace and I said, hey, this is, as we enter Christmas, this is the thing we want to do. We want to have enough money to buy a truck for Pastor Carlos. And we did. What kind of car did we buy him? Do you remember? Yeah, Ford Escape or Ranger or something like that. But it was nice and new and way better than what he had. And some of our folks from Grace got to go down and deliver it to him. And when I watched the video, I had tears in my eyes because he was so grateful. And so blown away by the generosity of the church. And it was a really sweet moment. And the next time I went down there, the first thing Carlos wanted me to do is come see his truck and say thank you again for it. Now listen, if you were here and you gave to that Christmas offering in 2017, that joy is your joy. That happiness is your happiness. That's not watching other people do a good thing like when we watch on the internet and our heart is warmed and then we scroll to the next thing. That's your joy. You did that. You participated in that. You made that possible. That was God using your gifts and your finances making you a part of the body of Christ so that you could participate in the good work that he was doing. That joy was your joy. If you give to grace, those 11 kids that were up here being dedicated, that's your joy. When we baptize somebody, that's your joy. When you see somebody come into the church, that's your joy. We have, I think, nine people coming to Discover Grace after church today coming out of a pandemic. That's your joy that those people are becoming a part of what we're doing here at Grace. Every win that Jesus claims here at this church, when we give, we are a part of that. Because those wins don't happen if we don't give. So we give because we are a part of the body of Christ. And that allows us to participate in the work that Jesus is doing, wherever he's doing work. The last point that I would make about why it's best for us to give is that giving invites us to mirror the generosity of God that's lavished upon us. It invites us to mirror the generosity that God has given us. Now, this too could be a whole sermon, and it was. The last time we talked about giving, Doug Bergeson, one of our elders, preached on it in February of 2020, and I don't do things like this, but it's the best sermon on giving I've ever heard. If you haven't heard it, and you'd like to explore this idea more, go back into the archives. It was Grace's Going Home series, February of 2020. Find the Doug Bergeson sermon. It's an excellent one on what I'm talking about right here, How we participate in God's generosity when we give. But what I would say to you this morning is simply this, that this is to me the most compelling reason to give. Because the longer you are a believer, the deeper you grow in gratitude to the Father. There's no two ways about it. You might think that if you've lived a life however you want it, in total selfishness, in total depravity, you've done all the bad things that anybody could do. You can check off all the boxes and and then at like 35, you come to know God, and you're amazed that he's wiped the slate clean, and he's accepted you into his kingdom, that that moment is maximum gratitude for God's generosity and forgiveness. No, it's not. Because to walk with God is to understand that when you become a Christian, he doesn't just forgive you for all the stuff that you did up to that moment. He forgives you for all the crap that you're going to do too. He knows every terrible thought that you're going to have. When you get saved, whatever your lowest point is after that, whatever rock bottom looks like after you become a Christian, God was already in that moment whispering to you that he loves you and he forgives you and he wants you to come back to him. He's already in that moment. Whether that moment's behind you or ahead of you, God was in it telling you already, I've covered this too. So to walk with God and to fall short again and again and again, to arrive at that place that Paul arrives at in Romans 7 that is to me the most redemptive verse in scripture, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death. To arrive there and be refreshed anew with God's overwhelming forgiveness and generosity to us. For it to hit us like a wave again that Jesus condescended, took on human flesh, lived with us in the muck and the mire, died on the cross for us, knowing that we would crud on that very death over and over and over again in our life only to require his forgiveness yet again and then he offers and then he goes about, once he dies for us, ascending to the right hand of the Father to advocate for us and to whisper in God's ear that, yes, I've covered that too. When we sit daily in the realization of the gospel and we let the waves of Jesus' forgiveness wash over us and God's generosity flood us, we cannot help but grow in our gratitude towards God. Whatever gratitude we experienced at salvation is the starting point for how it grows through our life. And so we give as an expression of that gratitude. We give because something so incredible is happening to us that we want to find a way to be conduits of that generosity that God has given us. God has given so much to me. God has given so much to us. God has enriched our lives so much that we can't help but want to desire to enrich the lives of others. We can't help but want to express the generosity that God has lavished upon us. And so giving in his best, most pure state is simply a reaction to the overflow of God's giving in our life. That's why Paul teaches in Corinthians that God loves a cheerful giver. Don't give out of compulsion, but give because you want to. And how can we grow our want to in giving? By focusing on the face of Jesus and remembering the generosity and the forgiveness that he offers us every day. And so giving is what's best for us because it reorients us to the gospel. It reorients us towards God's goodness in our life. God has been good to me and provided me this. I am going to give this portion of this, understanding that he can replace it or he can't, but God has been so generous to me that I want to be generous to others. That's why we give. I love this verse in 2 Corinthians 9-11 says, you will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God. There's this part of the Sermon on the Mount that I find incredibly intimidating, where Jesus says, let others see your good deeds, see your good works, and shine for the Father so that your light shine before others that they may see your good deeds and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that when people come into and out of your orbit in your life, they should simply see the way that you act and want more of your Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that when people come into and out of your orbit in your life, they should simply see the way that you act and want more of your father who is in heaven. And I always think to myself, how do you act like that? A really easy way is to be generous. That's what Corinthians tells us. That God has enriched us. He's given us resources in every way. Why? So that we might enrich others. And then both you and them will turn that to thanksgiving to God. And it will point us back to the Father and our Savior Jesus. That's why giving is what's best for us. It's good for us. It develops a spirit of generosity that constantly, constantly orients us back to Jesus. So I would end this morning with a simple challenge for you. Trust God and give. Trust God and his word and give. How much should I give? Just a little bit more than you are. That's always the answer. 10%? No, that's an Old Testament thing. How much do we give in the New Testament? Just a little bit more than we are. Whatever that means for you. Who do I give to? I'll be the first to tell you. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that you have to give all of your giving to the local church. I've sat in churches, I've heard pastors say, your first 10% goes to this church and then on top of that, other places. That's not in the Bible. I'm not going to sit here and teach you that. I'm not preaching this as a self-serving thing for grace. If you believe in grace and what's happening here and you feel compelled to participate in the victories that Jesus is winning here, then give to grace. But you give wherever God is advancing his kingdom. Wherever God is working and Jesus is moving, you give there. Just give. Trust God and do it. I have never talked to a single person in my whole life who has said, you know what? I heard what the pastor said about giving and I decided to start being more generous. That was a huge mistake. I really regret it. Wish I could have that back. Never heard anybody say that. So this morning, it's simple. If you and I could have a conversation, I would simply end it by saying, just trust God. Obey Him. Be a person who's generous. Let's give together. Let me pray for us. Father, we do love you. We are so grateful for the goodness and the gifts that you've lavished upon us. God, I pray first and foremost that we would let those wash over us. I pray more than anything else that we would simply leave here increasingly overwhelmed with your goodness to us. Father, for those of us who need this, who need to think about this in our own lives, I pray that because you said so would be all the reason that we ever need. I pray that we would trust that and walk in that. Knowing that even when we don't understand obedience sometimes, that it is going to lead us to a path of life. God, give us the heart and the gratitude and the spirit to be people who are generous. I pray that each one of us would leave here determined to be just a little bit more generous than we were when we walked in today. And God, for those of us who are obedient and who respond and who give. Would we find you there, please? Would you show us yourself in that giving? Can we ask that through the generosity that you compel us to that we are brought closer to your son and so inspired and enlivened to continue to be generous. It's in his name, the one who died for us and who advocates for us, that we pray. Amen.

If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else and what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day, they're not nearly as big of a deal. What are our big rocks? And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. A little confession, after we shot that video in the back corner, I was on my hands and knees for about 15 minutes picking up all those rocks. So I'm really glad we got it there on that first take, and I didn't have to do that again. Thank you for being here. Like I said, I'm the senior pastor here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. We got a full crew here this morning. That is exciting and good. So thanks for being here. Thanks for joining us online, particularly if you're on vacation and you're still choosing to make this a part of your Sunday. We are grateful for that. I'm really looking forward to the rest of this series as we talk about exactly what I addressed in the video. This idea of coming kind of back to life, the world feeling normal again, or at least approaching it. If we can avoid this Delta variant, but that's a whole different conversation. But it feels like we're approaching that. And as we do it, we have this unique opportunity to kind of reconstruct our life around the things that are most important to us. And really, we have this opportunity to reconstruct our life around Jesus. So for the next four weeks, we're going to talk about what our big rocks are. What are the things that are the most important to us and how do we orchestrate those things around Jesus and around this pursuit of God the Father. And I said specifically that I'm looking forward to the rest of the weeks of the series because I'm not looking forward to this morning in this series. I did not wake up this morning excited for this sermon. Some Sundays I wake up and I'm really, really, I can't wait to share with you what God has laid on my heart. Last Sunday is a great example of that. This Sunday, I'm preaching about money. So when I got up this morning, it wasn't like, yes, the tithe, here we come. Nor did you get up hoping that this would be the Sunday that I talked about money. So listen, I'll just confess up front. I'm no more interested in preaching this than you are in hearing it. Okay, but we're here now. So this is what we're going to do. And really, the reason that we're talking about this is first of all, first and foremost, I don't talk about this very much at Grace. The last time we talked about this was in February of 2020, and I didn't even do it. It was Doug Bergeson, all right? So we don't do it a whole lot, but this topic is all throughout the Bible. Scripture is replete with instructions on giving about big rocks in life, if we're going to talk about the things that matter most to us and how to prioritize those around Jesus, then we have to talk about finances. We have to ask the question, what does God want us to do with our resources and with our money? And the Bible talks about it so much that it would be irresponsible as a church and I'd be irresponsible as a pastor if we didn't revisit it with some regularity. So we arrive at it this morning and as we arrive at it, I'm kind of approaching it like this. This is why I'm sitting down for this one at a table instead of standing and gesticulating and walking around wildly and trying to keep calm and not yell at you because I'm approaching this as if you and I could have a conversation about it. If you and I were able to meet for lunch or if you could come to the office or we meet somewhere and we could talk and your question was, what does the Bible have to say about giving anyways? Or maybe even, why does God want me to give? Then this is the conversation that I would want to have with you. So I'm staying seated to remind me that this is what I would like to say to each of you if we had the opportunity to sit down and talk about this together. And as we do that, I would even say to you this, that as I wrote and approached this sermon, I really had in mind the person who is new to church. Maybe you are someone who, for the first time in a long time, church is important to you again. For the first time in a long time, spiritual health is important to you again. And so maybe you're kind of trying to get reengaged spiritually. Maybe you haven't been in church a lot for the past five, 10 years, and so you're kind of starting to re-engage and maybe have never really thought critically about giving and what the Bible has to say about it. This is for the new and the non-believers, for those of us who hear that we should give in church, who probably understand that the Bible tells us to do it, but maybe we don't know all the whys around it and maybe we don't have a developed theology of why we should be generous. So this sermon in particular is for you. Now I know that at Grace, and I see the evidence of it over and over again, we have plenty of you who have a really good theology of giving, who understand tithing and being generous and why we do it. And so for you, I hope that we hit on some things that are encouraging, particularly the first point that I make. I think we should apply it to everything, not just giving. And so I hope that there's some encouraging ways to think about it. But this is really for folks who, if I sat you down and I said, what does the Bible say about giving or why should we give? This is for you if you feel like, gosh, I'm not sure how well I would answer that. So like I said, I'm approaching it as a conversation and I want to approach the conversation with what the Bible even has to say about it. And as I sought that out this week, you know, the Old Testament has a lot of very specific instructions that we are to give. The Old Testament introduces this idea of giving in generosity like a new idea. Leave the corners of your field for the sojourners, for the poor, for the widow, for the aliens, for the people who don't yet have a home. We're told to bring our tithe to the storehouse in the Old Testament. We're told there's a whole portion in Leviticus that tells us exactly, tells the children of Israel exactly how they are to give. So in the Old Testament, it's given as an instruction. It's introduced almost as a new idea. But what you find in the New Testament, if you want to read New Testament verses about giving, and the New Testament is simply the part of the Bible that comes during Jesus's life and after. And Jesus kind of changes everything. So what does the Bible have to say about giving once Jesus gets on the scene? Well, once Jesus arrives, the instructions about giving become a little bit presumptive, as if this is a thing that we already know. This is actually what Jesus says about it in the Sermon on the Mount. If you have a Bible, you can turn to Matthew chapter 6. I'm going to read you verses 1 through 4. The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus' first recorded public address. It's the first time he talks. And he has performed miracles and those people began to follow them and then he begins to preach to them and he hits on myriad topics. But then he lands on giving for a different directions. But the interesting part to me about this verse, if you want to ask what does the New Testament teach about giving, is the two uses of the word when. When you give. When you give to the needy. Jesus is talking to the huddled masses. Talking to thousands of people in the middle of the day, presumably jobless folks for the most part. And he still assumes that they know, without ever introducing giving as a new idea, he assumes that they know that they should give. He assumes that they know that God expects them to be generous people. And so he says, when you do it, do it in such a way that you're not doing it in a showy way. Do it in secret. Be discreet about it. And there's a whole teaching there. But again, what's interesting to me is when you give, when you do it. And I bring that up because I think that that's how familiar a lot of us are with giving. We might not know why we're supposed to do it. We might not know what for. We might not know how we should be compelled to do it. We just know that we are supposed to. And so the interesting question is why? Why are we supposed to give? Why does God ask us in the Old Testament when he's setting everything up and then just assume of us that we know that we ought to in the New Testament? Why does God do that? And so we're going to spend the rest of the morning kind of answering that question, and this is the conversational piece of it. Why does God want me to give? The most important reason, the most important reason and most underrated reason we give is because God tells us to. The most important, and this is key, most underrated reason that we give is because God tells us to. Now, listen, here's why I say this. When my mom was growing up, she grew up in the 60s and 70s, and Linda, her mom, my mom, all wonderful woman, she ruled with an iron fist, man. This was back in the good old days, all right, when it was nice to be a parent. You rule with an iron fist. That was a funny slip. You ruled with an iron fist. Kids are to be seen and not heard. When the company comes over, you go upstairs. You do not interrupt. And when my mom would get out of line when she was told to do something, and she said, why? She had the audacity to say, why do I have to clean your room? Why? Because I told you to. Fire would burn in Linda's eyes, right? And mom would know. She better do whatever it was she was asked to do, even if it makes no sense at all to her, because there is going to be some serious repercussions if she doesn't. She saw the fire, and so she got right. And so when my mom grew up, because I told you to, was all the reason that a child needed. Well, when that's the only reason you get, that develops in you a little bit of resentment, right? This heart of resentment because my mom is kind and sweet and not rebellious like me and really was asking genuinely why I don't understand. Why do you want me to do that right now? It seems like I should be doing something else. Why do you want me to do that? But she wasn't allowed to ask that. And so that left her frustrated and resentful. So when she had children, she decided that because I said so is never a reason. I will always take the time to explain to my children why I'm asking them to do something. And to her credit, she did that. But when you're raising Nate, that becomes a real hassle. And I was always allowed to ask why. And I love that quote. There's some quote I picked up years ago that a reason is an invitation for an argument. And that's very true. And so I was always invited into that argument. Why? Go clean your room. Why do I have to do that right now? Go mow the grass. Why? And listen, if the why wasn't good enough, well, I didn't have to do it. In my head, if the why is not good enough, if it can't justify the request, well, then your request is dumb. And so what I learned in that environment is asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It does. Asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It does. Asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It manifests this idea of, okay, I understand what you want me to do, but I'm not going to do that until your reason justifies your request. And if it doesn't, if it falls short of King Nate's gauntlet of reasons, then you can forget it, buddy. So in our house, our response with Lily and then with John, which John can't talk yet. And I remember when Lily couldn't talk and people were like, just be grateful for these times. And I thought, you're jerks. You're not jerks. That makes sense to me now. John can't talk yet, but Lily can, and she likes to ask why. Lily's my daughter, for those of you who don't know me, not just some girl I talk about. But she likes to ask why. But the policy that we've adopted in our house is, first you obey, then you ask why. And this is gonna be what solves it forever. She'll have no issues when she's a parent. She'll replicate this exactly, right? But first you obey and then you ask why. First show that you're gonna be obedient. First show that you're going to submit. First show that the question is genuine and not an attempt to get out of it. And then come and we'll talk to you forever when you have a good attitude about the whys of why we should do something. And I bring this up because I think it's really important as we think about how we respond to the instructions of God. I know that very often when we are met with a teaching from Scripture that we should give, that we should read the Bible, that we should be selfless, that we should forgive as we are forgiven, that we should be generous to others, that we should turn the other cheek, that whenever it is possible for us, as far as it concerns us, that we should seek peace in others when peace is just not the thing that we want right now. Often in my life, and maybe yours too, we want to know the why before we offer our obedience. We want it to make sense to us before King Nate deigns to obey the instructions that I find here. And I will confess to you this, as I thought about this this week. This is not so much an indictment on your attitude, that's up to you, as it is sometimes an indictment on my preaching. Because when I preach and I give us instructions from the word, I always start with a why. Because I don't want to paint God as this ruthless dictator who sits in heaven giving you rules. I always want you to understand why it's what's best for you. But when we jump straight to the why before obedience, I think that begats in us this sense of entitlement. That if God's whys don't stack up for me, then I'm not going to engage in that behavior until they do. And I think it's important for us as believers to accept that the most important and underrated reason why we give is because our Father in heaven told us to. And I think this applies to everything. I think this applies to our quiet times. This applies to our grace with other people. This applies to any challenge that we would face. Anytime God's word tells us to do something, the first and most important reason we do it is because God told us to. Proverbs tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And I think that sometimes for me, I walk through life entitled as if I am owed a why, and God does not owe us that. So an important reason to apply to everything in our life is because our Father in Heaven told us to. Now once we accept that, and we adopt that posture of obedience, and I also want to be very clear, when I say that, I'm talking only to the Christians in the room. If you're here this morning and you're not a Christian, you've never signed up for this. You've never said, I submit my life to God. You've never said, you're the Lord of my life. I'm second. I'm going to do what you want. You've never said that. And so to you, I wouldn't say that you even need to give. And I definitely wouldn't say it's because God told you to. You haven't signed up for this yet and said, I'm going to submit myself to God's word. But if you are a Christian, then you have. So first we adopt a posture of obedience. And what we understand in that posture of obedience is that God wants what's best for us. This is what we talked about last week. What we believe is the verse I preached last week, that God actually leads us to paths of life, that in his presence there is fullness of joy. At his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. We actually believe that our God in heaven wants what's best for us and takes us to the best possible places. And so if he tells us to do something, it must be what's best for us. So we trust that about giving too. So the question really becomes this morning, not why does God want me to give, but why is giving best for me? That's really the question that we are asking this morning. Once we adopt this posture of obedience and say, yes, Father, I am a Christian, and because I am, I am submitted to you, and I will be a person who is a giving, generous person. But I also understand that as I do that, it's what's best for me, and I'd love to understand why it's what's best for me. So I've got a few reasons for you that we're just going to kind of go through. The first thing I would say to you when you ask why is giving what's best for me, I would say it's because God is generous to the generous. God is generous to generous people. Now, I have to be careful with this because this is how you get to health and wealth, right? This is how you get to me preaching to you. If you give, God's going to give back to you a hundredfold. If you give to the church this much, God's going to give you this much. Meanwhile, I'm asking you to fund my private jet and you can't figure out how to pay for a civic, okay? So that's, I don't want to go there. I'm not preaching health and wealth. I'm not telling you that the more you give to God, the more money he's going to give to you. However, this principle that God is generous to the generous is unavoidable in scripture. Jesus talks about this in Luke chapter 6, verse 38, when he says this, give and it will be given to you. Good measure pressed down, shaken together, running over will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. Corinthians says, he who sows little reaps little and he who sows much reaps much. There is a principle in the Bible that is unavoidable, that God is generous to the generous. And I'm lying to you and dishonest as a pastor if I don't say that's one of the reasons it's what's best for you. Because when we're generous to others, God is generous to us. Now what it doesn't say anywhere is that God is generous to us monetarily. What it doesn't say anywhere is that the blessings that God is going to be generous with are ones that are going to fill up our bank account. It does not say that. It just says God will be generous to you. And God's generosity comes in forms that is so much better than money. You understand? When you are generous with your resources, God is generous with his. It's an unavoidable truth of scripture. So God's generosity looks like good, rich, and deep, spiritually nourishing, life-giving friendships. God's generosity looks like a marriage that's seen some seasons but is hanging in there and loving one another. God's generosity is good relationships with your children. God's generosity is a place to go every day that you don't hate. God's generosity is when you're walking through a hard season but you know that there is a good season coming because your God is good and you know that every day won't feel like this day. God's generosity doesn't always come in the form of money. I know a family, I know a couple who they have living with them right now, a family member, and this is a family member that should not be living with them, okay? They shouldn't be there. They should be able to live on their own, but they're not. And it is really, they are expressing a great deal of generosity to this family member. And one of their friends learned about this and happens to have a cabin, a nice one, and said, go, stay at our cabin for a weekend. You need that. That's God's generosity being expressed to someone who's being generous. Do you see that? It's not always a one-for-one reciprocal return of money, but God is generous towards the generous, and so it behooves us to be generous. The next thing I would tell you is that giving acknowledges stewardship. Why is giving what's best for me? Well, because when we give, we acknowledge this concept of stewardship. Stewardship, the whole sermon could be about stewardship. The whole sermon could be about all four of the points that I'm making. But stewardship in particular is this idea that once we are believers, we understand that the things that we have in our life are not our own. They're God's. And he's entrusted them to us. To use them for the purposes of advancing his kingdom in the most effective way possible. Back in May on Mother's Day, we did a child dedication. And we had 11 children that we dedicated that day. It was great, super exciting day for Grace. And part of the dedication of the children is for the parents to acknowledge, both literally and symbolically, that this child is not mine. He is yours. She is yours. We are raising them in our home, but they belong to you, God. They are your children, Jesus. And we are raising them the best we can in the way that they should go according to your standards. But these children are not my children. John and Lily do not belong to Nate and Jen. They belong to God. And he has entrusted them to us because he believes that we have a unique capacity to form them and shape them into who they need to be for Jesus so that they move through life advancing his kingdom. They're not our kids. They're God's kids. Your house is not your house. It's God's house. Your finances are not your finances. They're God's finances. And once we realize that, that we are stewards of the things that God has given to us, then it becomes incredibly important. The primary question we ask about all the things with which we have been entrusted is, Jesus, how do I use these to further your name? How do I use these things to bring attention to you? How would you have me organize this part of my life? And so when we give, when we write the check weekly or we click the button monthly or we set it up or whatever it is we do, when we are generous and we give, it reminds us. Every time we see that come out of our account or hit our credit card, whatever it is, that's a reminder. None of this is mine anyways. It's God's. It's God's to use as he sees fit. And if he wants more, he can have more. So giving reminds us that we are stewards, not just with our money, but in everything in our life. Another thing I would say to you is that giving allows us to participate in what God is doing by being a part of the body of Christ. Giving allows us to participate in what is happening in the church, in the kingdom, in the body of Christ by being a part of the body of Christ. I love 1 Corinthians 12. I've never preached on it here, and I need to do a whole series on it because I think it's just an amazing teaching. But in 1 Corinthians 12, Paul lays out this idea that the church is a body and that everyone who's a part of the church has a part to play. The body has arms and legs and feet and hands and it has all kinds of things that are incredibly important. It has lungs that nobody ever sees, but if we don't have lungs, then the rest of it doesn't work. And it all intricately works together to get things accomplished. And I love this teaching because it reminds me as a pastor, I'm just the mouth. That's it. But y'all are the hands that touch people who need it. Y'all are the arms that are wrapped around folks who are struggling. Y'all are the feet that take the good news of the gospel into work. Y'all are the lungs that make this thing go. None of us, none of us, not me, not an elder, not somebody who's been here 30 years, none of us are more important to what's happening at Grace than anybody else. We simply have our part to play. My part is to run my mouth. Sometimes I wish somebody else would take that part. Because maybe I'd like to be the ear sometimes. But everybody has a part. And I think our part of being in the body of Christ, a church in an affluent suburb is to use our resources to serve the greater body of Christ. And when we do that as a church, we get to participate in things going on just outside of grace as well. And so to me, it's a wonderful picture of why as a church we should want to have a generous heart. Right now, we give 10% of everything that we get to ministries going on outside the walls of grace. It is one of my big long-term goals for the church to see that percentage increase a lot so that we play our part in God's greater body and who we are. But not just as we think about reaching outside of the walls of grace, but as we think about what happens within grace and how when we give, we are part of the celebrations that God allows for us here. We are part of the victories that Jesus wins here. We participate in that by giving and doing our part and being a part of the body of Christ. I think back to October of 2017. That was the first time I got to go down to Reynosa to go see the folks at Faith Ministry. Colleen of Faith Ministry fame is with us this morning. Hello, Colleen. That's a ministry in Mexico that builds houses for people who otherwise would not be able to have them. And Grace has been partners with them since before Grace existed. So more than 20 years. And I got to go down there in October of 2017 to see it for the first time. And it was a really great experience. And I'll never forget, we're sitting there and I wanted to say it's the parking lot, but that's generous. It's the place where the cars go. And we're sitting in the van and we're waiting to pull out. And I hear a car crank up and and it was as if that poor thing was being tortured. Like, it did not, every noise it made was, please, please don't make me do this. Like, and I turn around, and the bumper is in shatters. It's being held with bungee cords, and to say that it was a beater is generous to beaters, and it was being driven by the pastor down there, a younger guy named Pastor Carlos. And Pastor Carlos, he works 10 times harder than me. I could not do what he does. I asked him one time what his weekly schedule was and just the Bible studies that he has and the different towns and stuff that he touches on and the different people in his orbit. He needs a good car. He's shuttling kids back and forth. He works so hard. This is not what he should be driving. And so I kind of leaned over to some folks that were on the trip and I said, hey, I think Grace could raise enough money to buy him a truck. Can we do that? And I talked to the folks at Faith Ministry. Would it be cool if we bought him a truck? He seems to need it. And everybody was good with it. And so I came back to Grace and I said, hey, this is, as we enter Christmas, this is the thing we want to do. We want to have enough money to buy a truck for Pastor Carlos. And we did. What kind of car did we buy him? Do you remember? Yeah, Ford Escape or Ranger or something like that. But it was nice and new and way better than what he had. And some of our folks from Grace got to go down and deliver it to him. And when I watched the video, I had tears in my eyes because he was so grateful. And so blown away by the generosity of the church. And it was a really sweet moment. And the next time I went down there, the first thing Carlos wanted me to do is come see his truck and say thank you again for it. Now listen, if you were here and you gave to that Christmas offering in 2017, that joy is your joy. That happiness is your happiness. That's not watching other people do a good thing like when we watch on the internet and our heart is warmed and then we scroll to the next thing. That's your joy. You did that. You participated in that. You made that possible. That was God using your gifts and your finances making you a part of the body of Christ so that you could participate in the good work that he was doing. That joy was your joy. If you give to grace, those 11 kids that were up here being dedicated, that's your joy. When we baptize somebody, that's your joy. When you see somebody come into the church, that's your joy. We have, I think, nine people coming to Discover Grace after church today coming out of a pandemic. That's your joy that those people are becoming a part of what we're doing here at Grace. Every win that Jesus claims here at this church, when we give, we are a part of that. Because those wins don't happen if we don't give. So we give because we are a part of the body of Christ. And that allows us to participate in the work that Jesus is doing, wherever he's doing work. The last point that I would make about why it's best for us to give is that giving invites us to mirror the generosity of God that's lavished upon us. It invites us to mirror the generosity that God has given us. Now, this too could be a whole sermon, and it was. The last time we talked about giving, Doug Bergeson, one of our elders, preached on it in February of 2020, and I don't do things like this, but it's the best sermon on giving I've ever heard. If you haven't heard it, and you'd like to explore this idea more, go back into the archives. It was Grace's Going Home series, February of 2020. Find the Doug Bergeson sermon. It's an excellent one on what I'm talking about right here, How we participate in God's generosity when we give. But what I would say to you this morning is simply this, that this is to me the most compelling reason to give. Because the longer you are a believer, the deeper you grow in gratitude to the Father. There's no two ways about it. You might think that if you've lived a life however you want it, in total selfishness, in total depravity, you've done all the bad things that anybody could do. You can check off all the boxes and and then at like 35, you come to know God, and you're amazed that he's wiped the slate clean, and he's accepted you into his kingdom, that that moment is maximum gratitude for God's generosity and forgiveness. No, it's not. Because to walk with God is to understand that when you become a Christian, he doesn't just forgive you for all the stuff that you did up to that moment. He forgives you for all the crap that you're going to do too. He knows every terrible thought that you're going to have. When you get saved, whatever your lowest point is after that, whatever rock bottom looks like after you become a Christian, God was already in that moment whispering to you that he loves you and he forgives you and he wants you to come back to him. He's already in that moment. Whether that moment's behind you or ahead of you, God was in it telling you already, I've covered this too. So to walk with God and to fall short again and again and again, to arrive at that place that Paul arrives at in Romans 7 that is to me the most redemptive verse in scripture, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death. To arrive there and be refreshed anew with God's overwhelming forgiveness and generosity to us. For it to hit us like a wave again that Jesus condescended, took on human flesh, lived with us in the muck and the mire, died on the cross for us, knowing that we would crud on that very death over and over and over again in our life only to require his forgiveness yet again and then he offers and then he goes about, once he dies for us, ascending to the right hand of the Father to advocate for us and to whisper in God's ear that, yes, I've covered that too. When we sit daily in the realization of the gospel and we let the waves of Jesus' forgiveness wash over us and God's generosity flood us, we cannot help but grow in our gratitude towards God. Whatever gratitude we experienced at salvation is the starting point for how it grows through our life. And so we give as an expression of that gratitude. We give because something so incredible is happening to us that we want to find a way to be conduits of that generosity that God has given us. God has given so much to me. God has given so much to us. God has enriched our lives so much that we can't help but want to desire to enrich the lives of others. We can't help but want to express the generosity that God has lavished upon us. And so giving in his best, most pure state is simply a reaction to the overflow of God's giving in our life. That's why Paul teaches in Corinthians that God loves a cheerful giver. Don't give out of compulsion, but give because you want to. And how can we grow our want to in giving? By focusing on the face of Jesus and remembering the generosity and the forgiveness that he offers us every day. And so giving is what's best for us because it reorients us to the gospel. It reorients us towards God's goodness in our life. God has been good to me and provided me this. I am going to give this portion of this, understanding that he can replace it or he can't, but God has been so generous to me that I want to be generous to others. That's why we give. I love this verse in 2 Corinthians 9-11 says, you will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God. There's this part of the Sermon on the Mount that I find incredibly intimidating, where Jesus says, let others see your good deeds, see your good works, and shine for the Father so that your light shine before others that they may see your good deeds and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that when people come into and out of your orbit in your life, they should simply see the way that you act and want more of your Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that when people come into and out of your orbit in your life, they should simply see the way that you act and want more of your father who is in heaven. And I always think to myself, how do you act like that? A really easy way is to be generous. That's what Corinthians tells us. That God has enriched us. He's given us resources in every way. Why? So that we might enrich others. And then both you and them will turn that to thanksgiving to God. And it will point us back to the Father and our Savior Jesus. That's why giving is what's best for us. It's good for us. It develops a spirit of generosity that constantly, constantly orients us back to Jesus. So I would end this morning with a simple challenge for you. Trust God and give. Trust God and his word and give. How much should I give? Just a little bit more than you are. That's always the answer. 10%? No, that's an Old Testament thing. How much do we give in the New Testament? Just a little bit more than we are. Whatever that means for you. Who do I give to? I'll be the first to tell you. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that you have to give all of your giving to the local church. I've sat in churches, I've heard pastors say, your first 10% goes to this church and then on top of that, other places. That's not in the Bible. I'm not going to sit here and teach you that. I'm not preaching this as a self-serving thing for grace. If you believe in grace and what's happening here and you feel compelled to participate in the victories that Jesus is winning here, then give to grace. But you give wherever God is advancing his kingdom. Wherever God is working and Jesus is moving, you give there. Just give. Trust God and do it. I have never talked to a single person in my whole life who has said, you know what? I heard what the pastor said about giving and I decided to start being more generous. That was a huge mistake. I really regret it. Wish I could have that back. Never heard anybody say that. So this morning, it's simple. If you and I could have a conversation, I would simply end it by saying, just trust God. Obey Him. Be a person who's generous. Let's give together. Let me pray for us. Father, we do love you. We are so grateful for the goodness and the gifts that you've lavished upon us. God, I pray first and foremost that we would let those wash over us. I pray more than anything else that we would simply leave here increasingly overwhelmed with your goodness to us. Father, for those of us who need this, who need to think about this in our own lives, I pray that because you said so would be all the reason that we ever need. I pray that we would trust that and walk in that. Knowing that even when we don't understand obedience sometimes, that it is going to lead us to a path of life. God, give us the heart and the gratitude and the spirit to be people who are generous. I pray that each one of us would leave here determined to be just a little bit more generous than we were when we walked in today. And God, for those of us who are obedient and who respond and who give. Would we find you there, please? Would you show us yourself in that giving? Can we ask that through the generosity that you compel us to that we are brought closer to your son and so inspired and enlivened to continue to be generous. It's in his name, the one who died for us and who advocates for us, that we pray. Amen.

If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else and what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day, they're not nearly as big of a deal. What are our big rocks? And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. A little confession, after we shot that video in the back corner, I was on my hands and knees for about 15 minutes picking up all those rocks. So I'm really glad we got it there on that first take, and I didn't have to do that again. Thank you for being here. Like I said, I'm the senior pastor here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. We got a full crew here this morning. That is exciting and good. So thanks for being here. Thanks for joining us online, particularly if you're on vacation and you're still choosing to make this a part of your Sunday. We are grateful for that. I'm really looking forward to the rest of this series as we talk about exactly what I addressed in the video. This idea of coming kind of back to life, the world feeling normal again, or at least approaching it. If we can avoid this Delta variant, but that's a whole different conversation. But it feels like we're approaching that. And as we do it, we have this unique opportunity to kind of reconstruct our life around the things that are most important to us. And really, we have this opportunity to reconstruct our life around Jesus. So for the next four weeks, we're going to talk about what our big rocks are. What are the things that are the most important to us and how do we orchestrate those things around Jesus and around this pursuit of God the Father. And I said specifically that I'm looking forward to the rest of the weeks of the series because I'm not looking forward to this morning in this series. I did not wake up this morning excited for this sermon. Some Sundays I wake up and I'm really, really, I can't wait to share with you what God has laid on my heart. Last Sunday is a great example of that. This Sunday, I'm preaching about money. So when I got up this morning, it wasn't like, yes, the tithe, here we come. Nor did you get up hoping that this would be the Sunday that I talked about money. So listen, I'll just confess up front. I'm no more interested in preaching this than you are in hearing it. Okay, but we're here now. So this is what we're going to do. And really, the reason that we're talking about this is first of all, first and foremost, I don't talk about this very much at Grace. The last time we talked about this was in February of 2020, and I didn't even do it. It was Doug Bergeson, all right? So we don't do it a whole lot, but this topic is all throughout the Bible. Scripture is replete with instructions on giving about big rocks in life, if we're going to talk about the things that matter most to us and how to prioritize those around Jesus, then we have to talk about finances. We have to ask the question, what does God want us to do with our resources and with our money? And the Bible talks about it so much that it would be irresponsible as a church and I'd be irresponsible as a pastor if we didn't revisit it with some regularity. So we arrive at it this morning and as we arrive at it, I'm kind of approaching it like this. This is why I'm sitting down for this one at a table instead of standing and gesticulating and walking around wildly and trying to keep calm and not yell at you because I'm approaching this as if you and I could have a conversation about it. If you and I were able to meet for lunch or if you could come to the office or we meet somewhere and we could talk and your question was, what does the Bible have to say about giving anyways? Or maybe even, why does God want me to give? Then this is the conversation that I would want to have with you. So I'm staying seated to remind me that this is what I would like to say to each of you if we had the opportunity to sit down and talk about this together. And as we do that, I would even say to you this, that as I wrote and approached this sermon, I really had in mind the person who is new to church. Maybe you are someone who, for the first time in a long time, church is important to you again. For the first time in a long time, spiritual health is important to you again. And so maybe you're kind of trying to get reengaged spiritually. Maybe you haven't been in church a lot for the past five, 10 years, and so you're kind of starting to re-engage and maybe have never really thought critically about giving and what the Bible has to say about it. This is for the new and the non-believers, for those of us who hear that we should give in church, who probably understand that the Bible tells us to do it, but maybe we don't know all the whys around it and maybe we don't have a developed theology of why we should be generous. So this sermon in particular is for you. Now I know that at Grace, and I see the evidence of it over and over again, we have plenty of you who have a really good theology of giving, who understand tithing and being generous and why we do it. And so for you, I hope that we hit on some things that are encouraging, particularly the first point that I make. I think we should apply it to everything, not just giving. And so I hope that there's some encouraging ways to think about it. But this is really for folks who, if I sat you down and I said, what does the Bible say about giving or why should we give? This is for you if you feel like, gosh, I'm not sure how well I would answer that. So like I said, I'm approaching it as a conversation and I want to approach the conversation with what the Bible even has to say about it. And as I sought that out this week, you know, the Old Testament has a lot of very specific instructions that we are to give. The Old Testament introduces this idea of giving in generosity like a new idea. Leave the corners of your field for the sojourners, for the poor, for the widow, for the aliens, for the people who don't yet have a home. We're told to bring our tithe to the storehouse in the Old Testament. We're told there's a whole portion in Leviticus that tells us exactly, tells the children of Israel exactly how they are to give. So in the Old Testament, it's given as an instruction. It's introduced almost as a new idea. But what you find in the New Testament, if you want to read New Testament verses about giving, and the New Testament is simply the part of the Bible that comes during Jesus's life and after. And Jesus kind of changes everything. So what does the Bible have to say about giving once Jesus gets on the scene? Well, once Jesus arrives, the instructions about giving become a little bit presumptive, as if this is a thing that we already know. This is actually what Jesus says about it in the Sermon on the Mount. If you have a Bible, you can turn to Matthew chapter 6. I'm going to read you verses 1 through 4. The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus' first recorded public address. It's the first time he talks. And he has performed miracles and those people began to follow them and then he begins to preach to them and he hits on myriad topics. But then he lands on giving for a different directions. But the interesting part to me about this verse, if you want to ask what does the New Testament teach about giving, is the two uses of the word when. When you give. When you give to the needy. Jesus is talking to the huddled masses. Talking to thousands of people in the middle of the day, presumably jobless folks for the most part. And he still assumes that they know, without ever introducing giving as a new idea, he assumes that they know that they should give. He assumes that they know that God expects them to be generous people. And so he says, when you do it, do it in such a way that you're not doing it in a showy way. Do it in secret. Be discreet about it. And there's a whole teaching there. But again, what's interesting to me is when you give, when you do it. And I bring that up because I think that that's how familiar a lot of us are with giving. We might not know why we're supposed to do it. We might not know what for. We might not know how we should be compelled to do it. We just know that we are supposed to. And so the interesting question is why? Why are we supposed to give? Why does God ask us in the Old Testament when he's setting everything up and then just assume of us that we know that we ought to in the New Testament? Why does God do that? And so we're going to spend the rest of the morning kind of answering that question, and this is the conversational piece of it. Why does God want me to give? The most important reason, the most important reason and most underrated reason we give is because God tells us to. The most important, and this is key, most underrated reason that we give is because God tells us to. Now, listen, here's why I say this. When my mom was growing up, she grew up in the 60s and 70s, and Linda, her mom, my mom, all wonderful woman, she ruled with an iron fist, man. This was back in the good old days, all right, when it was nice to be a parent. You rule with an iron fist. That was a funny slip. You ruled with an iron fist. Kids are to be seen and not heard. When the company comes over, you go upstairs. You do not interrupt. And when my mom would get out of line when she was told to do something, and she said, why? She had the audacity to say, why do I have to clean your room? Why? Because I told you to. Fire would burn in Linda's eyes, right? And mom would know. She better do whatever it was she was asked to do, even if it makes no sense at all to her, because there is going to be some serious repercussions if she doesn't. She saw the fire, and so she got right. And so when my mom grew up, because I told you to, was all the reason that a child needed. Well, when that's the only reason you get, that develops in you a little bit of resentment, right? This heart of resentment because my mom is kind and sweet and not rebellious like me and really was asking genuinely why I don't understand. Why do you want me to do that right now? It seems like I should be doing something else. Why do you want me to do that? But she wasn't allowed to ask that. And so that left her frustrated and resentful. So when she had children, she decided that because I said so is never a reason. I will always take the time to explain to my children why I'm asking them to do something. And to her credit, she did that. But when you're raising Nate, that becomes a real hassle. And I was always allowed to ask why. And I love that quote. There's some quote I picked up years ago that a reason is an invitation for an argument. And that's very true. And so I was always invited into that argument. Why? Go clean your room. Why do I have to do that right now? Go mow the grass. Why? And listen, if the why wasn't good enough, well, I didn't have to do it. In my head, if the why is not good enough, if it can't justify the request, well, then your request is dumb. And so what I learned in that environment is asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It does. Asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It does. Asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It manifests this idea of, okay, I understand what you want me to do, but I'm not going to do that until your reason justifies your request. And if it doesn't, if it falls short of King Nate's gauntlet of reasons, then you can forget it, buddy. So in our house, our response with Lily and then with John, which John can't talk yet. And I remember when Lily couldn't talk and people were like, just be grateful for these times. And I thought, you're jerks. You're not jerks. That makes sense to me now. John can't talk yet, but Lily can, and she likes to ask why. Lily's my daughter, for those of you who don't know me, not just some girl I talk about. But she likes to ask why. But the policy that we've adopted in our house is, first you obey, then you ask why. And this is gonna be what solves it forever. She'll have no issues when she's a parent. She'll replicate this exactly, right? But first you obey and then you ask why. First show that you're gonna be obedient. First show that you're going to submit. First show that the question is genuine and not an attempt to get out of it. And then come and we'll talk to you forever when you have a good attitude about the whys of why we should do something. And I bring this up because I think it's really important as we think about how we respond to the instructions of God. I know that very often when we are met with a teaching from Scripture that we should give, that we should read the Bible, that we should be selfless, that we should forgive as we are forgiven, that we should be generous to others, that we should turn the other cheek, that whenever it is possible for us, as far as it concerns us, that we should seek peace in others when peace is just not the thing that we want right now. Often in my life, and maybe yours too, we want to know the why before we offer our obedience. We want it to make sense to us before King Nate deigns to obey the instructions that I find here. And I will confess to you this, as I thought about this this week. This is not so much an indictment on your attitude, that's up to you, as it is sometimes an indictment on my preaching. Because when I preach and I give us instructions from the word, I always start with a why. Because I don't want to paint God as this ruthless dictator who sits in heaven giving you rules. I always want you to understand why it's what's best for you. But when we jump straight to the why before obedience, I think that begats in us this sense of entitlement. That if God's whys don't stack up for me, then I'm not going to engage in that behavior until they do. And I think it's important for us as believers to accept that the most important and underrated reason why we give is because our Father in heaven told us to. And I think this applies to everything. I think this applies to our quiet times. This applies to our grace with other people. This applies to any challenge that we would face. Anytime God's word tells us to do something, the first and most important reason we do it is because God told us to. Proverbs tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And I think that sometimes for me, I walk through life entitled as if I am owed a why, and God does not owe us that. So an important reason to apply to everything in our life is because our Father in Heaven told us to. Now once we accept that, and we adopt that posture of obedience, and I also want to be very clear, when I say that, I'm talking only to the Christians in the room. If you're here this morning and you're not a Christian, you've never signed up for this. You've never said, I submit my life to God. You've never said, you're the Lord of my life. I'm second. I'm going to do what you want. You've never said that. And so to you, I wouldn't say that you even need to give. And I definitely wouldn't say it's because God told you to. You haven't signed up for this yet and said, I'm going to submit myself to God's word. But if you are a Christian, then you have. So first we adopt a posture of obedience. And what we understand in that posture of obedience is that God wants what's best for us. This is what we talked about last week. What we believe is the verse I preached last week, that God actually leads us to paths of life, that in his presence there is fullness of joy. At his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. We actually believe that our God in heaven wants what's best for us and takes us to the best possible places. And so if he tells us to do something, it must be what's best for us. So we trust that about giving too. So the question really becomes this morning, not why does God want me to give, but why is giving best for me? That's really the question that we are asking this morning. Once we adopt this posture of obedience and say, yes, Father, I am a Christian, and because I am, I am submitted to you, and I will be a person who is a giving, generous person. But I also understand that as I do that, it's what's best for me, and I'd love to understand why it's what's best for me. So I've got a few reasons for you that we're just going to kind of go through. The first thing I would say to you when you ask why is giving what's best for me, I would say it's because God is generous to the generous. God is generous to generous people. Now, I have to be careful with this because this is how you get to health and wealth, right? This is how you get to me preaching to you. If you give, God's going to give back to you a hundredfold. If you give to the church this much, God's going to give you this much. Meanwhile, I'm asking you to fund my private jet and you can't figure out how to pay for a civic, okay? So that's, I don't want to go there. I'm not preaching health and wealth. I'm not telling you that the more you give to God, the more money he's going to give to you. However, this principle that God is generous to the generous is unavoidable in scripture. Jesus talks about this in Luke chapter 6, verse 38, when he says this, give and it will be given to you. Good measure pressed down, shaken together, running over will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. Corinthians says, he who sows little reaps little and he who sows much reaps much. There is a principle in the Bible that is unavoidable, that God is generous to the generous. And I'm lying to you and dishonest as a pastor if I don't say that's one of the reasons it's what's best for you. Because when we're generous to others, God is generous to us. Now what it doesn't say anywhere is that God is generous to us monetarily. What it doesn't say anywhere is that the blessings that God is going to be generous with are ones that are going to fill up our bank account. It does not say that. It just says God will be generous to you. And God's generosity comes in forms that is so much better than money. You understand? When you are generous with your resources, God is generous with his. It's an unavoidable truth of scripture. So God's generosity looks like good, rich, and deep, spiritually nourishing, life-giving friendships. God's generosity looks like a marriage that's seen some seasons but is hanging in there and loving one another. God's generosity is good relationships with your children. God's generosity is a place to go every day that you don't hate. God's generosity is when you're walking through a hard season but you know that there is a good season coming because your God is good and you know that every day won't feel like this day. God's generosity doesn't always come in the form of money. I know a family, I know a couple who they have living with them right now, a family member, and this is a family member that should not be living with them, okay? They shouldn't be there. They should be able to live on their own, but they're not. And it is really, they are expressing a great deal of generosity to this family member. And one of their friends learned about this and happens to have a cabin, a nice one, and said, go, stay at our cabin for a weekend. You need that. That's God's generosity being expressed to someone who's being generous. Do you see that? It's not always a one-for-one reciprocal return of money, but God is generous towards the generous, and so it behooves us to be generous. The next thing I would tell you is that giving acknowledges stewardship. Why is giving what's best for me? Well, because when we give, we acknowledge this concept of stewardship. Stewardship, the whole sermon could be about stewardship. The whole sermon could be about all four of the points that I'm making. But stewardship in particular is this idea that once we are believers, we understand that the things that we have in our life are not our own. They're God's. And he's entrusted them to us. To use them for the purposes of advancing his kingdom in the most effective way possible. Back in May on Mother's Day, we did a child dedication. And we had 11 children that we dedicated that day. It was great, super exciting day for Grace. And part of the dedication of the children is for the parents to acknowledge, both literally and symbolically, that this child is not mine. He is yours. She is yours. We are raising them in our home, but they belong to you, God. They are your children, Jesus. And we are raising them the best we can in the way that they should go according to your standards. But these children are not my children. John and Lily do not belong to Nate and Jen. They belong to God. And he has entrusted them to us because he believes that we have a unique capacity to form them and shape them into who they need to be for Jesus so that they move through life advancing his kingdom. They're not our kids. They're God's kids. Your house is not your house. It's God's house. Your finances are not your finances. They're God's finances. And once we realize that, that we are stewards of the things that God has given to us, then it becomes incredibly important. The primary question we ask about all the things with which we have been entrusted is, Jesus, how do I use these to further your name? How do I use these things to bring attention to you? How would you have me organize this part of my life? And so when we give, when we write the check weekly or we click the button monthly or we set it up or whatever it is we do, when we are generous and we give, it reminds us. Every time we see that come out of our account or hit our credit card, whatever it is, that's a reminder. None of this is mine anyways. It's God's. It's God's to use as he sees fit. And if he wants more, he can have more. So giving reminds us that we are stewards, not just with our money, but in everything in our life. Another thing I would say to you is that giving allows us to participate in what God is doing by being a part of the body of Christ. Giving allows us to participate in what is happening in the church, in the kingdom, in the body of Christ by being a part of the body of Christ. I love 1 Corinthians 12. I've never preached on it here, and I need to do a whole series on it because I think it's just an amazing teaching. But in 1 Corinthians 12, Paul lays out this idea that the church is a body and that everyone who's a part of the church has a part to play. The body has arms and legs and feet and hands and it has all kinds of things that are incredibly important. It has lungs that nobody ever sees, but if we don't have lungs, then the rest of it doesn't work. And it all intricately works together to get things accomplished. And I love this teaching because it reminds me as a pastor, I'm just the mouth. That's it. But y'all are the hands that touch people who need it. Y'all are the arms that are wrapped around folks who are struggling. Y'all are the feet that take the good news of the gospel into work. Y'all are the lungs that make this thing go. None of us, none of us, not me, not an elder, not somebody who's been here 30 years, none of us are more important to what's happening at Grace than anybody else. We simply have our part to play. My part is to run my mouth. Sometimes I wish somebody else would take that part. Because maybe I'd like to be the ear sometimes. But everybody has a part. And I think our part of being in the body of Christ, a church in an affluent suburb is to use our resources to serve the greater body of Christ. And when we do that as a church, we get to participate in things going on just outside of grace as well. And so to me, it's a wonderful picture of why as a church we should want to have a generous heart. Right now, we give 10% of everything that we get to ministries going on outside the walls of grace. It is one of my big long-term goals for the church to see that percentage increase a lot so that we play our part in God's greater body and who we are. But not just as we think about reaching outside of the walls of grace, but as we think about what happens within grace and how when we give, we are part of the celebrations that God allows for us here. We are part of the victories that Jesus wins here. We participate in that by giving and doing our part and being a part of the body of Christ. I think back to October of 2017. That was the first time I got to go down to Reynosa to go see the folks at Faith Ministry. Colleen of Faith Ministry fame is with us this morning. Hello, Colleen. That's a ministry in Mexico that builds houses for people who otherwise would not be able to have them. And Grace has been partners with them since before Grace existed. So more than 20 years. And I got to go down there in October of 2017 to see it for the first time. And it was a really great experience. And I'll never forget, we're sitting there and I wanted to say it's the parking lot, but that's generous. It's the place where the cars go. And we're sitting in the van and we're waiting to pull out. And I hear a car crank up and and it was as if that poor thing was being tortured. Like, it did not, every noise it made was, please, please don't make me do this. Like, and I turn around, and the bumper is in shatters. It's being held with bungee cords, and to say that it was a beater is generous to beaters, and it was being driven by the pastor down there, a younger guy named Pastor Carlos. And Pastor Carlos, he works 10 times harder than me. I could not do what he does. I asked him one time what his weekly schedule was and just the Bible studies that he has and the different towns and stuff that he touches on and the different people in his orbit. He needs a good car. He's shuttling kids back and forth. He works so hard. This is not what he should be driving. And so I kind of leaned over to some folks that were on the trip and I said, hey, I think Grace could raise enough money to buy him a truck. Can we do that? And I talked to the folks at Faith Ministry. Would it be cool if we bought him a truck? He seems to need it. And everybody was good with it. And so I came back to Grace and I said, hey, this is, as we enter Christmas, this is the thing we want to do. We want to have enough money to buy a truck for Pastor Carlos. And we did. What kind of car did we buy him? Do you remember? Yeah, Ford Escape or Ranger or something like that. But it was nice and new and way better than what he had. And some of our folks from Grace got to go down and deliver it to him. And when I watched the video, I had tears in my eyes because he was so grateful. And so blown away by the generosity of the church. And it was a really sweet moment. And the next time I went down there, the first thing Carlos wanted me to do is come see his truck and say thank you again for it. Now listen, if you were here and you gave to that Christmas offering in 2017, that joy is your joy. That happiness is your happiness. That's not watching other people do a good thing like when we watch on the internet and our heart is warmed and then we scroll to the next thing. That's your joy. You did that. You participated in that. You made that possible. That was God using your gifts and your finances making you a part of the body of Christ so that you could participate in the good work that he was doing. That joy was your joy. If you give to grace, those 11 kids that were up here being dedicated, that's your joy. When we baptize somebody, that's your joy. When you see somebody come into the church, that's your joy. We have, I think, nine people coming to Discover Grace after church today coming out of a pandemic. That's your joy that those people are becoming a part of what we're doing here at Grace. Every win that Jesus claims here at this church, when we give, we are a part of that. Because those wins don't happen if we don't give. So we give because we are a part of the body of Christ. And that allows us to participate in the work that Jesus is doing, wherever he's doing work. The last point that I would make about why it's best for us to give is that giving invites us to mirror the generosity of God that's lavished upon us. It invites us to mirror the generosity that God has given us. Now, this too could be a whole sermon, and it was. The last time we talked about giving, Doug Bergeson, one of our elders, preached on it in February of 2020, and I don't do things like this, but it's the best sermon on giving I've ever heard. If you haven't heard it, and you'd like to explore this idea more, go back into the archives. It was Grace's Going Home series, February of 2020. Find the Doug Bergeson sermon. It's an excellent one on what I'm talking about right here, How we participate in God's generosity when we give. But what I would say to you this morning is simply this, that this is to me the most compelling reason to give. Because the longer you are a believer, the deeper you grow in gratitude to the Father. There's no two ways about it. You might think that if you've lived a life however you want it, in total selfishness, in total depravity, you've done all the bad things that anybody could do. You can check off all the boxes and and then at like 35, you come to know God, and you're amazed that he's wiped the slate clean, and he's accepted you into his kingdom, that that moment is maximum gratitude for God's generosity and forgiveness. No, it's not. Because to walk with God is to understand that when you become a Christian, he doesn't just forgive you for all the stuff that you did up to that moment. He forgives you for all the crap that you're going to do too. He knows every terrible thought that you're going to have. When you get saved, whatever your lowest point is after that, whatever rock bottom looks like after you become a Christian, God was already in that moment whispering to you that he loves you and he forgives you and he wants you to come back to him. He's already in that moment. Whether that moment's behind you or ahead of you, God was in it telling you already, I've covered this too. So to walk with God and to fall short again and again and again, to arrive at that place that Paul arrives at in Romans 7 that is to me the most redemptive verse in scripture, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death. To arrive there and be refreshed anew with God's overwhelming forgiveness and generosity to us. For it to hit us like a wave again that Jesus condescended, took on human flesh, lived with us in the muck and the mire, died on the cross for us, knowing that we would crud on that very death over and over and over again in our life only to require his forgiveness yet again and then he offers and then he goes about, once he dies for us, ascending to the right hand of the Father to advocate for us and to whisper in God's ear that, yes, I've covered that too. When we sit daily in the realization of the gospel and we let the waves of Jesus' forgiveness wash over us and God's generosity flood us, we cannot help but grow in our gratitude towards God. Whatever gratitude we experienced at salvation is the starting point for how it grows through our life. And so we give as an expression of that gratitude. We give because something so incredible is happening to us that we want to find a way to be conduits of that generosity that God has given us. God has given so much to me. God has given so much to us. God has enriched our lives so much that we can't help but want to desire to enrich the lives of others. We can't help but want to express the generosity that God has lavished upon us. And so giving in his best, most pure state is simply a reaction to the overflow of God's giving in our life. That's why Paul teaches in Corinthians that God loves a cheerful giver. Don't give out of compulsion, but give because you want to. And how can we grow our want to in giving? By focusing on the face of Jesus and remembering the generosity and the forgiveness that he offers us every day. And so giving is what's best for us because it reorients us to the gospel. It reorients us towards God's goodness in our life. God has been good to me and provided me this. I am going to give this portion of this, understanding that he can replace it or he can't, but God has been so generous to me that I want to be generous to others. That's why we give. I love this verse in 2 Corinthians 9-11 says, you will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God. There's this part of the Sermon on the Mount that I find incredibly intimidating, where Jesus says, let others see your good deeds, see your good works, and shine for the Father so that your light shine before others that they may see your good deeds and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that when people come into and out of your orbit in your life, they should simply see the way that you act and want more of your Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that when people come into and out of your orbit in your life, they should simply see the way that you act and want more of your father who is in heaven. And I always think to myself, how do you act like that? A really easy way is to be generous. That's what Corinthians tells us. That God has enriched us. He's given us resources in every way. Why? So that we might enrich others. And then both you and them will turn that to thanksgiving to God. And it will point us back to the Father and our Savior Jesus. That's why giving is what's best for us. It's good for us. It develops a spirit of generosity that constantly, constantly orients us back to Jesus. So I would end this morning with a simple challenge for you. Trust God and give. Trust God and his word and give. How much should I give? Just a little bit more than you are. That's always the answer. 10%? No, that's an Old Testament thing. How much do we give in the New Testament? Just a little bit more than we are. Whatever that means for you. Who do I give to? I'll be the first to tell you. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that you have to give all of your giving to the local church. I've sat in churches, I've heard pastors say, your first 10% goes to this church and then on top of that, other places. That's not in the Bible. I'm not going to sit here and teach you that. I'm not preaching this as a self-serving thing for grace. If you believe in grace and what's happening here and you feel compelled to participate in the victories that Jesus is winning here, then give to grace. But you give wherever God is advancing his kingdom. Wherever God is working and Jesus is moving, you give there. Just give. Trust God and do it. I have never talked to a single person in my whole life who has said, you know what? I heard what the pastor said about giving and I decided to start being more generous. That was a huge mistake. I really regret it. Wish I could have that back. Never heard anybody say that. So this morning, it's simple. If you and I could have a conversation, I would simply end it by saying, just trust God. Obey Him. Be a person who's generous. Let's give together. Let me pray for us. Father, we do love you. We are so grateful for the goodness and the gifts that you've lavished upon us. God, I pray first and foremost that we would let those wash over us. I pray more than anything else that we would simply leave here increasingly overwhelmed with your goodness to us. Father, for those of us who need this, who need to think about this in our own lives, I pray that because you said so would be all the reason that we ever need. I pray that we would trust that and walk in that. Knowing that even when we don't understand obedience sometimes, that it is going to lead us to a path of life. God, give us the heart and the gratitude and the spirit to be people who are generous. I pray that each one of us would leave here determined to be just a little bit more generous than we were when we walked in today. And God, for those of us who are obedient and who respond and who give. Would we find you there, please? Would you show us yourself in that giving? Can we ask that through the generosity that you compel us to that we are brought closer to your son and so inspired and enlivened to continue to be generous. It's in his name, the one who died for us and who advocates for us, that we pray. Amen.

If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else and what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day, they're not nearly as big of a deal. What are our big rocks? And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. A little confession, after we shot that video in the back corner, I was on my hands and knees for about 15 minutes picking up all those rocks. So I'm really glad we got it there on that first take, and I didn't have to do that again. Thank you for being here. Like I said, I'm the senior pastor here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. We got a full crew here this morning. That is exciting and good. So thanks for being here. Thanks for joining us online, particularly if you're on vacation and you're still choosing to make this a part of your Sunday. We are grateful for that. I'm really looking forward to the rest of this series as we talk about exactly what I addressed in the video. This idea of coming kind of back to life, the world feeling normal again, or at least approaching it. If we can avoid this Delta variant, but that's a whole different conversation. But it feels like we're approaching that. And as we do it, we have this unique opportunity to kind of reconstruct our life around the things that are most important to us. And really, we have this opportunity to reconstruct our life around Jesus. So for the next four weeks, we're going to talk about what our big rocks are. What are the things that are the most important to us and how do we orchestrate those things around Jesus and around this pursuit of God the Father. And I said specifically that I'm looking forward to the rest of the weeks of the series because I'm not looking forward to this morning in this series. I did not wake up this morning excited for this sermon. Some Sundays I wake up and I'm really, really, I can't wait to share with you what God has laid on my heart. Last Sunday is a great example of that. This Sunday, I'm preaching about money. So when I got up this morning, it wasn't like, yes, the tithe, here we come. Nor did you get up hoping that this would be the Sunday that I talked about money. So listen, I'll just confess up front. I'm no more interested in preaching this than you are in hearing it. Okay, but we're here now. So this is what we're going to do. And really, the reason that we're talking about this is first of all, first and foremost, I don't talk about this very much at Grace. The last time we talked about this was in February of 2020, and I didn't even do it. It was Doug Bergeson, all right? So we don't do it a whole lot, but this topic is all throughout the Bible. Scripture is replete with instructions on giving about big rocks in life, if we're going to talk about the things that matter most to us and how to prioritize those around Jesus, then we have to talk about finances. We have to ask the question, what does God want us to do with our resources and with our money? And the Bible talks about it so much that it would be irresponsible as a church and I'd be irresponsible as a pastor if we didn't revisit it with some regularity. So we arrive at it this morning and as we arrive at it, I'm kind of approaching it like this. This is why I'm sitting down for this one at a table instead of standing and gesticulating and walking around wildly and trying to keep calm and not yell at you because I'm approaching this as if you and I could have a conversation about it. If you and I were able to meet for lunch or if you could come to the office or we meet somewhere and we could talk and your question was, what does the Bible have to say about giving anyways? Or maybe even, why does God want me to give? Then this is the conversation that I would want to have with you. So I'm staying seated to remind me that this is what I would like to say to each of you if we had the opportunity to sit down and talk about this together. And as we do that, I would even say to you this, that as I wrote and approached this sermon, I really had in mind the person who is new to church. Maybe you are someone who, for the first time in a long time, church is important to you again. For the first time in a long time, spiritual health is important to you again. And so maybe you're kind of trying to get reengaged spiritually. Maybe you haven't been in church a lot for the past five, 10 years, and so you're kind of starting to re-engage and maybe have never really thought critically about giving and what the Bible has to say about it. This is for the new and the non-believers, for those of us who hear that we should give in church, who probably understand that the Bible tells us to do it, but maybe we don't know all the whys around it and maybe we don't have a developed theology of why we should be generous. So this sermon in particular is for you. Now I know that at Grace, and I see the evidence of it over and over again, we have plenty of you who have a really good theology of giving, who understand tithing and being generous and why we do it. And so for you, I hope that we hit on some things that are encouraging, particularly the first point that I make. I think we should apply it to everything, not just giving. And so I hope that there's some encouraging ways to think about it. But this is really for folks who, if I sat you down and I said, what does the Bible say about giving or why should we give? This is for you if you feel like, gosh, I'm not sure how well I would answer that. So like I said, I'm approaching it as a conversation and I want to approach the conversation with what the Bible even has to say about it. And as I sought that out this week, you know, the Old Testament has a lot of very specific instructions that we are to give. The Old Testament introduces this idea of giving in generosity like a new idea. Leave the corners of your field for the sojourners, for the poor, for the widow, for the aliens, for the people who don't yet have a home. We're told to bring our tithe to the storehouse in the Old Testament. We're told there's a whole portion in Leviticus that tells us exactly, tells the children of Israel exactly how they are to give. So in the Old Testament, it's given as an instruction. It's introduced almost as a new idea. But what you find in the New Testament, if you want to read New Testament verses about giving, and the New Testament is simply the part of the Bible that comes during Jesus's life and after. And Jesus kind of changes everything. So what does the Bible have to say about giving once Jesus gets on the scene? Well, once Jesus arrives, the instructions about giving become a little bit presumptive, as if this is a thing that we already know. This is actually what Jesus says about it in the Sermon on the Mount. If you have a Bible, you can turn to Matthew chapter 6. I'm going to read you verses 1 through 4. The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus' first recorded public address. It's the first time he talks. And he has performed miracles and those people began to follow them and then he begins to preach to them and he hits on myriad topics. But then he lands on giving for a different directions. But the interesting part to me about this verse, if you want to ask what does the New Testament teach about giving, is the two uses of the word when. When you give. When you give to the needy. Jesus is talking to the huddled masses. Talking to thousands of people in the middle of the day, presumably jobless folks for the most part. And he still assumes that they know, without ever introducing giving as a new idea, he assumes that they know that they should give. He assumes that they know that God expects them to be generous people. And so he says, when you do it, do it in such a way that you're not doing it in a showy way. Do it in secret. Be discreet about it. And there's a whole teaching there. But again, what's interesting to me is when you give, when you do it. And I bring that up because I think that that's how familiar a lot of us are with giving. We might not know why we're supposed to do it. We might not know what for. We might not know how we should be compelled to do it. We just know that we are supposed to. And so the interesting question is why? Why are we supposed to give? Why does God ask us in the Old Testament when he's setting everything up and then just assume of us that we know that we ought to in the New Testament? Why does God do that? And so we're going to spend the rest of the morning kind of answering that question, and this is the conversational piece of it. Why does God want me to give? The most important reason, the most important reason and most underrated reason we give is because God tells us to. The most important, and this is key, most underrated reason that we give is because God tells us to. Now, listen, here's why I say this. When my mom was growing up, she grew up in the 60s and 70s, and Linda, her mom, my mom, all wonderful woman, she ruled with an iron fist, man. This was back in the good old days, all right, when it was nice to be a parent. You rule with an iron fist. That was a funny slip. You ruled with an iron fist. Kids are to be seen and not heard. When the company comes over, you go upstairs. You do not interrupt. And when my mom would get out of line when she was told to do something, and she said, why? She had the audacity to say, why do I have to clean your room? Why? Because I told you to. Fire would burn in Linda's eyes, right? And mom would know. She better do whatever it was she was asked to do, even if it makes no sense at all to her, because there is going to be some serious repercussions if she doesn't. She saw the fire, and so she got right. And so when my mom grew up, because I told you to, was all the reason that a child needed. Well, when that's the only reason you get, that develops in you a little bit of resentment, right? This heart of resentment because my mom is kind and sweet and not rebellious like me and really was asking genuinely why I don't understand. Why do you want me to do that right now? It seems like I should be doing something else. Why do you want me to do that? But she wasn't allowed to ask that. And so that left her frustrated and resentful. So when she had children, she decided that because I said so is never a reason. I will always take the time to explain to my children why I'm asking them to do something. And to her credit, she did that. But when you're raising Nate, that becomes a real hassle. And I was always allowed to ask why. And I love that quote. There's some quote I picked up years ago that a reason is an invitation for an argument. And that's very true. And so I was always invited into that argument. Why? Go clean your room. Why do I have to do that right now? Go mow the grass. Why? And listen, if the why wasn't good enough, well, I didn't have to do it. In my head, if the why is not good enough, if it can't justify the request, well, then your request is dumb. And so what I learned in that environment is asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It does. Asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It does. Asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It manifests this idea of, okay, I understand what you want me to do, but I'm not going to do that until your reason justifies your request. And if it doesn't, if it falls short of King Nate's gauntlet of reasons, then you can forget it, buddy. So in our house, our response with Lily and then with John, which John can't talk yet. And I remember when Lily couldn't talk and people were like, just be grateful for these times. And I thought, you're jerks. You're not jerks. That makes sense to me now. John can't talk yet, but Lily can, and she likes to ask why. Lily's my daughter, for those of you who don't know me, not just some girl I talk about. But she likes to ask why. But the policy that we've adopted in our house is, first you obey, then you ask why. And this is gonna be what solves it forever. She'll have no issues when she's a parent. She'll replicate this exactly, right? But first you obey and then you ask why. First show that you're gonna be obedient. First show that you're going to submit. First show that the question is genuine and not an attempt to get out of it. And then come and we'll talk to you forever when you have a good attitude about the whys of why we should do something. And I bring this up because I think it's really important as we think about how we respond to the instructions of God. I know that very often when we are met with a teaching from Scripture that we should give, that we should read the Bible, that we should be selfless, that we should forgive as we are forgiven, that we should be generous to others, that we should turn the other cheek, that whenever it is possible for us, as far as it concerns us, that we should seek peace in others when peace is just not the thing that we want right now. Often in my life, and maybe yours too, we want to know the why before we offer our obedience. We want it to make sense to us before King Nate deigns to obey the instructions that I find here. And I will confess to you this, as I thought about this this week. This is not so much an indictment on your attitude, that's up to you, as it is sometimes an indictment on my preaching. Because when I preach and I give us instructions from the word, I always start with a why. Because I don't want to paint God as this ruthless dictator who sits in heaven giving you rules. I always want you to understand why it's what's best for you. But when we jump straight to the why before obedience, I think that begats in us this sense of entitlement. That if God's whys don't stack up for me, then I'm not going to engage in that behavior until they do. And I think it's important for us as believers to accept that the most important and underrated reason why we give is because our Father in heaven told us to. And I think this applies to everything. I think this applies to our quiet times. This applies to our grace with other people. This applies to any challenge that we would face. Anytime God's word tells us to do something, the first and most important reason we do it is because God told us to. Proverbs tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And I think that sometimes for me, I walk through life entitled as if I am owed a why, and God does not owe us that. So an important reason to apply to everything in our life is because our Father in Heaven told us to. Now once we accept that, and we adopt that posture of obedience, and I also want to be very clear, when I say that, I'm talking only to the Christians in the room. If you're here this morning and you're not a Christian, you've never signed up for this. You've never said, I submit my life to God. You've never said, you're the Lord of my life. I'm second. I'm going to do what you want. You've never said that. And so to you, I wouldn't say that you even need to give. And I definitely wouldn't say it's because God told you to. You haven't signed up for this yet and said, I'm going to submit myself to God's word. But if you are a Christian, then you have. So first we adopt a posture of obedience. And what we understand in that posture of obedience is that God wants what's best for us. This is what we talked about last week. What we believe is the verse I preached last week, that God actually leads us to paths of life, that in his presence there is fullness of joy. At his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. We actually believe that our God in heaven wants what's best for us and takes us to the best possible places. And so if he tells us to do something, it must be what's best for us. So we trust that about giving too. So the question really becomes this morning, not why does God want me to give, but why is giving best for me? That's really the question that we are asking this morning. Once we adopt this posture of obedience and say, yes, Father, I am a Christian, and because I am, I am submitted to you, and I will be a person who is a giving, generous person. But I also understand that as I do that, it's what's best for me, and I'd love to understand why it's what's best for me. So I've got a few reasons for you that we're just going to kind of go through. The first thing I would say to you when you ask why is giving what's best for me, I would say it's because God is generous to the generous. God is generous to generous people. Now, I have to be careful with this because this is how you get to health and wealth, right? This is how you get to me preaching to you. If you give, God's going to give back to you a hundredfold. If you give to the church this much, God's going to give you this much. Meanwhile, I'm asking you to fund my private jet and you can't figure out how to pay for a civic, okay? So that's, I don't want to go there. I'm not preaching health and wealth. I'm not telling you that the more you give to God, the more money he's going to give to you. However, this principle that God is generous to the generous is unavoidable in scripture. Jesus talks about this in Luke chapter 6, verse 38, when he says this, give and it will be given to you. Good measure pressed down, shaken together, running over will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. Corinthians says, he who sows little reaps little and he who sows much reaps much. There is a principle in the Bible that is unavoidable, that God is generous to the generous. And I'm lying to you and dishonest as a pastor if I don't say that's one of the reasons it's what's best for you. Because when we're generous to others, God is generous to us. Now what it doesn't say anywhere is that God is generous to us monetarily. What it doesn't say anywhere is that the blessings that God is going to be generous with are ones that are going to fill up our bank account. It does not say that. It just says God will be generous to you. And God's generosity comes in forms that is so much better than money. You understand? When you are generous with your resources, God is generous with his. It's an unavoidable truth of scripture. So God's generosity looks like good, rich, and deep, spiritually nourishing, life-giving friendships. God's generosity looks like a marriage that's seen some seasons but is hanging in there and loving one another. God's generosity is good relationships with your children. God's generosity is a place to go every day that you don't hate. God's generosity is when you're walking through a hard season but you know that there is a good season coming because your God is good and you know that every day won't feel like this day. God's generosity doesn't always come in the form of money. I know a family, I know a couple who they have living with them right now, a family member, and this is a family member that should not be living with them, okay? They shouldn't be there. They should be able to live on their own, but they're not. And it is really, they are expressing a great deal of generosity to this family member. And one of their friends learned about this and happens to have a cabin, a nice one, and said, go, stay at our cabin for a weekend. You need that. That's God's generosity being expressed to someone who's being generous. Do you see that? It's not always a one-for-one reciprocal return of money, but God is generous towards the generous, and so it behooves us to be generous. The next thing I would tell you is that giving acknowledges stewardship. Why is giving what's best for me? Well, because when we give, we acknowledge this concept of stewardship. Stewardship, the whole sermon could be about stewardship. The whole sermon could be about all four of the points that I'm making. But stewardship in particular is this idea that once we are believers, we understand that the things that we have in our life are not our own. They're God's. And he's entrusted them to us. To use them for the purposes of advancing his kingdom in the most effective way possible. Back in May on Mother's Day, we did a child dedication. And we had 11 children that we dedicated that day. It was great, super exciting day for Grace. And part of the dedication of the children is for the parents to acknowledge, both literally and symbolically, that this child is not mine. He is yours. She is yours. We are raising them in our home, but they belong to you, God. They are your children, Jesus. And we are raising them the best we can in the way that they should go according to your standards. But these children are not my children. John and Lily do not belong to Nate and Jen. They belong to God. And he has entrusted them to us because he believes that we have a unique capacity to form them and shape them into who they need to be for Jesus so that they move through life advancing his kingdom. They're not our kids. They're God's kids. Your house is not your house. It's God's house. Your finances are not your finances. They're God's finances. And once we realize that, that we are stewards of the things that God has given to us, then it becomes incredibly important. The primary question we ask about all the things with which we have been entrusted is, Jesus, how do I use these to further your name? How do I use these things to bring attention to you? How would you have me organize this part of my life? And so when we give, when we write the check weekly or we click the button monthly or we set it up or whatever it is we do, when we are generous and we give, it reminds us. Every time we see that come out of our account or hit our credit card, whatever it is, that's a reminder. None of this is mine anyways. It's God's. It's God's to use as he sees fit. And if he wants more, he can have more. So giving reminds us that we are stewards, not just with our money, but in everything in our life. Another thing I would say to you is that giving allows us to participate in what God is doing by being a part of the body of Christ. Giving allows us to participate in what is happening in the church, in the kingdom, in the body of Christ by being a part of the body of Christ. I love 1 Corinthians 12. I've never preached on it here, and I need to do a whole series on it because I think it's just an amazing teaching. But in 1 Corinthians 12, Paul lays out this idea that the church is a body and that everyone who's a part of the church has a part to play. The body has arms and legs and feet and hands and it has all kinds of things that are incredibly important. It has lungs that nobody ever sees, but if we don't have lungs, then the rest of it doesn't work. And it all intricately works together to get things accomplished. And I love this teaching because it reminds me as a pastor, I'm just the mouth. That's it. But y'all are the hands that touch people who need it. Y'all are the arms that are wrapped around folks who are struggling. Y'all are the feet that take the good news of the gospel into work. Y'all are the lungs that make this thing go. None of us, none of us, not me, not an elder, not somebody who's been here 30 years, none of us are more important to what's happening at Grace than anybody else. We simply have our part to play. My part is to run my mouth. Sometimes I wish somebody else would take that part. Because maybe I'd like to be the ear sometimes. But everybody has a part. And I think our part of being in the body of Christ, a church in an affluent suburb is to use our resources to serve the greater body of Christ. And when we do that as a church, we get to participate in things going on just outside of grace as well. And so to me, it's a wonderful picture of why as a church we should want to have a generous heart. Right now, we give 10% of everything that we get to ministries going on outside the walls of grace. It is one of my big long-term goals for the church to see that percentage increase a lot so that we play our part in God's greater body and who we are. But not just as we think about reaching outside of the walls of grace, but as we think about what happens within grace and how when we give, we are part of the celebrations that God allows for us here. We are part of the victories that Jesus wins here. We participate in that by giving and doing our part and being a part of the body of Christ. I think back to October of 2017. That was the first time I got to go down to Reynosa to go see the folks at Faith Ministry. Colleen of Faith Ministry fame is with us this morning. Hello, Colleen. That's a ministry in Mexico that builds houses for people who otherwise would not be able to have them. And Grace has been partners with them since before Grace existed. So more than 20 years. And I got to go down there in October of 2017 to see it for the first time. And it was a really great experience. And I'll never forget, we're sitting there and I wanted to say it's the parking lot, but that's generous. It's the place where the cars go. And we're sitting in the van and we're waiting to pull out. And I hear a car crank up and and it was as if that poor thing was being tortured. Like, it did not, every noise it made was, please, please don't make me do this. Like, and I turn around, and the bumper is in shatters. It's being held with bungee cords, and to say that it was a beater is generous to beaters, and it was being driven by the pastor down there, a younger guy named Pastor Carlos. And Pastor Carlos, he works 10 times harder than me. I could not do what he does. I asked him one time what his weekly schedule was and just the Bible studies that he has and the different towns and stuff that he touches on and the different people in his orbit. He needs a good car. He's shuttling kids back and forth. He works so hard. This is not what he should be driving. And so I kind of leaned over to some folks that were on the trip and I said, hey, I think Grace could raise enough money to buy him a truck. Can we do that? And I talked to the folks at Faith Ministry. Would it be cool if we bought him a truck? He seems to need it. And everybody was good with it. And so I came back to Grace and I said, hey, this is, as we enter Christmas, this is the thing we want to do. We want to have enough money to buy a truck for Pastor Carlos. And we did. What kind of car did we buy him? Do you remember? Yeah, Ford Escape or Ranger or something like that. But it was nice and new and way better than what he had. And some of our folks from Grace got to go down and deliver it to him. And when I watched the video, I had tears in my eyes because he was so grateful. And so blown away by the generosity of the church. And it was a really sweet moment. And the next time I went down there, the first thing Carlos wanted me to do is come see his truck and say thank you again for it. Now listen, if you were here and you gave to that Christmas offering in 2017, that joy is your joy. That happiness is your happiness. That's not watching other people do a good thing like when we watch on the internet and our heart is warmed and then we scroll to the next thing. That's your joy. You did that. You participated in that. You made that possible. That was God using your gifts and your finances making you a part of the body of Christ so that you could participate in the good work that he was doing. That joy was your joy. If you give to grace, those 11 kids that were up here being dedicated, that's your joy. When we baptize somebody, that's your joy. When you see somebody come into the church, that's your joy. We have, I think, nine people coming to Discover Grace after church today coming out of a pandemic. That's your joy that those people are becoming a part of what we're doing here at Grace. Every win that Jesus claims here at this church, when we give, we are a part of that. Because those wins don't happen if we don't give. So we give because we are a part of the body of Christ. And that allows us to participate in the work that Jesus is doing, wherever he's doing work. The last point that I would make about why it's best for us to give is that giving invites us to mirror the generosity of God that's lavished upon us. It invites us to mirror the generosity that God has given us. Now, this too could be a whole sermon, and it was. The last time we talked about giving, Doug Bergeson, one of our elders, preached on it in February of 2020, and I don't do things like this, but it's the best sermon on giving I've ever heard. If you haven't heard it, and you'd like to explore this idea more, go back into the archives. It was Grace's Going Home series, February of 2020. Find the Doug Bergeson sermon. It's an excellent one on what I'm talking about right here, How we participate in God's generosity when we give. But what I would say to you this morning is simply this, that this is to me the most compelling reason to give. Because the longer you are a believer, the deeper you grow in gratitude to the Father. There's no two ways about it. You might think that if you've lived a life however you want it, in total selfishness, in total depravity, you've done all the bad things that anybody could do. You can check off all the boxes and and then at like 35, you come to know God, and you're amazed that he's wiped the slate clean, and he's accepted you into his kingdom, that that moment is maximum gratitude for God's generosity and forgiveness. No, it's not. Because to walk with God is to understand that when you become a Christian, he doesn't just forgive you for all the stuff that you did up to that moment. He forgives you for all the crap that you're going to do too. He knows every terrible thought that you're going to have. When you get saved, whatever your lowest point is after that, whatever rock bottom looks like after you become a Christian, God was already in that moment whispering to you that he loves you and he forgives you and he wants you to come back to him. He's already in that moment. Whether that moment's behind you or ahead of you, God was in it telling you already, I've covered this too. So to walk with God and to fall short again and again and again, to arrive at that place that Paul arrives at in Romans 7 that is to me the most redemptive verse in scripture, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death. To arrive there and be refreshed anew with God's overwhelming forgiveness and generosity to us. For it to hit us like a wave again that Jesus condescended, took on human flesh, lived with us in the muck and the mire, died on the cross for us, knowing that we would crud on that very death over and over and over again in our life only to require his forgiveness yet again and then he offers and then he goes about, once he dies for us, ascending to the right hand of the Father to advocate for us and to whisper in God's ear that, yes, I've covered that too. When we sit daily in the realization of the gospel and we let the waves of Jesus' forgiveness wash over us and God's generosity flood us, we cannot help but grow in our gratitude towards God. Whatever gratitude we experienced at salvation is the starting point for how it grows through our life. And so we give as an expression of that gratitude. We give because something so incredible is happening to us that we want to find a way to be conduits of that generosity that God has given us. God has given so much to me. God has given so much to us. God has enriched our lives so much that we can't help but want to desire to enrich the lives of others. We can't help but want to express the generosity that God has lavished upon us. And so giving in his best, most pure state is simply a reaction to the overflow of God's giving in our life. That's why Paul teaches in Corinthians that God loves a cheerful giver. Don't give out of compulsion, but give because you want to. And how can we grow our want to in giving? By focusing on the face of Jesus and remembering the generosity and the forgiveness that he offers us every day. And so giving is what's best for us because it reorients us to the gospel. It reorients us towards God's goodness in our life. God has been good to me and provided me this. I am going to give this portion of this, understanding that he can replace it or he can't, but God has been so generous to me that I want to be generous to others. That's why we give. I love this verse in 2 Corinthians 9-11 says, you will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God. There's this part of the Sermon on the Mount that I find incredibly intimidating, where Jesus says, let others see your good deeds, see your good works, and shine for the Father so that your light shine before others that they may see your good deeds and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that when people come into and out of your orbit in your life, they should simply see the way that you act and want more of your Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that when people come into and out of your orbit in your life, they should simply see the way that you act and want more of your father who is in heaven. And I always think to myself, how do you act like that? A really easy way is to be generous. That's what Corinthians tells us. That God has enriched us. He's given us resources in every way. Why? So that we might enrich others. And then both you and them will turn that to thanksgiving to God. And it will point us back to the Father and our Savior Jesus. That's why giving is what's best for us. It's good for us. It develops a spirit of generosity that constantly, constantly orients us back to Jesus. So I would end this morning with a simple challenge for you. Trust God and give. Trust God and his word and give. How much should I give? Just a little bit more than you are. That's always the answer. 10%? No, that's an Old Testament thing. How much do we give in the New Testament? Just a little bit more than we are. Whatever that means for you. Who do I give to? I'll be the first to tell you. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that you have to give all of your giving to the local church. I've sat in churches, I've heard pastors say, your first 10% goes to this church and then on top of that, other places. That's not in the Bible. I'm not going to sit here and teach you that. I'm not preaching this as a self-serving thing for grace. If you believe in grace and what's happening here and you feel compelled to participate in the victories that Jesus is winning here, then give to grace. But you give wherever God is advancing his kingdom. Wherever God is working and Jesus is moving, you give there. Just give. Trust God and do it. I have never talked to a single person in my whole life who has said, you know what? I heard what the pastor said about giving and I decided to start being more generous. That was a huge mistake. I really regret it. Wish I could have that back. Never heard anybody say that. So this morning, it's simple. If you and I could have a conversation, I would simply end it by saying, just trust God. Obey Him. Be a person who's generous. Let's give together. Let me pray for us. Father, we do love you. We are so grateful for the goodness and the gifts that you've lavished upon us. God, I pray first and foremost that we would let those wash over us. I pray more than anything else that we would simply leave here increasingly overwhelmed with your goodness to us. Father, for those of us who need this, who need to think about this in our own lives, I pray that because you said so would be all the reason that we ever need. I pray that we would trust that and walk in that. Knowing that even when we don't understand obedience sometimes, that it is going to lead us to a path of life. God, give us the heart and the gratitude and the spirit to be people who are generous. I pray that each one of us would leave here determined to be just a little bit more generous than we were when we walked in today. And God, for those of us who are obedient and who respond and who give. Would we find you there, please? Would you show us yourself in that giving? Can we ask that through the generosity that you compel us to that we are brought closer to your son and so inspired and enlivened to continue to be generous. It's in his name, the one who died for us and who advocates for us, that we pray. Amen.

If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else and what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day, they're not nearly as big of a deal. What are our big rocks? And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. A little confession, after we shot that video in the back corner, I was on my hands and knees for about 15 minutes picking up all those rocks. So I'm really glad we got it there on that first take, and I didn't have to do that again. Thank you for being here. Like I said, I'm the senior pastor here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. We got a full crew here this morning. That is exciting and good. So thanks for being here. Thanks for joining us online, particularly if you're on vacation and you're still choosing to make this a part of your Sunday. We are grateful for that. I'm really looking forward to the rest of this series as we talk about exactly what I addressed in the video. This idea of coming kind of back to life, the world feeling normal again, or at least approaching it. If we can avoid this Delta variant, but that's a whole different conversation. But it feels like we're approaching that. And as we do it, we have this unique opportunity to kind of reconstruct our life around the things that are most important to us. And really, we have this opportunity to reconstruct our life around Jesus. So for the next four weeks, we're going to talk about what our big rocks are. What are the things that are the most important to us and how do we orchestrate those things around Jesus and around this pursuit of God the Father. And I said specifically that I'm looking forward to the rest of the weeks of the series because I'm not looking forward to this morning in this series. I did not wake up this morning excited for this sermon. Some Sundays I wake up and I'm really, really, I can't wait to share with you what God has laid on my heart. Last Sunday is a great example of that. This Sunday, I'm preaching about money. So when I got up this morning, it wasn't like, yes, the tithe, here we come. Nor did you get up hoping that this would be the Sunday that I talked about money. So listen, I'll just confess up front. I'm no more interested in preaching this than you are in hearing it. Okay, but we're here now. So this is what we're going to do. And really, the reason that we're talking about this is first of all, first and foremost, I don't talk about this very much at Grace. The last time we talked about this was in February of 2020, and I didn't even do it. It was Doug Bergeson, all right? So we don't do it a whole lot, but this topic is all throughout the Bible. Scripture is replete with instructions on giving about big rocks in life, if we're going to talk about the things that matter most to us and how to prioritize those around Jesus, then we have to talk about finances. We have to ask the question, what does God want us to do with our resources and with our money? And the Bible talks about it so much that it would be irresponsible as a church and I'd be irresponsible as a pastor if we didn't revisit it with some regularity. So we arrive at it this morning and as we arrive at it, I'm kind of approaching it like this. This is why I'm sitting down for this one at a table instead of standing and gesticulating and walking around wildly and trying to keep calm and not yell at you because I'm approaching this as if you and I could have a conversation about it. If you and I were able to meet for lunch or if you could come to the office or we meet somewhere and we could talk and your question was, what does the Bible have to say about giving anyways? Or maybe even, why does God want me to give? Then this is the conversation that I would want to have with you. So I'm staying seated to remind me that this is what I would like to say to each of you if we had the opportunity to sit down and talk about this together. And as we do that, I would even say to you this, that as I wrote and approached this sermon, I really had in mind the person who is new to church. Maybe you are someone who, for the first time in a long time, church is important to you again. For the first time in a long time, spiritual health is important to you again. And so maybe you're kind of trying to get reengaged spiritually. Maybe you haven't been in church a lot for the past five, 10 years, and so you're kind of starting to re-engage and maybe have never really thought critically about giving and what the Bible has to say about it. This is for the new and the non-believers, for those of us who hear that we should give in church, who probably understand that the Bible tells us to do it, but maybe we don't know all the whys around it and maybe we don't have a developed theology of why we should be generous. So this sermon in particular is for you. Now I know that at Grace, and I see the evidence of it over and over again, we have plenty of you who have a really good theology of giving, who understand tithing and being generous and why we do it. And so for you, I hope that we hit on some things that are encouraging, particularly the first point that I make. I think we should apply it to everything, not just giving. And so I hope that there's some encouraging ways to think about it. But this is really for folks who, if I sat you down and I said, what does the Bible say about giving or why should we give? This is for you if you feel like, gosh, I'm not sure how well I would answer that. So like I said, I'm approaching it as a conversation and I want to approach the conversation with what the Bible even has to say about it. And as I sought that out this week, you know, the Old Testament has a lot of very specific instructions that we are to give. The Old Testament introduces this idea of giving in generosity like a new idea. Leave the corners of your field for the sojourners, for the poor, for the widow, for the aliens, for the people who don't yet have a home. We're told to bring our tithe to the storehouse in the Old Testament. We're told there's a whole portion in Leviticus that tells us exactly, tells the children of Israel exactly how they are to give. So in the Old Testament, it's given as an instruction. It's introduced almost as a new idea. But what you find in the New Testament, if you want to read New Testament verses about giving, and the New Testament is simply the part of the Bible that comes during Jesus's life and after. And Jesus kind of changes everything. So what does the Bible have to say about giving once Jesus gets on the scene? Well, once Jesus arrives, the instructions about giving become a little bit presumptive, as if this is a thing that we already know. This is actually what Jesus says about it in the Sermon on the Mount. If you have a Bible, you can turn to Matthew chapter 6. I'm going to read you verses 1 through 4. The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus' first recorded public address. It's the first time he talks. And he has performed miracles and those people began to follow them and then he begins to preach to them and he hits on myriad topics. But then he lands on giving for a different directions. But the interesting part to me about this verse, if you want to ask what does the New Testament teach about giving, is the two uses of the word when. When you give. When you give to the needy. Jesus is talking to the huddled masses. Talking to thousands of people in the middle of the day, presumably jobless folks for the most part. And he still assumes that they know, without ever introducing giving as a new idea, he assumes that they know that they should give. He assumes that they know that God expects them to be generous people. And so he says, when you do it, do it in such a way that you're not doing it in a showy way. Do it in secret. Be discreet about it. And there's a whole teaching there. But again, what's interesting to me is when you give, when you do it. And I bring that up because I think that that's how familiar a lot of us are with giving. We might not know why we're supposed to do it. We might not know what for. We might not know how we should be compelled to do it. We just know that we are supposed to. And so the interesting question is why? Why are we supposed to give? Why does God ask us in the Old Testament when he's setting everything up and then just assume of us that we know that we ought to in the New Testament? Why does God do that? And so we're going to spend the rest of the morning kind of answering that question, and this is the conversational piece of it. Why does God want me to give? The most important reason, the most important reason and most underrated reason we give is because God tells us to. The most important, and this is key, most underrated reason that we give is because God tells us to. Now, listen, here's why I say this. When my mom was growing up, she grew up in the 60s and 70s, and Linda, her mom, my mom, all wonderful woman, she ruled with an iron fist, man. This was back in the good old days, all right, when it was nice to be a parent. You rule with an iron fist. That was a funny slip. You ruled with an iron fist. Kids are to be seen and not heard. When the company comes over, you go upstairs. You do not interrupt. And when my mom would get out of line when she was told to do something, and she said, why? She had the audacity to say, why do I have to clean your room? Why? Because I told you to. Fire would burn in Linda's eyes, right? And mom would know. She better do whatever it was she was asked to do, even if it makes no sense at all to her, because there is going to be some serious repercussions if she doesn't. She saw the fire, and so she got right. And so when my mom grew up, because I told you to, was all the reason that a child needed. Well, when that's the only reason you get, that develops in you a little bit of resentment, right? This heart of resentment because my mom is kind and sweet and not rebellious like me and really was asking genuinely why I don't understand. Why do you want me to do that right now? It seems like I should be doing something else. Why do you want me to do that? But she wasn't allowed to ask that. And so that left her frustrated and resentful. So when she had children, she decided that because I said so is never a reason. I will always take the time to explain to my children why I'm asking them to do something. And to her credit, she did that. But when you're raising Nate, that becomes a real hassle. And I was always allowed to ask why. And I love that quote. There's some quote I picked up years ago that a reason is an invitation for an argument. And that's very true. And so I was always invited into that argument. Why? Go clean your room. Why do I have to do that right now? Go mow the grass. Why? And listen, if the why wasn't good enough, well, I didn't have to do it. In my head, if the why is not good enough, if it can't justify the request, well, then your request is dumb. And so what I learned in that environment is asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It does. Asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It does. Asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It manifests this idea of, okay, I understand what you want me to do, but I'm not going to do that until your reason justifies your request. And if it doesn't, if it falls short of King Nate's gauntlet of reasons, then you can forget it, buddy. So in our house, our response with Lily and then with John, which John can't talk yet. And I remember when Lily couldn't talk and people were like, just be grateful for these times. And I thought, you're jerks. You're not jerks. That makes sense to me now. John can't talk yet, but Lily can, and she likes to ask why. Lily's my daughter, for those of you who don't know me, not just some girl I talk about. But she likes to ask why. But the policy that we've adopted in our house is, first you obey, then you ask why. And this is gonna be what solves it forever. She'll have no issues when she's a parent. She'll replicate this exactly, right? But first you obey and then you ask why. First show that you're gonna be obedient. First show that you're going to submit. First show that the question is genuine and not an attempt to get out of it. And then come and we'll talk to you forever when you have a good attitude about the whys of why we should do something. And I bring this up because I think it's really important as we think about how we respond to the instructions of God. I know that very often when we are met with a teaching from Scripture that we should give, that we should read the Bible, that we should be selfless, that we should forgive as we are forgiven, that we should be generous to others, that we should turn the other cheek, that whenever it is possible for us, as far as it concerns us, that we should seek peace in others when peace is just not the thing that we want right now. Often in my life, and maybe yours too, we want to know the why before we offer our obedience. We want it to make sense to us before King Nate deigns to obey the instructions that I find here. And I will confess to you this, as I thought about this this week. This is not so much an indictment on your attitude, that's up to you, as it is sometimes an indictment on my preaching. Because when I preach and I give us instructions from the word, I always start with a why. Because I don't want to paint God as this ruthless dictator who sits in heaven giving you rules. I always want you to understand why it's what's best for you. But when we jump straight to the why before obedience, I think that begats in us this sense of entitlement. That if God's whys don't stack up for me, then I'm not going to engage in that behavior until they do. And I think it's important for us as believers to accept that the most important and underrated reason why we give is because our Father in heaven told us to. And I think this applies to everything. I think this applies to our quiet times. This applies to our grace with other people. This applies to any challenge that we would face. Anytime God's word tells us to do something, the first and most important reason we do it is because God told us to. Proverbs tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And I think that sometimes for me, I walk through life entitled as if I am owed a why, and God does not owe us that. So an important reason to apply to everything in our life is because our Father in Heaven told us to. Now once we accept that, and we adopt that posture of obedience, and I also want to be very clear, when I say that, I'm talking only to the Christians in the room. If you're here this morning and you're not a Christian, you've never signed up for this. You've never said, I submit my life to God. You've never said, you're the Lord of my life. I'm second. I'm going to do what you want. You've never said that. And so to you, I wouldn't say that you even need to give. And I definitely wouldn't say it's because God told you to. You haven't signed up for this yet and said, I'm going to submit myself to God's word. But if you are a Christian, then you have. So first we adopt a posture of obedience. And what we understand in that posture of obedience is that God wants what's best for us. This is what we talked about last week. What we believe is the verse I preached last week, that God actually leads us to paths of life, that in his presence there is fullness of joy. At his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. We actually believe that our God in heaven wants what's best for us and takes us to the best possible places. And so if he tells us to do something, it must be what's best for us. So we trust that about giving too. So the question really becomes this morning, not why does God want me to give, but why is giving best for me? That's really the question that we are asking this morning. Once we adopt this posture of obedience and say, yes, Father, I am a Christian, and because I am, I am submitted to you, and I will be a person who is a giving, generous person. But I also understand that as I do that, it's what's best for me, and I'd love to understand why it's what's best for me. So I've got a few reasons for you that we're just going to kind of go through. The first thing I would say to you when you ask why is giving what's best for me, I would say it's because God is generous to the generous. God is generous to generous people. Now, I have to be careful with this because this is how you get to health and wealth, right? This is how you get to me preaching to you. If you give, God's going to give back to you a hundredfold. If you give to the church this much, God's going to give you this much. Meanwhile, I'm asking you to fund my private jet and you can't figure out how to pay for a civic, okay? So that's, I don't want to go there. I'm not preaching health and wealth. I'm not telling you that the more you give to God, the more money he's going to give to you. However, this principle that God is generous to the generous is unavoidable in scripture. Jesus talks about this in Luke chapter 6, verse 38, when he says this, give and it will be given to you. Good measure pressed down, shaken together, running over will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. Corinthians says, he who sows little reaps little and he who sows much reaps much. There is a principle in the Bible that is unavoidable, that God is generous to the generous. And I'm lying to you and dishonest as a pastor if I don't say that's one of the reasons it's what's best for you. Because when we're generous to others, God is generous to us. Now what it doesn't say anywhere is that God is generous to us monetarily. What it doesn't say anywhere is that the blessings that God is going to be generous with are ones that are going to fill up our bank account. It does not say that. It just says God will be generous to you. And God's generosity comes in forms that is so much better than money. You understand? When you are generous with your resources, God is generous with his. It's an unavoidable truth of scripture. So God's generosity looks like good, rich, and deep, spiritually nourishing, life-giving friendships. God's generosity looks like a marriage that's seen some seasons but is hanging in there and loving one another. God's generosity is good relationships with your children. God's generosity is a place to go every day that you don't hate. God's generosity is when you're walking through a hard season but you know that there is a good season coming because your God is good and you know that every day won't feel like this day. God's generosity doesn't always come in the form of money. I know a family, I know a couple who they have living with them right now, a family member, and this is a family member that should not be living with them, okay? They shouldn't be there. They should be able to live on their own, but they're not. And it is really, they are expressing a great deal of generosity to this family member. And one of their friends learned about this and happens to have a cabin, a nice one, and said, go, stay at our cabin for a weekend. You need that. That's God's generosity being expressed to someone who's being generous. Do you see that? It's not always a one-for-one reciprocal return of money, but God is generous towards the generous, and so it behooves us to be generous. The next thing I would tell you is that giving acknowledges stewardship. Why is giving what's best for me? Well, because when we give, we acknowledge this concept of stewardship. Stewardship, the whole sermon could be about stewardship. The whole sermon could be about all four of the points that I'm making. But stewardship in particular is this idea that once we are believers, we understand that the things that we have in our life are not our own. They're God's. And he's entrusted them to us. To use them for the purposes of advancing his kingdom in the most effective way possible. Back in May on Mother's Day, we did a child dedication. And we had 11 children that we dedicated that day. It was great, super exciting day for Grace. And part of the dedication of the children is for the parents to acknowledge, both literally and symbolically, that this child is not mine. He is yours. She is yours. We are raising them in our home, but they belong to you, God. They are your children, Jesus. And we are raising them the best we can in the way that they should go according to your standards. But these children are not my children. John and Lily do not belong to Nate and Jen. They belong to God. And he has entrusted them to us because he believes that we have a unique capacity to form them and shape them into who they need to be for Jesus so that they move through life advancing his kingdom. They're not our kids. They're God's kids. Your house is not your house. It's God's house. Your finances are not your finances. They're God's finances. And once we realize that, that we are stewards of the things that God has given to us, then it becomes incredibly important. The primary question we ask about all the things with which we have been entrusted is, Jesus, how do I use these to further your name? How do I use these things to bring attention to you? How would you have me organize this part of my life? And so when we give, when we write the check weekly or we click the button monthly or we set it up or whatever it is we do, when we are generous and we give, it reminds us. Every time we see that come out of our account or hit our credit card, whatever it is, that's a reminder. None of this is mine anyways. It's God's. It's God's to use as he sees fit. And if he wants more, he can have more. So giving reminds us that we are stewards, not just with our money, but in everything in our life. Another thing I would say to you is that giving allows us to participate in what God is doing by being a part of the body of Christ. Giving allows us to participate in what is happening in the church, in the kingdom, in the body of Christ by being a part of the body of Christ. I love 1 Corinthians 12. I've never preached on it here, and I need to do a whole series on it because I think it's just an amazing teaching. But in 1 Corinthians 12, Paul lays out this idea that the church is a body and that everyone who's a part of the church has a part to play. The body has arms and legs and feet and hands and it has all kinds of things that are incredibly important. It has lungs that nobody ever sees, but if we don't have lungs, then the rest of it doesn't work. And it all intricately works together to get things accomplished. And I love this teaching because it reminds me as a pastor, I'm just the mouth. That's it. But y'all are the hands that touch people who need it. Y'all are the arms that are wrapped around folks who are struggling. Y'all are the feet that take the good news of the gospel into work. Y'all are the lungs that make this thing go. None of us, none of us, not me, not an elder, not somebody who's been here 30 years, none of us are more important to what's happening at Grace than anybody else. We simply have our part to play. My part is to run my mouth. Sometimes I wish somebody else would take that part. Because maybe I'd like to be the ear sometimes. But everybody has a part. And I think our part of being in the body of Christ, a church in an affluent suburb is to use our resources to serve the greater body of Christ. And when we do that as a church, we get to participate in things going on just outside of grace as well. And so to me, it's a wonderful picture of why as a church we should want to have a generous heart. Right now, we give 10% of everything that we get to ministries going on outside the walls of grace. It is one of my big long-term goals for the church to see that percentage increase a lot so that we play our part in God's greater body and who we are. But not just as we think about reaching outside of the walls of grace, but as we think about what happens within grace and how when we give, we are part of the celebrations that God allows for us here. We are part of the victories that Jesus wins here. We participate in that by giving and doing our part and being a part of the body of Christ. I think back to October of 2017. That was the first time I got to go down to Reynosa to go see the folks at Faith Ministry. Colleen of Faith Ministry fame is with us this morning. Hello, Colleen. That's a ministry in Mexico that builds houses for people who otherwise would not be able to have them. And Grace has been partners with them since before Grace existed. So more than 20 years. And I got to go down there in October of 2017 to see it for the first time. And it was a really great experience. And I'll never forget, we're sitting there and I wanted to say it's the parking lot, but that's generous. It's the place where the cars go. And we're sitting in the van and we're waiting to pull out. And I hear a car crank up and and it was as if that poor thing was being tortured. Like, it did not, every noise it made was, please, please don't make me do this. Like, and I turn around, and the bumper is in shatters. It's being held with bungee cords, and to say that it was a beater is generous to beaters, and it was being driven by the pastor down there, a younger guy named Pastor Carlos. And Pastor Carlos, he works 10 times harder than me. I could not do what he does. I asked him one time what his weekly schedule was and just the Bible studies that he has and the different towns and stuff that he touches on and the different people in his orbit. He needs a good car. He's shuttling kids back and forth. He works so hard. This is not what he should be driving. And so I kind of leaned over to some folks that were on the trip and I said, hey, I think Grace could raise enough money to buy him a truck. Can we do that? And I talked to the folks at Faith Ministry. Would it be cool if we bought him a truck? He seems to need it. And everybody was good with it. And so I came back to Grace and I said, hey, this is, as we enter Christmas, this is the thing we want to do. We want to have enough money to buy a truck for Pastor Carlos. And we did. What kind of car did we buy him? Do you remember? Yeah, Ford Escape or Ranger or something like that. But it was nice and new and way better than what he had. And some of our folks from Grace got to go down and deliver it to him. And when I watched the video, I had tears in my eyes because he was so grateful. And so blown away by the generosity of the church. And it was a really sweet moment. And the next time I went down there, the first thing Carlos wanted me to do is come see his truck and say thank you again for it. Now listen, if you were here and you gave to that Christmas offering in 2017, that joy is your joy. That happiness is your happiness. That's not watching other people do a good thing like when we watch on the internet and our heart is warmed and then we scroll to the next thing. That's your joy. You did that. You participated in that. You made that possible. That was God using your gifts and your finances making you a part of the body of Christ so that you could participate in the good work that he was doing. That joy was your joy. If you give to grace, those 11 kids that were up here being dedicated, that's your joy. When we baptize somebody, that's your joy. When you see somebody come into the church, that's your joy. We have, I think, nine people coming to Discover Grace after church today coming out of a pandemic. That's your joy that those people are becoming a part of what we're doing here at Grace. Every win that Jesus claims here at this church, when we give, we are a part of that. Because those wins don't happen if we don't give. So we give because we are a part of the body of Christ. And that allows us to participate in the work that Jesus is doing, wherever he's doing work. The last point that I would make about why it's best for us to give is that giving invites us to mirror the generosity of God that's lavished upon us. It invites us to mirror the generosity that God has given us. Now, this too could be a whole sermon, and it was. The last time we talked about giving, Doug Bergeson, one of our elders, preached on it in February of 2020, and I don't do things like this, but it's the best sermon on giving I've ever heard. If you haven't heard it, and you'd like to explore this idea more, go back into the archives. It was Grace's Going Home series, February of 2020. Find the Doug Bergeson sermon. It's an excellent one on what I'm talking about right here, How we participate in God's generosity when we give. But what I would say to you this morning is simply this, that this is to me the most compelling reason to give. Because the longer you are a believer, the deeper you grow in gratitude to the Father. There's no two ways about it. You might think that if you've lived a life however you want it, in total selfishness, in total depravity, you've done all the bad things that anybody could do. You can check off all the boxes and and then at like 35, you come to know God, and you're amazed that he's wiped the slate clean, and he's accepted you into his kingdom, that that moment is maximum gratitude for God's generosity and forgiveness. No, it's not. Because to walk with God is to understand that when you become a Christian, he doesn't just forgive you for all the stuff that you did up to that moment. He forgives you for all the crap that you're going to do too. He knows every terrible thought that you're going to have. When you get saved, whatever your lowest point is after that, whatever rock bottom looks like after you become a Christian, God was already in that moment whispering to you that he loves you and he forgives you and he wants you to come back to him. He's already in that moment. Whether that moment's behind you or ahead of you, God was in it telling you already, I've covered this too. So to walk with God and to fall short again and again and again, to arrive at that place that Paul arrives at in Romans 7 that is to me the most redemptive verse in scripture, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death. To arrive there and be refreshed anew with God's overwhelming forgiveness and generosity to us. For it to hit us like a wave again that Jesus condescended, took on human flesh, lived with us in the muck and the mire, died on the cross for us, knowing that we would crud on that very death over and over and over again in our life only to require his forgiveness yet again and then he offers and then he goes about, once he dies for us, ascending to the right hand of the Father to advocate for us and to whisper in God's ear that, yes, I've covered that too. When we sit daily in the realization of the gospel and we let the waves of Jesus' forgiveness wash over us and God's generosity flood us, we cannot help but grow in our gratitude towards God. Whatever gratitude we experienced at salvation is the starting point for how it grows through our life. And so we give as an expression of that gratitude. We give because something so incredible is happening to us that we want to find a way to be conduits of that generosity that God has given us. God has given so much to me. God has given so much to us. God has enriched our lives so much that we can't help but want to desire to enrich the lives of others. We can't help but want to express the generosity that God has lavished upon us. And so giving in his best, most pure state is simply a reaction to the overflow of God's giving in our life. That's why Paul teaches in Corinthians that God loves a cheerful giver. Don't give out of compulsion, but give because you want to. And how can we grow our want to in giving? By focusing on the face of Jesus and remembering the generosity and the forgiveness that he offers us every day. And so giving is what's best for us because it reorients us to the gospel. It reorients us towards God's goodness in our life. God has been good to me and provided me this. I am going to give this portion of this, understanding that he can replace it or he can't, but God has been so generous to me that I want to be generous to others. That's why we give. I love this verse in 2 Corinthians 9-11 says, you will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God. There's this part of the Sermon on the Mount that I find incredibly intimidating, where Jesus says, let others see your good deeds, see your good works, and shine for the Father so that your light shine before others that they may see your good deeds and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that when people come into and out of your orbit in your life, they should simply see the way that you act and want more of your Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that when people come into and out of your orbit in your life, they should simply see the way that you act and want more of your father who is in heaven. And I always think to myself, how do you act like that? A really easy way is to be generous. That's what Corinthians tells us. That God has enriched us. He's given us resources in every way. Why? So that we might enrich others. And then both you and them will turn that to thanksgiving to God. And it will point us back to the Father and our Savior Jesus. That's why giving is what's best for us. It's good for us. It develops a spirit of generosity that constantly, constantly orients us back to Jesus. So I would end this morning with a simple challenge for you. Trust God and give. Trust God and his word and give. How much should I give? Just a little bit more than you are. That's always the answer. 10%? No, that's an Old Testament thing. How much do we give in the New Testament? Just a little bit more than we are. Whatever that means for you. Who do I give to? I'll be the first to tell you. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that you have to give all of your giving to the local church. I've sat in churches, I've heard pastors say, your first 10% goes to this church and then on top of that, other places. That's not in the Bible. I'm not going to sit here and teach you that. I'm not preaching this as a self-serving thing for grace. If you believe in grace and what's happening here and you feel compelled to participate in the victories that Jesus is winning here, then give to grace. But you give wherever God is advancing his kingdom. Wherever God is working and Jesus is moving, you give there. Just give. Trust God and do it. I have never talked to a single person in my whole life who has said, you know what? I heard what the pastor said about giving and I decided to start being more generous. That was a huge mistake. I really regret it. Wish I could have that back. Never heard anybody say that. So this morning, it's simple. If you and I could have a conversation, I would simply end it by saying, just trust God. Obey Him. Be a person who's generous. Let's give together. Let me pray for us. Father, we do love you. We are so grateful for the goodness and the gifts that you've lavished upon us. God, I pray first and foremost that we would let those wash over us. I pray more than anything else that we would simply leave here increasingly overwhelmed with your goodness to us. Father, for those of us who need this, who need to think about this in our own lives, I pray that because you said so would be all the reason that we ever need. I pray that we would trust that and walk in that. Knowing that even when we don't understand obedience sometimes, that it is going to lead us to a path of life. God, give us the heart and the gratitude and the spirit to be people who are generous. I pray that each one of us would leave here determined to be just a little bit more generous than we were when we walked in today. And God, for those of us who are obedient and who respond and who give. Would we find you there, please? Would you show us yourself in that giving? Can we ask that through the generosity that you compel us to that we are brought closer to your son and so inspired and enlivened to continue to be generous. It's in his name, the one who died for us and who advocates for us, that we pray. Amen.

If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else and what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day, they're not nearly as big of a deal. What are our big rocks? And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. A little confession, after we shot that video in the back corner, I was on my hands and knees for about 15 minutes picking up all those rocks. So I'm really glad we got it there on that first take, and I didn't have to do that again. Thank you for being here. Like I said, I'm the senior pastor here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to do that. We got a full crew here this morning. That is exciting and good. So thanks for being here. Thanks for joining us online, particularly if you're on vacation and you're still choosing to make this a part of your Sunday. We are grateful for that. I'm really looking forward to the rest of this series as we talk about exactly what I addressed in the video. This idea of coming kind of back to life, the world feeling normal again, or at least approaching it. If we can avoid this Delta variant, but that's a whole different conversation. But it feels like we're approaching that. And as we do it, we have this unique opportunity to kind of reconstruct our life around the things that are most important to us. And really, we have this opportunity to reconstruct our life around Jesus. So for the next four weeks, we're going to talk about what our big rocks are. What are the things that are the most important to us and how do we orchestrate those things around Jesus and around this pursuit of God the Father. And I said specifically that I'm looking forward to the rest of the weeks of the series because I'm not looking forward to this morning in this series. I did not wake up this morning excited for this sermon. Some Sundays I wake up and I'm really, really, I can't wait to share with you what God has laid on my heart. Last Sunday is a great example of that. This Sunday, I'm preaching about money. So when I got up this morning, it wasn't like, yes, the tithe, here we come. Nor did you get up hoping that this would be the Sunday that I talked about money. So listen, I'll just confess up front. I'm no more interested in preaching this than you are in hearing it. Okay, but we're here now. So this is what we're going to do. And really, the reason that we're talking about this is first of all, first and foremost, I don't talk about this very much at Grace. The last time we talked about this was in February of 2020, and I didn't even do it. It was Doug Bergeson, all right? So we don't do it a whole lot, but this topic is all throughout the Bible. Scripture is replete with instructions on giving about big rocks in life, if we're going to talk about the things that matter most to us and how to prioritize those around Jesus, then we have to talk about finances. We have to ask the question, what does God want us to do with our resources and with our money? And the Bible talks about it so much that it would be irresponsible as a church and I'd be irresponsible as a pastor if we didn't revisit it with some regularity. So we arrive at it this morning and as we arrive at it, I'm kind of approaching it like this. This is why I'm sitting down for this one at a table instead of standing and gesticulating and walking around wildly and trying to keep calm and not yell at you because I'm approaching this as if you and I could have a conversation about it. If you and I were able to meet for lunch or if you could come to the office or we meet somewhere and we could talk and your question was, what does the Bible have to say about giving anyways? Or maybe even, why does God want me to give? Then this is the conversation that I would want to have with you. So I'm staying seated to remind me that this is what I would like to say to each of you if we had the opportunity to sit down and talk about this together. And as we do that, I would even say to you this, that as I wrote and approached this sermon, I really had in mind the person who is new to church. Maybe you are someone who, for the first time in a long time, church is important to you again. For the first time in a long time, spiritual health is important to you again. And so maybe you're kind of trying to get reengaged spiritually. Maybe you haven't been in church a lot for the past five, 10 years, and so you're kind of starting to re-engage and maybe have never really thought critically about giving and what the Bible has to say about it. This is for the new and the non-believers, for those of us who hear that we should give in church, who probably understand that the Bible tells us to do it, but maybe we don't know all the whys around it and maybe we don't have a developed theology of why we should be generous. So this sermon in particular is for you. Now I know that at Grace, and I see the evidence of it over and over again, we have plenty of you who have a really good theology of giving, who understand tithing and being generous and why we do it. And so for you, I hope that we hit on some things that are encouraging, particularly the first point that I make. I think we should apply it to everything, not just giving. And so I hope that there's some encouraging ways to think about it. But this is really for folks who, if I sat you down and I said, what does the Bible say about giving or why should we give? This is for you if you feel like, gosh, I'm not sure how well I would answer that. So like I said, I'm approaching it as a conversation and I want to approach the conversation with what the Bible even has to say about it. And as I sought that out this week, you know, the Old Testament has a lot of very specific instructions that we are to give. The Old Testament introduces this idea of giving in generosity like a new idea. Leave the corners of your field for the sojourners, for the poor, for the widow, for the aliens, for the people who don't yet have a home. We're told to bring our tithe to the storehouse in the Old Testament. We're told there's a whole portion in Leviticus that tells us exactly, tells the children of Israel exactly how they are to give. So in the Old Testament, it's given as an instruction. It's introduced almost as a new idea. But what you find in the New Testament, if you want to read New Testament verses about giving, and the New Testament is simply the part of the Bible that comes during Jesus's life and after. And Jesus kind of changes everything. So what does the Bible have to say about giving once Jesus gets on the scene? Well, once Jesus arrives, the instructions about giving become a little bit presumptive, as if this is a thing that we already know. This is actually what Jesus says about it in the Sermon on the Mount. If you have a Bible, you can turn to Matthew chapter 6. I'm going to read you verses 1 through 4. The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus' first recorded public address. It's the first time he talks. And he has performed miracles and those people began to follow them and then he begins to preach to them and he hits on myriad topics. But then he lands on giving for a different directions. But the interesting part to me about this verse, if you want to ask what does the New Testament teach about giving, is the two uses of the word when. When you give. When you give to the needy. Jesus is talking to the huddled masses. Talking to thousands of people in the middle of the day, presumably jobless folks for the most part. And he still assumes that they know, without ever introducing giving as a new idea, he assumes that they know that they should give. He assumes that they know that God expects them to be generous people. And so he says, when you do it, do it in such a way that you're not doing it in a showy way. Do it in secret. Be discreet about it. And there's a whole teaching there. But again, what's interesting to me is when you give, when you do it. And I bring that up because I think that that's how familiar a lot of us are with giving. We might not know why we're supposed to do it. We might not know what for. We might not know how we should be compelled to do it. We just know that we are supposed to. And so the interesting question is why? Why are we supposed to give? Why does God ask us in the Old Testament when he's setting everything up and then just assume of us that we know that we ought to in the New Testament? Why does God do that? And so we're going to spend the rest of the morning kind of answering that question, and this is the conversational piece of it. Why does God want me to give? The most important reason, the most important reason and most underrated reason we give is because God tells us to. The most important, and this is key, most underrated reason that we give is because God tells us to. Now, listen, here's why I say this. When my mom was growing up, she grew up in the 60s and 70s, and Linda, her mom, my mom, all wonderful woman, she ruled with an iron fist, man. This was back in the good old days, all right, when it was nice to be a parent. You rule with an iron fist. That was a funny slip. You ruled with an iron fist. Kids are to be seen and not heard. When the company comes over, you go upstairs. You do not interrupt. And when my mom would get out of line when she was told to do something, and she said, why? She had the audacity to say, why do I have to clean your room? Why? Because I told you to. Fire would burn in Linda's eyes, right? And mom would know. She better do whatever it was she was asked to do, even if it makes no sense at all to her, because there is going to be some serious repercussions if she doesn't. She saw the fire, and so she got right. And so when my mom grew up, because I told you to, was all the reason that a child needed. Well, when that's the only reason you get, that develops in you a little bit of resentment, right? This heart of resentment because my mom is kind and sweet and not rebellious like me and really was asking genuinely why I don't understand. Why do you want me to do that right now? It seems like I should be doing something else. Why do you want me to do that? But she wasn't allowed to ask that. And so that left her frustrated and resentful. So when she had children, she decided that because I said so is never a reason. I will always take the time to explain to my children why I'm asking them to do something. And to her credit, she did that. But when you're raising Nate, that becomes a real hassle. And I was always allowed to ask why. And I love that quote. There's some quote I picked up years ago that a reason is an invitation for an argument. And that's very true. And so I was always invited into that argument. Why? Go clean your room. Why do I have to do that right now? Go mow the grass. Why? And listen, if the why wasn't good enough, well, I didn't have to do it. In my head, if the why is not good enough, if it can't justify the request, well, then your request is dumb. And so what I learned in that environment is asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It does. Asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It does. Asking why before we obey manifests a sense of entitlement. It manifests this idea of, okay, I understand what you want me to do, but I'm not going to do that until your reason justifies your request. And if it doesn't, if it falls short of King Nate's gauntlet of reasons, then you can forget it, buddy. So in our house, our response with Lily and then with John, which John can't talk yet. And I remember when Lily couldn't talk and people were like, just be grateful for these times. And I thought, you're jerks. You're not jerks. That makes sense to me now. John can't talk yet, but Lily can, and she likes to ask why. Lily's my daughter, for those of you who don't know me, not just some girl I talk about. But she likes to ask why. But the policy that we've adopted in our house is, first you obey, then you ask why. And this is gonna be what solves it forever. She'll have no issues when she's a parent. She'll replicate this exactly, right? But first you obey and then you ask why. First show that you're gonna be obedient. First show that you're going to submit. First show that the question is genuine and not an attempt to get out of it. And then come and we'll talk to you forever when you have a good attitude about the whys of why we should do something. And I bring this up because I think it's really important as we think about how we respond to the instructions of God. I know that very often when we are met with a teaching from Scripture that we should give, that we should read the Bible, that we should be selfless, that we should forgive as we are forgiven, that we should be generous to others, that we should turn the other cheek, that whenever it is possible for us, as far as it concerns us, that we should seek peace in others when peace is just not the thing that we want right now. Often in my life, and maybe yours too, we want to know the why before we offer our obedience. We want it to make sense to us before King Nate deigns to obey the instructions that I find here. And I will confess to you this, as I thought about this this week. This is not so much an indictment on your attitude, that's up to you, as it is sometimes an indictment on my preaching. Because when I preach and I give us instructions from the word, I always start with a why. Because I don't want to paint God as this ruthless dictator who sits in heaven giving you rules. I always want you to understand why it's what's best for you. But when we jump straight to the why before obedience, I think that begats in us this sense of entitlement. That if God's whys don't stack up for me, then I'm not going to engage in that behavior until they do. And I think it's important for us as believers to accept that the most important and underrated reason why we give is because our Father in heaven told us to. And I think this applies to everything. I think this applies to our quiet times. This applies to our grace with other people. This applies to any challenge that we would face. Anytime God's word tells us to do something, the first and most important reason we do it is because God told us to. Proverbs tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And I think that sometimes for me, I walk through life entitled as if I am owed a why, and God does not owe us that. So an important reason to apply to everything in our life is because our Father in Heaven told us to. Now once we accept that, and we adopt that posture of obedience, and I also want to be very clear, when I say that, I'm talking only to the Christians in the room. If you're here this morning and you're not a Christian, you've never signed up for this. You've never said, I submit my life to God. You've never said, you're the Lord of my life. I'm second. I'm going to do what you want. You've never said that. And so to you, I wouldn't say that you even need to give. And I definitely wouldn't say it's because God told you to. You haven't signed up for this yet and said, I'm going to submit myself to God's word. But if you are a Christian, then you have. So first we adopt a posture of obedience. And what we understand in that posture of obedience is that God wants what's best for us. This is what we talked about last week. What we believe is the verse I preached last week, that God actually leads us to paths of life, that in his presence there is fullness of joy. At his right hand there are pleasures forevermore. We actually believe that our God in heaven wants what's best for us and takes us to the best possible places. And so if he tells us to do something, it must be what's best for us. So we trust that about giving too. So the question really becomes this morning, not why does God want me to give, but why is giving best for me? That's really the question that we are asking this morning. Once we adopt this posture of obedience and say, yes, Father, I am a Christian, and because I am, I am submitted to you, and I will be a person who is a giving, generous person. But I also understand that as I do that, it's what's best for me, and I'd love to understand why it's what's best for me. So I've got a few reasons for you that we're just going to kind of go through. The first thing I would say to you when you ask why is giving what's best for me, I would say it's because God is generous to the generous. God is generous to generous people. Now, I have to be careful with this because this is how you get to health and wealth, right? This is how you get to me preaching to you. If you give, God's going to give back to you a hundredfold. If you give to the church this much, God's going to give you this much. Meanwhile, I'm asking you to fund my private jet and you can't figure out how to pay for a civic, okay? So that's, I don't want to go there. I'm not preaching health and wealth. I'm not telling you that the more you give to God, the more money he's going to give to you. However, this principle that God is generous to the generous is unavoidable in scripture. Jesus talks about this in Luke chapter 6, verse 38, when he says this, give and it will be given to you. Good measure pressed down, shaken together, running over will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. Corinthians says, he who sows little reaps little and he who sows much reaps much. There is a principle in the Bible that is unavoidable, that God is generous to the generous. And I'm lying to you and dishonest as a pastor if I don't say that's one of the reasons it's what's best for you. Because when we're generous to others, God is generous to us. Now what it doesn't say anywhere is that God is generous to us monetarily. What it doesn't say anywhere is that the blessings that God is going to be generous with are ones that are going to fill up our bank account. It does not say that. It just says God will be generous to you. And God's generosity comes in forms that is so much better than money. You understand? When you are generous with your resources, God is generous with his. It's an unavoidable truth of scripture. So God's generosity looks like good, rich, and deep, spiritually nourishing, life-giving friendships. God's generosity looks like a marriage that's seen some seasons but is hanging in there and loving one another. God's generosity is good relationships with your children. God's generosity is a place to go every day that you don't hate. God's generosity is when you're walking through a hard season but you know that there is a good season coming because your God is good and you know that every day won't feel like this day. God's generosity doesn't always come in the form of money. I know a family, I know a couple who they have living with them right now, a family member, and this is a family member that should not be living with them, okay? They shouldn't be there. They should be able to live on their own, but they're not. And it is really, they are expressing a great deal of generosity to this family member. And one of their friends learned about this and happens to have a cabin, a nice one, and said, go, stay at our cabin for a weekend. You need that. That's God's generosity being expressed to someone who's being generous. Do you see that? It's not always a one-for-one reciprocal return of money, but God is generous towards the generous, and so it behooves us to be generous. The next thing I would tell you is that giving acknowledges stewardship. Why is giving what's best for me? Well, because when we give, we acknowledge this concept of stewardship. Stewardship, the whole sermon could be about stewardship. The whole sermon could be about all four of the points that I'm making. But stewardship in particular is this idea that once we are believers, we understand that the things that we have in our life are not our own. They're God's. And he's entrusted them to us. To use them for the purposes of advancing his kingdom in the most effective way possible. Back in May on Mother's Day, we did a child dedication. And we had 11 children that we dedicated that day. It was great, super exciting day for Grace. And part of the dedication of the children is for the parents to acknowledge, both literally and symbolically, that this child is not mine. He is yours. She is yours. We are raising them in our home, but they belong to you, God. They are your children, Jesus. And we are raising them the best we can in the way that they should go according to your standards. But these children are not my children. John and Lily do not belong to Nate and Jen. They belong to God. And he has entrusted them to us because he believes that we have a unique capacity to form them and shape them into who they need to be for Jesus so that they move through life advancing his kingdom. They're not our kids. They're God's kids. Your house is not your house. It's God's house. Your finances are not your finances. They're God's finances. And once we realize that, that we are stewards of the things that God has given to us, then it becomes incredibly important. The primary question we ask about all the things with which we have been entrusted is, Jesus, how do I use these to further your name? How do I use these things to bring attention to you? How would you have me organize this part of my life? And so when we give, when we write the check weekly or we click the button monthly or we set it up or whatever it is we do, when we are generous and we give, it reminds us. Every time we see that come out of our account or hit our credit card, whatever it is, that's a reminder. None of this is mine anyways. It's God's. It's God's to use as he sees fit. And if he wants more, he can have more. So giving reminds us that we are stewards, not just with our money, but in everything in our life. Another thing I would say to you is that giving allows us to participate in what God is doing by being a part of the body of Christ. Giving allows us to participate in what is happening in the church, in the kingdom, in the body of Christ by being a part of the body of Christ. I love 1 Corinthians 12. I've never preached on it here, and I need to do a whole series on it because I think it's just an amazing teaching. But in 1 Corinthians 12, Paul lays out this idea that the church is a body and that everyone who's a part of the church has a part to play. The body has arms and legs and feet and hands and it has all kinds of things that are incredibly important. It has lungs that nobody ever sees, but if we don't have lungs, then the rest of it doesn't work. And it all intricately works together to get things accomplished. And I love this teaching because it reminds me as a pastor, I'm just the mouth. That's it. But y'all are the hands that touch people who need it. Y'all are the arms that are wrapped around folks who are struggling. Y'all are the feet that take the good news of the gospel into work. Y'all are the lungs that make this thing go. None of us, none of us, not me, not an elder, not somebody who's been here 30 years, none of us are more important to what's happening at Grace than anybody else. We simply have our part to play. My part is to run my mouth. Sometimes I wish somebody else would take that part. Because maybe I'd like to be the ear sometimes. But everybody has a part. And I think our part of being in the body of Christ, a church in an affluent suburb is to use our resources to serve the greater body of Christ. And when we do that as a church, we get to participate in things going on just outside of grace as well. And so to me, it's a wonderful picture of why as a church we should want to have a generous heart. Right now, we give 10% of everything that we get to ministries going on outside the walls of grace. It is one of my big long-term goals for the church to see that percentage increase a lot so that we play our part in God's greater body and who we are. But not just as we think about reaching outside of the walls of grace, but as we think about what happens within grace and how when we give, we are part of the celebrations that God allows for us here. We are part of the victories that Jesus wins here. We participate in that by giving and doing our part and being a part of the body of Christ. I think back to October of 2017. That was the first time I got to go down to Reynosa to go see the folks at Faith Ministry. Colleen of Faith Ministry fame is with us this morning. Hello, Colleen. That's a ministry in Mexico that builds houses for people who otherwise would not be able to have them. And Grace has been partners with them since before Grace existed. So more than 20 years. And I got to go down there in October of 2017 to see it for the first time. And it was a really great experience. And I'll never forget, we're sitting there and I wanted to say it's the parking lot, but that's generous. It's the place where the cars go. And we're sitting in the van and we're waiting to pull out. And I hear a car crank up and and it was as if that poor thing was being tortured. Like, it did not, every noise it made was, please, please don't make me do this. Like, and I turn around, and the bumper is in shatters. It's being held with bungee cords, and to say that it was a beater is generous to beaters, and it was being driven by the pastor down there, a younger guy named Pastor Carlos. And Pastor Carlos, he works 10 times harder than me. I could not do what he does. I asked him one time what his weekly schedule was and just the Bible studies that he has and the different towns and stuff that he touches on and the different people in his orbit. He needs a good car. He's shuttling kids back and forth. He works so hard. This is not what he should be driving. And so I kind of leaned over to some folks that were on the trip and I said, hey, I think Grace could raise enough money to buy him a truck. Can we do that? And I talked to the folks at Faith Ministry. Would it be cool if we bought him a truck? He seems to need it. And everybody was good with it. And so I came back to Grace and I said, hey, this is, as we enter Christmas, this is the thing we want to do. We want to have enough money to buy a truck for Pastor Carlos. And we did. What kind of car did we buy him? Do you remember? Yeah, Ford Escape or Ranger or something like that. But it was nice and new and way better than what he had. And some of our folks from Grace got to go down and deliver it to him. And when I watched the video, I had tears in my eyes because he was so grateful. And so blown away by the generosity of the church. And it was a really sweet moment. And the next time I went down there, the first thing Carlos wanted me to do is come see his truck and say thank you again for it. Now listen, if you were here and you gave to that Christmas offering in 2017, that joy is your joy. That happiness is your happiness. That's not watching other people do a good thing like when we watch on the internet and our heart is warmed and then we scroll to the next thing. That's your joy. You did that. You participated in that. You made that possible. That was God using your gifts and your finances making you a part of the body of Christ so that you could participate in the good work that he was doing. That joy was your joy. If you give to grace, those 11 kids that were up here being dedicated, that's your joy. When we baptize somebody, that's your joy. When you see somebody come into the church, that's your joy. We have, I think, nine people coming to Discover Grace after church today coming out of a pandemic. That's your joy that those people are becoming a part of what we're doing here at Grace. Every win that Jesus claims here at this church, when we give, we are a part of that. Because those wins don't happen if we don't give. So we give because we are a part of the body of Christ. And that allows us to participate in the work that Jesus is doing, wherever he's doing work. The last point that I would make about why it's best for us to give is that giving invites us to mirror the generosity of God that's lavished upon us. It invites us to mirror the generosity that God has given us. Now, this too could be a whole sermon, and it was. The last time we talked about giving, Doug Bergeson, one of our elders, preached on it in February of 2020, and I don't do things like this, but it's the best sermon on giving I've ever heard. If you haven't heard it, and you'd like to explore this idea more, go back into the archives. It was Grace's Going Home series, February of 2020. Find the Doug Bergeson sermon. It's an excellent one on what I'm talking about right here, How we participate in God's generosity when we give. But what I would say to you this morning is simply this, that this is to me the most compelling reason to give. Because the longer you are a believer, the deeper you grow in gratitude to the Father. There's no two ways about it. You might think that if you've lived a life however you want it, in total selfishness, in total depravity, you've done all the bad things that anybody could do. You can check off all the boxes and and then at like 35, you come to know God, and you're amazed that he's wiped the slate clean, and he's accepted you into his kingdom, that that moment is maximum gratitude for God's generosity and forgiveness. No, it's not. Because to walk with God is to understand that when you become a Christian, he doesn't just forgive you for all the stuff that you did up to that moment. He forgives you for all the crap that you're going to do too. He knows every terrible thought that you're going to have. When you get saved, whatever your lowest point is after that, whatever rock bottom looks like after you become a Christian, God was already in that moment whispering to you that he loves you and he forgives you and he wants you to come back to him. He's already in that moment. Whether that moment's behind you or ahead of you, God was in it telling you already, I've covered this too. So to walk with God and to fall short again and again and again, to arrive at that place that Paul arrives at in Romans 7 that is to me the most redemptive verse in scripture, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death. To arrive there and be refreshed anew with God's overwhelming forgiveness and generosity to us. For it to hit us like a wave again that Jesus condescended, took on human flesh, lived with us in the muck and the mire, died on the cross for us, knowing that we would crud on that very death over and over and over again in our life only to require his forgiveness yet again and then he offers and then he goes about, once he dies for us, ascending to the right hand of the Father to advocate for us and to whisper in God's ear that, yes, I've covered that too. When we sit daily in the realization of the gospel and we let the waves of Jesus' forgiveness wash over us and God's generosity flood us, we cannot help but grow in our gratitude towards God. Whatever gratitude we experienced at salvation is the starting point for how it grows through our life. And so we give as an expression of that gratitude. We give because something so incredible is happening to us that we want to find a way to be conduits of that generosity that God has given us. God has given so much to me. God has given so much to us. God has enriched our lives so much that we can't help but want to desire to enrich the lives of others. We can't help but want to express the generosity that God has lavished upon us. And so giving in his best, most pure state is simply a reaction to the overflow of God's giving in our life. That's why Paul teaches in Corinthians that God loves a cheerful giver. Don't give out of compulsion, but give because you want to. And how can we grow our want to in giving? By focusing on the face of Jesus and remembering the generosity and the forgiveness that he offers us every day. And so giving is what's best for us because it reorients us to the gospel. It reorients us towards God's goodness in our life. God has been good to me and provided me this. I am going to give this portion of this, understanding that he can replace it or he can't, but God has been so generous to me that I want to be generous to others. That's why we give. I love this verse in 2 Corinthians 9-11 says, you will be enriched in every way to be generous in every way, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God. There's this part of the Sermon on the Mount that I find incredibly intimidating, where Jesus says, let others see your good deeds, see your good works, and shine for the Father so that your light shine before others that they may see your good deeds and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that when people come into and out of your orbit in your life, they should simply see the way that you act and want more of your Father who is in heaven. It's this idea that when people come into and out of your orbit in your life, they should simply see the way that you act and want more of your father who is in heaven. And I always think to myself, how do you act like that? A really easy way is to be generous. That's what Corinthians tells us. That God has enriched us. He's given us resources in every way. Why? So that we might enrich others. And then both you and them will turn that to thanksgiving to God. And it will point us back to the Father and our Savior Jesus. That's why giving is what's best for us. It's good for us. It develops a spirit of generosity that constantly, constantly orients us back to Jesus. So I would end this morning with a simple challenge for you. Trust God and give. Trust God and his word and give. How much should I give? Just a little bit more than you are. That's always the answer. 10%? No, that's an Old Testament thing. How much do we give in the New Testament? Just a little bit more than we are. Whatever that means for you. Who do I give to? I'll be the first to tell you. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that you have to give all of your giving to the local church. I've sat in churches, I've heard pastors say, your first 10% goes to this church and then on top of that, other places. That's not in the Bible. I'm not going to sit here and teach you that. I'm not preaching this as a self-serving thing for grace. If you believe in grace and what's happening here and you feel compelled to participate in the victories that Jesus is winning here, then give to grace. But you give wherever God is advancing his kingdom. Wherever God is working and Jesus is moving, you give there. Just give. Trust God and do it. I have never talked to a single person in my whole life who has said, you know what? I heard what the pastor said about giving and I decided to start being more generous. That was a huge mistake. I really regret it. Wish I could have that back. Never heard anybody say that. So this morning, it's simple. If you and I could have a conversation, I would simply end it by saying, just trust God. Obey Him. Be a person who's generous. Let's give together. Let me pray for us. Father, we do love you. We are so grateful for the goodness and the gifts that you've lavished upon us. God, I pray first and foremost that we would let those wash over us. I pray more than anything else that we would simply leave here increasingly overwhelmed with your goodness to us. Father, for those of us who need this, who need to think about this in our own lives, I pray that because you said so would be all the reason that we ever need. I pray that we would trust that and walk in that. Knowing that even when we don't understand obedience sometimes, that it is going to lead us to a path of life. God, give us the heart and the gratitude and the spirit to be people who are generous. I pray that each one of us would leave here determined to be just a little bit more generous than we were when we walked in today. And God, for those of us who are obedient and who respond and who give. Would we find you there, please? Would you show us yourself in that giving? Can we ask that through the generosity that you compel us to that we are brought closer to your son and so inspired and enlivened to continue to be generous. It's in his name, the one who died for us and who advocates for us, that we pray. Amen.

Good to see everybody. Thank you guys for that. As is often the case these days, when it's time for me to preach, I don't want to. I just want to keep singing. It's so good to get to sing with my church family and to look and see everyone praising. What a blessing that is. I'm actually going to invite you guys back into prayer as I start the sermon this week. I don't know if you guys know this. Tuesday is kind of a big deal for us in this country, and it would probably be wise for churches to pray over it. So join me in doing that. Father, Tuesday is the election, and this is, you know, one of the more contentious ones that we have ever experienced. It is more polarizing and divisive and filled with vitriol than any that I am aware of previously. So Father, I just pray that you'd be with us. Pray that you'd be in the process. May your hand be all over what happens on Tuesday and very likely, Father, in the weeks following. Would we see you in the nooks and crannies and the polling locations in the districts of this election and the results of it. And Father, more than anything, I pray that your people would be peacemakers in the wake of it. I pray that your people would be unifiers in the wake of it. That we wouldn't have a heart to be right. We wouldn't have a heart to gloat or to complain. Or even have a heart towards doomsday scenarios. But that God, your children would seek to make the peace that you have won. Help us to do that no matter what happens on Tuesday. It's in your son's name we pray, and we're able to do that. Amen. All right, this is the third part in our series called James. I take great pride in my creative series titles, and so this one is James. Last week, Kyle carried the torch exceptionally well in talking about taming the tongue. Take it easy, it wasn't that good. It was fine. I assigned that to him because he is better at that than I am. It was less hypocritical coming from Kyle than me, if you know me well. So I'm very glad about that. I would also say just as a general statement so you guys know that it's a big value for me and for the elders and for Grace to have different voices up here speaking into your lives. So we will always look for opportunities for people besides me to continue to share and offer you their perspective, because I think we benefit from that. Scripture tells us that where there is many counselors, that there is wisdom and wise choices. So I think that that's a good thing. This week, we are jumping back into James chapter 2 to one of, some people call it controversial, though I don't really think that it is. It is confusing. A cursory glance at the passage, James 2 verses 14 through 26 is where we're going to be. If you're watching at home today, thank you so much for doing that. I don't blame you on this rainy morning, but I hope everybody will grab a Bible and interact with the text as we move through it, because we're going to go through that whole passage today. Just a cursory glance of the passage, it renders it a little bit confusing, I think, because as you move through the whole of Scripture, particularly the New Testament, the New Testament writers are very careful to explain that salvation comes through faith. Paul says it most pointedly confess with our mouth and believe with our heart that Jesus is Lord, then we will enter into the kingdom. Jesus beckons us to believe in him and to follow him. So we see over and over again through Scripture the miracle and the mystery of the gospel, which is salvation is offered to you free of merit, free of works, completely by faith. It is the greatest gift that could ever be given. God sent his son to die on the cross for you, for everyone, for the sins that you have committed and for the sins that he knows that you will commit. He died for those so that you might be reunited with his Father, with the Father, and with him, and with the Spirit for all of eternity. God loves you so much that he came after your soul by sending his Son to die on the cross for you. And if we place our faith in that death, then Scripture teaches us that we're going to heaven. Scripture teaches us that we will spend eternity in bliss with God. Scripture teaches us that because of that, we don't have to fear death. Scripture teaches us that because of that, we're a new creature. We're no longer a slave to sin as the old creature was. And so all through the Bible, we see salvation by faith. And then we get to James here at the end of the Bible. At the end of the Bible, this peculiar passage, James says, yeah, you show me your faith, I'll show you my works. You show me your faith without works and I'll show you a faith that's dead. As a matter of fact, let me show you how Abraham proved his faith by his works. And at a cursory glance, it seems like James is disagreeing with the rest of Scripture. The rest of Scripture is like, I'm good, I'm good, I have faith, I believe. And then James says, yeah, but if you believe you ought to do some stuff. And if you don't do some stuff, then you may not believe. Actually, James is more pointed than that. Remember we said that this was a well-crafted punch in the gut, this book was? James just says if you don't do some stuff, then you don't believe. It's not real. It's not sincere. And so even though it can seem a little bit contradictory, even though it can be challenging, I don't think it's confusing. I think it is crystal clear. So I want to walk us through James chapter 2 this morning and help us understand this passage and let us be appropriately challenged and worried by this passage because it's a tough one. This is what James writes. We'll start off with the first half of it. James 2, verses 14 through 18. So James shares this pretty stark, blunt reality. You can say all day long that you have faith. You can give a mental assent and a lip service to faith. Do you think that Jesus is the Son of God? Yes. But what James says is unless actions follow that, it's not sincere. We saw in chapter 1 that one of the things that James says about true religion, the thing that James says about true religion, is that true religion visits the widows and the orphans in their affliction and remains unstained from the world. So what he's saying is, true religion, people who truly have a genuine faith, will care for the poor and the needy. They will care to be a voice to the voiceless. And in continuing to pull that thread here in chapter two, he basically says, you can't call yourself a believer. You can't say that you have a genuine saving faith if you don't help someone who is in need. If someone comes to you and they say, I'm wet and I'm cold and I need a jacket and I live, I'm homeless and I'm in need. And we say, in our double-layered North Face jackets, I will pray for you. Be warm and filled. I hope you find good food. There's a place downtown called Seat at the Table. You should figure out a way to get there. It's great. And then we leave. James is saying, you don't care for the poor and the needy. You just like to say that you do. You're like me this morning. I was watching a woman get out of her car with a baby, and I watched her do it for like 10 minutes. And at the last second, I was like, you want me to come get you an umbrella? And she said, I mean, I'm good by now. And then she walked in. Like, if I really wanted, if I really cared about her, I would have walked out there with an umbrella. I just cared for the perception that I cared, right? What we do shows what we believe. It actually evidences that. So what James is saying here, and it's important not to miss this, is that works are an unavoidable result of a genuine faith. Works, good works, and we're going to talk about what those are, are an unavoidable result of a genuine faith. It is a natural consequence. If you have a genuine, believing, saving faith, then God will work in your heart to change you. There's a verse in Matthew that says, if you delight yourselves in the laws of the Lord, then he will give you the desires of your heart. And I've always loved that verse because it makes it seem like if I simply just love the Bible, then God will give me all the stuff that I want. I'm going to be a billionaire in no time. But what it means is when we reflect on God's word and we delight ourselves in it, we grow more like the principles in it. We grow more like God in character. And slowly, over time, because we delight in His Word, our heart beats for the same things that God's heart beats for. Our hearts beat with God. This is how the Spirit gets in our life and changes us. And the things that we want slowly become the things that He wants. The things that He delights in are the things that we delight in. And we're told in Romans that when we are saved, when we become a believer, when we have a true saving faith, that the old self, the old version of ourself that was a slave to sin, is buried with Christ and that this new self is resurrected with him on Easter. That's why baptism is a symbol of this rebirth. We go under the water. That's our old self being cast off and we rise as our new selves that God has radically and fundamentally changed. This new self has a Holy Spirit that's given to us as a down payment on our salvation, who speaks into us, who convicts us when we're going wrong, who encourages us when we're doing right. And so everything in Scripture points to the unavoidable reality that when God fundamentally changes our heart, when we have a saving faith and He rushes into our lives, that the unavoidable result is good works. Because we no longer have to choose our good works. They're a natural manifestation of the faith that is going on inside of us. That's what James is saying. And in saying this, this is important, James actually agrees with Jesus. In saying this, James actually agrees with the teachings of Jesus you have in your notes there. And at home, you should have been able to download the notes on the Gracevine. You have in your notes there two references, John 15, 5 and John 13, 35. And he says in those, John 15, 5 is this wonderful passage. He says, I am the vine and you are the branches. In our vernacular, I am the trunk and you are the branches. I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. I've talked about this before. When a branch is attached to a tree, it doesn't have to worry about when to produce the fruit or what kind of fruit to produce. All it has to worry about is staying attached to that tree. And Jesus says, if you abide in me and I in you, if you obey me, if you follow me, if you pursue me, if you walk with me, if you abide in me, then you will bear much fruit. You won't have to try to bear the fruit. You won't have to try to do the good works. You won't have to make a conscious effort to do it. Just abide in me and it will naturally produce a fruit in your life. James is simply agreeing with Jesus. He's saying it another way. He's saying it in a more pointed way so it's easier to understand. Then Jesus says again in John 13 35, he says, I give you a new command to love others as I have loved you. And then he says that the world will know that you are my disciples by your love for one another. The world will know that you are my children by what you do, by how you treat one another, by your actions. Jesus says you can say all day long that you love your brother. This is the exact example that James gives. You can say you love the poor and the needy, but if you walk away with your warm coat, then you don't. You don't really believe. Faith isn't really there. Jesus says, the world will know by your actions who you are. It's not a matter of just saying it. And honestly, we understand this principle. We get it. We've experienced this, that if there is love, there will be evidence, right? If you're not married, I think you can still appreciate the principles of this. When a husband and wife are married, when they get married, they stand at the altar and they make vows to each other. And they promise, I will love you and be faithful to you in sickness and in health and good times and in bad, in joy as well as in sorrow. It's one thing to stand on the altar and say those things. I had no clue what that meant when I was 25 years old. I said them and I meant them with my whole heart. I know what they mean now more than I did then. And those of you who have been married for 30 and 40 years, you know even way more than me what those words mean. And a husband, listen, a husband can tell his wife that he loves her. He can write her a nice card on her birthday, I love you, you're the best, you're the most beautiful woman in the world. Which apparently when people get married, everyone's unrealistic, right? I'm married to the most handsome man ever. Are you? Because we all look pretty average. Anyways, you can say nice things and it's fine to do that. It's fine to give a mental assent to it. But a wife knows if she's loved, right? If a husband loves his wife, he won't just tell her. He'll run interference for her on Saturday morning with the kids to try to let her get a little bit more sleep than she normally does. He'll clean the kitchen without being asked to clean the kitchen. He'll make a big deal over her birthday if she wants a big deal made of it. He'll make a little deal over her birthday if she wants a little deal made of it. He'll say kind things to her. He'll let her watch what she wants to watch. He'll take her car out on the weekend and wash it and fill it up with gas so that she doesn't have to worry about that. He'll learn the little things that let his wife know that she is loved. And she never has to wonder at that. And if a guy just says occasionally, hey, I love you, you know you're the best, and then never does anything, that's not love. That's selfishness. We understand this principle. We know this to be true in our own lives, and it's true of our faith as well. And it's so true of our faith, and James actually takes this, he actually doubles down on this. This idea of faith will produce works. Love will be manifested in how we act. By presenting us with this idea, and this is where it starts to get scary. According to James, mental assent is not the same as faith. Mental assent is not the same as faith. Promising love on the altar is not the same as loving for 30 years. Just agreeing mentally that Jesus is the Son of God is not a saving faith. This is why Jesus says another scary statement in the Gospels, not everyone who says unto me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. That should give you pause. This should give you pause. If what you're clinging to for your salvation is a prayer that you prayed when you were eight, the mental assent that you gave, we need to do some introspection about whether or not we have a saving faith. And I say that mental assent is not the same as faith because look at what James says in verse 19. He says, you believe that God is one. You do well. In other translations it says, good. Even the demons believe and shudder. You know who else knows that Jesus is the Son of God? Satan. You know who has way better theology than all of us collectively in this room? Demons. They know the Bible inside and out. They know who Jesus is, and they are scared of him. Yet they have not placed their faith in him for eternal life. They're still working towards something else. So a faith that simply gives a mental assent, that simply says, yeah, I think that's probably true, is a demonic faith, according to James. And we don't talk about demons and Satan here a lot, but it's in the passage. This is what he says, and this ought to give us pause that even demons go, yeah, Jesus is the Son of God, and they're scared of him, yet they don't have faith because it's more than just a mental assent. It's more than just agreeing with the set of facts. It's more than just confessing that Jesus is the Son of God. Again, I'll go back to that writing in Paul and Romans. If we confess with our hearts, if we confess with our mouths and believe in our hearts that Jesus is the Son of God, then we will be saved. Some of us stop at confessing with our mouths. That's where demons stop. And that's a scary, scary thing. James takes it a little bit further as he finishes out the passage. And he says that faith that doesn't provide works isn't even a saving faith. Faith that doesn't produce works isn't even a saving faith. He says it this way at the end of the passage. He says, A faith that is simply claimed and not evidenced and not met out with a series of good works and good deeds and love and grace and kindness, that's a dead faith. That's not a saving faith. A faith that we cling to because of a prayer that we prayed years ago and then nothing in our life changed after that is not a saving faith. That's why I am of the conviction, I've thought this for a long time from where I sit in ministry, that the surest sign that the gospel has taken root in someone's life is a radical change in their priorities. I've watched families come and go from churches. And you see families come and they profess a faith. They confess that they believe. And they come and maybe church attendance gets ramped up for a little bit. Maybe they're excited about it. They're caught up in the moment. But nothing between Sundays really changes. They still roll with the same group of people. And it's great. We ought to roll with the same group of people. We ought to have our friends who are not believers, but they can't be our only friends, and they can't have the only values that we emulate and try to not adopt. And the way that they spend their money doesn't change, and the way they spend their time doesn't change, and the way that they seek joy doesn't change. The only thing that really changes is now they go to church, and it makes them feel a little bit better. But eventually, eventually they'll start to fade away and then a year or two later, it's like that was just a flash in the pan. It was a confession, but it wasn't a sincere belief. Conversely, I've watched families profess a faith, come into church, kind of slowly step their way in, slowly take their next steps of obedience, becoming disciples of Christ, join small group, begin to give. Well, a huge indicator of someone's faith, and I don't talk about giving a lot, so hopefully you'll allow me this, is whether or not they give. I'm not talking about the church. I'm just talking about being generous people. Why else would you give 10% of your income away unless you were in love with a God who allowed you to do that as part of obedience to him? It doesn't make any sense. Why would a family do that unless God had radically changed their priorities? I've watched families come in and they had kids on ball teams and they were gone most weekends during the fall and the spring and every night of the week and it was consuming them. And they said, listen, because of our faith, because we want to be around church people more, we're not doing that. We're going to ratchet back all of our involvement everywhere else so that we can be involved in church. It's a radical change in priorities. I'm not saying that every family has to do that, but I am saying that that family radically changed their priorities. And to me, it's evidence that faith has taken hold. But James is very clear. If your faith is a faith that clings to a confession that you made years ago, and in the wake of your life, there is no difference. You're no different now than you were five years ago, and only you know the answer to that. And let me just twist it a little harder as I say that. Don't let yourself off the hook with this. Don't find pockets and ways to make yourself better when you really know that you're the same. If that's our faith, and there are no works, James says it's dead. So by now, you ought to be asking the question, well, crap, man, what are the works then? Because I'm a little nervous right now. What are the works that I ought to be producing? How do I know that I know that I know? How can I be certain? What kind of works is faith going to manifest in my life? I would point you to three passages to answer this question. The first is James 1.27. We talked about it earlier. I talked about it two weeks ago. It's the true religion passage. James says that, and I've that we are his disciples by our love for one another. So we should ask ourselves, as I look back on the wake of my life, do I have an increasing heart for the needy? Do I have an increasing desire to help those who are facing injustice and to be a voice for the voiceless? Or do I care about them as little now as I always have? Do I have an increased desire for holiness? Is the Holy Spirit in me, speaking into me and encouraging me as I venture into places where I need not be? Is he encouraging me as I venture towards places and people where I do need to be? Do I see that in my life? And then according to Jesus, do I look in my life and I see a wake of love in my life? Are there people who would point to me and say, I'm closer to Jesus because they love me well? Has that been manifesting itself in your life in such a way? And listen, the litmus test for this love, this godly love, this faith-inspired love that Jesus gives us is not loving the people who love us back. That's easy. Everyone does that. It's loving the people who don't love you back. It's loving the people that you don't have to love. It's loving the people when there's no transaction there. I'm not getting anything out of this. I just love you and I care for you. Do you have an increased wake of people that you love in your life that you don't have to love, that are sometimes unlovable? James says, if you have a genuine faith, then the answer to that question will be yes. And finally, Paul says in Galatians, we're told that we receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment for our salvation, that when we are saved, when we have a genuine faith, that the Holy Spirit rushes into our life, and that the Holy Spirit produces fruit. And the fruit of the Holy Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. So again, look at the wake of your life over the last three to five years. Are you producing? Are you experiencing more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? Are you still the cranky grump that you've always been? Is it more? Is it less? Is it the same? And now listen. I know this is not a fun sermon. You did not get up and shower and brave the rain and you families, we opened kids ministry today. You didn't get your kids ready so that you could come in here and I could kick you in the teeth. I'm sorry about that. This is a hard one. If you're feeling uncomfortable, you should. If you're doubting your salvation, that's all right. Because Paul tells us in Philippians that we should continually work out our salvation with fear and trembling, that our understanding of our salvation and our relationship with God will change over the years. And if it's not, and if it's not challenged, and we're just allowed to walk through life clinging to this thing that we said once and not seeing any works and not actually being a genuine believer and not experiencing genuine faith, shame on me if I'm your pastor for years and I never confront you with the truth that James gives us here. I have to. And here's why we need to have these hard conversations with ourselves. Here's why we need to think through this and ask the question, do I have a genuine faith? Do I see that in my life? Am I sure that I'm sure that I'm sure? This week, Jen and I spent the week back home. Jen and Lily are driving back today. I've shared with the church through the journey. Jen's dad, about two years ago, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And so we've been walking through that, Jen and I have, as a family and with her family. And this last week, he made the decision to stop treatment and receive hospice care in the home. And so we went home to be with the family. The good news is, it was a really, it was a good, sweet, peaceful, life-giving, gracious week. It was good to be around the family. And we're probably talking about months, not weeks. And so that's good too. And we're looking forward to sweet times with John as a whole family. I would also say for those of you who love Jen, please direct your condolences through me. The last thing she needs is to drive home from Athens, be sad that she is not with her dad right now, and then have to answer emails and texts about how he's doing and thinking and all that stuff. So direct those through me. Thank you. But here's why I bring it up. Because I sat with that man this week who has a genuine faith. We were joking about the multiple jackets that he's given to homeless people and sign spinners on the corner of the road. He just stops his car, gets out of the car, and hands him his jacket. He worked at AT&T for years and years and years. He was the vice president of international real estate, yet he knew the name of the parking attendants, he knew their birthdays, and he gave them gifts. He left gifts for the cleaning people in his office. He had a genuine faith. And now, as he's made the decision to embrace death, he is totally fearless and completely at peace. He is living out the verse that says, oh death, where is your sting? It has none for John because he's not fearful. He's totally at peace and he's going to see his Savior. And he's looking forward to it. I want you to have that peace. I want you to know that peace. I want my church to understand what that is. And that peace doesn't come by avoiding the hard truths in Scripture. It comes by continually working out our salvation with fear and with trembling. It comes with being sure that we know that we know. It comes with a genuine faith that will unavoidably produce works. I want you to have that faith too. I want you to have that peace too. So go home. Be concerned. Be confused. Be fearful. Work it out. Make sense of it. If I've confused you today, email me. Let's have a Zoom call or let's have a lunch and let's talk about it. But it's a good thing to have these conversations. It's a good thing to think through these, because when we do, we can be sure that we're sure that we're sure, and we can live our lives in perfect peace, and that's what I want for you, and that's what I want for my church. Let's pray, and then I think we're going to sing one more song together. Father, you were good. In loss, you are good. In grief, you are present. And in joys, you celebrate. So God, thank you for all of those moments and all the ways that you're with us. Lord, I pray that no one here would unnecessarily doubt that they know you. On the flip side, God, I pray that some of us would very necessarily doubt it and that in that doubt we would find a saving faith for maybe the first time ever. God, if any of us listening to me now needs to cry out to you as we sing this song, would we do that? Would you give us the courage to kneel at our house or in these rows or stand and maybe not sing and maybe just pray and search our hearts for where we are with you? Give us a genuine faith. Give us a faith that's rooted so deeply that we abide in you and you produce fruit in us. Give us the peace that comes when we know that we know you. It's in your son's name that I pray all these things. Amen.

Good to see everybody. Thank you guys for that. As is often the case these days, when it's time for me to preach, I don't want to. I just want to keep singing. It's so good to get to sing with my church family and to look and see everyone praising. What a blessing that is. I'm actually going to invite you guys back into prayer as I start the sermon this week. I don't know if you guys know this. Tuesday is kind of a big deal for us in this country, and it would probably be wise for churches to pray over it. So join me in doing that. Father, Tuesday is the election, and this is, you know, one of the more contentious ones that we have ever experienced. It is more polarizing and divisive and filled with vitriol than any that I am aware of previously. So Father, I just pray that you'd be with us. Pray that you'd be in the process. May your hand be all over what happens on Tuesday and very likely, Father, in the weeks following. Would we see you in the nooks and crannies and the polling locations in the districts of this election and the results of it. And Father, more than anything, I pray that your people would be peacemakers in the wake of it. I pray that your people would be unifiers in the wake of it. That we wouldn't have a heart to be right. We wouldn't have a heart to gloat or to complain. Or even have a heart towards doomsday scenarios. But that God, your children would seek to make the peace that you have won. Help us to do that no matter what happens on Tuesday. It's in your son's name we pray, and we're able to do that. Amen. All right, this is the third part in our series called James. I take great pride in my creative series titles, and so this one is James. Last week, Kyle carried the torch exceptionally well in talking about taming the tongue. Take it easy, it wasn't that good. It was fine. I assigned that to him because he is better at that than I am. It was less hypocritical coming from Kyle than me, if you know me well. So I'm very glad about that. I would also say just as a general statement so you guys know that it's a big value for me and for the elders and for Grace to have different voices up here speaking into your lives. So we will always look for opportunities for people besides me to continue to share and offer you their perspective, because I think we benefit from that. Scripture tells us that where there is many counselors, that there is wisdom and wise choices. So I think that that's a good thing. This week, we are jumping back into James chapter 2 to one of, some people call it controversial, though I don't really think that it is. It is confusing. A cursory glance at the passage, James 2 verses 14 through 26 is where we're going to be. If you're watching at home today, thank you so much for doing that. I don't blame you on this rainy morning, but I hope everybody will grab a Bible and interact with the text as we move through it, because we're going to go through that whole passage today. Just a cursory glance of the passage, it renders it a little bit confusing, I think, because as you move through the whole of Scripture, particularly the New Testament, the New Testament writers are very careful to explain that salvation comes through faith. Paul says it most pointedly confess with our mouth and believe with our heart that Jesus is Lord, then we will enter into the kingdom. Jesus beckons us to believe in him and to follow him. So we see over and over again through Scripture the miracle and the mystery of the gospel, which is salvation is offered to you free of merit, free of works, completely by faith. It is the greatest gift that could ever be given. God sent his son to die on the cross for you, for everyone, for the sins that you have committed and for the sins that he knows that you will commit. He died for those so that you might be reunited with his Father, with the Father, and with him, and with the Spirit for all of eternity. God loves you so much that he came after your soul by sending his Son to die on the cross for you. And if we place our faith in that death, then Scripture teaches us that we're going to heaven. Scripture teaches us that we will spend eternity in bliss with God. Scripture teaches us that because of that, we don't have to fear death. Scripture teaches us that because of that, we're a new creature. We're no longer a slave to sin as the old creature was. And so all through the Bible, we see salvation by faith. And then we get to James here at the end of the Bible. At the end of the Bible, this peculiar passage, James says, yeah, you show me your faith, I'll show you my works. You show me your faith without works and I'll show you a faith that's dead. As a matter of fact, let me show you how Abraham proved his faith by his works. And at a cursory glance, it seems like James is disagreeing with the rest of Scripture. The rest of Scripture is like, I'm good, I'm good, I have faith, I believe. And then James says, yeah, but if you believe you ought to do some stuff. And if you don't do some stuff, then you may not believe. Actually, James is more pointed than that. Remember we said that this was a well-crafted punch in the gut, this book was? James just says if you don't do some stuff, then you don't believe. It's not real. It's not sincere. And so even though it can seem a little bit contradictory, even though it can be challenging, I don't think it's confusing. I think it is crystal clear. So I want to walk us through James chapter 2 this morning and help us understand this passage and let us be appropriately challenged and worried by this passage because it's a tough one. This is what James writes. We'll start off with the first half of it. James 2, verses 14 through 18. So James shares this pretty stark, blunt reality. You can say all day long that you have faith. You can give a mental assent and a lip service to faith. Do you think that Jesus is the Son of God? Yes. But what James says is unless actions follow that, it's not sincere. We saw in chapter 1 that one of the things that James says about true religion, the thing that James says about true religion, is that true religion visits the widows and the orphans in their affliction and remains unstained from the world. So what he's saying is, true religion, people who truly have a genuine faith, will care for the poor and the needy. They will care to be a voice to the voiceless. And in continuing to pull that thread here in chapter two, he basically says, you can't call yourself a believer. You can't say that you have a genuine saving faith if you don't help someone who is in need. If someone comes to you and they say, I'm wet and I'm cold and I need a jacket and I live, I'm homeless and I'm in need. And we say, in our double-layered North Face jackets, I will pray for you. Be warm and filled. I hope you find good food. There's a place downtown called Seat at the Table. You should figure out a way to get there. It's great. And then we leave. James is saying, you don't care for the poor and the needy. You just like to say that you do. You're like me this morning. I was watching a woman get out of her car with a baby, and I watched her do it for like 10 minutes. And at the last second, I was like, you want me to come get you an umbrella? And she said, I mean, I'm good by now. And then she walked in. Like, if I really wanted, if I really cared about her, I would have walked out there with an umbrella. I just cared for the perception that I cared, right? What we do shows what we believe. It actually evidences that. So what James is saying here, and it's important not to miss this, is that works are an unavoidable result of a genuine faith. Works, good works, and we're going to talk about what those are, are an unavoidable result of a genuine faith. It is a natural consequence. If you have a genuine, believing, saving faith, then God will work in your heart to change you. There's a verse in Matthew that says, if you delight yourselves in the laws of the Lord, then he will give you the desires of your heart. And I've always loved that verse because it makes it seem like if I simply just love the Bible, then God will give me all the stuff that I want. I'm going to be a billionaire in no time. But what it means is when we reflect on God's word and we delight ourselves in it, we grow more like the principles in it. We grow more like God in character. And slowly, over time, because we delight in His Word, our heart beats for the same things that God's heart beats for. Our hearts beat with God. This is how the Spirit gets in our life and changes us. And the things that we want slowly become the things that He wants. The things that He delights in are the things that we delight in. And we're told in Romans that when we are saved, when we become a believer, when we have a true saving faith, that the old self, the old version of ourself that was a slave to sin, is buried with Christ and that this new self is resurrected with him on Easter. That's why baptism is a symbol of this rebirth. We go under the water. That's our old self being cast off and we rise as our new selves that God has radically and fundamentally changed. This new self has a Holy Spirit that's given to us as a down payment on our salvation, who speaks into us, who convicts us when we're going wrong, who encourages us when we're doing right. And so everything in Scripture points to the unavoidable reality that when God fundamentally changes our heart, when we have a saving faith and He rushes into our lives, that the unavoidable result is good works. Because we no longer have to choose our good works. They're a natural manifestation of the faith that is going on inside of us. That's what James is saying. And in saying this, this is important, James actually agrees with Jesus. In saying this, James actually agrees with the teachings of Jesus you have in your notes there. And at home, you should have been able to download the notes on the Gracevine. You have in your notes there two references, John 15, 5 and John 13, 35. And he says in those, John 15, 5 is this wonderful passage. He says, I am the vine and you are the branches. In our vernacular, I am the trunk and you are the branches. I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. I've talked about this before. When a branch is attached to a tree, it doesn't have to worry about when to produce the fruit or what kind of fruit to produce. All it has to worry about is staying attached to that tree. And Jesus says, if you abide in me and I in you, if you obey me, if you follow me, if you pursue me, if you walk with me, if you abide in me, then you will bear much fruit. You won't have to try to bear the fruit. You won't have to try to do the good works. You won't have to make a conscious effort to do it. Just abide in me and it will naturally produce a fruit in your life. James is simply agreeing with Jesus. He's saying it another way. He's saying it in a more pointed way so it's easier to understand. Then Jesus says again in John 13 35, he says, I give you a new command to love others as I have loved you. And then he says that the world will know that you are my disciples by your love for one another. The world will know that you are my children by what you do, by how you treat one another, by your actions. Jesus says you can say all day long that you love your brother. This is the exact example that James gives. You can say you love the poor and the needy, but if you walk away with your warm coat, then you don't. You don't really believe. Faith isn't really there. Jesus says, the world will know by your actions who you are. It's not a matter of just saying it. And honestly, we understand this principle. We get it. We've experienced this, that if there is love, there will be evidence, right? If you're not married, I think you can still appreciate the principles of this. When a husband and wife are married, when they get married, they stand at the altar and they make vows to each other. And they promise, I will love you and be faithful to you in sickness and in health and good times and in bad, in joy as well as in sorrow. It's one thing to stand on the altar and say those things. I had no clue what that meant when I was 25 years old. I said them and I meant them with my whole heart. I know what they mean now more than I did then. And those of you who have been married for 30 and 40 years, you know even way more than me what those words mean. And a husband, listen, a husband can tell his wife that he loves her. He can write her a nice card on her birthday, I love you, you're the best, you're the most beautiful woman in the world. Which apparently when people get married, everyone's unrealistic, right? I'm married to the most handsome man ever. Are you? Because we all look pretty average. Anyways, you can say nice things and it's fine to do that. It's fine to give a mental assent to it. But a wife knows if she's loved, right? If a husband loves his wife, he won't just tell her. He'll run interference for her on Saturday morning with the kids to try to let her get a little bit more sleep than she normally does. He'll clean the kitchen without being asked to clean the kitchen. He'll make a big deal over her birthday if she wants a big deal made of it. He'll make a little deal over her birthday if she wants a little deal made of it. He'll say kind things to her. He'll let her watch what she wants to watch. He'll take her car out on the weekend and wash it and fill it up with gas so that she doesn't have to worry about that. He'll learn the little things that let his wife know that she is loved. And she never has to wonder at that. And if a guy just says occasionally, hey, I love you, you know you're the best, and then never does anything, that's not love. That's selfishness. We understand this principle. We know this to be true in our own lives, and it's true of our faith as well. And it's so true of our faith, and James actually takes this, he actually doubles down on this. This idea of faith will produce works. Love will be manifested in how we act. By presenting us with this idea, and this is where it starts to get scary. According to James, mental assent is not the same as faith. Mental assent is not the same as faith. Promising love on the altar is not the same as loving for 30 years. Just agreeing mentally that Jesus is the Son of God is not a saving faith. This is why Jesus says another scary statement in the Gospels, not everyone who says unto me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. That should give you pause. This should give you pause. If what you're clinging to for your salvation is a prayer that you prayed when you were eight, the mental assent that you gave, we need to do some introspection about whether or not we have a saving faith. And I say that mental assent is not the same as faith because look at what James says in verse 19. He says, you believe that God is one. You do well. In other translations it says, good. Even the demons believe and shudder. You know who else knows that Jesus is the Son of God? Satan. You know who has way better theology than all of us collectively in this room? Demons. They know the Bible inside and out. They know who Jesus is, and they are scared of him. Yet they have not placed their faith in him for eternal life. They're still working towards something else. So a faith that simply gives a mental assent, that simply says, yeah, I think that's probably true, is a demonic faith, according to James. And we don't talk about demons and Satan here a lot, but it's in the passage. This is what he says, and this ought to give us pause that even demons go, yeah, Jesus is the Son of God, and they're scared of him, yet they don't have faith because it's more than just a mental assent. It's more than just agreeing with the set of facts. It's more than just confessing that Jesus is the Son of God. Again, I'll go back to that writing in Paul and Romans. If we confess with our hearts, if we confess with our mouths and believe in our hearts that Jesus is the Son of God, then we will be saved. Some of us stop at confessing with our mouths. That's where demons stop. And that's a scary, scary thing. James takes it a little bit further as he finishes out the passage. And he says that faith that doesn't provide works isn't even a saving faith. Faith that doesn't produce works isn't even a saving faith. He says it this way at the end of the passage. He says, A faith that is simply claimed and not evidenced and not met out with a series of good works and good deeds and love and grace and kindness, that's a dead faith. That's not a saving faith. A faith that we cling to because of a prayer that we prayed years ago and then nothing in our life changed after that is not a saving faith. That's why I am of the conviction, I've thought this for a long time from where I sit in ministry, that the surest sign that the gospel has taken root in someone's life is a radical change in their priorities. I've watched families come and go from churches. And you see families come and they profess a faith. They confess that they believe. And they come and maybe church attendance gets ramped up for a little bit. Maybe they're excited about it. They're caught up in the moment. But nothing between Sundays really changes. They still roll with the same group of people. And it's great. We ought to roll with the same group of people. We ought to have our friends who are not believers, but they can't be our only friends, and they can't have the only values that we emulate and try to not adopt. And the way that they spend their money doesn't change, and the way they spend their time doesn't change, and the way that they seek joy doesn't change. The only thing that really changes is now they go to church, and it makes them feel a little bit better. But eventually, eventually they'll start to fade away and then a year or two later, it's like that was just a flash in the pan. It was a confession, but it wasn't a sincere belief. Conversely, I've watched families profess a faith, come into church, kind of slowly step their way in, slowly take their next steps of obedience, becoming disciples of Christ, join small group, begin to give. Well, a huge indicator of someone's faith, and I don't talk about giving a lot, so hopefully you'll allow me this, is whether or not they give. I'm not talking about the church. I'm just talking about being generous people. Why else would you give 10% of your income away unless you were in love with a God who allowed you to do that as part of obedience to him? It doesn't make any sense. Why would a family do that unless God had radically changed their priorities? I've watched families come in and they had kids on ball teams and they were gone most weekends during the fall and the spring and every night of the week and it was consuming them. And they said, listen, because of our faith, because we want to be around church people more, we're not doing that. We're going to ratchet back all of our involvement everywhere else so that we can be involved in church. It's a radical change in priorities. I'm not saying that every family has to do that, but I am saying that that family radically changed their priorities. And to me, it's evidence that faith has taken hold. But James is very clear. If your faith is a faith that clings to a confession that you made years ago, and in the wake of your life, there is no difference. You're no different now than you were five years ago, and only you know the answer to that. And let me just twist it a little harder as I say that. Don't let yourself off the hook with this. Don't find pockets and ways to make yourself better when you really know that you're the same. If that's our faith, and there are no works, James says it's dead. So by now, you ought to be asking the question, well, crap, man, what are the works then? Because I'm a little nervous right now. What are the works that I ought to be producing? How do I know that I know that I know? How can I be certain? What kind of works is faith going to manifest in my life? I would point you to three passages to answer this question. The first is James 1.27. We talked about it earlier. I talked about it two weeks ago. It's the true religion passage. James says that, and I've that we are his disciples by our love for one another. So we should ask ourselves, as I look back on the wake of my life, do I have an increasing heart for the needy? Do I have an increasing desire to help those who are facing injustice and to be a voice for the voiceless? Or do I care about them as little now as I always have? Do I have an increased desire for holiness? Is the Holy Spirit in me, speaking into me and encouraging me as I venture into places where I need not be? Is he encouraging me as I venture towards places and people where I do need to be? Do I see that in my life? And then according to Jesus, do I look in my life and I see a wake of love in my life? Are there people who would point to me and say, I'm closer to Jesus because they love me well? Has that been manifesting itself in your life in such a way? And listen, the litmus test for this love, this godly love, this faith-inspired love that Jesus gives us is not loving the people who love us back. That's easy. Everyone does that. It's loving the people who don't love you back. It's loving the people that you don't have to love. It's loving the people when there's no transaction there. I'm not getting anything out of this. I just love you and I care for you. Do you have an increased wake of people that you love in your life that you don't have to love, that are sometimes unlovable? James says, if you have a genuine faith, then the answer to that question will be yes. And finally, Paul says in Galatians, we're told that we receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment for our salvation, that when we are saved, when we have a genuine faith, that the Holy Spirit rushes into our life, and that the Holy Spirit produces fruit. And the fruit of the Holy Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. So again, look at the wake of your life over the last three to five years. Are you producing? Are you experiencing more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? Are you still the cranky grump that you've always been? Is it more? Is it less? Is it the same? And now listen. I know this is not a fun sermon. You did not get up and shower and brave the rain and you families, we opened kids ministry today. You didn't get your kids ready so that you could come in here and I could kick you in the teeth. I'm sorry about that. This is a hard one. If you're feeling uncomfortable, you should. If you're doubting your salvation, that's all right. Because Paul tells us in Philippians that we should continually work out our salvation with fear and trembling, that our understanding of our salvation and our relationship with God will change over the years. And if it's not, and if it's not challenged, and we're just allowed to walk through life clinging to this thing that we said once and not seeing any works and not actually being a genuine believer and not experiencing genuine faith, shame on me if I'm your pastor for years and I never confront you with the truth that James gives us here. I have to. And here's why we need to have these hard conversations with ourselves. Here's why we need to think through this and ask the question, do I have a genuine faith? Do I see that in my life? Am I sure that I'm sure that I'm sure? This week, Jen and I spent the week back home. Jen and Lily are driving back today. I've shared with the church through the journey. Jen's dad, about two years ago, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And so we've been walking through that, Jen and I have, as a family and with her family. And this last week, he made the decision to stop treatment and receive hospice care in the home. And so we went home to be with the family. The good news is, it was a really, it was a good, sweet, peaceful, life-giving, gracious week. It was good to be around the family. And we're probably talking about months, not weeks. And so that's good too. And we're looking forward to sweet times with John as a whole family. I would also say for those of you who love Jen, please direct your condolences through me. The last thing she needs is to drive home from Athens, be sad that she is not with her dad right now, and then have to answer emails and texts about how he's doing and thinking and all that stuff. So direct those through me. Thank you. But here's why I bring it up. Because I sat with that man this week who has a genuine faith. We were joking about the multiple jackets that he's given to homeless people and sign spinners on the corner of the road. He just stops his car, gets out of the car, and hands him his jacket. He worked at AT&T for years and years and years. He was the vice president of international real estate, yet he knew the name of the parking attendants, he knew their birthdays, and he gave them gifts. He left gifts for the cleaning people in his office. He had a genuine faith. And now, as he's made the decision to embrace death, he is totally fearless and completely at peace. He is living out the verse that says, oh death, where is your sting? It has none for John because he's not fearful. He's totally at peace and he's going to see his Savior. And he's looking forward to it. I want you to have that peace. I want you to know that peace. I want my church to understand what that is. And that peace doesn't come by avoiding the hard truths in Scripture. It comes by continually working out our salvation with fear and with trembling. It comes with being sure that we know that we know. It comes with a genuine faith that will unavoidably produce works. I want you to have that faith too. I want you to have that peace too. So go home. Be concerned. Be confused. Be fearful. Work it out. Make sense of it. If I've confused you today, email me. Let's have a Zoom call or let's have a lunch and let's talk about it. But it's a good thing to have these conversations. It's a good thing to think through these, because when we do, we can be sure that we're sure that we're sure, and we can live our lives in perfect peace, and that's what I want for you, and that's what I want for my church. Let's pray, and then I think we're going to sing one more song together. Father, you were good. In loss, you are good. In grief, you are present. And in joys, you celebrate. So God, thank you for all of those moments and all the ways that you're with us. Lord, I pray that no one here would unnecessarily doubt that they know you. On the flip side, God, I pray that some of us would very necessarily doubt it and that in that doubt we would find a saving faith for maybe the first time ever. God, if any of us listening to me now needs to cry out to you as we sing this song, would we do that? Would you give us the courage to kneel at our house or in these rows or stand and maybe not sing and maybe just pray and search our hearts for where we are with you? Give us a genuine faith. Give us a faith that's rooted so deeply that we abide in you and you produce fruit in us. Give us the peace that comes when we know that we know you. It's in your son's name that I pray all these things. Amen.

Good to see everybody. Thank you guys for that. As is often the case these days, when it's time for me to preach, I don't want to. I just want to keep singing. It's so good to get to sing with my church family and to look and see everyone praising. What a blessing that is. I'm actually going to invite you guys back into prayer as I start the sermon this week. I don't know if you guys know this. Tuesday is kind of a big deal for us in this country, and it would probably be wise for churches to pray over it. So join me in doing that. Father, Tuesday is the election, and this is, you know, one of the more contentious ones that we have ever experienced. It is more polarizing and divisive and filled with vitriol than any that I am aware of previously. So Father, I just pray that you'd be with us. Pray that you'd be in the process. May your hand be all over what happens on Tuesday and very likely, Father, in the weeks following. Would we see you in the nooks and crannies and the polling locations in the districts of this election and the results of it. And Father, more than anything, I pray that your people would be peacemakers in the wake of it. I pray that your people would be unifiers in the wake of it. That we wouldn't have a heart to be right. We wouldn't have a heart to gloat or to complain. Or even have a heart towards doomsday scenarios. But that God, your children would seek to make the peace that you have won. Help us to do that no matter what happens on Tuesday. It's in your son's name we pray, and we're able to do that. Amen. All right, this is the third part in our series called James. I take great pride in my creative series titles, and so this one is James. Last week, Kyle carried the torch exceptionally well in talking about taming the tongue. Take it easy, it wasn't that good. It was fine. I assigned that to him because he is better at that than I am. It was less hypocritical coming from Kyle than me, if you know me well. So I'm very glad about that. I would also say just as a general statement so you guys know that it's a big value for me and for the elders and for Grace to have different voices up here speaking into your lives. So we will always look for opportunities for people besides me to continue to share and offer you their perspective, because I think we benefit from that. Scripture tells us that where there is many counselors, that there is wisdom and wise choices. So I think that that's a good thing. This week, we are jumping back into James chapter 2 to one of, some people call it controversial, though I don't really think that it is. It is confusing. A cursory glance at the passage, James 2 verses 14 through 26 is where we're going to be. If you're watching at home today, thank you so much for doing that. I don't blame you on this rainy morning, but I hope everybody will grab a Bible and interact with the text as we move through it, because we're going to go through that whole passage today. Just a cursory glance of the passage, it renders it a little bit confusing, I think, because as you move through the whole of Scripture, particularly the New Testament, the New Testament writers are very careful to explain that salvation comes through faith. Paul says it most pointedly confess with our mouth and believe with our heart that Jesus is Lord, then we will enter into the kingdom. Jesus beckons us to believe in him and to follow him. So we see over and over again through Scripture the miracle and the mystery of the gospel, which is salvation is offered to you free of merit, free of works, completely by faith. It is the greatest gift that could ever be given. God sent his son to die on the cross for you, for everyone, for the sins that you have committed and for the sins that he knows that you will commit. He died for those so that you might be reunited with his Father, with the Father, and with him, and with the Spirit for all of eternity. God loves you so much that he came after your soul by sending his Son to die on the cross for you. And if we place our faith in that death, then Scripture teaches us that we're going to heaven. Scripture teaches us that we will spend eternity in bliss with God. Scripture teaches us that because of that, we don't have to fear death. Scripture teaches us that because of that, we're a new creature. We're no longer a slave to sin as the old creature was. And so all through the Bible, we see salvation by faith. And then we get to James here at the end of the Bible. At the end of the Bible, this peculiar passage, James says, yeah, you show me your faith, I'll show you my works. You show me your faith without works and I'll show you a faith that's dead. As a matter of fact, let me show you how Abraham proved his faith by his works. And at a cursory glance, it seems like James is disagreeing with the rest of Scripture. The rest of Scripture is like, I'm good, I'm good, I have faith, I believe. And then James says, yeah, but if you believe you ought to do some stuff. And if you don't do some stuff, then you may not believe. Actually, James is more pointed than that. Remember we said that this was a well-crafted punch in the gut, this book was? James just says if you don't do some stuff, then you don't believe. It's not real. It's not sincere. And so even though it can seem a little bit contradictory, even though it can be challenging, I don't think it's confusing. I think it is crystal clear. So I want to walk us through James chapter 2 this morning and help us understand this passage and let us be appropriately challenged and worried by this passage because it's a tough one. This is what James writes. We'll start off with the first half of it. James 2, verses 14 through 18. So James shares this pretty stark, blunt reality. You can say all day long that you have faith. You can give a mental assent and a lip service to faith. Do you think that Jesus is the Son of God? Yes. But what James says is unless actions follow that, it's not sincere. We saw in chapter 1 that one of the things that James says about true religion, the thing that James says about true religion, is that true religion visits the widows and the orphans in their affliction and remains unstained from the world. So what he's saying is, true religion, people who truly have a genuine faith, will care for the poor and the needy. They will care to be a voice to the voiceless. And in continuing to pull that thread here in chapter two, he basically says, you can't call yourself a believer. You can't say that you have a genuine saving faith if you don't help someone who is in need. If someone comes to you and they say, I'm wet and I'm cold and I need a jacket and I live, I'm homeless and I'm in need. And we say, in our double-layered North Face jackets, I will pray for you. Be warm and filled. I hope you find good food. There's a place downtown called Seat at the Table. You should figure out a way to get there. It's great. And then we leave. James is saying, you don't care for the poor and the needy. You just like to say that you do. You're like me this morning. I was watching a woman get out of her car with a baby, and I watched her do it for like 10 minutes. And at the last second, I was like, you want me to come get you an umbrella? And she said, I mean, I'm good by now. And then she walked in. Like, if I really wanted, if I really cared about her, I would have walked out there with an umbrella. I just cared for the perception that I cared, right? What we do shows what we believe. It actually evidences that. So what James is saying here, and it's important not to miss this, is that works are an unavoidable result of a genuine faith. Works, good works, and we're going to talk about what those are, are an unavoidable result of a genuine faith. It is a natural consequence. If you have a genuine, believing, saving faith, then God will work in your heart to change you. There's a verse in Matthew that says, if you delight yourselves in the laws of the Lord, then he will give you the desires of your heart. And I've always loved that verse because it makes it seem like if I simply just love the Bible, then God will give me all the stuff that I want. I'm going to be a billionaire in no time. But what it means is when we reflect on God's word and we delight ourselves in it, we grow more like the principles in it. We grow more like God in character. And slowly, over time, because we delight in His Word, our heart beats for the same things that God's heart beats for. Our hearts beat with God. This is how the Spirit gets in our life and changes us. And the things that we want slowly become the things that He wants. The things that He delights in are the things that we delight in. And we're told in Romans that when we are saved, when we become a believer, when we have a true saving faith, that the old self, the old version of ourself that was a slave to sin, is buried with Christ and that this new self is resurrected with him on Easter. That's why baptism is a symbol of this rebirth. We go under the water. That's our old self being cast off and we rise as our new selves that God has radically and fundamentally changed. This new self has a Holy Spirit that's given to us as a down payment on our salvation, who speaks into us, who convicts us when we're going wrong, who encourages us when we're doing right. And so everything in Scripture points to the unavoidable reality that when God fundamentally changes our heart, when we have a saving faith and He rushes into our lives, that the unavoidable result is good works. Because we no longer have to choose our good works. They're a natural manifestation of the faith that is going on inside of us. That's what James is saying. And in saying this, this is important, James actually agrees with Jesus. In saying this, James actually agrees with the teachings of Jesus you have in your notes there. And at home, you should have been able to download the notes on the Gracevine. You have in your notes there two references, John 15, 5 and John 13, 35. And he says in those, John 15, 5 is this wonderful passage. He says, I am the vine and you are the branches. In our vernacular, I am the trunk and you are the branches. I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. I've talked about this before. When a branch is attached to a tree, it doesn't have to worry about when to produce the fruit or what kind of fruit to produce. All it has to worry about is staying attached to that tree. And Jesus says, if you abide in me and I in you, if you obey me, if you follow me, if you pursue me, if you walk with me, if you abide in me, then you will bear much fruit. You won't have to try to bear the fruit. You won't have to try to do the good works. You won't have to make a conscious effort to do it. Just abide in me and it will naturally produce a fruit in your life. James is simply agreeing with Jesus. He's saying it another way. He's saying it in a more pointed way so it's easier to understand. Then Jesus says again in John 13 35, he says, I give you a new command to love others as I have loved you. And then he says that the world will know that you are my disciples by your love for one another. The world will know that you are my children by what you do, by how you treat one another, by your actions. Jesus says you can say all day long that you love your brother. This is the exact example that James gives. You can say you love the poor and the needy, but if you walk away with your warm coat, then you don't. You don't really believe. Faith isn't really there. Jesus says, the world will know by your actions who you are. It's not a matter of just saying it. And honestly, we understand this principle. We get it. We've experienced this, that if there is love, there will be evidence, right? If you're not married, I think you can still appreciate the principles of this. When a husband and wife are married, when they get married, they stand at the altar and they make vows to each other. And they promise, I will love you and be faithful to you in sickness and in health and good times and in bad, in joy as well as in sorrow. It's one thing to stand on the altar and say those things. I had no clue what that meant when I was 25 years old. I said them and I meant them with my whole heart. I know what they mean now more than I did then. And those of you who have been married for 30 and 40 years, you know even way more than me what those words mean. And a husband, listen, a husband can tell his wife that he loves her. He can write her a nice card on her birthday, I love you, you're the best, you're the most beautiful woman in the world. Which apparently when people get married, everyone's unrealistic, right? I'm married to the most handsome man ever. Are you? Because we all look pretty average. Anyways, you can say nice things and it's fine to do that. It's fine to give a mental assent to it. But a wife knows if she's loved, right? If a husband loves his wife, he won't just tell her. He'll run interference for her on Saturday morning with the kids to try to let her get a little bit more sleep than she normally does. He'll clean the kitchen without being asked to clean the kitchen. He'll make a big deal over her birthday if she wants a big deal made of it. He'll make a little deal over her birthday if she wants a little deal made of it. He'll say kind things to her. He'll let her watch what she wants to watch. He'll take her car out on the weekend and wash it and fill it up with gas so that she doesn't have to worry about that. He'll learn the little things that let his wife know that she is loved. And she never has to wonder at that. And if a guy just says occasionally, hey, I love you, you know you're the best, and then never does anything, that's not love. That's selfishness. We understand this principle. We know this to be true in our own lives, and it's true of our faith as well. And it's so true of our faith, and James actually takes this, he actually doubles down on this. This idea of faith will produce works. Love will be manifested in how we act. By presenting us with this idea, and this is where it starts to get scary. According to James, mental assent is not the same as faith. Mental assent is not the same as faith. Promising love on the altar is not the same as loving for 30 years. Just agreeing mentally that Jesus is the Son of God is not a saving faith. This is why Jesus says another scary statement in the Gospels, not everyone who says unto me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. That should give you pause. This should give you pause. If what you're clinging to for your salvation is a prayer that you prayed when you were eight, the mental assent that you gave, we need to do some introspection about whether or not we have a saving faith. And I say that mental assent is not the same as faith because look at what James says in verse 19. He says, you believe that God is one. You do well. In other translations it says, good. Even the demons believe and shudder. You know who else knows that Jesus is the Son of God? Satan. You know who has way better theology than all of us collectively in this room? Demons. They know the Bible inside and out. They know who Jesus is, and they are scared of him. Yet they have not placed their faith in him for eternal life. They're still working towards something else. So a faith that simply gives a mental assent, that simply says, yeah, I think that's probably true, is a demonic faith, according to James. And we don't talk about demons and Satan here a lot, but it's in the passage. This is what he says, and this ought to give us pause that even demons go, yeah, Jesus is the Son of God, and they're scared of him, yet they don't have faith because it's more than just a mental assent. It's more than just agreeing with the set of facts. It's more than just confessing that Jesus is the Son of God. Again, I'll go back to that writing in Paul and Romans. If we confess with our hearts, if we confess with our mouths and believe in our hearts that Jesus is the Son of God, then we will be saved. Some of us stop at confessing with our mouths. That's where demons stop. And that's a scary, scary thing. James takes it a little bit further as he finishes out the passage. And he says that faith that doesn't provide works isn't even a saving faith. Faith that doesn't produce works isn't even a saving faith. He says it this way at the end of the passage. He says, A faith that is simply claimed and not evidenced and not met out with a series of good works and good deeds and love and grace and kindness, that's a dead faith. That's not a saving faith. A faith that we cling to because of a prayer that we prayed years ago and then nothing in our life changed after that is not a saving faith. That's why I am of the conviction, I've thought this for a long time from where I sit in ministry, that the surest sign that the gospel has taken root in someone's life is a radical change in their priorities. I've watched families come and go from churches. And you see families come and they profess a faith. They confess that they believe. And they come and maybe church attendance gets ramped up for a little bit. Maybe they're excited about it. They're caught up in the moment. But nothing between Sundays really changes. They still roll with the same group of people. And it's great. We ought to roll with the same group of people. We ought to have our friends who are not believers, but they can't be our only friends, and they can't have the only values that we emulate and try to not adopt. And the way that they spend their money doesn't change, and the way they spend their time doesn't change, and the way that they seek joy doesn't change. The only thing that really changes is now they go to church, and it makes them feel a little bit better. But eventually, eventually they'll start to fade away and then a year or two later, it's like that was just a flash in the pan. It was a confession, but it wasn't a sincere belief. Conversely, I've watched families profess a faith, come into church, kind of slowly step their way in, slowly take their next steps of obedience, becoming disciples of Christ, join small group, begin to give. Well, a huge indicator of someone's faith, and I don't talk about giving a lot, so hopefully you'll allow me this, is whether or not they give. I'm not talking about the church. I'm just talking about being generous people. Why else would you give 10% of your income away unless you were in love with a God who allowed you to do that as part of obedience to him? It doesn't make any sense. Why would a family do that unless God had radically changed their priorities? I've watched families come in and they had kids on ball teams and they were gone most weekends during the fall and the spring and every night of the week and it was consuming them. And they said, listen, because of our faith, because we want to be around church people more, we're not doing that. We're going to ratchet back all of our involvement everywhere else so that we can be involved in church. It's a radical change in priorities. I'm not saying that every family has to do that, but I am saying that that family radically changed their priorities. And to me, it's evidence that faith has taken hold. But James is very clear. If your faith is a faith that clings to a confession that you made years ago, and in the wake of your life, there is no difference. You're no different now than you were five years ago, and only you know the answer to that. And let me just twist it a little harder as I say that. Don't let yourself off the hook with this. Don't find pockets and ways to make yourself better when you really know that you're the same. If that's our faith, and there are no works, James says it's dead. So by now, you ought to be asking the question, well, crap, man, what are the works then? Because I'm a little nervous right now. What are the works that I ought to be producing? How do I know that I know that I know? How can I be certain? What kind of works is faith going to manifest in my life? I would point you to three passages to answer this question. The first is James 1.27. We talked about it earlier. I talked about it two weeks ago. It's the true religion passage. James says that, and I've that we are his disciples by our love for one another. So we should ask ourselves, as I look back on the wake of my life, do I have an increasing heart for the needy? Do I have an increasing desire to help those who are facing injustice and to be a voice for the voiceless? Or do I care about them as little now as I always have? Do I have an increased desire for holiness? Is the Holy Spirit in me, speaking into me and encouraging me as I venture into places where I need not be? Is he encouraging me as I venture towards places and people where I do need to be? Do I see that in my life? And then according to Jesus, do I look in my life and I see a wake of love in my life? Are there people who would point to me and say, I'm closer to Jesus because they love me well? Has that been manifesting itself in your life in such a way? And listen, the litmus test for this love, this godly love, this faith-inspired love that Jesus gives us is not loving the people who love us back. That's easy. Everyone does that. It's loving the people who don't love you back. It's loving the people that you don't have to love. It's loving the people when there's no transaction there. I'm not getting anything out of this. I just love you and I care for you. Do you have an increased wake of people that you love in your life that you don't have to love, that are sometimes unlovable? James says, if you have a genuine faith, then the answer to that question will be yes. And finally, Paul says in Galatians, we're told that we receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment for our salvation, that when we are saved, when we have a genuine faith, that the Holy Spirit rushes into our life, and that the Holy Spirit produces fruit. And the fruit of the Holy Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. So again, look at the wake of your life over the last three to five years. Are you producing? Are you experiencing more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? Are you still the cranky grump that you've always been? Is it more? Is it less? Is it the same? And now listen. I know this is not a fun sermon. You did not get up and shower and brave the rain and you families, we opened kids ministry today. You didn't get your kids ready so that you could come in here and I could kick you in the teeth. I'm sorry about that. This is a hard one. If you're feeling uncomfortable, you should. If you're doubting your salvation, that's all right. Because Paul tells us in Philippians that we should continually work out our salvation with fear and trembling, that our understanding of our salvation and our relationship with God will change over the years. And if it's not, and if it's not challenged, and we're just allowed to walk through life clinging to this thing that we said once and not seeing any works and not actually being a genuine believer and not experiencing genuine faith, shame on me if I'm your pastor for years and I never confront you with the truth that James gives us here. I have to. And here's why we need to have these hard conversations with ourselves. Here's why we need to think through this and ask the question, do I have a genuine faith? Do I see that in my life? Am I sure that I'm sure that I'm sure? This week, Jen and I spent the week back home. Jen and Lily are driving back today. I've shared with the church through the journey. Jen's dad, about two years ago, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And so we've been walking through that, Jen and I have, as a family and with her family. And this last week, he made the decision to stop treatment and receive hospice care in the home. And so we went home to be with the family. The good news is, it was a really, it was a good, sweet, peaceful, life-giving, gracious week. It was good to be around the family. And we're probably talking about months, not weeks. And so that's good too. And we're looking forward to sweet times with John as a whole family. I would also say for those of you who love Jen, please direct your condolences through me. The last thing she needs is to drive home from Athens, be sad that she is not with her dad right now, and then have to answer emails and texts about how he's doing and thinking and all that stuff. So direct those through me. Thank you. But here's why I bring it up. Because I sat with that man this week who has a genuine faith. We were joking about the multiple jackets that he's given to homeless people and sign spinners on the corner of the road. He just stops his car, gets out of the car, and hands him his jacket. He worked at AT&T for years and years and years. He was the vice president of international real estate, yet he knew the name of the parking attendants, he knew their birthdays, and he gave them gifts. He left gifts for the cleaning people in his office. He had a genuine faith. And now, as he's made the decision to embrace death, he is totally fearless and completely at peace. He is living out the verse that says, oh death, where is your sting? It has none for John because he's not fearful. He's totally at peace and he's going to see his Savior. And he's looking forward to it. I want you to have that peace. I want you to know that peace. I want my church to understand what that is. And that peace doesn't come by avoiding the hard truths in Scripture. It comes by continually working out our salvation with fear and with trembling. It comes with being sure that we know that we know. It comes with a genuine faith that will unavoidably produce works. I want you to have that faith too. I want you to have that peace too. So go home. Be concerned. Be confused. Be fearful. Work it out. Make sense of it. If I've confused you today, email me. Let's have a Zoom call or let's have a lunch and let's talk about it. But it's a good thing to have these conversations. It's a good thing to think through these, because when we do, we can be sure that we're sure that we're sure, and we can live our lives in perfect peace, and that's what I want for you, and that's what I want for my church. Let's pray, and then I think we're going to sing one more song together. Father, you were good. In loss, you are good. In grief, you are present. And in joys, you celebrate. So God, thank you for all of those moments and all the ways that you're with us. Lord, I pray that no one here would unnecessarily doubt that they know you. On the flip side, God, I pray that some of us would very necessarily doubt it and that in that doubt we would find a saving faith for maybe the first time ever. God, if any of us listening to me now needs to cry out to you as we sing this song, would we do that? Would you give us the courage to kneel at our house or in these rows or stand and maybe not sing and maybe just pray and search our hearts for where we are with you? Give us a genuine faith. Give us a faith that's rooted so deeply that we abide in you and you produce fruit in us. Give us the peace that comes when we know that we know you. It's in your son's name that I pray all these things. Amen.