Matthew

Good morning. My name is Doug Bergeson, and I am a partner here at Grace. Typically, when I say good morning, it's supposed to elicit a response, but I don't want to put too much pressure on you. Thank you. Hold on to your hats, because we are going to kick this morning off with a bang. We're going to play one round of Final Jeopardy for all the marbles, okay? And just to refresh, I will give you the answer, and you, our studio audience, is to find the question that best fits that answer. You got it? Okay, here we go. A, sitting at a dead stop on I-95. B, anesthesia-free root canal. C, listening to a celebrity athlete refer to himself exclusively in the third person. D, being waterboarded. E, death by meteor. And F, all of the above. Okay, now your job is to answer in the form of a question. Just shout it out. Someone asked, Nate asked if that was my wife. No, no. She was thinking it, but she's not that type to do that. No, no, that's very kind of you. I wish that you had made it a little less personal, a little less hurtful. What kind of sermon? I'm looking for what kind of sermon? Stewardship sermon, I guess. That's right, a sermon on giving. You know, it's a little sad and depressing for me that you found that so easy to answer. What really stings is that there are some of you out there who answered that question without any sense of irony, without any sense that it was meant to be a joke. I was watching a few of you, and you were actually sitting there trying to answer it seriously. Yeah, I think I'd rather die by a meteor than have to listen to Doug. But okay, well, too bad. I'm here. I'm going to go for it, and you just have to put up with it, okay? But first, let me open us in prayer. Dear Lord, thank you for this morning. Thank you for all these people. Help me say what it is you want me to say and help it to be profitable for us. And it's your name we pray, amen. Okay, as we are kicking off our capital campaign, Grace is Going Home, I've been asked to speak on biblical stewardship, how we invest our resources, our energy, our passions, our time, and our finances. But what I have to say this morning really doesn't have anything to do with our campaign. It encompasses it. It's included in that. Rather, though, I want to share my understanding of what the Bible teaches about biblical stewardship, about giving, about the importance and practice of it. I also want to push back against some of the ways biblical teaching has been misrepresented and misunderstood. My hope is to adjust the lens through which we see giving in a way that reveals it to be the blessing and the privilege that God intended. Now, I've heard a bunch of stewardship sermons over the years, some better than others, and good or bad, compelling or not, they all kind of typically hit the same notes. You know, one being that, boy, the Bible talks a lot about giving, so it must be really important, and you better pay attention, that God is the owner and source of everything. So why do we even fuss? You know, and why do we even think that it's any of ours in the first place? How we should use our resources for God's glory. How giving expresses our thanks to God and is an outward expression of a confession, really, of the gospel. And how our giving can help people in important ways. And typically, your stewardship sermon ends, sort of seals the deal with an emotional and heart-rending story of how a certain gift made an enormous difference in someone's life. You're not going to hear any of that from me this morning. No bringing you to the emotional brink. No pulling at your heartstrings. No litany of all the great things grace can accomplish helped by your generosity. Another thing you're not going to hear from me is something that every stewardship sermon and stewardship campaign has either said outright or strongly implied, that God and His church need our money. They need our tithes and offerings to carry on their business. Now, I'm exaggerating just a little bit, but it sounded sometimes as if God is up in heaven, fingers crossed, anxiously waiting to see if Debbie and I come through with an appropriate tithe so that the work of the church can move forward. And that's only a part of it. If you're all familiar with the Bible standards for giving, you know that the bar is set pretty high. It is hard to do right. There are a lot of boxes to check. Not only are we supposed to give, but we're supposed to be generous about it. And being generous might not even be good enough because the Bible standard is sacrificial giving. And not only are we asked to give generously, perhaps even sacrificially, but we're supposed to give in a spirit that considers others' needs more important than our own. Not only are we asked to give generously and with the proper care and concern for others, but we're supposed to give freely, not out of obligation or compulsion. Finally, it's not enough to give generously, even sacrificially, thinking only of others, not at all about ourselves, freely, not out of obligation or compulsion. There's one added kicker. We're supposed to do it joyfully. We're supposed to be happy about it. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my, how do we do all that? Not surprisingly, my track record is pretty mixed in meeting all those expectations. I'm not at all convinced I'm doing it right, doing it well, or doing it enough, and I know I am not alone in thinking that. If you could see me when I open my checkbook, I'm not sure you would remark to yourself, well, would you look at that? Look how cheerful Doug is. More often, you would see someone who's trying to be a good soldier, who's giving out of his abundance, who's giving out of a sense of need, who's giving out of a sense of obligation, recognizing that the need's here and elsewhere. You know, of course, there have been times when a specific appeal, maybe a church or a cause or perhaps a mission trip, has really gotten a hold of me and touched me, where I became emotionally invested, you know, and I've really got fired up, kind of like a sugar high. But before too long, I always seem to settle back into the less emotional, more mundane and murky exercise of balancing what I need and want with what I think God needs and wants from me. What's the right amount? I don't want to be stingy, but do I really want to go overboard? What's enough? If I give everything away, is that better? Is that inherently more spiritual? How does that square with my responsibility to my family? There's a tension. It's as if I'm in a Turkish bazaar bargaining with God. My goal, more often than not, is to try to arrive at a number that allows me to feel good about myself and sufficiently faithful because I gave God his part without impinging too much on the things that I want, the things I'm used to doing and having, the things others in my life want and expect. Something's lost in this process. That simply can't be what the biblical writers are talking about. For some of us, that sense of obligation leads to a desire to seek God's approval, to do enough to please him, to check that box. For others, it can lead to a pervading sense that giving is a zero-sum game, that when we give, inevitably we forfeit something of equal or greater value. It can also leave open the door for spiritual pride, the thinking that, you know, we're really coming through for the church and for God, that we are one of his 18, you know, a sense of self-righteousness and self-satisfaction. Or the pendulum can easily swing in the other direction, where that sense of obligation leads to guilt or a sense that somehow we're disappointing God. For others, we might simply tune it all out and convince ourselves that we're at a stage of life where this really doesn't apply to us. If we have young kids, we're just starting out, my pace sucks at work, blah, blah, blah. We'll worry about that later. So I became increasingly dissatisfied with what I was hearing about giving. It left a bad taste in my mouth. Nothing I had heard had equipped me to give as the Bible wanted me to, generously, joyfully, with a genuinely compassionate heart and caring heart, not out of obligation or compulsion. It's not that all those reasons for giving that I had heard were wrong. They're not. But something was missing, something big and vital to the understanding and practice of biblical giving. And because they didn't tell the whole story, those reasons simply weren't enough for me to experience giving as God intended. So what was missing? It's a $64 question. I'll tell you what was missing. I needed to be more selfish about my giving. That's what was missing. I needed to think about my giving in a much more self-interested light. I needed to understand better what was in it for me. Why? Because giving isn't for God. It's for you and me to benefit and help us. Now, the Bible does talk a ton about the importance of giving. No argument there. An enormous emphasis is placed on giving generosity in Scripture. But all those sermons and stewardship campaigns that I heard had it backwards. Giving's not important to God because he needs it. God wants us to give because we need it, because of the magnificent things the act of giving can do for our stubborn human hearts, how it can shape them, transform them, and move them to a better place. There's no question that our giving can help others, but what's too often missed is how profoundly our giving can help us. The idea that God and his church need our money creates a sense of obligation and duty that misleads and ties us in all kinds of knots. And it does the experience of giving a huge disservice. Now, this may come as a shocker, but God is perfectly capable of doing what he intends to do without your or my help. Scripture's pretty emphatic at that point. Listen to this passage from Psalm 50, written at a time when God's people, the nation of Israel, were seeming to be very faithful and obedient. They were giving lots of tithes and offerings. But they too had it backwards by thinking that their sacrifices and offerings were what were important to God, as if he needed them. This is God talking. I have no need of a bull from your stall or goats from your pens. For every animal of the forest is mine and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird in the mountains and the creatures of the field are mine. If I was hungry, I would not tell you. I love that. I love that. You know, that seems pretty clear to me clear to me. God values our giving and graciously accepts and uses our gifts, but he does so for us, for our good, for what giving can do to our weak and frail and wandering human hearts. When I said I needed to view my giving more selfishly, when I needed to think about giving in a more selfish light, it's to embrace and lean into this truth that giving can be life-changing for the giver. And the sooner one grasps that truth, the sooner biblical stewardship seems less like an obligation and more like a gift, less like a duty and more like a privilege, less like eating your Brussels sprouts. And I'm referring to Brussels sprouts before you. All the new recipes the last 20 years where they throw in brown sugar. The kind of Brussels sprouts my mom made for us. She boiled them and maybe if she was in a really good charitable mood, she'd sprinkle a little salt, a little pinch of salt. They were horrible. So remember that when you're thinking that. Don't say, oh yeah, I like Brussels sprouts. So it'll be less like eating your Brussels sprouts and a lot more like a cream-filled donut. Not to overstate things, but how we think about giving is a game changer. When one thinks of it primarily as an obligation, the act of giving is robbed of much of its joy and its power to transform our lives. And it's very hard not to think of it as an obligation unless one sees that it is the giver who benefits from giving as much or more than anyone or anything else. Giving is a gift for the giver first and foremost because of its power to move and shape our hearts. My go-to passage in scripture is one many of you are probably familiar with. It's from Matthew chapter 6. I adore this verse. This is Jesus talking. It's one of the most straightforward passages in all of Scripture. And for God's purposes, for what he's trying to accomplish, one of the most useful. Wherever I place my time, my energies, my passions, my affections, my confidence, my joy, my hope, and yes, even my financial resources, that's where you'll find my heart. Now, you might have noticed when I came up here that I brought a rug with me, a very special rug. Way back in the late 1980s, Deb and I finally had a little bit of discretionary income. And I forget how now, but I developed an interest in Oriental rugs. I found them just exquisitely beautiful works of art, each one painstakingly hand-woven over very many months. And, you know, I was enthralled with them, and I went as far as to start buying a few and spending what, for Debbie and I, was a lot of money. Now, you have to bear with me, because I actually have to bend. This is Persian from the holy city of Gom in central Iran. It's woven out of silk with hundreds of knots per square inch. The signature of its master weaver, or Rami, is woven in Farsi here at the top. Needless to say, my rugs immediately became part of my treasure. One way you could tell they were my treasure is that when anyone was coming over to the house, I would scurry and roll it up and put it away for fear that it would be spilled on. Now some might say that defeats the purpose of having a rug if you put it away whenever it might be seen or walked on, but I didn't care. Another way you could tell that these rugs were part of my treasure is that for about, oh, roughly the first thousand times she ever vacuumed them, I couldn't help myself. I felt compelled to gently remind Debbie that she needed to be careful, very careful, and never, I mean never, suck up the fringe for fear that that's not as tightly woven and it unravels and falls apart. I have since stopped that practice, fearing that I might suffer an unusual and tragically fatal accident while sleeping in bed one night. Now, I'm not saying that it's wrong to appreciate and enjoy beautiful things. It's simply to illustrate how easily they capture our affections, how easily they become part of our treasure. Far more than supporting a church or funding a ministry, giving away our resources can be a most powerful antidote for all those things in our lives that compete to be our treasure, a very practical and effective way to help us loosen our grip on our earthly treasure. When we give and invest in the things God cares most about, in things that can have an eternal impact, whether we know it or not, whether we can feel it or not, we are moving our heart's center of gravity. And we are adjusting the lens through which we view our lives, our world, and our futures. Cultivating a perspective that increasingly mirrors God's. God does not need or want our money. What God covets is our hearts. That's what he's fighting for. And the act of giving is one of his most effective tools to align our hearts with his. Now, I might have raised a few eyebrows earlier when I said that in order to experience giving as God intended, joyfully, generously, compassionately, and freely, I needed to understand giving in a much more self-interested light. Surely, someone must have been out there thinking to themselves, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Isn't Christianity all about being completely and utterly unselfish? Never thinking of yourself, but always considering others more important? Yes and no. It's certainly true that we are called to be unselfish in the sense of considering others' well-being before our own. But that's not the same as saying that it's not in our selfish best interest to do that. In Luke 9, Jesus explains it this way. Again, this is Jesus talking. So here's Jesus calling us to serve and to sacrifice and follow his example, but that we do this ultimately to benefit. And it may surprise some, but any notion that self-interest is somehow anti-Christian is not supported in Scripture. How we act in our own self-interest is where we've gone off the rails. That's been the problem since the Garden of Eden, not the self-interest itself. In fact, the Bible consistently encourages us to pursue a life of faith precisely because it's in our best interest to do that. Taking it one step further, placing your faith and trust in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is the single most self-interested thing one can ever possibly do. Okay, so what now? What am I suggesting each of us do? First is to simply acknowledge that where we lay up our treasure is where you'll find our hearts. It's as night follows day. It's really pretty straightforward. So if you care at all about the condition of your heart, you can't really avoid some introspection, some question about where you're laying up your treasure. Second, I want to encourage each of us to lean into the transformational power of giving by taking a step or two forward, whatever that step might be for you. Far more than an obligation, the ability to share our resources is an opportunity and a privilege that we should not let go to waste. Few things are as effective in helping us move our treasure to where moth and rust won't destroy. Few things have such potential to align the beat of our heart to the rhythm of God's own. However, please keep in mind that moving our treasure doesn't happen overnight. It's a process. I'm reminded of a time about 20 years ago when I started a Navy SEAL workout plan at home. I get it. Feel free to snicker. I'm not Navy SEAL material. Nevertheless, I kicked off what was supposed to be a 12-week program of two and a half strenuous hours each day, six days a week. Turns out, this is also a shocker, it was too much. It was too soon, and it was way too unpleasant. After six weeks, I had completely given up and was back upstairs in my office eating milk duds all afternoon, doing exactly zero hours of strenuous exercise each day. And that's how these things often work. And moving our treasure is no different. Far better to advance the ball, to take a step or two forward, wherever you are in your journey. Forward progress and movement are the keys. I've been at the stewardship thing a long time, and I've already shared some of my struggles, but my growing appreciation for how giving blesses me has made a difference. In all my years, I don't think I've ever given sacrificially in the sense of really giving up something I really, really wanted and needed. But over the last few weeks, as I've been thinking about my experience with giving, I've come to see that's not exactly how God works. I've always viewed sacrificial giving as coming through what I call the front door perspective, in which a battle of the will takes place right out in the open of my consciousness. A forceful bending of my will, giving up something I really need or want simply out of obedience and faith. I collapse. Exhausted and spent, but faithful and obedient, confident in God's smiling approval. You rock, Doug. Well done, good and faithful servant. Now the key is getting up. I didn't really practice that very good. But I no longer believe that's how giving sacrificially or otherwise actually works. Rather, much more quietly and far less dramatically, God enters through our back door and starts working on us, using our giving to slowly change what we think we need and what we think we want, what's important to us, and a priority. In fact, I'm beginning to suspect that the people who actually do give sacrificially don't even necessarily know they're doing it, because at this point, what they view as valuable, what they treasure, has moved and evolved so much. Personally, I have a long way to go, But I can honestly say that over the years, God has used his gift of giving to slowly but surely move my treasure, and thus my heart, to a far better place. The things that I think I need and want have changed, and I've come to view the opportunity afforded by giving as much more of a privilege and much more of a joy than ever before, and I find that enormously encouraging and hopeful. In closing, it's more than okay to think about how giving benefits us. In fact, I think it's critical to understand if we truly seek the life that God has designed for us, life that is truly life. Listen to this lavish promise from 1 Timothy. Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant, nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. In this way, they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life. Back in the 1950s, a young missionary traveled deep into the jungle of Ecuador to spread the good news of Jesus Christ to people who hadn't heard it. He and his four colleagues were found murdered along a remote riverbank, murdered by the very tribespeople they had gone to find. A famous saying is attributed to that young missionary, and it's stuck with me over the years, and it really captures what I've tried to share this morning. He had written it in his personal journal six years before he died, and this is what he wrote. He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose. He this morning. Thank you for your magnificent plan of redemption that graciously includes us. And you do that because in your wisdom, that's how we change. That's how we grow. That's how we prepare for eternity. Thank you for giving, for not only what it does and the witness it provides, but also what it does to our human hearts. And we thank you for loving us, for pursuing us, and for the hope that you give us. And it's your name we pray. Amen.

Good morning. My name is Doug Bergeson, and I am a partner here at Grace. Typically, when I say good morning, it's supposed to elicit a response, but I don't want to put too much pressure on you. Thank you. Hold on to your hats, because we are going to kick this morning off with a bang. We're going to play one round of Final Jeopardy for all the marbles, okay? And just to refresh, I will give you the answer, and you, our studio audience, is to find the question that best fits that answer. You got it? Okay, here we go. A, sitting at a dead stop on I-95. B, anesthesia-free root canal. C, listening to a celebrity athlete refer to himself exclusively in the third person. D, being waterboarded. E, death by meteor. And F, all of the above. Okay, now your job is to answer in the form of a question. Just shout it out. Someone asked, Nate asked if that was my wife. No, no. She was thinking it, but she's not that type to do that. No, no, that's very kind of you. I wish that you had made it a little less personal, a little less hurtful. What kind of sermon? I'm looking for what kind of sermon? Stewardship sermon, I guess. That's right, a sermon on giving. You know, it's a little sad and depressing for me that you found that so easy to answer. What really stings is that there are some of you out there who answered that question without any sense of irony, without any sense that it was meant to be a joke. I was watching a few of you, and you were actually sitting there trying to answer it seriously. Yeah, I think I'd rather die by a meteor than have to listen to Doug. But okay, well, too bad. I'm here. I'm going to go for it, and you just have to put up with it, okay? But first, let me open us in prayer. Dear Lord, thank you for this morning. Thank you for all these people. Help me say what it is you want me to say and help it to be profitable for us. And it's your name we pray, amen. Okay, as we are kicking off our capital campaign, Grace is Going Home, I've been asked to speak on biblical stewardship, how we invest our resources, our energy, our passions, our time, and our finances. But what I have to say this morning really doesn't have anything to do with our campaign. It encompasses it. It's included in that. Rather, though, I want to share my understanding of what the Bible teaches about biblical stewardship, about giving, about the importance and practice of it. I also want to push back against some of the ways biblical teaching has been misrepresented and misunderstood. My hope is to adjust the lens through which we see giving in a way that reveals it to be the blessing and the privilege that God intended. Now, I've heard a bunch of stewardship sermons over the years, some better than others, and good or bad, compelling or not, they all kind of typically hit the same notes. You know, one being that, boy, the Bible talks a lot about giving, so it must be really important, and you better pay attention, that God is the owner and source of everything. So why do we even fuss? You know, and why do we even think that it's any of ours in the first place? How we should use our resources for God's glory. How giving expresses our thanks to God and is an outward expression of a confession, really, of the gospel. And how our giving can help people in important ways. And typically, your stewardship sermon ends, sort of seals the deal with an emotional and heart-rending story of how a certain gift made an enormous difference in someone's life. You're not going to hear any of that from me this morning. No bringing you to the emotional brink. No pulling at your heartstrings. No litany of all the great things grace can accomplish helped by your generosity. Another thing you're not going to hear from me is something that every stewardship sermon and stewardship campaign has either said outright or strongly implied, that God and His church need our money. They need our tithes and offerings to carry on their business. Now, I'm exaggerating just a little bit, but it sounded sometimes as if God is up in heaven, fingers crossed, anxiously waiting to see if Debbie and I come through with an appropriate tithe so that the work of the church can move forward. And that's only a part of it. If you're all familiar with the Bible standards for giving, you know that the bar is set pretty high. It is hard to do right. There are a lot of boxes to check. Not only are we supposed to give, but we're supposed to be generous about it. And being generous might not even be good enough because the Bible standard is sacrificial giving. And not only are we asked to give generously, perhaps even sacrificially, but we're supposed to give in a spirit that considers others' needs more important than our own. Not only are we asked to give generously and with the proper care and concern for others, but we're supposed to give freely, not out of obligation or compulsion. Finally, it's not enough to give generously, even sacrificially, thinking only of others, not at all about ourselves, freely, not out of obligation or compulsion. There's one added kicker. We're supposed to do it joyfully. We're supposed to be happy about it. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my, how do we do all that? Not surprisingly, my track record is pretty mixed in meeting all those expectations. I'm not at all convinced I'm doing it right, doing it well, or doing it enough, and I know I am not alone in thinking that. If you could see me when I open my checkbook, I'm not sure you would remark to yourself, well, would you look at that? Look how cheerful Doug is. More often, you would see someone who's trying to be a good soldier, who's giving out of his abundance, who's giving out of a sense of need, who's giving out of a sense of obligation, recognizing that the need's here and elsewhere. You know, of course, there have been times when a specific appeal, maybe a church or a cause or perhaps a mission trip, has really gotten a hold of me and touched me, where I became emotionally invested, you know, and I've really got fired up, kind of like a sugar high. But before too long, I always seem to settle back into the less emotional, more mundane and murky exercise of balancing what I need and want with what I think God needs and wants from me. What's the right amount? I don't want to be stingy, but do I really want to go overboard? What's enough? If I give everything away, is that better? Is that inherently more spiritual? How does that square with my responsibility to my family? There's a tension. It's as if I'm in a Turkish bazaar bargaining with God. My goal, more often than not, is to try to arrive at a number that allows me to feel good about myself and sufficiently faithful because I gave God his part without impinging too much on the things that I want, the things I'm used to doing and having, the things others in my life want and expect. Something's lost in this process. That simply can't be what the biblical writers are talking about. For some of us, that sense of obligation leads to a desire to seek God's approval, to do enough to please him, to check that box. For others, it can lead to a pervading sense that giving is a zero-sum game, that when we give, inevitably we forfeit something of equal or greater value. It can also leave open the door for spiritual pride, the thinking that, you know, we're really coming through for the church and for God, that we are one of his 18, you know, a sense of self-righteousness and self-satisfaction. Or the pendulum can easily swing in the other direction, where that sense of obligation leads to guilt or a sense that somehow we're disappointing God. For others, we might simply tune it all out and convince ourselves that we're at a stage of life where this really doesn't apply to us. If we have young kids, we're just starting out, my pace sucks at work, blah, blah, blah. We'll worry about that later. So I became increasingly dissatisfied with what I was hearing about giving. It left a bad taste in my mouth. Nothing I had heard had equipped me to give as the Bible wanted me to, generously, joyfully, with a genuinely compassionate heart and caring heart, not out of obligation or compulsion. It's not that all those reasons for giving that I had heard were wrong. They're not. But something was missing, something big and vital to the understanding and practice of biblical giving. And because they didn't tell the whole story, those reasons simply weren't enough for me to experience giving as God intended. So what was missing? It's a $64 question. I'll tell you what was missing. I needed to be more selfish about my giving. That's what was missing. I needed to think about my giving in a much more self-interested light. I needed to understand better what was in it for me. Why? Because giving isn't for God. It's for you and me to benefit and help us. Now, the Bible does talk a ton about the importance of giving. No argument there. An enormous emphasis is placed on giving generosity in Scripture. But all those sermons and stewardship campaigns that I heard had it backwards. Giving's not important to God because he needs it. God wants us to give because we need it, because of the magnificent things the act of giving can do for our stubborn human hearts, how it can shape them, transform them, and move them to a better place. There's no question that our giving can help others, but what's too often missed is how profoundly our giving can help us. The idea that God and his church need our money creates a sense of obligation and duty that misleads and ties us in all kinds of knots. And it does the experience of giving a huge disservice. Now, this may come as a shocker, but God is perfectly capable of doing what he intends to do without your or my help. Scripture's pretty emphatic at that point. Listen to this passage from Psalm 50, written at a time when God's people, the nation of Israel, were seeming to be very faithful and obedient. They were giving lots of tithes and offerings. But they too had it backwards by thinking that their sacrifices and offerings were what were important to God, as if he needed them. This is God talking. I have no need of a bull from your stall or goats from your pens. For every animal of the forest is mine and the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird in the mountains and the creatures of the field are mine. If I was hungry, I would not tell you. I love that. I love that. You know, that seems pretty clear to me clear to me. God values our giving and graciously accepts and uses our gifts, but he does so for us, for our good, for what giving can do to our weak and frail and wandering human hearts. When I said I needed to view my giving more selfishly, when I needed to think about giving in a more selfish light, it's to embrace and lean into this truth that giving can be life-changing for the giver. And the sooner one grasps that truth, the sooner biblical stewardship seems less like an obligation and more like a gift, less like a duty and more like a privilege, less like eating your Brussels sprouts. And I'm referring to Brussels sprouts before you. All the new recipes the last 20 years where they throw in brown sugar. The kind of Brussels sprouts my mom made for us. She boiled them and maybe if she was in a really good charitable mood, she'd sprinkle a little salt, a little pinch of salt. They were horrible. So remember that when you're thinking that. Don't say, oh yeah, I like Brussels sprouts. So it'll be less like eating your Brussels sprouts and a lot more like a cream-filled donut. Not to overstate things, but how we think about giving is a game changer. When one thinks of it primarily as an obligation, the act of giving is robbed of much of its joy and its power to transform our lives. And it's very hard not to think of it as an obligation unless one sees that it is the giver who benefits from giving as much or more than anyone or anything else. Giving is a gift for the giver first and foremost because of its power to move and shape our hearts. My go-to passage in scripture is one many of you are probably familiar with. It's from Matthew chapter 6. I adore this verse. This is Jesus talking. It's one of the most straightforward passages in all of Scripture. And for God's purposes, for what he's trying to accomplish, one of the most useful. Wherever I place my time, my energies, my passions, my affections, my confidence, my joy, my hope, and yes, even my financial resources, that's where you'll find my heart. Now, you might have noticed when I came up here that I brought a rug with me, a very special rug. Way back in the late 1980s, Deb and I finally had a little bit of discretionary income. And I forget how now, but I developed an interest in Oriental rugs. I found them just exquisitely beautiful works of art, each one painstakingly hand-woven over very many months. And, you know, I was enthralled with them, and I went as far as to start buying a few and spending what, for Debbie and I, was a lot of money. Now, you have to bear with me, because I actually have to bend. This is Persian from the holy city of Gom in central Iran. It's woven out of silk with hundreds of knots per square inch. The signature of its master weaver, or Rami, is woven in Farsi here at the top. Needless to say, my rugs immediately became part of my treasure. One way you could tell they were my treasure is that when anyone was coming over to the house, I would scurry and roll it up and put it away for fear that it would be spilled on. Now some might say that defeats the purpose of having a rug if you put it away whenever it might be seen or walked on, but I didn't care. Another way you could tell that these rugs were part of my treasure is that for about, oh, roughly the first thousand times she ever vacuumed them, I couldn't help myself. I felt compelled to gently remind Debbie that she needed to be careful, very careful, and never, I mean never, suck up the fringe for fear that that's not as tightly woven and it unravels and falls apart. I have since stopped that practice, fearing that I might suffer an unusual and tragically fatal accident while sleeping in bed one night. Now, I'm not saying that it's wrong to appreciate and enjoy beautiful things. It's simply to illustrate how easily they capture our affections, how easily they become part of our treasure. Far more than supporting a church or funding a ministry, giving away our resources can be a most powerful antidote for all those things in our lives that compete to be our treasure, a very practical and effective way to help us loosen our grip on our earthly treasure. When we give and invest in the things God cares most about, in things that can have an eternal impact, whether we know it or not, whether we can feel it or not, we are moving our heart's center of gravity. And we are adjusting the lens through which we view our lives, our world, and our futures. Cultivating a perspective that increasingly mirrors God's. God does not need or want our money. What God covets is our hearts. That's what he's fighting for. And the act of giving is one of his most effective tools to align our hearts with his. Now, I might have raised a few eyebrows earlier when I said that in order to experience giving as God intended, joyfully, generously, compassionately, and freely, I needed to understand giving in a much more self-interested light. Surely, someone must have been out there thinking to themselves, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Isn't Christianity all about being completely and utterly unselfish? Never thinking of yourself, but always considering others more important? Yes and no. It's certainly true that we are called to be unselfish in the sense of considering others' well-being before our own. But that's not the same as saying that it's not in our selfish best interest to do that. In Luke 9, Jesus explains it this way. Again, this is Jesus talking. So here's Jesus calling us to serve and to sacrifice and follow his example, but that we do this ultimately to benefit. And it may surprise some, but any notion that self-interest is somehow anti-Christian is not supported in Scripture. How we act in our own self-interest is where we've gone off the rails. That's been the problem since the Garden of Eden, not the self-interest itself. In fact, the Bible consistently encourages us to pursue a life of faith precisely because it's in our best interest to do that. Taking it one step further, placing your faith and trust in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is the single most self-interested thing one can ever possibly do. Okay, so what now? What am I suggesting each of us do? First is to simply acknowledge that where we lay up our treasure is where you'll find our hearts. It's as night follows day. It's really pretty straightforward. So if you care at all about the condition of your heart, you can't really avoid some introspection, some question about where you're laying up your treasure. Second, I want to encourage each of us to lean into the transformational power of giving by taking a step or two forward, whatever that step might be for you. Far more than an obligation, the ability to share our resources is an opportunity and a privilege that we should not let go to waste. Few things are as effective in helping us move our treasure to where moth and rust won't destroy. Few things have such potential to align the beat of our heart to the rhythm of God's own. However, please keep in mind that moving our treasure doesn't happen overnight. It's a process. I'm reminded of a time about 20 years ago when I started a Navy SEAL workout plan at home. I get it. Feel free to snicker. I'm not Navy SEAL material. Nevertheless, I kicked off what was supposed to be a 12-week program of two and a half strenuous hours each day, six days a week. Turns out, this is also a shocker, it was too much. It was too soon, and it was way too unpleasant. After six weeks, I had completely given up and was back upstairs in my office eating milk duds all afternoon, doing exactly zero hours of strenuous exercise each day. And that's how these things often work. And moving our treasure is no different. Far better to advance the ball, to take a step or two forward, wherever you are in your journey. Forward progress and movement are the keys. I've been at the stewardship thing a long time, and I've already shared some of my struggles, but my growing appreciation for how giving blesses me has made a difference. In all my years, I don't think I've ever given sacrificially in the sense of really giving up something I really, really wanted and needed. But over the last few weeks, as I've been thinking about my experience with giving, I've come to see that's not exactly how God works. I've always viewed sacrificial giving as coming through what I call the front door perspective, in which a battle of the will takes place right out in the open of my consciousness. A forceful bending of my will, giving up something I really need or want simply out of obedience and faith. I collapse. Exhausted and spent, but faithful and obedient, confident in God's smiling approval. You rock, Doug. Well done, good and faithful servant. Now the key is getting up. I didn't really practice that very good. But I no longer believe that's how giving sacrificially or otherwise actually works. Rather, much more quietly and far less dramatically, God enters through our back door and starts working on us, using our giving to slowly change what we think we need and what we think we want, what's important to us, and a priority. In fact, I'm beginning to suspect that the people who actually do give sacrificially don't even necessarily know they're doing it, because at this point, what they view as valuable, what they treasure, has moved and evolved so much. Personally, I have a long way to go, But I can honestly say that over the years, God has used his gift of giving to slowly but surely move my treasure, and thus my heart, to a far better place. The things that I think I need and want have changed, and I've come to view the opportunity afforded by giving as much more of a privilege and much more of a joy than ever before, and I find that enormously encouraging and hopeful. In closing, it's more than okay to think about how giving benefits us. In fact, I think it's critical to understand if we truly seek the life that God has designed for us, life that is truly life. Listen to this lavish promise from 1 Timothy. Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant, nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. In this way, they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life. Back in the 1950s, a young missionary traveled deep into the jungle of Ecuador to spread the good news of Jesus Christ to people who hadn't heard it. He and his four colleagues were found murdered along a remote riverbank, murdered by the very tribespeople they had gone to find. A famous saying is attributed to that young missionary, and it's stuck with me over the years, and it really captures what I've tried to share this morning. He had written it in his personal journal six years before he died, and this is what he wrote. He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose. He this morning. Thank you for your magnificent plan of redemption that graciously includes us. And you do that because in your wisdom, that's how we change. That's how we grow. That's how we prepare for eternity. Thank you for giving, for not only what it does and the witness it provides, but also what it does to our human hearts. And we thank you for loving us, for pursuing us, and for the hope that you give us. And it's your name we pray. Amen.

My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's so good to see you. Thanks again so much for making grace a part of your Sunday morning. It's such a blessing when you are. Last week we wrapped up a series in a prayer out of Ephesians that we're making the prayer for 2024. And next week we're going to launch into what's going to be our spring series. It's going to carry us to Easter called Final Thoughts. It's going to be a look at what's called the Upper Room Discourse found in the second half of John chapter 13 all the way through John chapter 17. And you'll not be surprised to know that I'm excited to go through that series with you guys. I've been doing a lot of reading and studying there and I'm'm looking forward to sharing that with you. Right here this morning, we're taking a break between series to do an update Sunday. As many of you know, hopefully all of you know, we're in the midst of a campaign to build a permanent home for grace. We do not own this space, believe it or not, as nice as it is. It's not ours. But it is our goal and our hope and our belief that God wants us to have a permanent home. So we have four acres right around the corner on Litchford on which we intend to build about a 16,000 square foot building that's out there. You can take a look at it if you want. We believe it's God's desire for us to take steps of faith to be able to build on that land and move into a permanent home from which we will minister to serve the community and hopefully draw closer to God together. And I'm going to give you an update on where we stand with that at the end of the service today, because of course I'm going to wait to the end of the service. In the meantime, I also wanted to take this morning in the sermon to talk to you about the subject of giving, which I'm sure is very exciting for everyone. Yes, no one wakes up excited to hear a sermon on giving. As a matter of fact, we kind of cringe at the idea of the sermons on giving. And I've known that I was going to need to do this since the elders at the end of last year were like, hey, man, it's been a minute since you talked about giving. And I've known that I was going to need to do this since the elders at the end of last year were like, hey man, it's been a minute since you talked about giving, and we think that's an important thing to teach the people of God about. So we need to try to work that in. And I knew that they were right, but I haven't done a sermon on giving, I think in three or four years. As a matter of fact, the last sermon at Grace that was done on the idea of giving, tithing, stewardship, generosity, whatever you want to call it, was done by Doug Bergeson, one of our elders. And one of the reasons I've waited so long to preach one on giving is because his was so good, I wanted you to forget it before I had to preach one and you compared it. But like I said, it's been three or four years since I've done a sermon on giving. And it's not for the reason that you probably think it is. It's not because I don't, I'm shy about the topic. It's not because I don't want to put in front of you things that scripture says about it. As a matter of fact, my thought in leading you guys, and I've tried to lead this way since I was hired in 2017, is to be of the mindset that this room is full of, for the most part, smart adults. For the most part. This room is full of reasonable, spiritually mature people. For the most part. This room is full of reasonable, spiritually mature people for the most part. And I need to lead you in that way. So it's not that I'm shy about giving in its relationship with the church. You all know that if you don't give to grace, then grace doesn't exist. That's how it works. You guys are aware of real life. You know that if you're a partner of grace, we need you to give to grace. That's not a secret. Now, there's misconceptions about giving sometimes, and so we may not know all the details. And when I say that, I remember back at my previous church called Greystone, we had a couple of guys who were general contractors, and they, for a while, were helping us with some of our facilities. And so we were walking through the auditorium one day, two of the general contractors and me and the executive pastor, and they looked at us and they said, so how do you guys, like, get paid? And we said, you know, the church allots us a salary. And they go, but do you, like, do you make money on commission? And we said, what? And they go, like, if you invite a family and they start to give to the church, do you get a cut of that? And I said, no, but I'm going to do that at my next church. But I'll never forget it because I thought it was funny. We laughed. No, that's not how it works. It's a set salary, yada, yada, yada. So I know that not everybody understands all the mechanics, but you know the bottom line that if you don't give to the church, the church doesn't exist. That's just how it goes. So we don't need to be shy about that. And I would say two things. One, if this is your first time with us, this is not a typical Sunday, an update Sunday, and me talking like this is. But me talking about this, it's a special, specific Sunday. And two, if it's a turnoff to you that I'm talking about giving in the church, I don't know how to give you a longer break. You're just going to be mad at me. But we need to talk about giving. And the reason that it's been a while since I've used Sunday morning to focus on it is this. I think of Sundays, and there's more ways to think about them than this, but rudimentarily, I think of Sundays as either strategic Sundays or spiritual Sundays. Spiritual Sundays push the needle forward spiritually. They challenge us. They encourage us. They inspire us. They draw us closer to God. We leave here desiring God more. We leave here desiring to know Jesus more deeply. We leave here with hopefully our roots deepened a little bit. And spiritual Sundays are what I want to do every Sunday. You guys will remember, I'm not sure if it was last fall or fall before last, when we said, hey, we're not doing announcements anymore. And some of y'all made fun of me. And then we didn't start doing announcements again. We just started taking some time to tell you what was going on in the church. But the reason we did that is because we felt, Aaron and I did, that they disrupted the spiritual flow of what was happening in the service. And we didn't want to keep doing that. We wanted the service to be spiritual in nature and spiritual in focus, and for you guys to leave focusing on that, we didn't want to denigrate it with bringing it down to this practical level, but we had to accept and acknowledge that the Sunday morning time has to do some things for the church body that can't all be 100% spiritual all the time. And so we've accepted that and we've reinstalled announcements and that's fine. But in that ethos is a desire for every Sunday morning to be a spiritual encounter for you with your creator so you leave here feeling a little bit closer to him and more desirous of him than you did when you entered. So there's spiritual Sundays, but then there's also strategic Sundays. Strategic Sundays are Sundays that are necessary to inform you guys, to direct us, to point us to a place, to bring you along, and it's something that's needed in the life of the church at the time. And that's how I've kind of thought about giving sermons. Is that from time to time it's necessary to talk about giving because we need you guys to give so that we can do God's will. Because giving allows us to go and to serve God. Giving allows us to go and to build God's kingdom. Giving allows us to accomplish spiritual things. But as this sermon was coming up, and I was kind of wrapping my head around what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, it was really impressed upon me that I was very wrong in the way that I thought about the approach to those Sundays. And I wasn't wrong intentionally. I never made a conscious decision to relegate giving as a strategic topic rather than a spiritual one. I just somehow did it, thinking if we focus on spiritual things, that the other behaviors and practices will follow that are necessary. So let's just keep having spiritual Sundays. And how I've shortchanged you guys is by failing to realize that a Sunday spent talking about giving is very much a spiritual Sunday. Giving is a spiritually impactful act. And in fact, I would say the spiritual value of giving is diminished when we regard it as a means to an end. Giving doesn't allow us to serve God. It is serving God. Giving doesn't enable us to do God's will. It is God's will. Giving doesn't make spiritual things possible. It is a spiritual thing. It is what's best for us. It is what's good for us. God desires us to grow in our capacity to give. It is a spiritual discipline that is just as important as any other spiritual discipline. I said it this way. Learning to give is just as spiritually impactful as learning to repent. Learning to give is just as spiritually impactful as learning to repent. And that word repent there there I kind of labored over what to put there just consider it a placeholder for any spiritual discipline on which we would all agree We need to pursue post salvation Once you accept Christ as your Savior once you confess with your mouth and believe with your heart that he is who he says he is He did what he said he did and he's gonna do what he says he's gonna do We would all agree that there's a series of spiritual disciplines that we need to into our life. We need to learn to forgive. We need to learn to pray. We need to learn to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and be students of scripture. We need to learn how to show mercy, how to show grace, how to be kind. And we need to learn to be generous and to give. It's so on par with the other spiritual disciplines that in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 6, my men's group pointed out to me this week, Jesus puts giving on a spiritual plane with prayer and fasting, saying it is just as important for his people to give as it is for them to learn to pray, as it is for them to learn to forgive, as it is for them to learn to repent. So the act of giving is a spiritual act. It progresses us in our faith. The act of giving moves us closer to God. It deepens our desire for him. And we'll see in a minute that it grows our gratitude for Him. So really, it's to my detriment and yours that I don't talk about it more often. Because it's a spiritual act that makes our lives richer and brings us closer to the Father when we do it. Now there's any number of places I can go in the New Testament to show you how it's a spiritual act and what its benefits are for us. Why? Because when I say it's a spiritual act, in part what I mean is it's what's best for us. God tells us it's what's best for us, which seems counterintuitive because we kind of have a mindset in life that we're supposed to get all we can, can't all we get, and sit on our can, right? Like that's what we're supposed to do. We get everything we can, we keep it, and then we let it grow. That's what we do. So it seems counterintuitive that the best thing for us would be to have a mindset to begin to give part of that away. And yet God says it is best for us. God says he makes it very clear he wants us to be generous people. So I want to talk to you about two reasons, two things that it does for us when we give, two ways that it's spiritually impactful. There are myriad more, but these are the two that we have time to focus on this morning. I would first take your attention to Matthew chapter 6. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. You're going to see verse 21 on the screen, but I'm actually going to read a little bit prior to that, beginning in verse 19. Jesus says this in the Sermon on the Mount. Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourself treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy, where thieves do not break in and steal. Listen, for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. That is such a concept. Such a rich verse. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. In my men's group on Tuesday morning, we're going through the book of Matthew, and we arrived at chapters 6 and 7 on Tuesday. And there is so much to talk about that as I was reading for the morning, I thought we probably should have only read one chapter because there's just so much detail here. And despite there being so many things to discuss, we spent the entire discussion in this verse. What does that mean and how do we live that out? Where your treasure is there, your heart will be also. I've heard since I was a little kid, show me your calendar and your checkbook, and I can tell you what you care about. And it's absolutely true. And so what we see from this idea of where your treasure is, there your heart will be also, is that our passion goes with our giving. Our passion follows our giving. I think sometimes we wait to be passionate about something, and then we expect our giving to follow that passion. No, our passion will go where our giving goes, wherever our treasures are, wherever we spend our time and our talents and our treasures, our passion will follow that. And here's how I know that that's true experientially. A few years ago, Lily, she just turned eight, so she was four or five. She was on a four and five-year-old soccer team, and I agreed to coach it, which was an egregious error that I will never make again. I hated almost literally every second of it. We had several kids from the church also on that team, and so my small group would basically sit on the sidelines with their Yetis in their lawn chairs laughing at me as I screamed at their child to please pay attention to the game. Just literally laughing out loud at me the entire time. I hated it so much. I'll never do that again. If John asks me to coach his team when he's five, I'm going to tell him to kick rocks. So Lily, last spring, had her first soccer season in like real soccer. It was YMCA soccer. It like counted. They don't keep score yet, but I do. And she did okay. The coach was this lady named Heidi, and I really developed a respect for Heidi. She did an excellent job with the girls. I thought she approached practice in a really respectable way. And then she had an assistant coach named Jamie, who's just a really nice, friendly guy. I loved his demeanor with the girls. And so at the end of the season, I stayed out of it. I kind of would help Coach Lily a little bit and holler at her to get in the right spot. But that was it. But at the end of the season, Heidi and Jamie came to me. And Heidi said, you know, she had two daughters on the team. She was like, my oldest daughter is going to be playing at a different level now. I can't coach two teams. Jamie's going to be the head coach. Can you be his assistant coach so our girls can continue to play together? And I said, okay, I've got a couple caveats. Because she started talking about, we'll give you access to the portal. And I was like, I don't want access to any portals. I don't want any login information. I don't want to go to a single website. I'm not doing that. She's like, we'll send you the spreadsheet for playing time. You will not. I will not open it. You figure that out. It doesn't take two people to figure out how to make 10 girls play the same amount of time. All right? You do that. If you make me do it, I'll just sit lily. I'm not even going to think about it. And I'm like, I'm not. Like, I'll be at practice. I don't care what we do at practice. Don't ask for my input. So I'm just there for the name, okay, just to get our girls to play together. I'll play along. That's how I approach the season. But every Wednesday, Heidi and Jamie start texting. What do you think the girls need to work on tonight? And darn it if I didn't have some thoughts. And then we'd go, and the girls are running drills, and I'm like, ah, you're doing this wrong. So I'm going over there to help them. And then on Saturday, I can't help but interject a little bit. I'm telling you, by the end of the season, by the end of the season, Jen will attest to this, I'm on the sideline. You can hear my voice over the whole field the duration of the game, hollering at our girls to get into position and to move up and to push back and to attack and to yada, yada, yada. Like, I'm all in. When there's a timeout, I'm running out on the field, and I'm high-fiving the little girls. I love those little girls. Whenever they would do something great, like new, like, oh, look at that. She had a flash of this is really great. I would always turn and find Mom and Dad and celebrate that with them. By the end of the season, I loved them. I loved coaching. I was texting Jamie and Heidi during the day with jokes and thoughts. And at the end, they're like, can you help us next season? Yes, I'm all in. I can't wait. I thought about how excited I am for soccer season the other day, right? And it's because, I don't think it's because I'm like sports dad. I don't really care if Lily plays or not. It's because it was fun. It was fun to get to know the girls and to celebrate with them and to get to know the families. Like it was a good time. My passion followed my time. My passion followed my giving. Jen and I give to some nonprofits. I get a lot of emails, updates, nonprofits. I don't read hardly any of them. But if I give, I read. Not because I want to see what my money's doing, because it's not a lot. The answer is not much, buddy. But because I'm genuinely interested in those ministries and I want to know what's happening and I want to know that they're thriving. When we give of our time and our talents and our treasures to the things of God, our heart for the things of God grows. If you want more passion for the church, if you want more passion for the things of God, for organizations that are building God's kingdom, give to those things. And our passion will go with our giving. The other thing we see that I would highlight in the New Testament is in 2 Corinthians 9. On the screen you'll see verses 11 through 12, but I'm going to keep reading because I think the verses that follow that are really interesting as well. Verse 11. Listen. Verse 15, this is amazing. You know what that indescribable gift is? The opportunity to be generous. Thanks be to God for the indescribable gift of the invitation into generosity. That's a remarkable statement. Now, a little context around that passage, that group of verses. The church in Jerusalem was struggling financially. Jerusalem was stricken with poverty. And so the church in Jerusalem had great needs and needs in the community around it and not the means to care for them. So in Paul's missionary journeys around Asia Minor, he takes up love offerings to be taken back to Jerusalem on their behalf. And so in this passage, he's petitioning the church in Corinth family and use it for somebody else that needs it. And you'll experience the gratitude that happens when we're invited into giving. And that gratitude will be multiplied by the recipient who will then turn in praise to your God for providing them what they needed. That's why it's an indescribable gift when we give out of our wealth, out of our extra, out of our surplus. It makes us more grateful for what we have and for what God has invited us into, and it doubles when the recipients get it and they turn in praise to our God as well. This is why I say that not only does our passion go with our giving, but our gratitude grows with our giving. Our gratitude for what we have, for the opportunities that we've been given. It grows with our giving. The more, as it would seem in these verses, the more we give, the more we experience of this indescribable gift, the more we experience of what it, the goodness of what it is to be a conduit of God's generosity to others. He's been generous to you, not so that you might hoard it, but so that you might direct it into different places. And listen, he doesn't need, listen to this, this is super important. He doesn't need to give you money so that you'll give money to the other things. He can find ways to get it directly to them. But what he's doing by funneling it through you is inviting you into the process of generosity that you might be blessed. It's an indescribable gift. And I love the way it starts out. He has made us rich that we might give. And I don't think that everybody in the room is rich. And I don't even have a good working definition of that. If we wanted to compare us to the average family in Honduras, we're all rich. If we want to compare us to the average family in Manhattan, we're not. So it's a sliding scale and I'm not here to define it. But what I do know is some of us have the means to give and that we should do it. Some of us might not feel like we have the means to give. Things might be tight, but we should still give. So I can say this with no hesitation, with no qualification. If you are a believer, it is God's will that you would be someone who would give. If you are a believer, then a step of obedience that God calls you to take unequivocally is to be a person or a family that gives of your time, talents, and treasures. That's without question. We are certain that God wants us to give. And again, he wants us to give because our passion goes with our giving and our gratitude grows with our giving. He wants us to give for our sake. In light of that, the reality that God calls us all to be people who give generously. I would say a couple things about what that means and the reality of that. The first thing I would say is this, and it's so important to me that I wanted to put it on the screen so that you could read it with me and we could be certain that it was covered. The New Testament does not mandate giving 10% or giving to our local church. So I'm aware that any time I preach a sermon on giving, it can be viewed as and is unavoidably in a yucky way self-serving. I get that. Which is why I have never once preached to you at Grace or to anyone to grace. I'm trying to get you, if you do not have a habit of it already, to experience the goodness and the indescribable gift of giving. Because when we give, it grows us in our spirit. It brings us closer to the Father. It helps us know Jesus more. We find him in his service. I ardently believe that giving is what's best for you. So I'm pleading with you to give, but I'm not asking you to give to grace. The other thing is, I'm not asking you to give 10%. 10% is an Old Testament number. It's not a New Testament number. We can find nothing in the New Testament that compels us to give 10%. That's where we get the word tithe. And that's why we try not to use tithe around here because we don't believe that that's a New Testament thing. We would tell you, and most people I know who have a good theology of giving would say that 10% is a good starting point. But sometimes we really can't afford 10%. Give 5%. Some of us have been giving, and I say this delicately, we've been giving 10% for years comfortably. It's time to pray about ramping that up. 12, 12 and a half percent, 15%, 20%, whatever it might be. But here's the other thing I would say is that when we see giving show up in the New Testament, it's almost always like it was in Corinthians, to give to the poor, to give to the needy, to give to those in need, to the have-nots. It's almost always in reference to giving to those who have less than you. That's where we see it in the New Testament, and that's why I'm certain that we need to be giving. Now, here's what I would say about grace, just to be honest and transparent about this as well. I would genuinely hope that if you partner with grace, and for those unfamiliar with our terminology at grace, we have partners, we don't have members, because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. So if you're a partner of Grace, we hope that you would partner with us financially. And the way that I would say it is, if you have been touched by what happens here, if your marriage and your family is made stronger, if your faith is made deeper by what's happened at Grace, then we hope that you would consider partnering with us financially. And I would also tell you, because giving is about giving to those that have less than us, 10% of everything that is given here to the general budget goes to ministries happening outside the walls of Grace, and that is how you can actively participate in giving to those who are in need. And I will also tell you this. We would love to see, just because it's indicative of health, we would love to see our top-line budget number grow, to have more money received this year than we received last year. And the reason that the elders, when I say we, I mean the elders, the finance committee, and the mission committee want to see that number grow. And we want to see it grow not so that we can redo the sanctuary. That's just putting makeup on a pig. That's not even worth it. We don't have computers that we want to buy or new speakers. We don't want to give extravagant raises to anyone but me. We don't have any other things that we want to do. And obviously I'm just kidding about that. We want to see that 10% that we give away grow to 15 and 20 and 30 and 40% of our budget. We want to collectively be conduits of grace. We spend the same amount in virtually every ministry that we have since I got here because we want that number to grow so that the percentage of what we give away can grow. That's the heart of the elders and of the finance committee. So I hope that you would consider partnering us in that way, but I will not tell you that you have a biblical mandate to do so. My heart for you, quite simply, is that you would see giving as a spiritual exercise. And if your family is not one that gives, it's okay. We want to invite you to start doing that. If there's other people or institutions building God's kingdom outside the walls of grace and you're passionate about them and you're compelled to give, start there. Give to them. Give to where your heart leads you to give. Be prayerful before God and ask him where he would have you funnel his resources. And do it. And watch your passion go with that gift. And watch your gratitude grow with that gift. But step into that. If you are someone who's been giving comfortably at a certain rate for years, prayerfully consider if you're married with your spouse, where God might have you direct more. And in that way, we can be obedient to this biblical command to give, and we can grow in our wisdom and in grace and in our faith deeper roots in Christ as we learn this new spiritual discipline of giving. I'm going to pray, and then I'm going to update you on where we're at with the building campaign. Father, thank you for the indescribable gift of providing us with resources that we might be used to funnel those to others. God, I pray that you would make us conduits of grace. Lord, for all of us, I pray that we might consider what you would have us do in light of this. Who and to what and to where you would have us give? Give us courage and faith that you will provide for us what we need. And God, for those that take steps to begin giving for the first time, I pray that they would see very quickly their passion grow towards your things, your heart, your places, and that they would see their gratitude grow as well. Lord, we ask all these things in your son's name. Amen.

My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's so good to see you. Thanks again so much for making grace a part of your Sunday morning. It's such a blessing when you are. Last week we wrapped up a series in a prayer out of Ephesians that we're making the prayer for 2024. And next week we're going to launch into what's going to be our spring series. It's going to carry us to Easter called Final Thoughts. It's going to be a look at what's called the Upper Room Discourse found in the second half of John chapter 13 all the way through John chapter 17. And you'll not be surprised to know that I'm excited to go through that series with you guys. I've been doing a lot of reading and studying there and I'm'm looking forward to sharing that with you. Right here this morning, we're taking a break between series to do an update Sunday. As many of you know, hopefully all of you know, we're in the midst of a campaign to build a permanent home for grace. We do not own this space, believe it or not, as nice as it is. It's not ours. But it is our goal and our hope and our belief that God wants us to have a permanent home. So we have four acres right around the corner on Litchford on which we intend to build about a 16,000 square foot building that's out there. You can take a look at it if you want. We believe it's God's desire for us to take steps of faith to be able to build on that land and move into a permanent home from which we will minister to serve the community and hopefully draw closer to God together. And I'm going to give you an update on where we stand with that at the end of the service today, because of course I'm going to wait to the end of the service. In the meantime, I also wanted to take this morning in the sermon to talk to you about the subject of giving, which I'm sure is very exciting for everyone. Yes, no one wakes up excited to hear a sermon on giving. As a matter of fact, we kind of cringe at the idea of the sermons on giving. And I've known that I was going to need to do this since the elders at the end of last year were like, hey, man, it's been a minute since you talked about giving. And I've known that I was going to need to do this since the elders at the end of last year were like, hey man, it's been a minute since you talked about giving, and we think that's an important thing to teach the people of God about. So we need to try to work that in. And I knew that they were right, but I haven't done a sermon on giving, I think in three or four years. As a matter of fact, the last sermon at Grace that was done on the idea of giving, tithing, stewardship, generosity, whatever you want to call it, was done by Doug Bergeson, one of our elders. And one of the reasons I've waited so long to preach one on giving is because his was so good, I wanted you to forget it before I had to preach one and you compared it. But like I said, it's been three or four years since I've done a sermon on giving. And it's not for the reason that you probably think it is. It's not because I don't, I'm shy about the topic. It's not because I don't want to put in front of you things that scripture says about it. As a matter of fact, my thought in leading you guys, and I've tried to lead this way since I was hired in 2017, is to be of the mindset that this room is full of, for the most part, smart adults. For the most part. This room is full of reasonable, spiritually mature people. For the most part. This room is full of reasonable, spiritually mature people for the most part. And I need to lead you in that way. So it's not that I'm shy about giving in its relationship with the church. You all know that if you don't give to grace, then grace doesn't exist. That's how it works. You guys are aware of real life. You know that if you're a partner of grace, we need you to give to grace. That's not a secret. Now, there's misconceptions about giving sometimes, and so we may not know all the details. And when I say that, I remember back at my previous church called Greystone, we had a couple of guys who were general contractors, and they, for a while, were helping us with some of our facilities. And so we were walking through the auditorium one day, two of the general contractors and me and the executive pastor, and they looked at us and they said, so how do you guys, like, get paid? And we said, you know, the church allots us a salary. And they go, but do you, like, do you make money on commission? And we said, what? And they go, like, if you invite a family and they start to give to the church, do you get a cut of that? And I said, no, but I'm going to do that at my next church. But I'll never forget it because I thought it was funny. We laughed. No, that's not how it works. It's a set salary, yada, yada, yada. So I know that not everybody understands all the mechanics, but you know the bottom line that if you don't give to the church, the church doesn't exist. That's just how it goes. So we don't need to be shy about that. And I would say two things. One, if this is your first time with us, this is not a typical Sunday, an update Sunday, and me talking like this is. But me talking about this, it's a special, specific Sunday. And two, if it's a turnoff to you that I'm talking about giving in the church, I don't know how to give you a longer break. You're just going to be mad at me. But we need to talk about giving. And the reason that it's been a while since I've used Sunday morning to focus on it is this. I think of Sundays, and there's more ways to think about them than this, but rudimentarily, I think of Sundays as either strategic Sundays or spiritual Sundays. Spiritual Sundays push the needle forward spiritually. They challenge us. They encourage us. They inspire us. They draw us closer to God. We leave here desiring God more. We leave here desiring to know Jesus more deeply. We leave here with hopefully our roots deepened a little bit. And spiritual Sundays are what I want to do every Sunday. You guys will remember, I'm not sure if it was last fall or fall before last, when we said, hey, we're not doing announcements anymore. And some of y'all made fun of me. And then we didn't start doing announcements again. We just started taking some time to tell you what was going on in the church. But the reason we did that is because we felt, Aaron and I did, that they disrupted the spiritual flow of what was happening in the service. And we didn't want to keep doing that. We wanted the service to be spiritual in nature and spiritual in focus, and for you guys to leave focusing on that, we didn't want to denigrate it with bringing it down to this practical level, but we had to accept and acknowledge that the Sunday morning time has to do some things for the church body that can't all be 100% spiritual all the time. And so we've accepted that and we've reinstalled announcements and that's fine. But in that ethos is a desire for every Sunday morning to be a spiritual encounter for you with your creator so you leave here feeling a little bit closer to him and more desirous of him than you did when you entered. So there's spiritual Sundays, but then there's also strategic Sundays. Strategic Sundays are Sundays that are necessary to inform you guys, to direct us, to point us to a place, to bring you along, and it's something that's needed in the life of the church at the time. And that's how I've kind of thought about giving sermons. Is that from time to time it's necessary to talk about giving because we need you guys to give so that we can do God's will. Because giving allows us to go and to serve God. Giving allows us to go and to build God's kingdom. Giving allows us to accomplish spiritual things. But as this sermon was coming up, and I was kind of wrapping my head around what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, it was really impressed upon me that I was very wrong in the way that I thought about the approach to those Sundays. And I wasn't wrong intentionally. I never made a conscious decision to relegate giving as a strategic topic rather than a spiritual one. I just somehow did it, thinking if we focus on spiritual things, that the other behaviors and practices will follow that are necessary. So let's just keep having spiritual Sundays. And how I've shortchanged you guys is by failing to realize that a Sunday spent talking about giving is very much a spiritual Sunday. Giving is a spiritually impactful act. And in fact, I would say the spiritual value of giving is diminished when we regard it as a means to an end. Giving doesn't allow us to serve God. It is serving God. Giving doesn't enable us to do God's will. It is God's will. Giving doesn't make spiritual things possible. It is a spiritual thing. It is what's best for us. It is what's good for us. God desires us to grow in our capacity to give. It is a spiritual discipline that is just as important as any other spiritual discipline. I said it this way. Learning to give is just as spiritually impactful as learning to repent. Learning to give is just as spiritually impactful as learning to repent. And that word repent there there I kind of labored over what to put there just consider it a placeholder for any spiritual discipline on which we would all agree We need to pursue post salvation Once you accept Christ as your Savior once you confess with your mouth and believe with your heart that he is who he says he is He did what he said he did and he's gonna do what he says he's gonna do We would all agree that there's a series of spiritual disciplines that we need to into our life. We need to learn to forgive. We need to learn to pray. We need to learn to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and be students of scripture. We need to learn how to show mercy, how to show grace, how to be kind. And we need to learn to be generous and to give. It's so on par with the other spiritual disciplines that in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 6, my men's group pointed out to me this week, Jesus puts giving on a spiritual plane with prayer and fasting, saying it is just as important for his people to give as it is for them to learn to pray, as it is for them to learn to forgive, as it is for them to learn to repent. So the act of giving is a spiritual act. It progresses us in our faith. The act of giving moves us closer to God. It deepens our desire for him. And we'll see in a minute that it grows our gratitude for Him. So really, it's to my detriment and yours that I don't talk about it more often. Because it's a spiritual act that makes our lives richer and brings us closer to the Father when we do it. Now there's any number of places I can go in the New Testament to show you how it's a spiritual act and what its benefits are for us. Why? Because when I say it's a spiritual act, in part what I mean is it's what's best for us. God tells us it's what's best for us, which seems counterintuitive because we kind of have a mindset in life that we're supposed to get all we can, can't all we get, and sit on our can, right? Like that's what we're supposed to do. We get everything we can, we keep it, and then we let it grow. That's what we do. So it seems counterintuitive that the best thing for us would be to have a mindset to begin to give part of that away. And yet God says it is best for us. God says he makes it very clear he wants us to be generous people. So I want to talk to you about two reasons, two things that it does for us when we give, two ways that it's spiritually impactful. There are myriad more, but these are the two that we have time to focus on this morning. I would first take your attention to Matthew chapter 6. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. You're going to see verse 21 on the screen, but I'm actually going to read a little bit prior to that, beginning in verse 19. Jesus says this in the Sermon on the Mount. Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourself treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy, where thieves do not break in and steal. Listen, for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. That is such a concept. Such a rich verse. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. In my men's group on Tuesday morning, we're going through the book of Matthew, and we arrived at chapters 6 and 7 on Tuesday. And there is so much to talk about that as I was reading for the morning, I thought we probably should have only read one chapter because there's just so much detail here. And despite there being so many things to discuss, we spent the entire discussion in this verse. What does that mean and how do we live that out? Where your treasure is there, your heart will be also. I've heard since I was a little kid, show me your calendar and your checkbook, and I can tell you what you care about. And it's absolutely true. And so what we see from this idea of where your treasure is, there your heart will be also, is that our passion goes with our giving. Our passion follows our giving. I think sometimes we wait to be passionate about something, and then we expect our giving to follow that passion. No, our passion will go where our giving goes, wherever our treasures are, wherever we spend our time and our talents and our treasures, our passion will follow that. And here's how I know that that's true experientially. A few years ago, Lily, she just turned eight, so she was four or five. She was on a four and five-year-old soccer team, and I agreed to coach it, which was an egregious error that I will never make again. I hated almost literally every second of it. We had several kids from the church also on that team, and so my small group would basically sit on the sidelines with their Yetis in their lawn chairs laughing at me as I screamed at their child to please pay attention to the game. Just literally laughing out loud at me the entire time. I hated it so much. I'll never do that again. If John asks me to coach his team when he's five, I'm going to tell him to kick rocks. So Lily, last spring, had her first soccer season in like real soccer. It was YMCA soccer. It like counted. They don't keep score yet, but I do. And she did okay. The coach was this lady named Heidi, and I really developed a respect for Heidi. She did an excellent job with the girls. I thought she approached practice in a really respectable way. And then she had an assistant coach named Jamie, who's just a really nice, friendly guy. I loved his demeanor with the girls. And so at the end of the season, I stayed out of it. I kind of would help Coach Lily a little bit and holler at her to get in the right spot. But that was it. But at the end of the season, Heidi and Jamie came to me. And Heidi said, you know, she had two daughters on the team. She was like, my oldest daughter is going to be playing at a different level now. I can't coach two teams. Jamie's going to be the head coach. Can you be his assistant coach so our girls can continue to play together? And I said, okay, I've got a couple caveats. Because she started talking about, we'll give you access to the portal. And I was like, I don't want access to any portals. I don't want any login information. I don't want to go to a single website. I'm not doing that. She's like, we'll send you the spreadsheet for playing time. You will not. I will not open it. You figure that out. It doesn't take two people to figure out how to make 10 girls play the same amount of time. All right? You do that. If you make me do it, I'll just sit lily. I'm not even going to think about it. And I'm like, I'm not. Like, I'll be at practice. I don't care what we do at practice. Don't ask for my input. So I'm just there for the name, okay, just to get our girls to play together. I'll play along. That's how I approach the season. But every Wednesday, Heidi and Jamie start texting. What do you think the girls need to work on tonight? And darn it if I didn't have some thoughts. And then we'd go, and the girls are running drills, and I'm like, ah, you're doing this wrong. So I'm going over there to help them. And then on Saturday, I can't help but interject a little bit. I'm telling you, by the end of the season, by the end of the season, Jen will attest to this, I'm on the sideline. You can hear my voice over the whole field the duration of the game, hollering at our girls to get into position and to move up and to push back and to attack and to yada, yada, yada. Like, I'm all in. When there's a timeout, I'm running out on the field, and I'm high-fiving the little girls. I love those little girls. Whenever they would do something great, like new, like, oh, look at that. She had a flash of this is really great. I would always turn and find Mom and Dad and celebrate that with them. By the end of the season, I loved them. I loved coaching. I was texting Jamie and Heidi during the day with jokes and thoughts. And at the end, they're like, can you help us next season? Yes, I'm all in. I can't wait. I thought about how excited I am for soccer season the other day, right? And it's because, I don't think it's because I'm like sports dad. I don't really care if Lily plays or not. It's because it was fun. It was fun to get to know the girls and to celebrate with them and to get to know the families. Like it was a good time. My passion followed my time. My passion followed my giving. Jen and I give to some nonprofits. I get a lot of emails, updates, nonprofits. I don't read hardly any of them. But if I give, I read. Not because I want to see what my money's doing, because it's not a lot. The answer is not much, buddy. But because I'm genuinely interested in those ministries and I want to know what's happening and I want to know that they're thriving. When we give of our time and our talents and our treasures to the things of God, our heart for the things of God grows. If you want more passion for the church, if you want more passion for the things of God, for organizations that are building God's kingdom, give to those things. And our passion will go with our giving. The other thing we see that I would highlight in the New Testament is in 2 Corinthians 9. On the screen you'll see verses 11 through 12, but I'm going to keep reading because I think the verses that follow that are really interesting as well. Verse 11. Listen. Verse 15, this is amazing. You know what that indescribable gift is? The opportunity to be generous. Thanks be to God for the indescribable gift of the invitation into generosity. That's a remarkable statement. Now, a little context around that passage, that group of verses. The church in Jerusalem was struggling financially. Jerusalem was stricken with poverty. And so the church in Jerusalem had great needs and needs in the community around it and not the means to care for them. So in Paul's missionary journeys around Asia Minor, he takes up love offerings to be taken back to Jerusalem on their behalf. And so in this passage, he's petitioning the church in Corinth family and use it for somebody else that needs it. And you'll experience the gratitude that happens when we're invited into giving. And that gratitude will be multiplied by the recipient who will then turn in praise to your God for providing them what they needed. That's why it's an indescribable gift when we give out of our wealth, out of our extra, out of our surplus. It makes us more grateful for what we have and for what God has invited us into, and it doubles when the recipients get it and they turn in praise to our God as well. This is why I say that not only does our passion go with our giving, but our gratitude grows with our giving. Our gratitude for what we have, for the opportunities that we've been given. It grows with our giving. The more, as it would seem in these verses, the more we give, the more we experience of this indescribable gift, the more we experience of what it, the goodness of what it is to be a conduit of God's generosity to others. He's been generous to you, not so that you might hoard it, but so that you might direct it into different places. And listen, he doesn't need, listen to this, this is super important. He doesn't need to give you money so that you'll give money to the other things. He can find ways to get it directly to them. But what he's doing by funneling it through you is inviting you into the process of generosity that you might be blessed. It's an indescribable gift. And I love the way it starts out. He has made us rich that we might give. And I don't think that everybody in the room is rich. And I don't even have a good working definition of that. If we wanted to compare us to the average family in Honduras, we're all rich. If we want to compare us to the average family in Manhattan, we're not. So it's a sliding scale and I'm not here to define it. But what I do know is some of us have the means to give and that we should do it. Some of us might not feel like we have the means to give. Things might be tight, but we should still give. So I can say this with no hesitation, with no qualification. If you are a believer, it is God's will that you would be someone who would give. If you are a believer, then a step of obedience that God calls you to take unequivocally is to be a person or a family that gives of your time, talents, and treasures. That's without question. We are certain that God wants us to give. And again, he wants us to give because our passion goes with our giving and our gratitude grows with our giving. He wants us to give for our sake. In light of that, the reality that God calls us all to be people who give generously. I would say a couple things about what that means and the reality of that. The first thing I would say is this, and it's so important to me that I wanted to put it on the screen so that you could read it with me and we could be certain that it was covered. The New Testament does not mandate giving 10% or giving to our local church. So I'm aware that any time I preach a sermon on giving, it can be viewed as and is unavoidably in a yucky way self-serving. I get that. Which is why I have never once preached to you at Grace or to anyone to grace. I'm trying to get you, if you do not have a habit of it already, to experience the goodness and the indescribable gift of giving. Because when we give, it grows us in our spirit. It brings us closer to the Father. It helps us know Jesus more. We find him in his service. I ardently believe that giving is what's best for you. So I'm pleading with you to give, but I'm not asking you to give to grace. The other thing is, I'm not asking you to give 10%. 10% is an Old Testament number. It's not a New Testament number. We can find nothing in the New Testament that compels us to give 10%. That's where we get the word tithe. And that's why we try not to use tithe around here because we don't believe that that's a New Testament thing. We would tell you, and most people I know who have a good theology of giving would say that 10% is a good starting point. But sometimes we really can't afford 10%. Give 5%. Some of us have been giving, and I say this delicately, we've been giving 10% for years comfortably. It's time to pray about ramping that up. 12, 12 and a half percent, 15%, 20%, whatever it might be. But here's the other thing I would say is that when we see giving show up in the New Testament, it's almost always like it was in Corinthians, to give to the poor, to give to the needy, to give to those in need, to the have-nots. It's almost always in reference to giving to those who have less than you. That's where we see it in the New Testament, and that's why I'm certain that we need to be giving. Now, here's what I would say about grace, just to be honest and transparent about this as well. I would genuinely hope that if you partner with grace, and for those unfamiliar with our terminology at grace, we have partners, we don't have members, because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. So if you're a partner of Grace, we hope that you would partner with us financially. And the way that I would say it is, if you have been touched by what happens here, if your marriage and your family is made stronger, if your faith is made deeper by what's happened at Grace, then we hope that you would consider partnering with us financially. And I would also tell you, because giving is about giving to those that have less than us, 10% of everything that is given here to the general budget goes to ministries happening outside the walls of Grace, and that is how you can actively participate in giving to those who are in need. And I will also tell you this. We would love to see, just because it's indicative of health, we would love to see our top-line budget number grow, to have more money received this year than we received last year. And the reason that the elders, when I say we, I mean the elders, the finance committee, and the mission committee want to see that number grow. And we want to see it grow not so that we can redo the sanctuary. That's just putting makeup on a pig. That's not even worth it. We don't have computers that we want to buy or new speakers. We don't want to give extravagant raises to anyone but me. We don't have any other things that we want to do. And obviously I'm just kidding about that. We want to see that 10% that we give away grow to 15 and 20 and 30 and 40% of our budget. We want to collectively be conduits of grace. We spend the same amount in virtually every ministry that we have since I got here because we want that number to grow so that the percentage of what we give away can grow. That's the heart of the elders and of the finance committee. So I hope that you would consider partnering us in that way, but I will not tell you that you have a biblical mandate to do so. My heart for you, quite simply, is that you would see giving as a spiritual exercise. And if your family is not one that gives, it's okay. We want to invite you to start doing that. If there's other people or institutions building God's kingdom outside the walls of grace and you're passionate about them and you're compelled to give, start there. Give to them. Give to where your heart leads you to give. Be prayerful before God and ask him where he would have you funnel his resources. And do it. And watch your passion go with that gift. And watch your gratitude grow with that gift. But step into that. If you are someone who's been giving comfortably at a certain rate for years, prayerfully consider if you're married with your spouse, where God might have you direct more. And in that way, we can be obedient to this biblical command to give, and we can grow in our wisdom and in grace and in our faith deeper roots in Christ as we learn this new spiritual discipline of giving. I'm going to pray, and then I'm going to update you on where we're at with the building campaign. Father, thank you for the indescribable gift of providing us with resources that we might be used to funnel those to others. God, I pray that you would make us conduits of grace. Lord, for all of us, I pray that we might consider what you would have us do in light of this. Who and to what and to where you would have us give? Give us courage and faith that you will provide for us what we need. And God, for those that take steps to begin giving for the first time, I pray that they would see very quickly their passion grow towards your things, your heart, your places, and that they would see their gratitude grow as well. Lord, we ask all these things in your son's name. Amen.

My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's so good to see you. Thanks again so much for making grace a part of your Sunday morning. It's such a blessing when you are. Last week we wrapped up a series in a prayer out of Ephesians that we're making the prayer for 2024. And next week we're going to launch into what's going to be our spring series. It's going to carry us to Easter called Final Thoughts. It's going to be a look at what's called the Upper Room Discourse found in the second half of John chapter 13 all the way through John chapter 17. And you'll not be surprised to know that I'm excited to go through that series with you guys. I've been doing a lot of reading and studying there and I'm'm looking forward to sharing that with you. Right here this morning, we're taking a break between series to do an update Sunday. As many of you know, hopefully all of you know, we're in the midst of a campaign to build a permanent home for grace. We do not own this space, believe it or not, as nice as it is. It's not ours. But it is our goal and our hope and our belief that God wants us to have a permanent home. So we have four acres right around the corner on Litchford on which we intend to build about a 16,000 square foot building that's out there. You can take a look at it if you want. We believe it's God's desire for us to take steps of faith to be able to build on that land and move into a permanent home from which we will minister to serve the community and hopefully draw closer to God together. And I'm going to give you an update on where we stand with that at the end of the service today, because of course I'm going to wait to the end of the service. In the meantime, I also wanted to take this morning in the sermon to talk to you about the subject of giving, which I'm sure is very exciting for everyone. Yes, no one wakes up excited to hear a sermon on giving. As a matter of fact, we kind of cringe at the idea of the sermons on giving. And I've known that I was going to need to do this since the elders at the end of last year were like, hey, man, it's been a minute since you talked about giving. And I've known that I was going to need to do this since the elders at the end of last year were like, hey man, it's been a minute since you talked about giving, and we think that's an important thing to teach the people of God about. So we need to try to work that in. And I knew that they were right, but I haven't done a sermon on giving, I think in three or four years. As a matter of fact, the last sermon at Grace that was done on the idea of giving, tithing, stewardship, generosity, whatever you want to call it, was done by Doug Bergeson, one of our elders. And one of the reasons I've waited so long to preach one on giving is because his was so good, I wanted you to forget it before I had to preach one and you compared it. But like I said, it's been three or four years since I've done a sermon on giving. And it's not for the reason that you probably think it is. It's not because I don't, I'm shy about the topic. It's not because I don't want to put in front of you things that scripture says about it. As a matter of fact, my thought in leading you guys, and I've tried to lead this way since I was hired in 2017, is to be of the mindset that this room is full of, for the most part, smart adults. For the most part. This room is full of reasonable, spiritually mature people. For the most part. This room is full of reasonable, spiritually mature people for the most part. And I need to lead you in that way. So it's not that I'm shy about giving in its relationship with the church. You all know that if you don't give to grace, then grace doesn't exist. That's how it works. You guys are aware of real life. You know that if you're a partner of grace, we need you to give to grace. That's not a secret. Now, there's misconceptions about giving sometimes, and so we may not know all the details. And when I say that, I remember back at my previous church called Greystone, we had a couple of guys who were general contractors, and they, for a while, were helping us with some of our facilities. And so we were walking through the auditorium one day, two of the general contractors and me and the executive pastor, and they looked at us and they said, so how do you guys, like, get paid? And we said, you know, the church allots us a salary. And they go, but do you, like, do you make money on commission? And we said, what? And they go, like, if you invite a family and they start to give to the church, do you get a cut of that? And I said, no, but I'm going to do that at my next church. But I'll never forget it because I thought it was funny. We laughed. No, that's not how it works. It's a set salary, yada, yada, yada. So I know that not everybody understands all the mechanics, but you know the bottom line that if you don't give to the church, the church doesn't exist. That's just how it goes. So we don't need to be shy about that. And I would say two things. One, if this is your first time with us, this is not a typical Sunday, an update Sunday, and me talking like this is. But me talking about this, it's a special, specific Sunday. And two, if it's a turnoff to you that I'm talking about giving in the church, I don't know how to give you a longer break. You're just going to be mad at me. But we need to talk about giving. And the reason that it's been a while since I've used Sunday morning to focus on it is this. I think of Sundays, and there's more ways to think about them than this, but rudimentarily, I think of Sundays as either strategic Sundays or spiritual Sundays. Spiritual Sundays push the needle forward spiritually. They challenge us. They encourage us. They inspire us. They draw us closer to God. We leave here desiring God more. We leave here desiring to know Jesus more deeply. We leave here with hopefully our roots deepened a little bit. And spiritual Sundays are what I want to do every Sunday. You guys will remember, I'm not sure if it was last fall or fall before last, when we said, hey, we're not doing announcements anymore. And some of y'all made fun of me. And then we didn't start doing announcements again. We just started taking some time to tell you what was going on in the church. But the reason we did that is because we felt, Aaron and I did, that they disrupted the spiritual flow of what was happening in the service. And we didn't want to keep doing that. We wanted the service to be spiritual in nature and spiritual in focus, and for you guys to leave focusing on that, we didn't want to denigrate it with bringing it down to this practical level, but we had to accept and acknowledge that the Sunday morning time has to do some things for the church body that can't all be 100% spiritual all the time. And so we've accepted that and we've reinstalled announcements and that's fine. But in that ethos is a desire for every Sunday morning to be a spiritual encounter for you with your creator so you leave here feeling a little bit closer to him and more desirous of him than you did when you entered. So there's spiritual Sundays, but then there's also strategic Sundays. Strategic Sundays are Sundays that are necessary to inform you guys, to direct us, to point us to a place, to bring you along, and it's something that's needed in the life of the church at the time. And that's how I've kind of thought about giving sermons. Is that from time to time it's necessary to talk about giving because we need you guys to give so that we can do God's will. Because giving allows us to go and to serve God. Giving allows us to go and to build God's kingdom. Giving allows us to accomplish spiritual things. But as this sermon was coming up, and I was kind of wrapping my head around what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, it was really impressed upon me that I was very wrong in the way that I thought about the approach to those Sundays. And I wasn't wrong intentionally. I never made a conscious decision to relegate giving as a strategic topic rather than a spiritual one. I just somehow did it, thinking if we focus on spiritual things, that the other behaviors and practices will follow that are necessary. So let's just keep having spiritual Sundays. And how I've shortchanged you guys is by failing to realize that a Sunday spent talking about giving is very much a spiritual Sunday. Giving is a spiritually impactful act. And in fact, I would say the spiritual value of giving is diminished when we regard it as a means to an end. Giving doesn't allow us to serve God. It is serving God. Giving doesn't enable us to do God's will. It is God's will. Giving doesn't make spiritual things possible. It is a spiritual thing. It is what's best for us. It is what's good for us. God desires us to grow in our capacity to give. It is a spiritual discipline that is just as important as any other spiritual discipline. I said it this way. Learning to give is just as spiritually impactful as learning to repent. Learning to give is just as spiritually impactful as learning to repent. And that word repent there there I kind of labored over what to put there just consider it a placeholder for any spiritual discipline on which we would all agree We need to pursue post salvation Once you accept Christ as your Savior once you confess with your mouth and believe with your heart that he is who he says he is He did what he said he did and he's gonna do what he says he's gonna do We would all agree that there's a series of spiritual disciplines that we need to into our life. We need to learn to forgive. We need to learn to pray. We need to learn to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and be students of scripture. We need to learn how to show mercy, how to show grace, how to be kind. And we need to learn to be generous and to give. It's so on par with the other spiritual disciplines that in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 6, my men's group pointed out to me this week, Jesus puts giving on a spiritual plane with prayer and fasting, saying it is just as important for his people to give as it is for them to learn to pray, as it is for them to learn to forgive, as it is for them to learn to repent. So the act of giving is a spiritual act. It progresses us in our faith. The act of giving moves us closer to God. It deepens our desire for him. And we'll see in a minute that it grows our gratitude for Him. So really, it's to my detriment and yours that I don't talk about it more often. Because it's a spiritual act that makes our lives richer and brings us closer to the Father when we do it. Now there's any number of places I can go in the New Testament to show you how it's a spiritual act and what its benefits are for us. Why? Because when I say it's a spiritual act, in part what I mean is it's what's best for us. God tells us it's what's best for us, which seems counterintuitive because we kind of have a mindset in life that we're supposed to get all we can, can't all we get, and sit on our can, right? Like that's what we're supposed to do. We get everything we can, we keep it, and then we let it grow. That's what we do. So it seems counterintuitive that the best thing for us would be to have a mindset to begin to give part of that away. And yet God says it is best for us. God says he makes it very clear he wants us to be generous people. So I want to talk to you about two reasons, two things that it does for us when we give, two ways that it's spiritually impactful. There are myriad more, but these are the two that we have time to focus on this morning. I would first take your attention to Matthew chapter 6. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. You're going to see verse 21 on the screen, but I'm actually going to read a little bit prior to that, beginning in verse 19. Jesus says this in the Sermon on the Mount. Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourself treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy, where thieves do not break in and steal. Listen, for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. That is such a concept. Such a rich verse. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. In my men's group on Tuesday morning, we're going through the book of Matthew, and we arrived at chapters 6 and 7 on Tuesday. And there is so much to talk about that as I was reading for the morning, I thought we probably should have only read one chapter because there's just so much detail here. And despite there being so many things to discuss, we spent the entire discussion in this verse. What does that mean and how do we live that out? Where your treasure is there, your heart will be also. I've heard since I was a little kid, show me your calendar and your checkbook, and I can tell you what you care about. And it's absolutely true. And so what we see from this idea of where your treasure is, there your heart will be also, is that our passion goes with our giving. Our passion follows our giving. I think sometimes we wait to be passionate about something, and then we expect our giving to follow that passion. No, our passion will go where our giving goes, wherever our treasures are, wherever we spend our time and our talents and our treasures, our passion will follow that. And here's how I know that that's true experientially. A few years ago, Lily, she just turned eight, so she was four or five. She was on a four and five-year-old soccer team, and I agreed to coach it, which was an egregious error that I will never make again. I hated almost literally every second of it. We had several kids from the church also on that team, and so my small group would basically sit on the sidelines with their Yetis in their lawn chairs laughing at me as I screamed at their child to please pay attention to the game. Just literally laughing out loud at me the entire time. I hated it so much. I'll never do that again. If John asks me to coach his team when he's five, I'm going to tell him to kick rocks. So Lily, last spring, had her first soccer season in like real soccer. It was YMCA soccer. It like counted. They don't keep score yet, but I do. And she did okay. The coach was this lady named Heidi, and I really developed a respect for Heidi. She did an excellent job with the girls. I thought she approached practice in a really respectable way. And then she had an assistant coach named Jamie, who's just a really nice, friendly guy. I loved his demeanor with the girls. And so at the end of the season, I stayed out of it. I kind of would help Coach Lily a little bit and holler at her to get in the right spot. But that was it. But at the end of the season, Heidi and Jamie came to me. And Heidi said, you know, she had two daughters on the team. She was like, my oldest daughter is going to be playing at a different level now. I can't coach two teams. Jamie's going to be the head coach. Can you be his assistant coach so our girls can continue to play together? And I said, okay, I've got a couple caveats. Because she started talking about, we'll give you access to the portal. And I was like, I don't want access to any portals. I don't want any login information. I don't want to go to a single website. I'm not doing that. She's like, we'll send you the spreadsheet for playing time. You will not. I will not open it. You figure that out. It doesn't take two people to figure out how to make 10 girls play the same amount of time. All right? You do that. If you make me do it, I'll just sit lily. I'm not even going to think about it. And I'm like, I'm not. Like, I'll be at practice. I don't care what we do at practice. Don't ask for my input. So I'm just there for the name, okay, just to get our girls to play together. I'll play along. That's how I approach the season. But every Wednesday, Heidi and Jamie start texting. What do you think the girls need to work on tonight? And darn it if I didn't have some thoughts. And then we'd go, and the girls are running drills, and I'm like, ah, you're doing this wrong. So I'm going over there to help them. And then on Saturday, I can't help but interject a little bit. I'm telling you, by the end of the season, by the end of the season, Jen will attest to this, I'm on the sideline. You can hear my voice over the whole field the duration of the game, hollering at our girls to get into position and to move up and to push back and to attack and to yada, yada, yada. Like, I'm all in. When there's a timeout, I'm running out on the field, and I'm high-fiving the little girls. I love those little girls. Whenever they would do something great, like new, like, oh, look at that. She had a flash of this is really great. I would always turn and find Mom and Dad and celebrate that with them. By the end of the season, I loved them. I loved coaching. I was texting Jamie and Heidi during the day with jokes and thoughts. And at the end, they're like, can you help us next season? Yes, I'm all in. I can't wait. I thought about how excited I am for soccer season the other day, right? And it's because, I don't think it's because I'm like sports dad. I don't really care if Lily plays or not. It's because it was fun. It was fun to get to know the girls and to celebrate with them and to get to know the families. Like it was a good time. My passion followed my time. My passion followed my giving. Jen and I give to some nonprofits. I get a lot of emails, updates, nonprofits. I don't read hardly any of them. But if I give, I read. Not because I want to see what my money's doing, because it's not a lot. The answer is not much, buddy. But because I'm genuinely interested in those ministries and I want to know what's happening and I want to know that they're thriving. When we give of our time and our talents and our treasures to the things of God, our heart for the things of God grows. If you want more passion for the church, if you want more passion for the things of God, for organizations that are building God's kingdom, give to those things. And our passion will go with our giving. The other thing we see that I would highlight in the New Testament is in 2 Corinthians 9. On the screen you'll see verses 11 through 12, but I'm going to keep reading because I think the verses that follow that are really interesting as well. Verse 11. Listen. Verse 15, this is amazing. You know what that indescribable gift is? The opportunity to be generous. Thanks be to God for the indescribable gift of the invitation into generosity. That's a remarkable statement. Now, a little context around that passage, that group of verses. The church in Jerusalem was struggling financially. Jerusalem was stricken with poverty. And so the church in Jerusalem had great needs and needs in the community around it and not the means to care for them. So in Paul's missionary journeys around Asia Minor, he takes up love offerings to be taken back to Jerusalem on their behalf. And so in this passage, he's petitioning the church in Corinth family and use it for somebody else that needs it. And you'll experience the gratitude that happens when we're invited into giving. And that gratitude will be multiplied by the recipient who will then turn in praise to your God for providing them what they needed. That's why it's an indescribable gift when we give out of our wealth, out of our extra, out of our surplus. It makes us more grateful for what we have and for what God has invited us into, and it doubles when the recipients get it and they turn in praise to our God as well. This is why I say that not only does our passion go with our giving, but our gratitude grows with our giving. Our gratitude for what we have, for the opportunities that we've been given. It grows with our giving. The more, as it would seem in these verses, the more we give, the more we experience of this indescribable gift, the more we experience of what it, the goodness of what it is to be a conduit of God's generosity to others. He's been generous to you, not so that you might hoard it, but so that you might direct it into different places. And listen, he doesn't need, listen to this, this is super important. He doesn't need to give you money so that you'll give money to the other things. He can find ways to get it directly to them. But what he's doing by funneling it through you is inviting you into the process of generosity that you might be blessed. It's an indescribable gift. And I love the way it starts out. He has made us rich that we might give. And I don't think that everybody in the room is rich. And I don't even have a good working definition of that. If we wanted to compare us to the average family in Honduras, we're all rich. If we want to compare us to the average family in Manhattan, we're not. So it's a sliding scale and I'm not here to define it. But what I do know is some of us have the means to give and that we should do it. Some of us might not feel like we have the means to give. Things might be tight, but we should still give. So I can say this with no hesitation, with no qualification. If you are a believer, it is God's will that you would be someone who would give. If you are a believer, then a step of obedience that God calls you to take unequivocally is to be a person or a family that gives of your time, talents, and treasures. That's without question. We are certain that God wants us to give. And again, he wants us to give because our passion goes with our giving and our gratitude grows with our giving. He wants us to give for our sake. In light of that, the reality that God calls us all to be people who give generously. I would say a couple things about what that means and the reality of that. The first thing I would say is this, and it's so important to me that I wanted to put it on the screen so that you could read it with me and we could be certain that it was covered. The New Testament does not mandate giving 10% or giving to our local church. So I'm aware that any time I preach a sermon on giving, it can be viewed as and is unavoidably in a yucky way self-serving. I get that. Which is why I have never once preached to you at Grace or to anyone to grace. I'm trying to get you, if you do not have a habit of it already, to experience the goodness and the indescribable gift of giving. Because when we give, it grows us in our spirit. It brings us closer to the Father. It helps us know Jesus more. We find him in his service. I ardently believe that giving is what's best for you. So I'm pleading with you to give, but I'm not asking you to give to grace. The other thing is, I'm not asking you to give 10%. 10% is an Old Testament number. It's not a New Testament number. We can find nothing in the New Testament that compels us to give 10%. That's where we get the word tithe. And that's why we try not to use tithe around here because we don't believe that that's a New Testament thing. We would tell you, and most people I know who have a good theology of giving would say that 10% is a good starting point. But sometimes we really can't afford 10%. Give 5%. Some of us have been giving, and I say this delicately, we've been giving 10% for years comfortably. It's time to pray about ramping that up. 12, 12 and a half percent, 15%, 20%, whatever it might be. But here's the other thing I would say is that when we see giving show up in the New Testament, it's almost always like it was in Corinthians, to give to the poor, to give to the needy, to give to those in need, to the have-nots. It's almost always in reference to giving to those who have less than you. That's where we see it in the New Testament, and that's why I'm certain that we need to be giving. Now, here's what I would say about grace, just to be honest and transparent about this as well. I would genuinely hope that if you partner with grace, and for those unfamiliar with our terminology at grace, we have partners, we don't have members, because members tend to consume and partners tend to contribute. So if you're a partner of Grace, we hope that you would partner with us financially. And the way that I would say it is, if you have been touched by what happens here, if your marriage and your family is made stronger, if your faith is made deeper by what's happened at Grace, then we hope that you would consider partnering with us financially. And I would also tell you, because giving is about giving to those that have less than us, 10% of everything that is given here to the general budget goes to ministries happening outside the walls of Grace, and that is how you can actively participate in giving to those who are in need. And I will also tell you this. We would love to see, just because it's indicative of health, we would love to see our top-line budget number grow, to have more money received this year than we received last year. And the reason that the elders, when I say we, I mean the elders, the finance committee, and the mission committee want to see that number grow. And we want to see it grow not so that we can redo the sanctuary. That's just putting makeup on a pig. That's not even worth it. We don't have computers that we want to buy or new speakers. We don't want to give extravagant raises to anyone but me. We don't have any other things that we want to do. And obviously I'm just kidding about that. We want to see that 10% that we give away grow to 15 and 20 and 30 and 40% of our budget. We want to collectively be conduits of grace. We spend the same amount in virtually every ministry that we have since I got here because we want that number to grow so that the percentage of what we give away can grow. That's the heart of the elders and of the finance committee. So I hope that you would consider partnering us in that way, but I will not tell you that you have a biblical mandate to do so. My heart for you, quite simply, is that you would see giving as a spiritual exercise. And if your family is not one that gives, it's okay. We want to invite you to start doing that. If there's other people or institutions building God's kingdom outside the walls of grace and you're passionate about them and you're compelled to give, start there. Give to them. Give to where your heart leads you to give. Be prayerful before God and ask him where he would have you funnel his resources. And do it. And watch your passion go with that gift. And watch your gratitude grow with that gift. But step into that. If you are someone who's been giving comfortably at a certain rate for years, prayerfully consider if you're married with your spouse, where God might have you direct more. And in that way, we can be obedient to this biblical command to give, and we can grow in our wisdom and in grace and in our faith deeper roots in Christ as we learn this new spiritual discipline of giving. I'm going to pray, and then I'm going to update you on where we're at with the building campaign. Father, thank you for the indescribable gift of providing us with resources that we might be used to funnel those to others. God, I pray that you would make us conduits of grace. Lord, for all of us, I pray that we might consider what you would have us do in light of this. Who and to what and to where you would have us give? Give us courage and faith that you will provide for us what we need. And God, for those that take steps to begin giving for the first time, I pray that they would see very quickly their passion grow towards your things, your heart, your places, and that they would see their gratitude grow as well. Lord, we ask all these things in your son's name. Amen.

All right, well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Now's not a good time. I'm busy. Happy Mother's Day for those to whom it applies. As we were singing that last song, I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. I think that's an excellent song for Mother's Day. I think about my wife, who's an incredible mother. I think about the mom that I got to grow up with. I think about the kids that we have and share together and see God's evidence, the evidence of God's goodness all over my life. And hopefully for Mother's Day, that's something that you get to reminisce and think about too. Hopefully you have a great mom. Hopefully you've gotten to experience being a mom if that's something that you want to experience. But I also know that for others, Mother's Day is hard. We had a lot of hard Mother's Days when we wanted the gift of children and we didn't have it yet. And so I always like to just acknowledge that and pray in gratitude for good moms, for good memories, for the blessing of motherhood, but also pray for strengthening for those for whom Mother's Day is difficult for myriad reasons. So if you'll join me in prayer, I'll pray, and then we'll dive into the sermon. Father, we're grateful for good moms, moms that love us,oms that love us enough to get on to us, to keep after us, to not give in. Moms who wake up in the night with us. Moms who are always there, who leave notes in our lunches and who pray with us every morning. We thank you for moms that we've seen read your word and seek you diligently. We thank you for moms who raised us to help see you. And God, we thank you for the gift of motherhood and parenthood. And those of us who have children, God, are so grateful that you've given us that gift. And so we pray that we would be the mom and the dad to them that we need to be. God, also lift up those for whom holidays like this are difficult. Maybe it's difficult because their mom's not here anymore, and that's hard. Maybe it's difficult because they want to be a mom and they're not. And that's hard. Maybe it's difficult, God, because we thought we were going to be a mom and then we weren't. So, Lord, I pray just for special strength, protection, grace, and peace onto those folks. And that, God, those of us who feel blessed by today would see you as the author of that blessing. In Jesus' name, amen. So this is part five of our series called Big Emotions, where we're just kind of looking at different stories and instances in the Bible where we see these emotional flare-ups, these blow-ups and these blow-outs, and kind of just ask, what can we learn from that? Because this blowing up is a very part, it's a part of the human existence. It's something that we all experience. And so earlier in the series, we talked about, I talked about Peter cutting off the ear of one of the soldiers in the garden, and I kind of compared that to when we lash out at people. We just get angry, and we lash out, we're cutting off ears, and we should try to cut off less ears. And we talked about what can we do when we feel like lashing out. And so I thought it would be good to look at the other end of that and say, what do we do when we're the one whose ear just got cut off? What do we do when someone lashes out at us? So the question for today is, what should you do when someone blows up on you? When you are on the receiving end of unwarranted anger, of unjust frustration, of unfair lashing out, what should you do when someone blows up on you? And I thought that this would be appropriate for Mother's Day because what is being a mom if not getting blown up at eight times a day because you had the audacity to suggest that now might be a good time to brush your hair or not wear Crocs with a church dress or not get out of bed at 630 to make Mother's Day breakfast. Not that any of those things happen in our home, but with your children who are less good than ours, I'm sure that they blow up at you. And I can only imagine, you know, right now we've got a seven-year-old daughter. John is two. He doesn't really know how to blow up at anybody. He just clenches his fist really tight and you can just hear, he screams and you can just see this visceral anger coming from him, which is great. And, but Lily knows how to blow up. She's seven, but they're seven-year-old blowups, you know, like they're not, they don't really sting a little. I bet the 17-year-old blowups are rough. I bet those, I'm not looking forward to those. And then something tells me that the older your children get, the worse those instances become. And I also know that on the other end of the spectrum, I've talked with enough people, with aging parents, that sometimes as parents get older and older, their filter is just used up. It's just used up. They don't have a new one. There's no replacement. You can't get one from Amazon. It's just gunked up and they've tossed it aside. And they can say things that aren't so nice sometimes. And that's tough. It's tough when someone blows up on you. It's tough to be on the receiving end of unfair anger. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was going to pick up my dad at the airport. And I was at the airport and just kind of started to, I was near the terminal, so the traffic kind of starts to funnel in and slow down and whatever. And this cab, like a literal taxi cab, I don't even know, like, what are you guys even doing anymore? Like, who's using cabs? And not, why does it even exist in Raleigh? I don't understand this. It's like, it's like, it's like seeing the yellow pages on your front door or something. Like, didn't we, didn't we cover this? Anyways, cab comes blowing past me, swerves into my lane, like, and, and, and like slams on his brakes. Like he's mad at me. And I'm like, what in the world's going on with this guy? I have no idea. I did not see him anywhere in my rear view. I was not aware. I didn't even think that I had changed lanes recently. He just decided he was mad at me. He gets in front of me and I'm like, whatever. So I, I actually, I didn't even need to be in that lane and he was now going slow to mess with me. So I, I I just went around him like I got to go to the second terminal, buddy. And I look over, and he is aggressively hanging the bird at me. And I don't know how you do that non-aggressively, but this was aggressive. Shaking his fist, yelling things. I literally, like honestly, I'm on the stage, okay? I'm preaching to people. So before God, I have no clue, no clue what I did that upset this guy. And so I just kind of looked at him and went, and kept driving. I don't know. I wasn't mad, but he was really mad at me. So what do we do when someone gets really angry with us and we don't deserve it? We didn't do anything. We don't know what to do. How do we act in those moments? How does God want us to act? And what's really cool is not even how does God want us to act just so that we behave well, but how can we act in those moments that will actually draw people, the people who are angry and the people who can see that anger, that will actually draw them closer to our Father. What can we do in those situations when someone blows up on us? When I was thinking about that, there's one story that comes to mind in the Bible. To me, it's the best blow-up story in the whole Bible. It's one of the biggest ones. I can't think of many others that are like it, if any at all. But it's in 1 Samuel. We see the first part of it in chapter 18, and then I'm going to point us to chapter 19. So Saul is the king of Israel. He's the first king of Israel, but there's this kid named David who's been anointed as the next king of Israel. Normally, Saul's son Jonathan would take the throne from him, but God has used the prophet Samuel to anoint David as the next king of Israel. And then after getting anointed, David does this really annoying thing where he goes down in the valley and he kills a giant that everybody else in the whole country was afraid of, including Saul, and he does it without Saul's armor. And so Saul's a little ticked at him. And then he puts David in his army, and there's this song. This is the English translation of the song. Maybe it sounds better in the original Hebrew. I don't know. It's a pretty dumb song, if you ask me. But it was, Saul has killed his thousands, but David has slayed his tens of thousands. I don't know what the melody is on that. Maybe I should get Roburg to help me out. That seemed to work for you. But I don't, that was the song, right? So there's some jealousy there between Saul and David. And so Saul was a man that was given to what we would probably identify as anxiety or depression, bouts of despair and anger. And one of the only things that could calm him was David coming to the palace and playing the harp for Saul. That would calm him down. And so David's doing that one day, and Saul is just seized with anger and throws his spear at David to try to kill him two times. David dodges both of them and then gets out of there. Then after that, Jonathan, who was David's closest friend in the world, goes to Saul, his dad, and he's like, dude, this is a paraphrase. He says, dude, what are you doing? What's the problem here, man? This guy, he loves you. He serves you. He's a good servant. He's faithful. He's a good leader of men on the battlefield. He's there to play the harp when you need him to. I'm not mad at him. I'm happy that he's going to be my king. You don't need to be mad at him for me. Just like knock it off with David, with hating David. Can you do that for me? And Saul says, yes, I promise I will not try to kill him anymore. Which just as an aside, if you ever in your life have to promise to stop trying to kill someone, you just need to take a look in the mirror. That's all. I'm not going to make a bunch of points about that, but that's a sentence that no one should say. I promise I will not try to kill him anymore. Then we pick up the story in 1 Samuel 19. Turns out Saul's a liar. He just really liked trying to kill David. So here we go. Then a harmful spirit from the Lord came upon Saul, and he sat in his house with his spear in his hand, and David was playing the lyre. And Saul sought to pin David to the wall with the spear, but he eluded Saul so that he struck the spear into the wall, and David fled and escaped that night. Saul sent messengers to David's house to watch him, that he might kill him in the morning. But Michal, David's wife, told him, If you do not escape with spear two times, leaves, gets invited back to the palace, goes back to the palace. He's playing the lyre again to try to soothe Saul. And Saul, for a third time, throws a spear at David. David eludes it and gets out of there. Which, as an aside, I'd just like to point out, this is one of the fundamental differences between David and I. I have a one-spear-throw policy. If you throw your spear at me one time in anyone's house, I'm leaving that house, and I'm not going to trust you around spears again. David has a three-spear policy, much more gracious than I am. So he eludes it for the third time. He leaves. McCall is actually Saul's daughter that was given to David in marriage, and she helps him escape. Later on, we see this poignant scene where David and Jonathan meet in a field, and Jonathan tells David, you're going to have to go until my dad dies. He's never going to stop wanting to kill you, so you got to go. So David, for I think about this 20 year period goes and he just lives in the wilderness with a band of some of his soldiers. And they just elude Saul at various times. Saul chases David through the wilderness, trying to capture him and kill him. And there's actually two really poignant scenes in the wilderness where David has a chance to kill Saul and he doesn't. There's one where they're in the En Gedi, the caves on the edge of the En Gedi plain, which is in the southern part of Israel, close to the Dead Sea. And Saul's army must have been close because David and his men were hiding in a cave. And Saul, now at my house, when someone says they have to go to the bathroom, we say, do you have to go to the bathroom or the bathroom bathroom? Saul had to go to the bathroom bathroom. So he goes into a cave to take care of business. While he's in there, just so happens, that's where David and his guys are. And David's guys are giving David the eyes like, dude, you could totally kill him right now. And David realizes this. But he says, shame on me if I harm the head of the Lord's anointed. So he takes his knife and he cuts off an edge of the robe and Saul leaves. And once he's a little ways off, within shouting distance at least, David feels terrible that he even did what he did. And he goes out and he gets Saul attention, and he shows him the robe. And Saul feels so bad about the grace and forgiveness that David shows him that he decides, I think I'm going to be done killing David for a while. And he goes back to the palace. It wasn't long before he started hunting for David again. This time, David and a guy named Abishai snuck into the tent at night, and Saul's laying on the ground asleep with all of his men around him asleep as well. And Abishai looks at David, and he says, let me strike him with the spear. It will only take once. It will not take twice, which is a really, like, it's one of the cool lines. Like, I only need to do it once, man. I won't need two on this one. I'll get him. And David says, no, shame on me if I touch the Lord's anointed. And then in a battle between some of David's forces and some of Saul's forces, Saul ends up being killed. And the person who takes Saul's life, David actually takes their life for being willing to do that to the Lord's anointed. So what we see from David is that although Saul blew up on him, had completely unjust, unfair, unwarranted anger at David, David always, his whole life took the high road. His whole life honored Saul. Never once did he raise to meet Saul where he was. And so if we're going to ask, what should we do when someone blows up on us, when we are the object of unwarranted anger and frustration, I think we can look to this example of the life of David and see what he did, and we can mimic those things in our own life. And what's really helpful about this is I think that there are three really important New Testament passages, verses or passages, because some of them are two verses. I think there are three really important New Testament passages that honestly, every Christian, if you're here and you call yourself a believer, you should have these memorized. You should be able to say these off the top of your head. These should be things that show up in your life that you think of often enough so regularly that you can quote them. You might not know where they're from. You might not know how to find them. You might have to type them into Google to figure out the reference like I did this week, but you should know them. You should know what to type into Google. And so I want to look at three verses that display three behaviors that David displayed in this story about his interaction with Saul. So let's look at three things that were true of David and try to make those true of us. The first thing we see in this story is that David was slow to anger. He was slow to anger. And I know he was slow to anger because David could have, by all accounts, by all accounts, he was a better warrior than Saul. By every measure, he was superior to Saul. When Saul is in his house and potentially drunk and throwing spears at him, David could have very easily taken that spear out of the wall and gotten his vengeance on Saul right there. Now, you might say, well, he couldn't do that. There's guards. He could have been killed. Yeah, maybe, but what we know is that he didn't raise up in red-hot anger and do what some of us would do if somebody tried to hurt us. He kept his cool. He was slow to anger, which is really not the typical response in the human experience, right? That's why James writes this verse to remind us to do it. In James 1, 19 and 20, he says, does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. This is one that we should know. This is one that we should have memorized. This is one that we should remind ourselves of, particularly when someone is blowing up at us. Because human nature is not to stay calm and stay down here. Human nature is to rise and meet the anger with anger, isn't it? You guys who are married know this. You know this. You've had those fights, those days, where you look at each other and you're just mad at each other. You're just mad. And finally, one of you goes, what are you mad about? What are you even upset for? And the other one says, I don't know. You're mad at me, and I don't know why you're mad, so I'm mad at you. Well, I don't know why you're mad. So I'm mad at you. And then you kind of go back and forth. You're like, what was the first thing that made us mad? And nobody knows. And like, can we just agree to just kind of set the arms down and slowly back away from this one? Are we done here? We're like, yeah, we're done here. But that's typical in human interaction to meet anger with anger. I remember years ago, very early on in our marriage, Jen and I were at each other's throats about something. I don't remember what. But as we were talking about it, she gets really upset. She storms up the stairs, slams our bedroom door. Now, what did I do? Did I, because of my maturity and wisdom, think to myself, she's probably overreacting, but I'm going to let her stay up there and simmer because we don't want to say words in anger. And, you know, I'm sure that she'll kind of calm down. She'll realize maybe that was a little bit too much, and she'll come and apologize and tell me I'm right. That's probably what I need to do. No, I did not do that. I did not do that. Instead, I thought, I'm going to go upstairs. I'm going to tell her that she does not need to be slamming doors in our house. So I go upstairs, and I open that door, and I start getting on to her for the way that she's expressing her anger. And she, again, I don't want to talk to you right now, and leaves the room and goes into the guest room and slams that door. Now listen. Here's what I know. I don't know what we were fighting about. But if I make that sweet woman act like that, it's my fault. I was wrong. I don't know what we were fighting about. I know I was wrong. That's what I know. Now when she went into the second room and shut that door, did I leave her be? No. Because I wanted to poke it. So I walk up to the guest bedroom and I open that door. And I said, you know, I can open this door too. I can open all the doors. I don't know what happened after that. Things just kind of went red, I guess. It was just a blur. That's what we do, isn't it? Someone's mad at us. Oh, I'm going to get mad at you. Some cab driver hangs you the bird, you're like, hey man, forget you. You know, like whatever. Your kid snaps at you, you've had a stressful day, you meet them there and you snap at them. Your spouse, your co-worker, your parent. That's what we do, isn't it? Someone's angry with us, we raise to meet that anger. Well, James tells us, don't do that. Don't do that. Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. It's important to be quick to listen and slow to speak too, because in those moments when we're frustrated, we have things that we want to say. But if we'll calm down and listen, we'll probably learn new information that may change what we want to say, that may help us be slower to anger. So when someone's angry with us, wisdom says, I'm going to be quiet, I'm going to be patient, I'm going to listen, and I will not meet anger with anger. This is what David does. The second thing that David does is David was quick to forgive. He was slow to listen and quick to forgive. He moves to forgiveness very, very quickly. We see no evidence whatsoever in any of the texts that David was ever angry with Saul or that David could not forgive Saul ever through the rest of his life. We see David offer Saul quick forgiveness, which is right in line with what Jesus teaches Peter in Matthew chapter 18. When it says that Peter came up to him and said, Lord, how often will my brother sin against me that should I forgive him? As many as seven times? And Jesus says to as many times as you need to. Forgive again, forgive again, forgive again, forgive again. And it feels pretty generous for Peter to ask that. How many times, when my brother commits the same offense against me, how many times should I forgive him? Up to seven, which makes sense. Your friend comes over to your house, he gets too rowdy, he breaks your new TV. You forgive him that one time. How many more times should I forgive him? Seven? That's a lot of breaking TVs. And Jesus says, no, as many times as you need to forgive them, forgive them. The way that I think about it is, as many times as we hope God forgives us, forgive other people that many times. When someone offends us, when someone lashes out at us, when we are the object of someone's unfair anger and unfair frustration, we should as quickly as we can move to forgive that person. Because holding that grudge is only going to hurt us. It's not going to hurt them. Now, I will also say this. Last year at Lent, during the Lent season, I did a sermon on forgiveness. And I basically just preached to you from the perspective of my good friend, whose husband was having an affair on her, and she had to really learn what forgiveness looked like because they had five kids, and that was really, really tough. And one of the things that she said that was super helpful, if you're a person who's struggling with forgiveness or wants a more robust explanation of forgiveness and what it looks like, then I would encourage you to go back and listen to that sermon. But one of the things she said that I found very helpful and others have commented to me too that was very helpful is forgiving someone does not mean that you have to trust them again. And so I would say this to you. If the person who is blowing up at you is making a habit of that, if they do it regularly, if it's not just a one-off that you can ascribe to a set of circumstances that are no longer true, but you have someone in your life who's blowing up at you again and again and again, you should be slow to anger in those situations, and you should be quick to find a path to forgiveness in those situations. But let me tell you what David did not do. He did not go back into Saul's palace again. He did not make himself vulnerable to a spear the fourth time. He did not trust Saul again. Did he forgive him? Yes. Did he honor him? Yes. Did he give him grace? Absolutely. But did he put himself back in that home? No. No. If you have someone in your life who is habitually blowing up at you, it is perfectly good and wise to remove yourself from that situation until something changes and you feel like you can trust that that's not going to keep happening. As we talk about what do we do when someone blows up on us, it's... I'm mostly talking about people who aren't our spouses. If it's our spouse and they do it all the time, if it's our brother or sister or friend or mom or dad and they do it all the time, that's a separate sermon. But what I would say to that separate sermon is, it's okay to not put yourself back in a situation where someone's going to blow up at you all the time, where you feel like you're just around a ticking time bomb. We should seek to forgive, but we don't have to trust and keep putting ourself in a place where that is going to happen over and over and over again until we believe that something is going to be different. The last thing David does is David was a conduit of grace. He was a conduit of grace. He was connected to God's grace. He was pouring grace out onto others. Back in the fall, I did a series called The Five Traits of Grace, the five characteristics that make us who we are, The five things that we want every partner to exhibit. And one of those things is to be a conduit of grace. To be attached to the grace of God so that the grace that we receive flows out onto others. This is the verse that I think of when I think of this. This is probably, if you're going to memorize any verse at all, if you don't know any of these, start with this one. Start with this verse. Put it on your mirror where you get dressed. Put it on your dashboard if you get angry in the car. Put it next to where your emails are if those things make you angry. Whatever sets you off, whatever stokes your fire, just put this verse so that you can see it. And it's super easy to memorize and it's super impactful. For from his fullness, John says, we have all received grace upon grace. From God's fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From the fullness of God's grace that pours out on us, we have all received grace upon grace. When we think about a couple of weeks ago on Palm Sunday, I did a sermon about the earned wrath of God on us for placing his son on the cross and that Jesus on the cross exhausts the wrath of God for his children. When we think of the wrath that we don't have to experience because God poured it out on Jesus instead of us, that's grace. And God knew, as I said, God knew that we were going to cheapen the blood of Christ by presuming upon the grace of God. He knew that we were going to do that. He knew what you were going to do after you prayed the prayer and after you accepted Jesus as your Savior. He knew that you were going to move through that awful season of your life that you'd like to forget. He knew that and he forgave that. He knows what lies ahead and he's forgiven that. When we think about the grace that we feel every week when we come to church and we sit here and we sing the songs and we have this voice in our head that reminds us of who we are and what we've done and where we've been and that if the people here knew what I was capable of, if the people here knew what I know, then I would have to find a different church to go to. And yet God chooses me and God loves me and God blesses me and he's given me grace upon grace. When we realize that, that that God is so good to us, that that God is so patient with us, that that God will watch us go through years where we don't have quiet times, where we're not praying to him, where we're not seeking him, where everything about our Christian life is compulsory and cursory. He will watch that zombie walk through life and still try to breathe spiritual life into us at all times, calling us back to him. He is excited every time we come home. He is excited every time we utter the words, dear God, and we begin to pray. He is thrilled in his heart every time he hears your voice praise your creator. When we receive from his fullness that much grace, it is very easy to pour grace out onto others. And this is what David did. He had grace for Saul. I think he understood Saul's plight. I think he had patience for him and his depressions and his moods, even in understanding his desire for his own son to be on the throne. And one of the best pictures of grace we see, maybe in the Bible, but definitely in the life of David, is once Saul has passed away, David has ascended to the throne. Anybody who's watched the History Channel or read any books about old kings and kingdoms knows that once a king takes over, one of the first acts of orders of business is to kill everyone associated with the bloodline that preceded him so that there's no threats to his throne. And there was no one left that they knew of, but then one day somebody found a relative of Saul's. It was a nephew or a cousin or something, I can't remember which. Named Mephibosheth. Mephibosheth, it says, had a disability. And that's important because that made it more difficult for Mephibosheth to earn money and provide for himself. So he was a person who needed help. And they brought him to David, expecting David to kill him, to put him to death, to be done with the line of Saul and move on. Instead, David, learning who he was, had mercy and grace on him, made a seat at his table for him, and invited Mephibosheth to live in the palace and dine with him and be with him and considered him a family member for the rest of his life. That was how David showed grace and honor to Saul. That's the kind of grace that we're to show to others. The grace that says, I'm not saying I did this in the moment, I'm not trying to give myself credit, but the grace that says, you know what? It would be super stressful to be a cab driver. I don't know how they do it. I went to Chick-fil-A and Home Depot the other day. I was about to lose my mind, and that's like five minutes away. I don't know how they do it to be a cab driver. And you know what? I bet I did something inconsiderate that I wasn't even thinking of. So I'm going to give them them that. Somebody cuts you off in traffic. They're probably in a hurry. They probably need to get where they're going. Or, if this helps, life would be really hard to be that dumb. So I'm glad that God didn't make me that dumb. Whatever you need. We offer others grace. And I'll tell you who's the world's best at offering other people grace. It's Jen, my wife. She will do this all the time. We will be in traffic. Someone will cut me off, cause me to have to slam on the brakes. Our children are crying. We're terrified. And I'll say, my gosh, can you believe that person? And she'll say, now, Nady, because she calls me Nady. If you want to call me Nady, too, you can. It'd just be weird. She says, now, Nady, you don't know. His wife could be in the passenger seat in labor right now. And we just need, tell me I'm lying. And we just, we don't know what's going on in their life. I could be walking down the road, I promise you. I could be walking down the road and some guy could just come up to me and dog cuss me in front of my family. And then I could get out of the situation and walk down there and be like, can you believe that guy? What a jerk. And she'd be like, now, lady, you don't know what's going on in his life. His wife may have just left him and his parents may have just passed away. You don't know. That kind of grace. And when we remind ourselves of God's goodness and grace to us every day, it is easy to pour that out onto others. And I say start with that one, memorize that one, because if we're full of grace and we're offering other people grace, can't we be more quick to forgive when they mess up? Can't we remember that hurt people hurt people and just assume that they're hurting and maybe actually help them get to the bottom of their hurt rather than piling on and making them feel shame for blowing up in a way that they regret? If we're full of grace, won't we be slow to be angry? Won't we stay here longer? Because we're trying to see the best in them and we're trying to give them the benefit of the doubt in the situation. I think if we just abound in grace that it takes care of the rest. And then the amazing thing that happens when we do this, when someone blows up at us unfairly or unjustly, if we do what this says, when someone blows up on you, be slow to anger, quick to forgive, and abound in grace. When we do that, what are the people around you going to notice? What are your children going to pick up on? It's the easiest thing in the world to match anger for anger. It's the easiest thing in the world to lash back out. It's the easiest thing in the world to let someone say something nasty to you, say something mean to you, to have a server who's curt with you, one of those servers who acts like they don't even want to be there that day. It's perfectly human to let them walk away and then you venture frustration to the people around you. But what if you meet them with grace? What if you're slow to anger when other people would meet? What if you're quick to forgive when other people would hold on? What if you're abounding in grace when other people would abound in suspicion and doubt? Then not only have you brought that person who blew up at you a little bit closer to Jesus, not only do you bring yourself closer to Jesus, but you bring the people around you who see that and who marvel at that closer to Jesus too. Simply by being someone who, like David, is slow to anger, quick to forgive, and always abounding in grace. Let's pray. Father, would we in this way be more like David? And so be men and women after your own heart. God, when we are the subject of unfair anger, unfair frustration, when people treat us in ways that we don't deserve to be treated, would you help us to be slow to anger? Would you help us to stop and to listen? Not meet frustration with frustration? Would you help us to be quick to forgive where we can, to give us an earnest desire to find a path to that forgiveness? And God, more than those things, would you help us be people who abound in grace, who walk in this acute awareness of the grace and the love and the mercy that we have from you. Let us be people who walk in an acute awareness that from your fullness we have received grace upon grace, and let us freely and excitedly and happily give that grace to those around us, even when those around us treat us unfairly. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Now's not a good time. I'm busy. Happy Mother's Day for those to whom it applies. As we were singing that last song, I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. I think that's an excellent song for Mother's Day. I think about my wife, who's an incredible mother. I think about the mom that I got to grow up with. I think about the kids that we have and share together and see God's evidence, the evidence of God's goodness all over my life. And hopefully for Mother's Day, that's something that you get to reminisce and think about too. Hopefully you have a great mom. Hopefully you've gotten to experience being a mom if that's something that you want to experience. But I also know that for others, Mother's Day is hard. We had a lot of hard Mother's Days when we wanted the gift of children and we didn't have it yet. And so I always like to just acknowledge that and pray in gratitude for good moms, for good memories, for the blessing of motherhood, but also pray for strengthening for those for whom Mother's Day is difficult for myriad reasons. So if you'll join me in prayer, I'll pray, and then we'll dive into the sermon. Father, we're grateful for good moms, moms that love us,oms that love us enough to get on to us, to keep after us, to not give in. Moms who wake up in the night with us. Moms who are always there, who leave notes in our lunches and who pray with us every morning. We thank you for moms that we've seen read your word and seek you diligently. We thank you for moms who raised us to help see you. And God, we thank you for the gift of motherhood and parenthood. And those of us who have children, God, are so grateful that you've given us that gift. And so we pray that we would be the mom and the dad to them that we need to be. God, also lift up those for whom holidays like this are difficult. Maybe it's difficult because their mom's not here anymore, and that's hard. Maybe it's difficult because they want to be a mom and they're not. And that's hard. Maybe it's difficult, God, because we thought we were going to be a mom and then we weren't. So, Lord, I pray just for special strength, protection, grace, and peace onto those folks. And that, God, those of us who feel blessed by today would see you as the author of that blessing. In Jesus' name, amen. So this is part five of our series called Big Emotions, where we're just kind of looking at different stories and instances in the Bible where we see these emotional flare-ups, these blow-ups and these blow-outs, and kind of just ask, what can we learn from that? Because this blowing up is a very part, it's a part of the human existence. It's something that we all experience. And so earlier in the series, we talked about, I talked about Peter cutting off the ear of one of the soldiers in the garden, and I kind of compared that to when we lash out at people. We just get angry, and we lash out, we're cutting off ears, and we should try to cut off less ears. And we talked about what can we do when we feel like lashing out. And so I thought it would be good to look at the other end of that and say, what do we do when we're the one whose ear just got cut off? What do we do when someone lashes out at us? So the question for today is, what should you do when someone blows up on you? When you are on the receiving end of unwarranted anger, of unjust frustration, of unfair lashing out, what should you do when someone blows up on you? And I thought that this would be appropriate for Mother's Day because what is being a mom if not getting blown up at eight times a day because you had the audacity to suggest that now might be a good time to brush your hair or not wear Crocs with a church dress or not get out of bed at 630 to make Mother's Day breakfast. Not that any of those things happen in our home, but with your children who are less good than ours, I'm sure that they blow up at you. And I can only imagine, you know, right now we've got a seven-year-old daughter. John is two. He doesn't really know how to blow up at anybody. He just clenches his fist really tight and you can just hear, he screams and you can just see this visceral anger coming from him, which is great. And, but Lily knows how to blow up. She's seven, but they're seven-year-old blowups, you know, like they're not, they don't really sting a little. I bet the 17-year-old blowups are rough. I bet those, I'm not looking forward to those. And then something tells me that the older your children get, the worse those instances become. And I also know that on the other end of the spectrum, I've talked with enough people, with aging parents, that sometimes as parents get older and older, their filter is just used up. It's just used up. They don't have a new one. There's no replacement. You can't get one from Amazon. It's just gunked up and they've tossed it aside. And they can say things that aren't so nice sometimes. And that's tough. It's tough when someone blows up on you. It's tough to be on the receiving end of unfair anger. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was going to pick up my dad at the airport. And I was at the airport and just kind of started to, I was near the terminal, so the traffic kind of starts to funnel in and slow down and whatever. And this cab, like a literal taxi cab, I don't even know, like, what are you guys even doing anymore? Like, who's using cabs? And not, why does it even exist in Raleigh? I don't understand this. It's like, it's like, it's like seeing the yellow pages on your front door or something. Like, didn't we, didn't we cover this? Anyways, cab comes blowing past me, swerves into my lane, like, and, and, and like slams on his brakes. Like he's mad at me. And I'm like, what in the world's going on with this guy? I have no idea. I did not see him anywhere in my rear view. I was not aware. I didn't even think that I had changed lanes recently. He just decided he was mad at me. He gets in front of me and I'm like, whatever. So I, I actually, I didn't even need to be in that lane and he was now going slow to mess with me. So I, I I just went around him like I got to go to the second terminal, buddy. And I look over, and he is aggressively hanging the bird at me. And I don't know how you do that non-aggressively, but this was aggressive. Shaking his fist, yelling things. I literally, like honestly, I'm on the stage, okay? I'm preaching to people. So before God, I have no clue, no clue what I did that upset this guy. And so I just kind of looked at him and went, and kept driving. I don't know. I wasn't mad, but he was really mad at me. So what do we do when someone gets really angry with us and we don't deserve it? We didn't do anything. We don't know what to do. How do we act in those moments? How does God want us to act? And what's really cool is not even how does God want us to act just so that we behave well, but how can we act in those moments that will actually draw people, the people who are angry and the people who can see that anger, that will actually draw them closer to our Father. What can we do in those situations when someone blows up on us? When I was thinking about that, there's one story that comes to mind in the Bible. To me, it's the best blow-up story in the whole Bible. It's one of the biggest ones. I can't think of many others that are like it, if any at all. But it's in 1 Samuel. We see the first part of it in chapter 18, and then I'm going to point us to chapter 19. So Saul is the king of Israel. He's the first king of Israel, but there's this kid named David who's been anointed as the next king of Israel. Normally, Saul's son Jonathan would take the throne from him, but God has used the prophet Samuel to anoint David as the next king of Israel. And then after getting anointed, David does this really annoying thing where he goes down in the valley and he kills a giant that everybody else in the whole country was afraid of, including Saul, and he does it without Saul's armor. And so Saul's a little ticked at him. And then he puts David in his army, and there's this song. This is the English translation of the song. Maybe it sounds better in the original Hebrew. I don't know. It's a pretty dumb song, if you ask me. But it was, Saul has killed his thousands, but David has slayed his tens of thousands. I don't know what the melody is on that. Maybe I should get Roburg to help me out. That seemed to work for you. But I don't, that was the song, right? So there's some jealousy there between Saul and David. And so Saul was a man that was given to what we would probably identify as anxiety or depression, bouts of despair and anger. And one of the only things that could calm him was David coming to the palace and playing the harp for Saul. That would calm him down. And so David's doing that one day, and Saul is just seized with anger and throws his spear at David to try to kill him two times. David dodges both of them and then gets out of there. Then after that, Jonathan, who was David's closest friend in the world, goes to Saul, his dad, and he's like, dude, this is a paraphrase. He says, dude, what are you doing? What's the problem here, man? This guy, he loves you. He serves you. He's a good servant. He's faithful. He's a good leader of men on the battlefield. He's there to play the harp when you need him to. I'm not mad at him. I'm happy that he's going to be my king. You don't need to be mad at him for me. Just like knock it off with David, with hating David. Can you do that for me? And Saul says, yes, I promise I will not try to kill him anymore. Which just as an aside, if you ever in your life have to promise to stop trying to kill someone, you just need to take a look in the mirror. That's all. I'm not going to make a bunch of points about that, but that's a sentence that no one should say. I promise I will not try to kill him anymore. Then we pick up the story in 1 Samuel 19. Turns out Saul's a liar. He just really liked trying to kill David. So here we go. Then a harmful spirit from the Lord came upon Saul, and he sat in his house with his spear in his hand, and David was playing the lyre. And Saul sought to pin David to the wall with the spear, but he eluded Saul so that he struck the spear into the wall, and David fled and escaped that night. Saul sent messengers to David's house to watch him, that he might kill him in the morning. But Michal, David's wife, told him, If you do not escape with spear two times, leaves, gets invited back to the palace, goes back to the palace. He's playing the lyre again to try to soothe Saul. And Saul, for a third time, throws a spear at David. David eludes it and gets out of there. Which, as an aside, I'd just like to point out, this is one of the fundamental differences between David and I. I have a one-spear-throw policy. If you throw your spear at me one time in anyone's house, I'm leaving that house, and I'm not going to trust you around spears again. David has a three-spear policy, much more gracious than I am. So he eludes it for the third time. He leaves. McCall is actually Saul's daughter that was given to David in marriage, and she helps him escape. Later on, we see this poignant scene where David and Jonathan meet in a field, and Jonathan tells David, you're going to have to go until my dad dies. He's never going to stop wanting to kill you, so you got to go. So David, for I think about this 20 year period goes and he just lives in the wilderness with a band of some of his soldiers. And they just elude Saul at various times. Saul chases David through the wilderness, trying to capture him and kill him. And there's actually two really poignant scenes in the wilderness where David has a chance to kill Saul and he doesn't. There's one where they're in the En Gedi, the caves on the edge of the En Gedi plain, which is in the southern part of Israel, close to the Dead Sea. And Saul's army must have been close because David and his men were hiding in a cave. And Saul, now at my house, when someone says they have to go to the bathroom, we say, do you have to go to the bathroom or the bathroom bathroom? Saul had to go to the bathroom bathroom. So he goes into a cave to take care of business. While he's in there, just so happens, that's where David and his guys are. And David's guys are giving David the eyes like, dude, you could totally kill him right now. And David realizes this. But he says, shame on me if I harm the head of the Lord's anointed. So he takes his knife and he cuts off an edge of the robe and Saul leaves. And once he's a little ways off, within shouting distance at least, David feels terrible that he even did what he did. And he goes out and he gets Saul attention, and he shows him the robe. And Saul feels so bad about the grace and forgiveness that David shows him that he decides, I think I'm going to be done killing David for a while. And he goes back to the palace. It wasn't long before he started hunting for David again. This time, David and a guy named Abishai snuck into the tent at night, and Saul's laying on the ground asleep with all of his men around him asleep as well. And Abishai looks at David, and he says, let me strike him with the spear. It will only take once. It will not take twice, which is a really, like, it's one of the cool lines. Like, I only need to do it once, man. I won't need two on this one. I'll get him. And David says, no, shame on me if I touch the Lord's anointed. And then in a battle between some of David's forces and some of Saul's forces, Saul ends up being killed. And the person who takes Saul's life, David actually takes their life for being willing to do that to the Lord's anointed. So what we see from David is that although Saul blew up on him, had completely unjust, unfair, unwarranted anger at David, David always, his whole life took the high road. His whole life honored Saul. Never once did he raise to meet Saul where he was. And so if we're going to ask, what should we do when someone blows up on us, when we are the object of unwarranted anger and frustration, I think we can look to this example of the life of David and see what he did, and we can mimic those things in our own life. And what's really helpful about this is I think that there are three really important New Testament passages, verses or passages, because some of them are two verses. I think there are three really important New Testament passages that honestly, every Christian, if you're here and you call yourself a believer, you should have these memorized. You should be able to say these off the top of your head. These should be things that show up in your life that you think of often enough so regularly that you can quote them. You might not know where they're from. You might not know how to find them. You might have to type them into Google to figure out the reference like I did this week, but you should know them. You should know what to type into Google. And so I want to look at three verses that display three behaviors that David displayed in this story about his interaction with Saul. So let's look at three things that were true of David and try to make those true of us. The first thing we see in this story is that David was slow to anger. He was slow to anger. And I know he was slow to anger because David could have, by all accounts, by all accounts, he was a better warrior than Saul. By every measure, he was superior to Saul. When Saul is in his house and potentially drunk and throwing spears at him, David could have very easily taken that spear out of the wall and gotten his vengeance on Saul right there. Now, you might say, well, he couldn't do that. There's guards. He could have been killed. Yeah, maybe, but what we know is that he didn't raise up in red-hot anger and do what some of us would do if somebody tried to hurt us. He kept his cool. He was slow to anger, which is really not the typical response in the human experience, right? That's why James writes this verse to remind us to do it. In James 1, 19 and 20, he says, does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. This is one that we should know. This is one that we should have memorized. This is one that we should remind ourselves of, particularly when someone is blowing up at us. Because human nature is not to stay calm and stay down here. Human nature is to rise and meet the anger with anger, isn't it? You guys who are married know this. You know this. You've had those fights, those days, where you look at each other and you're just mad at each other. You're just mad. And finally, one of you goes, what are you mad about? What are you even upset for? And the other one says, I don't know. You're mad at me, and I don't know why you're mad, so I'm mad at you. Well, I don't know why you're mad. So I'm mad at you. And then you kind of go back and forth. You're like, what was the first thing that made us mad? And nobody knows. And like, can we just agree to just kind of set the arms down and slowly back away from this one? Are we done here? We're like, yeah, we're done here. But that's typical in human interaction to meet anger with anger. I remember years ago, very early on in our marriage, Jen and I were at each other's throats about something. I don't remember what. But as we were talking about it, she gets really upset. She storms up the stairs, slams our bedroom door. Now, what did I do? Did I, because of my maturity and wisdom, think to myself, she's probably overreacting, but I'm going to let her stay up there and simmer because we don't want to say words in anger. And, you know, I'm sure that she'll kind of calm down. She'll realize maybe that was a little bit too much, and she'll come and apologize and tell me I'm right. That's probably what I need to do. No, I did not do that. I did not do that. Instead, I thought, I'm going to go upstairs. I'm going to tell her that she does not need to be slamming doors in our house. So I go upstairs, and I open that door, and I start getting on to her for the way that she's expressing her anger. And she, again, I don't want to talk to you right now, and leaves the room and goes into the guest room and slams that door. Now listen. Here's what I know. I don't know what we were fighting about. But if I make that sweet woman act like that, it's my fault. I was wrong. I don't know what we were fighting about. I know I was wrong. That's what I know. Now when she went into the second room and shut that door, did I leave her be? No. Because I wanted to poke it. So I walk up to the guest bedroom and I open that door. And I said, you know, I can open this door too. I can open all the doors. I don't know what happened after that. Things just kind of went red, I guess. It was just a blur. That's what we do, isn't it? Someone's mad at us. Oh, I'm going to get mad at you. Some cab driver hangs you the bird, you're like, hey man, forget you. You know, like whatever. Your kid snaps at you, you've had a stressful day, you meet them there and you snap at them. Your spouse, your co-worker, your parent. That's what we do, isn't it? Someone's angry with us, we raise to meet that anger. Well, James tells us, don't do that. Don't do that. Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. It's important to be quick to listen and slow to speak too, because in those moments when we're frustrated, we have things that we want to say. But if we'll calm down and listen, we'll probably learn new information that may change what we want to say, that may help us be slower to anger. So when someone's angry with us, wisdom says, I'm going to be quiet, I'm going to be patient, I'm going to listen, and I will not meet anger with anger. This is what David does. The second thing that David does is David was quick to forgive. He was slow to listen and quick to forgive. He moves to forgiveness very, very quickly. We see no evidence whatsoever in any of the texts that David was ever angry with Saul or that David could not forgive Saul ever through the rest of his life. We see David offer Saul quick forgiveness, which is right in line with what Jesus teaches Peter in Matthew chapter 18. When it says that Peter came up to him and said, Lord, how often will my brother sin against me that should I forgive him? As many as seven times? And Jesus says to as many times as you need to. Forgive again, forgive again, forgive again, forgive again. And it feels pretty generous for Peter to ask that. How many times, when my brother commits the same offense against me, how many times should I forgive him? Up to seven, which makes sense. Your friend comes over to your house, he gets too rowdy, he breaks your new TV. You forgive him that one time. How many more times should I forgive him? Seven? That's a lot of breaking TVs. And Jesus says, no, as many times as you need to forgive them, forgive them. The way that I think about it is, as many times as we hope God forgives us, forgive other people that many times. When someone offends us, when someone lashes out at us, when we are the object of someone's unfair anger and unfair frustration, we should as quickly as we can move to forgive that person. Because holding that grudge is only going to hurt us. It's not going to hurt them. Now, I will also say this. Last year at Lent, during the Lent season, I did a sermon on forgiveness. And I basically just preached to you from the perspective of my good friend, whose husband was having an affair on her, and she had to really learn what forgiveness looked like because they had five kids, and that was really, really tough. And one of the things that she said that was super helpful, if you're a person who's struggling with forgiveness or wants a more robust explanation of forgiveness and what it looks like, then I would encourage you to go back and listen to that sermon. But one of the things she said that I found very helpful and others have commented to me too that was very helpful is forgiving someone does not mean that you have to trust them again. And so I would say this to you. If the person who is blowing up at you is making a habit of that, if they do it regularly, if it's not just a one-off that you can ascribe to a set of circumstances that are no longer true, but you have someone in your life who's blowing up at you again and again and again, you should be slow to anger in those situations, and you should be quick to find a path to forgiveness in those situations. But let me tell you what David did not do. He did not go back into Saul's palace again. He did not make himself vulnerable to a spear the fourth time. He did not trust Saul again. Did he forgive him? Yes. Did he honor him? Yes. Did he give him grace? Absolutely. But did he put himself back in that home? No. No. If you have someone in your life who is habitually blowing up at you, it is perfectly good and wise to remove yourself from that situation until something changes and you feel like you can trust that that's not going to keep happening. As we talk about what do we do when someone blows up on us, it's... I'm mostly talking about people who aren't our spouses. If it's our spouse and they do it all the time, if it's our brother or sister or friend or mom or dad and they do it all the time, that's a separate sermon. But what I would say to that separate sermon is, it's okay to not put yourself back in a situation where someone's going to blow up at you all the time, where you feel like you're just around a ticking time bomb. We should seek to forgive, but we don't have to trust and keep putting ourself in a place where that is going to happen over and over and over again until we believe that something is going to be different. The last thing David does is David was a conduit of grace. He was a conduit of grace. He was connected to God's grace. He was pouring grace out onto others. Back in the fall, I did a series called The Five Traits of Grace, the five characteristics that make us who we are, The five things that we want every partner to exhibit. And one of those things is to be a conduit of grace. To be attached to the grace of God so that the grace that we receive flows out onto others. This is the verse that I think of when I think of this. This is probably, if you're going to memorize any verse at all, if you don't know any of these, start with this one. Start with this verse. Put it on your mirror where you get dressed. Put it on your dashboard if you get angry in the car. Put it next to where your emails are if those things make you angry. Whatever sets you off, whatever stokes your fire, just put this verse so that you can see it. And it's super easy to memorize and it's super impactful. For from his fullness, John says, we have all received grace upon grace. From God's fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From the fullness of God's grace that pours out on us, we have all received grace upon grace. When we think about a couple of weeks ago on Palm Sunday, I did a sermon about the earned wrath of God on us for placing his son on the cross and that Jesus on the cross exhausts the wrath of God for his children. When we think of the wrath that we don't have to experience because God poured it out on Jesus instead of us, that's grace. And God knew, as I said, God knew that we were going to cheapen the blood of Christ by presuming upon the grace of God. He knew that we were going to do that. He knew what you were going to do after you prayed the prayer and after you accepted Jesus as your Savior. He knew that you were going to move through that awful season of your life that you'd like to forget. He knew that and he forgave that. He knows what lies ahead and he's forgiven that. When we think about the grace that we feel every week when we come to church and we sit here and we sing the songs and we have this voice in our head that reminds us of who we are and what we've done and where we've been and that if the people here knew what I was capable of, if the people here knew what I know, then I would have to find a different church to go to. And yet God chooses me and God loves me and God blesses me and he's given me grace upon grace. When we realize that, that that God is so good to us, that that God is so patient with us, that that God will watch us go through years where we don't have quiet times, where we're not praying to him, where we're not seeking him, where everything about our Christian life is compulsory and cursory. He will watch that zombie walk through life and still try to breathe spiritual life into us at all times, calling us back to him. He is excited every time we come home. He is excited every time we utter the words, dear God, and we begin to pray. He is thrilled in his heart every time he hears your voice praise your creator. When we receive from his fullness that much grace, it is very easy to pour grace out onto others. And this is what David did. He had grace for Saul. I think he understood Saul's plight. I think he had patience for him and his depressions and his moods, even in understanding his desire for his own son to be on the throne. And one of the best pictures of grace we see, maybe in the Bible, but definitely in the life of David, is once Saul has passed away, David has ascended to the throne. Anybody who's watched the History Channel or read any books about old kings and kingdoms knows that once a king takes over, one of the first acts of orders of business is to kill everyone associated with the bloodline that preceded him so that there's no threats to his throne. And there was no one left that they knew of, but then one day somebody found a relative of Saul's. It was a nephew or a cousin or something, I can't remember which. Named Mephibosheth. Mephibosheth, it says, had a disability. And that's important because that made it more difficult for Mephibosheth to earn money and provide for himself. So he was a person who needed help. And they brought him to David, expecting David to kill him, to put him to death, to be done with the line of Saul and move on. Instead, David, learning who he was, had mercy and grace on him, made a seat at his table for him, and invited Mephibosheth to live in the palace and dine with him and be with him and considered him a family member for the rest of his life. That was how David showed grace and honor to Saul. That's the kind of grace that we're to show to others. The grace that says, I'm not saying I did this in the moment, I'm not trying to give myself credit, but the grace that says, you know what? It would be super stressful to be a cab driver. I don't know how they do it. I went to Chick-fil-A and Home Depot the other day. I was about to lose my mind, and that's like five minutes away. I don't know how they do it to be a cab driver. And you know what? I bet I did something inconsiderate that I wasn't even thinking of. So I'm going to give them them that. Somebody cuts you off in traffic. They're probably in a hurry. They probably need to get where they're going. Or, if this helps, life would be really hard to be that dumb. So I'm glad that God didn't make me that dumb. Whatever you need. We offer others grace. And I'll tell you who's the world's best at offering other people grace. It's Jen, my wife. She will do this all the time. We will be in traffic. Someone will cut me off, cause me to have to slam on the brakes. Our children are crying. We're terrified. And I'll say, my gosh, can you believe that person? And she'll say, now, Nady, because she calls me Nady. If you want to call me Nady, too, you can. It'd just be weird. She says, now, Nady, you don't know. His wife could be in the passenger seat in labor right now. And we just need, tell me I'm lying. And we just, we don't know what's going on in their life. I could be walking down the road, I promise you. I could be walking down the road and some guy could just come up to me and dog cuss me in front of my family. And then I could get out of the situation and walk down there and be like, can you believe that guy? What a jerk. And she'd be like, now, lady, you don't know what's going on in his life. His wife may have just left him and his parents may have just passed away. You don't know. That kind of grace. And when we remind ourselves of God's goodness and grace to us every day, it is easy to pour that out onto others. And I say start with that one, memorize that one, because if we're full of grace and we're offering other people grace, can't we be more quick to forgive when they mess up? Can't we remember that hurt people hurt people and just assume that they're hurting and maybe actually help them get to the bottom of their hurt rather than piling on and making them feel shame for blowing up in a way that they regret? If we're full of grace, won't we be slow to be angry? Won't we stay here longer? Because we're trying to see the best in them and we're trying to give them the benefit of the doubt in the situation. I think if we just abound in grace that it takes care of the rest. And then the amazing thing that happens when we do this, when someone blows up at us unfairly or unjustly, if we do what this says, when someone blows up on you, be slow to anger, quick to forgive, and abound in grace. When we do that, what are the people around you going to notice? What are your children going to pick up on? It's the easiest thing in the world to match anger for anger. It's the easiest thing in the world to lash back out. It's the easiest thing in the world to let someone say something nasty to you, say something mean to you, to have a server who's curt with you, one of those servers who acts like they don't even want to be there that day. It's perfectly human to let them walk away and then you venture frustration to the people around you. But what if you meet them with grace? What if you're slow to anger when other people would meet? What if you're quick to forgive when other people would hold on? What if you're abounding in grace when other people would abound in suspicion and doubt? Then not only have you brought that person who blew up at you a little bit closer to Jesus, not only do you bring yourself closer to Jesus, but you bring the people around you who see that and who marvel at that closer to Jesus too. Simply by being someone who, like David, is slow to anger, quick to forgive, and always abounding in grace. Let's pray. Father, would we in this way be more like David? And so be men and women after your own heart. God, when we are the subject of unfair anger, unfair frustration, when people treat us in ways that we don't deserve to be treated, would you help us to be slow to anger? Would you help us to stop and to listen? Not meet frustration with frustration? Would you help us to be quick to forgive where we can, to give us an earnest desire to find a path to that forgiveness? And God, more than those things, would you help us be people who abound in grace, who walk in this acute awareness of the grace and the love and the mercy that we have from you. Let us be people who walk in an acute awareness that from your fullness we have received grace upon grace, and let us freely and excitedly and happily give that grace to those around us, even when those around us treat us unfairly. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Now's not a good time. I'm busy. Happy Mother's Day for those to whom it applies. As we were singing that last song, I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. I think that's an excellent song for Mother's Day. I think about my wife, who's an incredible mother. I think about the mom that I got to grow up with. I think about the kids that we have and share together and see God's evidence, the evidence of God's goodness all over my life. And hopefully for Mother's Day, that's something that you get to reminisce and think about too. Hopefully you have a great mom. Hopefully you've gotten to experience being a mom if that's something that you want to experience. But I also know that for others, Mother's Day is hard. We had a lot of hard Mother's Days when we wanted the gift of children and we didn't have it yet. And so I always like to just acknowledge that and pray in gratitude for good moms, for good memories, for the blessing of motherhood, but also pray for strengthening for those for whom Mother's Day is difficult for myriad reasons. So if you'll join me in prayer, I'll pray, and then we'll dive into the sermon. Father, we're grateful for good moms, moms that love us,oms that love us enough to get on to us, to keep after us, to not give in. Moms who wake up in the night with us. Moms who are always there, who leave notes in our lunches and who pray with us every morning. We thank you for moms that we've seen read your word and seek you diligently. We thank you for moms who raised us to help see you. And God, we thank you for the gift of motherhood and parenthood. And those of us who have children, God, are so grateful that you've given us that gift. And so we pray that we would be the mom and the dad to them that we need to be. God, also lift up those for whom holidays like this are difficult. Maybe it's difficult because their mom's not here anymore, and that's hard. Maybe it's difficult because they want to be a mom and they're not. And that's hard. Maybe it's difficult, God, because we thought we were going to be a mom and then we weren't. So, Lord, I pray just for special strength, protection, grace, and peace onto those folks. And that, God, those of us who feel blessed by today would see you as the author of that blessing. In Jesus' name, amen. So this is part five of our series called Big Emotions, where we're just kind of looking at different stories and instances in the Bible where we see these emotional flare-ups, these blow-ups and these blow-outs, and kind of just ask, what can we learn from that? Because this blowing up is a very part, it's a part of the human existence. It's something that we all experience. And so earlier in the series, we talked about, I talked about Peter cutting off the ear of one of the soldiers in the garden, and I kind of compared that to when we lash out at people. We just get angry, and we lash out, we're cutting off ears, and we should try to cut off less ears. And we talked about what can we do when we feel like lashing out. And so I thought it would be good to look at the other end of that and say, what do we do when we're the one whose ear just got cut off? What do we do when someone lashes out at us? So the question for today is, what should you do when someone blows up on you? When you are on the receiving end of unwarranted anger, of unjust frustration, of unfair lashing out, what should you do when someone blows up on you? And I thought that this would be appropriate for Mother's Day because what is being a mom if not getting blown up at eight times a day because you had the audacity to suggest that now might be a good time to brush your hair or not wear Crocs with a church dress or not get out of bed at 630 to make Mother's Day breakfast. Not that any of those things happen in our home, but with your children who are less good than ours, I'm sure that they blow up at you. And I can only imagine, you know, right now we've got a seven-year-old daughter. John is two. He doesn't really know how to blow up at anybody. He just clenches his fist really tight and you can just hear, he screams and you can just see this visceral anger coming from him, which is great. And, but Lily knows how to blow up. She's seven, but they're seven-year-old blowups, you know, like they're not, they don't really sting a little. I bet the 17-year-old blowups are rough. I bet those, I'm not looking forward to those. And then something tells me that the older your children get, the worse those instances become. And I also know that on the other end of the spectrum, I've talked with enough people, with aging parents, that sometimes as parents get older and older, their filter is just used up. It's just used up. They don't have a new one. There's no replacement. You can't get one from Amazon. It's just gunked up and they've tossed it aside. And they can say things that aren't so nice sometimes. And that's tough. It's tough when someone blows up on you. It's tough to be on the receiving end of unfair anger. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was going to pick up my dad at the airport. And I was at the airport and just kind of started to, I was near the terminal, so the traffic kind of starts to funnel in and slow down and whatever. And this cab, like a literal taxi cab, I don't even know, like, what are you guys even doing anymore? Like, who's using cabs? And not, why does it even exist in Raleigh? I don't understand this. It's like, it's like, it's like seeing the yellow pages on your front door or something. Like, didn't we, didn't we cover this? Anyways, cab comes blowing past me, swerves into my lane, like, and, and, and like slams on his brakes. Like he's mad at me. And I'm like, what in the world's going on with this guy? I have no idea. I did not see him anywhere in my rear view. I was not aware. I didn't even think that I had changed lanes recently. He just decided he was mad at me. He gets in front of me and I'm like, whatever. So I, I actually, I didn't even need to be in that lane and he was now going slow to mess with me. So I, I I just went around him like I got to go to the second terminal, buddy. And I look over, and he is aggressively hanging the bird at me. And I don't know how you do that non-aggressively, but this was aggressive. Shaking his fist, yelling things. I literally, like honestly, I'm on the stage, okay? I'm preaching to people. So before God, I have no clue, no clue what I did that upset this guy. And so I just kind of looked at him and went, and kept driving. I don't know. I wasn't mad, but he was really mad at me. So what do we do when someone gets really angry with us and we don't deserve it? We didn't do anything. We don't know what to do. How do we act in those moments? How does God want us to act? And what's really cool is not even how does God want us to act just so that we behave well, but how can we act in those moments that will actually draw people, the people who are angry and the people who can see that anger, that will actually draw them closer to our Father. What can we do in those situations when someone blows up on us? When I was thinking about that, there's one story that comes to mind in the Bible. To me, it's the best blow-up story in the whole Bible. It's one of the biggest ones. I can't think of many others that are like it, if any at all. But it's in 1 Samuel. We see the first part of it in chapter 18, and then I'm going to point us to chapter 19. So Saul is the king of Israel. He's the first king of Israel, but there's this kid named David who's been anointed as the next king of Israel. Normally, Saul's son Jonathan would take the throne from him, but God has used the prophet Samuel to anoint David as the next king of Israel. And then after getting anointed, David does this really annoying thing where he goes down in the valley and he kills a giant that everybody else in the whole country was afraid of, including Saul, and he does it without Saul's armor. And so Saul's a little ticked at him. And then he puts David in his army, and there's this song. This is the English translation of the song. Maybe it sounds better in the original Hebrew. I don't know. It's a pretty dumb song, if you ask me. But it was, Saul has killed his thousands, but David has slayed his tens of thousands. I don't know what the melody is on that. Maybe I should get Roburg to help me out. That seemed to work for you. But I don't, that was the song, right? So there's some jealousy there between Saul and David. And so Saul was a man that was given to what we would probably identify as anxiety or depression, bouts of despair and anger. And one of the only things that could calm him was David coming to the palace and playing the harp for Saul. That would calm him down. And so David's doing that one day, and Saul is just seized with anger and throws his spear at David to try to kill him two times. David dodges both of them and then gets out of there. Then after that, Jonathan, who was David's closest friend in the world, goes to Saul, his dad, and he's like, dude, this is a paraphrase. He says, dude, what are you doing? What's the problem here, man? This guy, he loves you. He serves you. He's a good servant. He's faithful. He's a good leader of men on the battlefield. He's there to play the harp when you need him to. I'm not mad at him. I'm happy that he's going to be my king. You don't need to be mad at him for me. Just like knock it off with David, with hating David. Can you do that for me? And Saul says, yes, I promise I will not try to kill him anymore. Which just as an aside, if you ever in your life have to promise to stop trying to kill someone, you just need to take a look in the mirror. That's all. I'm not going to make a bunch of points about that, but that's a sentence that no one should say. I promise I will not try to kill him anymore. Then we pick up the story in 1 Samuel 19. Turns out Saul's a liar. He just really liked trying to kill David. So here we go. Then a harmful spirit from the Lord came upon Saul, and he sat in his house with his spear in his hand, and David was playing the lyre. And Saul sought to pin David to the wall with the spear, but he eluded Saul so that he struck the spear into the wall, and David fled and escaped that night. Saul sent messengers to David's house to watch him, that he might kill him in the morning. But Michal, David's wife, told him, If you do not escape with spear two times, leaves, gets invited back to the palace, goes back to the palace. He's playing the lyre again to try to soothe Saul. And Saul, for a third time, throws a spear at David. David eludes it and gets out of there. Which, as an aside, I'd just like to point out, this is one of the fundamental differences between David and I. I have a one-spear-throw policy. If you throw your spear at me one time in anyone's house, I'm leaving that house, and I'm not going to trust you around spears again. David has a three-spear policy, much more gracious than I am. So he eludes it for the third time. He leaves. McCall is actually Saul's daughter that was given to David in marriage, and she helps him escape. Later on, we see this poignant scene where David and Jonathan meet in a field, and Jonathan tells David, you're going to have to go until my dad dies. He's never going to stop wanting to kill you, so you got to go. So David, for I think about this 20 year period goes and he just lives in the wilderness with a band of some of his soldiers. And they just elude Saul at various times. Saul chases David through the wilderness, trying to capture him and kill him. And there's actually two really poignant scenes in the wilderness where David has a chance to kill Saul and he doesn't. There's one where they're in the En Gedi, the caves on the edge of the En Gedi plain, which is in the southern part of Israel, close to the Dead Sea. And Saul's army must have been close because David and his men were hiding in a cave. And Saul, now at my house, when someone says they have to go to the bathroom, we say, do you have to go to the bathroom or the bathroom bathroom? Saul had to go to the bathroom bathroom. So he goes into a cave to take care of business. While he's in there, just so happens, that's where David and his guys are. And David's guys are giving David the eyes like, dude, you could totally kill him right now. And David realizes this. But he says, shame on me if I harm the head of the Lord's anointed. So he takes his knife and he cuts off an edge of the robe and Saul leaves. And once he's a little ways off, within shouting distance at least, David feels terrible that he even did what he did. And he goes out and he gets Saul attention, and he shows him the robe. And Saul feels so bad about the grace and forgiveness that David shows him that he decides, I think I'm going to be done killing David for a while. And he goes back to the palace. It wasn't long before he started hunting for David again. This time, David and a guy named Abishai snuck into the tent at night, and Saul's laying on the ground asleep with all of his men around him asleep as well. And Abishai looks at David, and he says, let me strike him with the spear. It will only take once. It will not take twice, which is a really, like, it's one of the cool lines. Like, I only need to do it once, man. I won't need two on this one. I'll get him. And David says, no, shame on me if I touch the Lord's anointed. And then in a battle between some of David's forces and some of Saul's forces, Saul ends up being killed. And the person who takes Saul's life, David actually takes their life for being willing to do that to the Lord's anointed. So what we see from David is that although Saul blew up on him, had completely unjust, unfair, unwarranted anger at David, David always, his whole life took the high road. His whole life honored Saul. Never once did he raise to meet Saul where he was. And so if we're going to ask, what should we do when someone blows up on us, when we are the object of unwarranted anger and frustration, I think we can look to this example of the life of David and see what he did, and we can mimic those things in our own life. And what's really helpful about this is I think that there are three really important New Testament passages, verses or passages, because some of them are two verses. I think there are three really important New Testament passages that honestly, every Christian, if you're here and you call yourself a believer, you should have these memorized. You should be able to say these off the top of your head. These should be things that show up in your life that you think of often enough so regularly that you can quote them. You might not know where they're from. You might not know how to find them. You might have to type them into Google to figure out the reference like I did this week, but you should know them. You should know what to type into Google. And so I want to look at three verses that display three behaviors that David displayed in this story about his interaction with Saul. So let's look at three things that were true of David and try to make those true of us. The first thing we see in this story is that David was slow to anger. He was slow to anger. And I know he was slow to anger because David could have, by all accounts, by all accounts, he was a better warrior than Saul. By every measure, he was superior to Saul. When Saul is in his house and potentially drunk and throwing spears at him, David could have very easily taken that spear out of the wall and gotten his vengeance on Saul right there. Now, you might say, well, he couldn't do that. There's guards. He could have been killed. Yeah, maybe, but what we know is that he didn't raise up in red-hot anger and do what some of us would do if somebody tried to hurt us. He kept his cool. He was slow to anger, which is really not the typical response in the human experience, right? That's why James writes this verse to remind us to do it. In James 1, 19 and 20, he says, does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. This is one that we should know. This is one that we should have memorized. This is one that we should remind ourselves of, particularly when someone is blowing up at us. Because human nature is not to stay calm and stay down here. Human nature is to rise and meet the anger with anger, isn't it? You guys who are married know this. You know this. You've had those fights, those days, where you look at each other and you're just mad at each other. You're just mad. And finally, one of you goes, what are you mad about? What are you even upset for? And the other one says, I don't know. You're mad at me, and I don't know why you're mad, so I'm mad at you. Well, I don't know why you're mad. So I'm mad at you. And then you kind of go back and forth. You're like, what was the first thing that made us mad? And nobody knows. And like, can we just agree to just kind of set the arms down and slowly back away from this one? Are we done here? We're like, yeah, we're done here. But that's typical in human interaction to meet anger with anger. I remember years ago, very early on in our marriage, Jen and I were at each other's throats about something. I don't remember what. But as we were talking about it, she gets really upset. She storms up the stairs, slams our bedroom door. Now, what did I do? Did I, because of my maturity and wisdom, think to myself, she's probably overreacting, but I'm going to let her stay up there and simmer because we don't want to say words in anger. And, you know, I'm sure that she'll kind of calm down. She'll realize maybe that was a little bit too much, and she'll come and apologize and tell me I'm right. That's probably what I need to do. No, I did not do that. I did not do that. Instead, I thought, I'm going to go upstairs. I'm going to tell her that she does not need to be slamming doors in our house. So I go upstairs, and I open that door, and I start getting on to her for the way that she's expressing her anger. And she, again, I don't want to talk to you right now, and leaves the room and goes into the guest room and slams that door. Now listen. Here's what I know. I don't know what we were fighting about. But if I make that sweet woman act like that, it's my fault. I was wrong. I don't know what we were fighting about. I know I was wrong. That's what I know. Now when she went into the second room and shut that door, did I leave her be? No. Because I wanted to poke it. So I walk up to the guest bedroom and I open that door. And I said, you know, I can open this door too. I can open all the doors. I don't know what happened after that. Things just kind of went red, I guess. It was just a blur. That's what we do, isn't it? Someone's mad at us. Oh, I'm going to get mad at you. Some cab driver hangs you the bird, you're like, hey man, forget you. You know, like whatever. Your kid snaps at you, you've had a stressful day, you meet them there and you snap at them. Your spouse, your co-worker, your parent. That's what we do, isn't it? Someone's angry with us, we raise to meet that anger. Well, James tells us, don't do that. Don't do that. Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. It's important to be quick to listen and slow to speak too, because in those moments when we're frustrated, we have things that we want to say. But if we'll calm down and listen, we'll probably learn new information that may change what we want to say, that may help us be slower to anger. So when someone's angry with us, wisdom says, I'm going to be quiet, I'm going to be patient, I'm going to listen, and I will not meet anger with anger. This is what David does. The second thing that David does is David was quick to forgive. He was slow to listen and quick to forgive. He moves to forgiveness very, very quickly. We see no evidence whatsoever in any of the texts that David was ever angry with Saul or that David could not forgive Saul ever through the rest of his life. We see David offer Saul quick forgiveness, which is right in line with what Jesus teaches Peter in Matthew chapter 18. When it says that Peter came up to him and said, Lord, how often will my brother sin against me that should I forgive him? As many as seven times? And Jesus says to as many times as you need to. Forgive again, forgive again, forgive again, forgive again. And it feels pretty generous for Peter to ask that. How many times, when my brother commits the same offense against me, how many times should I forgive him? Up to seven, which makes sense. Your friend comes over to your house, he gets too rowdy, he breaks your new TV. You forgive him that one time. How many more times should I forgive him? Seven? That's a lot of breaking TVs. And Jesus says, no, as many times as you need to forgive them, forgive them. The way that I think about it is, as many times as we hope God forgives us, forgive other people that many times. When someone offends us, when someone lashes out at us, when we are the object of someone's unfair anger and unfair frustration, we should as quickly as we can move to forgive that person. Because holding that grudge is only going to hurt us. It's not going to hurt them. Now, I will also say this. Last year at Lent, during the Lent season, I did a sermon on forgiveness. And I basically just preached to you from the perspective of my good friend, whose husband was having an affair on her, and she had to really learn what forgiveness looked like because they had five kids, and that was really, really tough. And one of the things that she said that was super helpful, if you're a person who's struggling with forgiveness or wants a more robust explanation of forgiveness and what it looks like, then I would encourage you to go back and listen to that sermon. But one of the things she said that I found very helpful and others have commented to me too that was very helpful is forgiving someone does not mean that you have to trust them again. And so I would say this to you. If the person who is blowing up at you is making a habit of that, if they do it regularly, if it's not just a one-off that you can ascribe to a set of circumstances that are no longer true, but you have someone in your life who's blowing up at you again and again and again, you should be slow to anger in those situations, and you should be quick to find a path to forgiveness in those situations. But let me tell you what David did not do. He did not go back into Saul's palace again. He did not make himself vulnerable to a spear the fourth time. He did not trust Saul again. Did he forgive him? Yes. Did he honor him? Yes. Did he give him grace? Absolutely. But did he put himself back in that home? No. No. If you have someone in your life who is habitually blowing up at you, it is perfectly good and wise to remove yourself from that situation until something changes and you feel like you can trust that that's not going to keep happening. As we talk about what do we do when someone blows up on us, it's... I'm mostly talking about people who aren't our spouses. If it's our spouse and they do it all the time, if it's our brother or sister or friend or mom or dad and they do it all the time, that's a separate sermon. But what I would say to that separate sermon is, it's okay to not put yourself back in a situation where someone's going to blow up at you all the time, where you feel like you're just around a ticking time bomb. We should seek to forgive, but we don't have to trust and keep putting ourself in a place where that is going to happen over and over and over again until we believe that something is going to be different. The last thing David does is David was a conduit of grace. He was a conduit of grace. He was connected to God's grace. He was pouring grace out onto others. Back in the fall, I did a series called The Five Traits of Grace, the five characteristics that make us who we are, The five things that we want every partner to exhibit. And one of those things is to be a conduit of grace. To be attached to the grace of God so that the grace that we receive flows out onto others. This is the verse that I think of when I think of this. This is probably, if you're going to memorize any verse at all, if you don't know any of these, start with this one. Start with this verse. Put it on your mirror where you get dressed. Put it on your dashboard if you get angry in the car. Put it next to where your emails are if those things make you angry. Whatever sets you off, whatever stokes your fire, just put this verse so that you can see it. And it's super easy to memorize and it's super impactful. For from his fullness, John says, we have all received grace upon grace. From God's fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From the fullness of God's grace that pours out on us, we have all received grace upon grace. When we think about a couple of weeks ago on Palm Sunday, I did a sermon about the earned wrath of God on us for placing his son on the cross and that Jesus on the cross exhausts the wrath of God for his children. When we think of the wrath that we don't have to experience because God poured it out on Jesus instead of us, that's grace. And God knew, as I said, God knew that we were going to cheapen the blood of Christ by presuming upon the grace of God. He knew that we were going to do that. He knew what you were going to do after you prayed the prayer and after you accepted Jesus as your Savior. He knew that you were going to move through that awful season of your life that you'd like to forget. He knew that and he forgave that. He knows what lies ahead and he's forgiven that. When we think about the grace that we feel every week when we come to church and we sit here and we sing the songs and we have this voice in our head that reminds us of who we are and what we've done and where we've been and that if the people here knew what I was capable of, if the people here knew what I know, then I would have to find a different church to go to. And yet God chooses me and God loves me and God blesses me and he's given me grace upon grace. When we realize that, that that God is so good to us, that that God is so patient with us, that that God will watch us go through years where we don't have quiet times, where we're not praying to him, where we're not seeking him, where everything about our Christian life is compulsory and cursory. He will watch that zombie walk through life and still try to breathe spiritual life into us at all times, calling us back to him. He is excited every time we come home. He is excited every time we utter the words, dear God, and we begin to pray. He is thrilled in his heart every time he hears your voice praise your creator. When we receive from his fullness that much grace, it is very easy to pour grace out onto others. And this is what David did. He had grace for Saul. I think he understood Saul's plight. I think he had patience for him and his depressions and his moods, even in understanding his desire for his own son to be on the throne. And one of the best pictures of grace we see, maybe in the Bible, but definitely in the life of David, is once Saul has passed away, David has ascended to the throne. Anybody who's watched the History Channel or read any books about old kings and kingdoms knows that once a king takes over, one of the first acts of orders of business is to kill everyone associated with the bloodline that preceded him so that there's no threats to his throne. And there was no one left that they knew of, but then one day somebody found a relative of Saul's. It was a nephew or a cousin or something, I can't remember which. Named Mephibosheth. Mephibosheth, it says, had a disability. And that's important because that made it more difficult for Mephibosheth to earn money and provide for himself. So he was a person who needed help. And they brought him to David, expecting David to kill him, to put him to death, to be done with the line of Saul and move on. Instead, David, learning who he was, had mercy and grace on him, made a seat at his table for him, and invited Mephibosheth to live in the palace and dine with him and be with him and considered him a family member for the rest of his life. That was how David showed grace and honor to Saul. That's the kind of grace that we're to show to others. The grace that says, I'm not saying I did this in the moment, I'm not trying to give myself credit, but the grace that says, you know what? It would be super stressful to be a cab driver. I don't know how they do it. I went to Chick-fil-A and Home Depot the other day. I was about to lose my mind, and that's like five minutes away. I don't know how they do it to be a cab driver. And you know what? I bet I did something inconsiderate that I wasn't even thinking of. So I'm going to give them them that. Somebody cuts you off in traffic. They're probably in a hurry. They probably need to get where they're going. Or, if this helps, life would be really hard to be that dumb. So I'm glad that God didn't make me that dumb. Whatever you need. We offer others grace. And I'll tell you who's the world's best at offering other people grace. It's Jen, my wife. She will do this all the time. We will be in traffic. Someone will cut me off, cause me to have to slam on the brakes. Our children are crying. We're terrified. And I'll say, my gosh, can you believe that person? And she'll say, now, Nady, because she calls me Nady. If you want to call me Nady, too, you can. It'd just be weird. She says, now, Nady, you don't know. His wife could be in the passenger seat in labor right now. And we just need, tell me I'm lying. And we just, we don't know what's going on in their life. I could be walking down the road, I promise you. I could be walking down the road and some guy could just come up to me and dog cuss me in front of my family. And then I could get out of the situation and walk down there and be like, can you believe that guy? What a jerk. And she'd be like, now, lady, you don't know what's going on in his life. His wife may have just left him and his parents may have just passed away. You don't know. That kind of grace. And when we remind ourselves of God's goodness and grace to us every day, it is easy to pour that out onto others. And I say start with that one, memorize that one, because if we're full of grace and we're offering other people grace, can't we be more quick to forgive when they mess up? Can't we remember that hurt people hurt people and just assume that they're hurting and maybe actually help them get to the bottom of their hurt rather than piling on and making them feel shame for blowing up in a way that they regret? If we're full of grace, won't we be slow to be angry? Won't we stay here longer? Because we're trying to see the best in them and we're trying to give them the benefit of the doubt in the situation. I think if we just abound in grace that it takes care of the rest. And then the amazing thing that happens when we do this, when someone blows up at us unfairly or unjustly, if we do what this says, when someone blows up on you, be slow to anger, quick to forgive, and abound in grace. When we do that, what are the people around you going to notice? What are your children going to pick up on? It's the easiest thing in the world to match anger for anger. It's the easiest thing in the world to lash back out. It's the easiest thing in the world to let someone say something nasty to you, say something mean to you, to have a server who's curt with you, one of those servers who acts like they don't even want to be there that day. It's perfectly human to let them walk away and then you venture frustration to the people around you. But what if you meet them with grace? What if you're slow to anger when other people would meet? What if you're quick to forgive when other people would hold on? What if you're abounding in grace when other people would abound in suspicion and doubt? Then not only have you brought that person who blew up at you a little bit closer to Jesus, not only do you bring yourself closer to Jesus, but you bring the people around you who see that and who marvel at that closer to Jesus too. Simply by being someone who, like David, is slow to anger, quick to forgive, and always abounding in grace. Let's pray. Father, would we in this way be more like David? And so be men and women after your own heart. God, when we are the subject of unfair anger, unfair frustration, when people treat us in ways that we don't deserve to be treated, would you help us to be slow to anger? Would you help us to stop and to listen? Not meet frustration with frustration? Would you help us to be quick to forgive where we can, to give us an earnest desire to find a path to that forgiveness? And God, more than those things, would you help us be people who abound in grace, who walk in this acute awareness of the grace and the love and the mercy that we have from you. Let us be people who walk in an acute awareness that from your fullness we have received grace upon grace, and let us freely and excitedly and happily give that grace to those around us, even when those around us treat us unfairly. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Now's not a good time. I'm busy. Happy Mother's Day for those to whom it applies. As we were singing that last song, I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. I think that's an excellent song for Mother's Day. I think about my wife, who's an incredible mother. I think about the mom that I got to grow up with. I think about the kids that we have and share together and see God's evidence, the evidence of God's goodness all over my life. And hopefully for Mother's Day, that's something that you get to reminisce and think about too. Hopefully you have a great mom. Hopefully you've gotten to experience being a mom if that's something that you want to experience. But I also know that for others, Mother's Day is hard. We had a lot of hard Mother's Days when we wanted the gift of children and we didn't have it yet. And so I always like to just acknowledge that and pray in gratitude for good moms, for good memories, for the blessing of motherhood, but also pray for strengthening for those for whom Mother's Day is difficult for myriad reasons. So if you'll join me in prayer, I'll pray, and then we'll dive into the sermon. Father, we're grateful for good moms, moms that love us,oms that love us enough to get on to us, to keep after us, to not give in. Moms who wake up in the night with us. Moms who are always there, who leave notes in our lunches and who pray with us every morning. We thank you for moms that we've seen read your word and seek you diligently. We thank you for moms who raised us to help see you. And God, we thank you for the gift of motherhood and parenthood. And those of us who have children, God, are so grateful that you've given us that gift. And so we pray that we would be the mom and the dad to them that we need to be. God, also lift up those for whom holidays like this are difficult. Maybe it's difficult because their mom's not here anymore, and that's hard. Maybe it's difficult because they want to be a mom and they're not. And that's hard. Maybe it's difficult, God, because we thought we were going to be a mom and then we weren't. So, Lord, I pray just for special strength, protection, grace, and peace onto those folks. And that, God, those of us who feel blessed by today would see you as the author of that blessing. In Jesus' name, amen. So this is part five of our series called Big Emotions, where we're just kind of looking at different stories and instances in the Bible where we see these emotional flare-ups, these blow-ups and these blow-outs, and kind of just ask, what can we learn from that? Because this blowing up is a very part, it's a part of the human existence. It's something that we all experience. And so earlier in the series, we talked about, I talked about Peter cutting off the ear of one of the soldiers in the garden, and I kind of compared that to when we lash out at people. We just get angry, and we lash out, we're cutting off ears, and we should try to cut off less ears. And we talked about what can we do when we feel like lashing out. And so I thought it would be good to look at the other end of that and say, what do we do when we're the one whose ear just got cut off? What do we do when someone lashes out at us? So the question for today is, what should you do when someone blows up on you? When you are on the receiving end of unwarranted anger, of unjust frustration, of unfair lashing out, what should you do when someone blows up on you? And I thought that this would be appropriate for Mother's Day because what is being a mom if not getting blown up at eight times a day because you had the audacity to suggest that now might be a good time to brush your hair or not wear Crocs with a church dress or not get out of bed at 630 to make Mother's Day breakfast. Not that any of those things happen in our home, but with your children who are less good than ours, I'm sure that they blow up at you. And I can only imagine, you know, right now we've got a seven-year-old daughter. John is two. He doesn't really know how to blow up at anybody. He just clenches his fist really tight and you can just hear, he screams and you can just see this visceral anger coming from him, which is great. And, but Lily knows how to blow up. She's seven, but they're seven-year-old blowups, you know, like they're not, they don't really sting a little. I bet the 17-year-old blowups are rough. I bet those, I'm not looking forward to those. And then something tells me that the older your children get, the worse those instances become. And I also know that on the other end of the spectrum, I've talked with enough people, with aging parents, that sometimes as parents get older and older, their filter is just used up. It's just used up. They don't have a new one. There's no replacement. You can't get one from Amazon. It's just gunked up and they've tossed it aside. And they can say things that aren't so nice sometimes. And that's tough. It's tough when someone blows up on you. It's tough to be on the receiving end of unfair anger. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was going to pick up my dad at the airport. And I was at the airport and just kind of started to, I was near the terminal, so the traffic kind of starts to funnel in and slow down and whatever. And this cab, like a literal taxi cab, I don't even know, like, what are you guys even doing anymore? Like, who's using cabs? And not, why does it even exist in Raleigh? I don't understand this. It's like, it's like, it's like seeing the yellow pages on your front door or something. Like, didn't we, didn't we cover this? Anyways, cab comes blowing past me, swerves into my lane, like, and, and, and like slams on his brakes. Like he's mad at me. And I'm like, what in the world's going on with this guy? I have no idea. I did not see him anywhere in my rear view. I was not aware. I didn't even think that I had changed lanes recently. He just decided he was mad at me. He gets in front of me and I'm like, whatever. So I, I actually, I didn't even need to be in that lane and he was now going slow to mess with me. So I, I I just went around him like I got to go to the second terminal, buddy. And I look over, and he is aggressively hanging the bird at me. And I don't know how you do that non-aggressively, but this was aggressive. Shaking his fist, yelling things. I literally, like honestly, I'm on the stage, okay? I'm preaching to people. So before God, I have no clue, no clue what I did that upset this guy. And so I just kind of looked at him and went, and kept driving. I don't know. I wasn't mad, but he was really mad at me. So what do we do when someone gets really angry with us and we don't deserve it? We didn't do anything. We don't know what to do. How do we act in those moments? How does God want us to act? And what's really cool is not even how does God want us to act just so that we behave well, but how can we act in those moments that will actually draw people, the people who are angry and the people who can see that anger, that will actually draw them closer to our Father. What can we do in those situations when someone blows up on us? When I was thinking about that, there's one story that comes to mind in the Bible. To me, it's the best blow-up story in the whole Bible. It's one of the biggest ones. I can't think of many others that are like it, if any at all. But it's in 1 Samuel. We see the first part of it in chapter 18, and then I'm going to point us to chapter 19. So Saul is the king of Israel. He's the first king of Israel, but there's this kid named David who's been anointed as the next king of Israel. Normally, Saul's son Jonathan would take the throne from him, but God has used the prophet Samuel to anoint David as the next king of Israel. And then after getting anointed, David does this really annoying thing where he goes down in the valley and he kills a giant that everybody else in the whole country was afraid of, including Saul, and he does it without Saul's armor. And so Saul's a little ticked at him. And then he puts David in his army, and there's this song. This is the English translation of the song. Maybe it sounds better in the original Hebrew. I don't know. It's a pretty dumb song, if you ask me. But it was, Saul has killed his thousands, but David has slayed his tens of thousands. I don't know what the melody is on that. Maybe I should get Roburg to help me out. That seemed to work for you. But I don't, that was the song, right? So there's some jealousy there between Saul and David. And so Saul was a man that was given to what we would probably identify as anxiety or depression, bouts of despair and anger. And one of the only things that could calm him was David coming to the palace and playing the harp for Saul. That would calm him down. And so David's doing that one day, and Saul is just seized with anger and throws his spear at David to try to kill him two times. David dodges both of them and then gets out of there. Then after that, Jonathan, who was David's closest friend in the world, goes to Saul, his dad, and he's like, dude, this is a paraphrase. He says, dude, what are you doing? What's the problem here, man? This guy, he loves you. He serves you. He's a good servant. He's faithful. He's a good leader of men on the battlefield. He's there to play the harp when you need him to. I'm not mad at him. I'm happy that he's going to be my king. You don't need to be mad at him for me. Just like knock it off with David, with hating David. Can you do that for me? And Saul says, yes, I promise I will not try to kill him anymore. Which just as an aside, if you ever in your life have to promise to stop trying to kill someone, you just need to take a look in the mirror. That's all. I'm not going to make a bunch of points about that, but that's a sentence that no one should say. I promise I will not try to kill him anymore. Then we pick up the story in 1 Samuel 19. Turns out Saul's a liar. He just really liked trying to kill David. So here we go. Then a harmful spirit from the Lord came upon Saul, and he sat in his house with his spear in his hand, and David was playing the lyre. And Saul sought to pin David to the wall with the spear, but he eluded Saul so that he struck the spear into the wall, and David fled and escaped that night. Saul sent messengers to David's house to watch him, that he might kill him in the morning. But Michal, David's wife, told him, If you do not escape with spear two times, leaves, gets invited back to the palace, goes back to the palace. He's playing the lyre again to try to soothe Saul. And Saul, for a third time, throws a spear at David. David eludes it and gets out of there. Which, as an aside, I'd just like to point out, this is one of the fundamental differences between David and I. I have a one-spear-throw policy. If you throw your spear at me one time in anyone's house, I'm leaving that house, and I'm not going to trust you around spears again. David has a three-spear policy, much more gracious than I am. So he eludes it for the third time. He leaves. McCall is actually Saul's daughter that was given to David in marriage, and she helps him escape. Later on, we see this poignant scene where David and Jonathan meet in a field, and Jonathan tells David, you're going to have to go until my dad dies. He's never going to stop wanting to kill you, so you got to go. So David, for I think about this 20 year period goes and he just lives in the wilderness with a band of some of his soldiers. And they just elude Saul at various times. Saul chases David through the wilderness, trying to capture him and kill him. And there's actually two really poignant scenes in the wilderness where David has a chance to kill Saul and he doesn't. There's one where they're in the En Gedi, the caves on the edge of the En Gedi plain, which is in the southern part of Israel, close to the Dead Sea. And Saul's army must have been close because David and his men were hiding in a cave. And Saul, now at my house, when someone says they have to go to the bathroom, we say, do you have to go to the bathroom or the bathroom bathroom? Saul had to go to the bathroom bathroom. So he goes into a cave to take care of business. While he's in there, just so happens, that's where David and his guys are. And David's guys are giving David the eyes like, dude, you could totally kill him right now. And David realizes this. But he says, shame on me if I harm the head of the Lord's anointed. So he takes his knife and he cuts off an edge of the robe and Saul leaves. And once he's a little ways off, within shouting distance at least, David feels terrible that he even did what he did. And he goes out and he gets Saul attention, and he shows him the robe. And Saul feels so bad about the grace and forgiveness that David shows him that he decides, I think I'm going to be done killing David for a while. And he goes back to the palace. It wasn't long before he started hunting for David again. This time, David and a guy named Abishai snuck into the tent at night, and Saul's laying on the ground asleep with all of his men around him asleep as well. And Abishai looks at David, and he says, let me strike him with the spear. It will only take once. It will not take twice, which is a really, like, it's one of the cool lines. Like, I only need to do it once, man. I won't need two on this one. I'll get him. And David says, no, shame on me if I touch the Lord's anointed. And then in a battle between some of David's forces and some of Saul's forces, Saul ends up being killed. And the person who takes Saul's life, David actually takes their life for being willing to do that to the Lord's anointed. So what we see from David is that although Saul blew up on him, had completely unjust, unfair, unwarranted anger at David, David always, his whole life took the high road. His whole life honored Saul. Never once did he raise to meet Saul where he was. And so if we're going to ask, what should we do when someone blows up on us, when we are the object of unwarranted anger and frustration, I think we can look to this example of the life of David and see what he did, and we can mimic those things in our own life. And what's really helpful about this is I think that there are three really important New Testament passages, verses or passages, because some of them are two verses. I think there are three really important New Testament passages that honestly, every Christian, if you're here and you call yourself a believer, you should have these memorized. You should be able to say these off the top of your head. These should be things that show up in your life that you think of often enough so regularly that you can quote them. You might not know where they're from. You might not know how to find them. You might have to type them into Google to figure out the reference like I did this week, but you should know them. You should know what to type into Google. And so I want to look at three verses that display three behaviors that David displayed in this story about his interaction with Saul. So let's look at three things that were true of David and try to make those true of us. The first thing we see in this story is that David was slow to anger. He was slow to anger. And I know he was slow to anger because David could have, by all accounts, by all accounts, he was a better warrior than Saul. By every measure, he was superior to Saul. When Saul is in his house and potentially drunk and throwing spears at him, David could have very easily taken that spear out of the wall and gotten his vengeance on Saul right there. Now, you might say, well, he couldn't do that. There's guards. He could have been killed. Yeah, maybe, but what we know is that he didn't raise up in red-hot anger and do what some of us would do if somebody tried to hurt us. He kept his cool. He was slow to anger, which is really not the typical response in the human experience, right? That's why James writes this verse to remind us to do it. In James 1, 19 and 20, he says, does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. This is one that we should know. This is one that we should have memorized. This is one that we should remind ourselves of, particularly when someone is blowing up at us. Because human nature is not to stay calm and stay down here. Human nature is to rise and meet the anger with anger, isn't it? You guys who are married know this. You know this. You've had those fights, those days, where you look at each other and you're just mad at each other. You're just mad. And finally, one of you goes, what are you mad about? What are you even upset for? And the other one says, I don't know. You're mad at me, and I don't know why you're mad, so I'm mad at you. Well, I don't know why you're mad. So I'm mad at you. And then you kind of go back and forth. You're like, what was the first thing that made us mad? And nobody knows. And like, can we just agree to just kind of set the arms down and slowly back away from this one? Are we done here? We're like, yeah, we're done here. But that's typical in human interaction to meet anger with anger. I remember years ago, very early on in our marriage, Jen and I were at each other's throats about something. I don't remember what. But as we were talking about it, she gets really upset. She storms up the stairs, slams our bedroom door. Now, what did I do? Did I, because of my maturity and wisdom, think to myself, she's probably overreacting, but I'm going to let her stay up there and simmer because we don't want to say words in anger. And, you know, I'm sure that she'll kind of calm down. She'll realize maybe that was a little bit too much, and she'll come and apologize and tell me I'm right. That's probably what I need to do. No, I did not do that. I did not do that. Instead, I thought, I'm going to go upstairs. I'm going to tell her that she does not need to be slamming doors in our house. So I go upstairs, and I open that door, and I start getting on to her for the way that she's expressing her anger. And she, again, I don't want to talk to you right now, and leaves the room and goes into the guest room and slams that door. Now listen. Here's what I know. I don't know what we were fighting about. But if I make that sweet woman act like that, it's my fault. I was wrong. I don't know what we were fighting about. I know I was wrong. That's what I know. Now when she went into the second room and shut that door, did I leave her be? No. Because I wanted to poke it. So I walk up to the guest bedroom and I open that door. And I said, you know, I can open this door too. I can open all the doors. I don't know what happened after that. Things just kind of went red, I guess. It was just a blur. That's what we do, isn't it? Someone's mad at us. Oh, I'm going to get mad at you. Some cab driver hangs you the bird, you're like, hey man, forget you. You know, like whatever. Your kid snaps at you, you've had a stressful day, you meet them there and you snap at them. Your spouse, your co-worker, your parent. That's what we do, isn't it? Someone's angry with us, we raise to meet that anger. Well, James tells us, don't do that. Don't do that. Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. It's important to be quick to listen and slow to speak too, because in those moments when we're frustrated, we have things that we want to say. But if we'll calm down and listen, we'll probably learn new information that may change what we want to say, that may help us be slower to anger. So when someone's angry with us, wisdom says, I'm going to be quiet, I'm going to be patient, I'm going to listen, and I will not meet anger with anger. This is what David does. The second thing that David does is David was quick to forgive. He was slow to listen and quick to forgive. He moves to forgiveness very, very quickly. We see no evidence whatsoever in any of the texts that David was ever angry with Saul or that David could not forgive Saul ever through the rest of his life. We see David offer Saul quick forgiveness, which is right in line with what Jesus teaches Peter in Matthew chapter 18. When it says that Peter came up to him and said, Lord, how often will my brother sin against me that should I forgive him? As many as seven times? And Jesus says to as many times as you need to. Forgive again, forgive again, forgive again, forgive again. And it feels pretty generous for Peter to ask that. How many times, when my brother commits the same offense against me, how many times should I forgive him? Up to seven, which makes sense. Your friend comes over to your house, he gets too rowdy, he breaks your new TV. You forgive him that one time. How many more times should I forgive him? Seven? That's a lot of breaking TVs. And Jesus says, no, as many times as you need to forgive them, forgive them. The way that I think about it is, as many times as we hope God forgives us, forgive other people that many times. When someone offends us, when someone lashes out at us, when we are the object of someone's unfair anger and unfair frustration, we should as quickly as we can move to forgive that person. Because holding that grudge is only going to hurt us. It's not going to hurt them. Now, I will also say this. Last year at Lent, during the Lent season, I did a sermon on forgiveness. And I basically just preached to you from the perspective of my good friend, whose husband was having an affair on her, and she had to really learn what forgiveness looked like because they had five kids, and that was really, really tough. And one of the things that she said that was super helpful, if you're a person who's struggling with forgiveness or wants a more robust explanation of forgiveness and what it looks like, then I would encourage you to go back and listen to that sermon. But one of the things she said that I found very helpful and others have commented to me too that was very helpful is forgiving someone does not mean that you have to trust them again. And so I would say this to you. If the person who is blowing up at you is making a habit of that, if they do it regularly, if it's not just a one-off that you can ascribe to a set of circumstances that are no longer true, but you have someone in your life who's blowing up at you again and again and again, you should be slow to anger in those situations, and you should be quick to find a path to forgiveness in those situations. But let me tell you what David did not do. He did not go back into Saul's palace again. He did not make himself vulnerable to a spear the fourth time. He did not trust Saul again. Did he forgive him? Yes. Did he honor him? Yes. Did he give him grace? Absolutely. But did he put himself back in that home? No. No. If you have someone in your life who is habitually blowing up at you, it is perfectly good and wise to remove yourself from that situation until something changes and you feel like you can trust that that's not going to keep happening. As we talk about what do we do when someone blows up on us, it's... I'm mostly talking about people who aren't our spouses. If it's our spouse and they do it all the time, if it's our brother or sister or friend or mom or dad and they do it all the time, that's a separate sermon. But what I would say to that separate sermon is, it's okay to not put yourself back in a situation where someone's going to blow up at you all the time, where you feel like you're just around a ticking time bomb. We should seek to forgive, but we don't have to trust and keep putting ourself in a place where that is going to happen over and over and over again until we believe that something is going to be different. The last thing David does is David was a conduit of grace. He was a conduit of grace. He was connected to God's grace. He was pouring grace out onto others. Back in the fall, I did a series called The Five Traits of Grace, the five characteristics that make us who we are, The five things that we want every partner to exhibit. And one of those things is to be a conduit of grace. To be attached to the grace of God so that the grace that we receive flows out onto others. This is the verse that I think of when I think of this. This is probably, if you're going to memorize any verse at all, if you don't know any of these, start with this one. Start with this verse. Put it on your mirror where you get dressed. Put it on your dashboard if you get angry in the car. Put it next to where your emails are if those things make you angry. Whatever sets you off, whatever stokes your fire, just put this verse so that you can see it. And it's super easy to memorize and it's super impactful. For from his fullness, John says, we have all received grace upon grace. From God's fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From the fullness of God's grace that pours out on us, we have all received grace upon grace. When we think about a couple of weeks ago on Palm Sunday, I did a sermon about the earned wrath of God on us for placing his son on the cross and that Jesus on the cross exhausts the wrath of God for his children. When we think of the wrath that we don't have to experience because God poured it out on Jesus instead of us, that's grace. And God knew, as I said, God knew that we were going to cheapen the blood of Christ by presuming upon the grace of God. He knew that we were going to do that. He knew what you were going to do after you prayed the prayer and after you accepted Jesus as your Savior. He knew that you were going to move through that awful season of your life that you'd like to forget. He knew that and he forgave that. He knows what lies ahead and he's forgiven that. When we think about the grace that we feel every week when we come to church and we sit here and we sing the songs and we have this voice in our head that reminds us of who we are and what we've done and where we've been and that if the people here knew what I was capable of, if the people here knew what I know, then I would have to find a different church to go to. And yet God chooses me and God loves me and God blesses me and he's given me grace upon grace. When we realize that, that that God is so good to us, that that God is so patient with us, that that God will watch us go through years where we don't have quiet times, where we're not praying to him, where we're not seeking him, where everything about our Christian life is compulsory and cursory. He will watch that zombie walk through life and still try to breathe spiritual life into us at all times, calling us back to him. He is excited every time we come home. He is excited every time we utter the words, dear God, and we begin to pray. He is thrilled in his heart every time he hears your voice praise your creator. When we receive from his fullness that much grace, it is very easy to pour grace out onto others. And this is what David did. He had grace for Saul. I think he understood Saul's plight. I think he had patience for him and his depressions and his moods, even in understanding his desire for his own son to be on the throne. And one of the best pictures of grace we see, maybe in the Bible, but definitely in the life of David, is once Saul has passed away, David has ascended to the throne. Anybody who's watched the History Channel or read any books about old kings and kingdoms knows that once a king takes over, one of the first acts of orders of business is to kill everyone associated with the bloodline that preceded him so that there's no threats to his throne. And there was no one left that they knew of, but then one day somebody found a relative of Saul's. It was a nephew or a cousin or something, I can't remember which. Named Mephibosheth. Mephibosheth, it says, had a disability. And that's important because that made it more difficult for Mephibosheth to earn money and provide for himself. So he was a person who needed help. And they brought him to David, expecting David to kill him, to put him to death, to be done with the line of Saul and move on. Instead, David, learning who he was, had mercy and grace on him, made a seat at his table for him, and invited Mephibosheth to live in the palace and dine with him and be with him and considered him a family member for the rest of his life. That was how David showed grace and honor to Saul. That's the kind of grace that we're to show to others. The grace that says, I'm not saying I did this in the moment, I'm not trying to give myself credit, but the grace that says, you know what? It would be super stressful to be a cab driver. I don't know how they do it. I went to Chick-fil-A and Home Depot the other day. I was about to lose my mind, and that's like five minutes away. I don't know how they do it to be a cab driver. And you know what? I bet I did something inconsiderate that I wasn't even thinking of. So I'm going to give them them that. Somebody cuts you off in traffic. They're probably in a hurry. They probably need to get where they're going. Or, if this helps, life would be really hard to be that dumb. So I'm glad that God didn't make me that dumb. Whatever you need. We offer others grace. And I'll tell you who's the world's best at offering other people grace. It's Jen, my wife. She will do this all the time. We will be in traffic. Someone will cut me off, cause me to have to slam on the brakes. Our children are crying. We're terrified. And I'll say, my gosh, can you believe that person? And she'll say, now, Nady, because she calls me Nady. If you want to call me Nady, too, you can. It'd just be weird. She says, now, Nady, you don't know. His wife could be in the passenger seat in labor right now. And we just need, tell me I'm lying. And we just, we don't know what's going on in their life. I could be walking down the road, I promise you. I could be walking down the road and some guy could just come up to me and dog cuss me in front of my family. And then I could get out of the situation and walk down there and be like, can you believe that guy? What a jerk. And she'd be like, now, lady, you don't know what's going on in his life. His wife may have just left him and his parents may have just passed away. You don't know. That kind of grace. And when we remind ourselves of God's goodness and grace to us every day, it is easy to pour that out onto others. And I say start with that one, memorize that one, because if we're full of grace and we're offering other people grace, can't we be more quick to forgive when they mess up? Can't we remember that hurt people hurt people and just assume that they're hurting and maybe actually help them get to the bottom of their hurt rather than piling on and making them feel shame for blowing up in a way that they regret? If we're full of grace, won't we be slow to be angry? Won't we stay here longer? Because we're trying to see the best in them and we're trying to give them the benefit of the doubt in the situation. I think if we just abound in grace that it takes care of the rest. And then the amazing thing that happens when we do this, when someone blows up at us unfairly or unjustly, if we do what this says, when someone blows up on you, be slow to anger, quick to forgive, and abound in grace. When we do that, what are the people around you going to notice? What are your children going to pick up on? It's the easiest thing in the world to match anger for anger. It's the easiest thing in the world to lash back out. It's the easiest thing in the world to let someone say something nasty to you, say something mean to you, to have a server who's curt with you, one of those servers who acts like they don't even want to be there that day. It's perfectly human to let them walk away and then you venture frustration to the people around you. But what if you meet them with grace? What if you're slow to anger when other people would meet? What if you're quick to forgive when other people would hold on? What if you're abounding in grace when other people would abound in suspicion and doubt? Then not only have you brought that person who blew up at you a little bit closer to Jesus, not only do you bring yourself closer to Jesus, but you bring the people around you who see that and who marvel at that closer to Jesus too. Simply by being someone who, like David, is slow to anger, quick to forgive, and always abounding in grace. Let's pray. Father, would we in this way be more like David? And so be men and women after your own heart. God, when we are the subject of unfair anger, unfair frustration, when people treat us in ways that we don't deserve to be treated, would you help us to be slow to anger? Would you help us to stop and to listen? Not meet frustration with frustration? Would you help us to be quick to forgive where we can, to give us an earnest desire to find a path to that forgiveness? And God, more than those things, would you help us be people who abound in grace, who walk in this acute awareness of the grace and the love and the mercy that we have from you. Let us be people who walk in an acute awareness that from your fullness we have received grace upon grace, and let us freely and excitedly and happily give that grace to those around us, even when those around us treat us unfairly. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. Now's not a good time. I'm busy. Happy Mother's Day for those to whom it applies. As we were singing that last song, I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. I think that's an excellent song for Mother's Day. I think about my wife, who's an incredible mother. I think about the mom that I got to grow up with. I think about the kids that we have and share together and see God's evidence, the evidence of God's goodness all over my life. And hopefully for Mother's Day, that's something that you get to reminisce and think about too. Hopefully you have a great mom. Hopefully you've gotten to experience being a mom if that's something that you want to experience. But I also know that for others, Mother's Day is hard. We had a lot of hard Mother's Days when we wanted the gift of children and we didn't have it yet. And so I always like to just acknowledge that and pray in gratitude for good moms, for good memories, for the blessing of motherhood, but also pray for strengthening for those for whom Mother's Day is difficult for myriad reasons. So if you'll join me in prayer, I'll pray, and then we'll dive into the sermon. Father, we're grateful for good moms, moms that love us,oms that love us enough to get on to us, to keep after us, to not give in. Moms who wake up in the night with us. Moms who are always there, who leave notes in our lunches and who pray with us every morning. We thank you for moms that we've seen read your word and seek you diligently. We thank you for moms who raised us to help see you. And God, we thank you for the gift of motherhood and parenthood. And those of us who have children, God, are so grateful that you've given us that gift. And so we pray that we would be the mom and the dad to them that we need to be. God, also lift up those for whom holidays like this are difficult. Maybe it's difficult because their mom's not here anymore, and that's hard. Maybe it's difficult because they want to be a mom and they're not. And that's hard. Maybe it's difficult, God, because we thought we were going to be a mom and then we weren't. So, Lord, I pray just for special strength, protection, grace, and peace onto those folks. And that, God, those of us who feel blessed by today would see you as the author of that blessing. In Jesus' name, amen. So this is part five of our series called Big Emotions, where we're just kind of looking at different stories and instances in the Bible where we see these emotional flare-ups, these blow-ups and these blow-outs, and kind of just ask, what can we learn from that? Because this blowing up is a very part, it's a part of the human existence. It's something that we all experience. And so earlier in the series, we talked about, I talked about Peter cutting off the ear of one of the soldiers in the garden, and I kind of compared that to when we lash out at people. We just get angry, and we lash out, we're cutting off ears, and we should try to cut off less ears. And we talked about what can we do when we feel like lashing out. And so I thought it would be good to look at the other end of that and say, what do we do when we're the one whose ear just got cut off? What do we do when someone lashes out at us? So the question for today is, what should you do when someone blows up on you? When you are on the receiving end of unwarranted anger, of unjust frustration, of unfair lashing out, what should you do when someone blows up on you? And I thought that this would be appropriate for Mother's Day because what is being a mom if not getting blown up at eight times a day because you had the audacity to suggest that now might be a good time to brush your hair or not wear Crocs with a church dress or not get out of bed at 630 to make Mother's Day breakfast. Not that any of those things happen in our home, but with your children who are less good than ours, I'm sure that they blow up at you. And I can only imagine, you know, right now we've got a seven-year-old daughter. John is two. He doesn't really know how to blow up at anybody. He just clenches his fist really tight and you can just hear, he screams and you can just see this visceral anger coming from him, which is great. And, but Lily knows how to blow up. She's seven, but they're seven-year-old blowups, you know, like they're not, they don't really sting a little. I bet the 17-year-old blowups are rough. I bet those, I'm not looking forward to those. And then something tells me that the older your children get, the worse those instances become. And I also know that on the other end of the spectrum, I've talked with enough people, with aging parents, that sometimes as parents get older and older, their filter is just used up. It's just used up. They don't have a new one. There's no replacement. You can't get one from Amazon. It's just gunked up and they've tossed it aside. And they can say things that aren't so nice sometimes. And that's tough. It's tough when someone blows up on you. It's tough to be on the receiving end of unfair anger. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was going to pick up my dad at the airport. And I was at the airport and just kind of started to, I was near the terminal, so the traffic kind of starts to funnel in and slow down and whatever. And this cab, like a literal taxi cab, I don't even know, like, what are you guys even doing anymore? Like, who's using cabs? And not, why does it even exist in Raleigh? I don't understand this. It's like, it's like, it's like seeing the yellow pages on your front door or something. Like, didn't we, didn't we cover this? Anyways, cab comes blowing past me, swerves into my lane, like, and, and, and like slams on his brakes. Like he's mad at me. And I'm like, what in the world's going on with this guy? I have no idea. I did not see him anywhere in my rear view. I was not aware. I didn't even think that I had changed lanes recently. He just decided he was mad at me. He gets in front of me and I'm like, whatever. So I, I actually, I didn't even need to be in that lane and he was now going slow to mess with me. So I, I I just went around him like I got to go to the second terminal, buddy. And I look over, and he is aggressively hanging the bird at me. And I don't know how you do that non-aggressively, but this was aggressive. Shaking his fist, yelling things. I literally, like honestly, I'm on the stage, okay? I'm preaching to people. So before God, I have no clue, no clue what I did that upset this guy. And so I just kind of looked at him and went, and kept driving. I don't know. I wasn't mad, but he was really mad at me. So what do we do when someone gets really angry with us and we don't deserve it? We didn't do anything. We don't know what to do. How do we act in those moments? How does God want us to act? And what's really cool is not even how does God want us to act just so that we behave well, but how can we act in those moments that will actually draw people, the people who are angry and the people who can see that anger, that will actually draw them closer to our Father. What can we do in those situations when someone blows up on us? When I was thinking about that, there's one story that comes to mind in the Bible. To me, it's the best blow-up story in the whole Bible. It's one of the biggest ones. I can't think of many others that are like it, if any at all. But it's in 1 Samuel. We see the first part of it in chapter 18, and then I'm going to point us to chapter 19. So Saul is the king of Israel. He's the first king of Israel, but there's this kid named David who's been anointed as the next king of Israel. Normally, Saul's son Jonathan would take the throne from him, but God has used the prophet Samuel to anoint David as the next king of Israel. And then after getting anointed, David does this really annoying thing where he goes down in the valley and he kills a giant that everybody else in the whole country was afraid of, including Saul, and he does it without Saul's armor. And so Saul's a little ticked at him. And then he puts David in his army, and there's this song. This is the English translation of the song. Maybe it sounds better in the original Hebrew. I don't know. It's a pretty dumb song, if you ask me. But it was, Saul has killed his thousands, but David has slayed his tens of thousands. I don't know what the melody is on that. Maybe I should get Roburg to help me out. That seemed to work for you. But I don't, that was the song, right? So there's some jealousy there between Saul and David. And so Saul was a man that was given to what we would probably identify as anxiety or depression, bouts of despair and anger. And one of the only things that could calm him was David coming to the palace and playing the harp for Saul. That would calm him down. And so David's doing that one day, and Saul is just seized with anger and throws his spear at David to try to kill him two times. David dodges both of them and then gets out of there. Then after that, Jonathan, who was David's closest friend in the world, goes to Saul, his dad, and he's like, dude, this is a paraphrase. He says, dude, what are you doing? What's the problem here, man? This guy, he loves you. He serves you. He's a good servant. He's faithful. He's a good leader of men on the battlefield. He's there to play the harp when you need him to. I'm not mad at him. I'm happy that he's going to be my king. You don't need to be mad at him for me. Just like knock it off with David, with hating David. Can you do that for me? And Saul says, yes, I promise I will not try to kill him anymore. Which just as an aside, if you ever in your life have to promise to stop trying to kill someone, you just need to take a look in the mirror. That's all. I'm not going to make a bunch of points about that, but that's a sentence that no one should say. I promise I will not try to kill him anymore. Then we pick up the story in 1 Samuel 19. Turns out Saul's a liar. He just really liked trying to kill David. So here we go. Then a harmful spirit from the Lord came upon Saul, and he sat in his house with his spear in his hand, and David was playing the lyre. And Saul sought to pin David to the wall with the spear, but he eluded Saul so that he struck the spear into the wall, and David fled and escaped that night. Saul sent messengers to David's house to watch him, that he might kill him in the morning. But Michal, David's wife, told him, If you do not escape with spear two times, leaves, gets invited back to the palace, goes back to the palace. He's playing the lyre again to try to soothe Saul. And Saul, for a third time, throws a spear at David. David eludes it and gets out of there. Which, as an aside, I'd just like to point out, this is one of the fundamental differences between David and I. I have a one-spear-throw policy. If you throw your spear at me one time in anyone's house, I'm leaving that house, and I'm not going to trust you around spears again. David has a three-spear policy, much more gracious than I am. So he eludes it for the third time. He leaves. McCall is actually Saul's daughter that was given to David in marriage, and she helps him escape. Later on, we see this poignant scene where David and Jonathan meet in a field, and Jonathan tells David, you're going to have to go until my dad dies. He's never going to stop wanting to kill you, so you got to go. So David, for I think about this 20 year period goes and he just lives in the wilderness with a band of some of his soldiers. And they just elude Saul at various times. Saul chases David through the wilderness, trying to capture him and kill him. And there's actually two really poignant scenes in the wilderness where David has a chance to kill Saul and he doesn't. There's one where they're in the En Gedi, the caves on the edge of the En Gedi plain, which is in the southern part of Israel, close to the Dead Sea. And Saul's army must have been close because David and his men were hiding in a cave. And Saul, now at my house, when someone says they have to go to the bathroom, we say, do you have to go to the bathroom or the bathroom bathroom? Saul had to go to the bathroom bathroom. So he goes into a cave to take care of business. While he's in there, just so happens, that's where David and his guys are. And David's guys are giving David the eyes like, dude, you could totally kill him right now. And David realizes this. But he says, shame on me if I harm the head of the Lord's anointed. So he takes his knife and he cuts off an edge of the robe and Saul leaves. And once he's a little ways off, within shouting distance at least, David feels terrible that he even did what he did. And he goes out and he gets Saul attention, and he shows him the robe. And Saul feels so bad about the grace and forgiveness that David shows him that he decides, I think I'm going to be done killing David for a while. And he goes back to the palace. It wasn't long before he started hunting for David again. This time, David and a guy named Abishai snuck into the tent at night, and Saul's laying on the ground asleep with all of his men around him asleep as well. And Abishai looks at David, and he says, let me strike him with the spear. It will only take once. It will not take twice, which is a really, like, it's one of the cool lines. Like, I only need to do it once, man. I won't need two on this one. I'll get him. And David says, no, shame on me if I touch the Lord's anointed. And then in a battle between some of David's forces and some of Saul's forces, Saul ends up being killed. And the person who takes Saul's life, David actually takes their life for being willing to do that to the Lord's anointed. So what we see from David is that although Saul blew up on him, had completely unjust, unfair, unwarranted anger at David, David always, his whole life took the high road. His whole life honored Saul. Never once did he raise to meet Saul where he was. And so if we're going to ask, what should we do when someone blows up on us, when we are the object of unwarranted anger and frustration, I think we can look to this example of the life of David and see what he did, and we can mimic those things in our own life. And what's really helpful about this is I think that there are three really important New Testament passages, verses or passages, because some of them are two verses. I think there are three really important New Testament passages that honestly, every Christian, if you're here and you call yourself a believer, you should have these memorized. You should be able to say these off the top of your head. These should be things that show up in your life that you think of often enough so regularly that you can quote them. You might not know where they're from. You might not know how to find them. You might have to type them into Google to figure out the reference like I did this week, but you should know them. You should know what to type into Google. And so I want to look at three verses that display three behaviors that David displayed in this story about his interaction with Saul. So let's look at three things that were true of David and try to make those true of us. The first thing we see in this story is that David was slow to anger. He was slow to anger. And I know he was slow to anger because David could have, by all accounts, by all accounts, he was a better warrior than Saul. By every measure, he was superior to Saul. When Saul is in his house and potentially drunk and throwing spears at him, David could have very easily taken that spear out of the wall and gotten his vengeance on Saul right there. Now, you might say, well, he couldn't do that. There's guards. He could have been killed. Yeah, maybe, but what we know is that he didn't raise up in red-hot anger and do what some of us would do if somebody tried to hurt us. He kept his cool. He was slow to anger, which is really not the typical response in the human experience, right? That's why James writes this verse to remind us to do it. In James 1, 19 and 20, he says, does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. This is one that we should know. This is one that we should have memorized. This is one that we should remind ourselves of, particularly when someone is blowing up at us. Because human nature is not to stay calm and stay down here. Human nature is to rise and meet the anger with anger, isn't it? You guys who are married know this. You know this. You've had those fights, those days, where you look at each other and you're just mad at each other. You're just mad. And finally, one of you goes, what are you mad about? What are you even upset for? And the other one says, I don't know. You're mad at me, and I don't know why you're mad, so I'm mad at you. Well, I don't know why you're mad. So I'm mad at you. And then you kind of go back and forth. You're like, what was the first thing that made us mad? And nobody knows. And like, can we just agree to just kind of set the arms down and slowly back away from this one? Are we done here? We're like, yeah, we're done here. But that's typical in human interaction to meet anger with anger. I remember years ago, very early on in our marriage, Jen and I were at each other's throats about something. I don't remember what. But as we were talking about it, she gets really upset. She storms up the stairs, slams our bedroom door. Now, what did I do? Did I, because of my maturity and wisdom, think to myself, she's probably overreacting, but I'm going to let her stay up there and simmer because we don't want to say words in anger. And, you know, I'm sure that she'll kind of calm down. She'll realize maybe that was a little bit too much, and she'll come and apologize and tell me I'm right. That's probably what I need to do. No, I did not do that. I did not do that. Instead, I thought, I'm going to go upstairs. I'm going to tell her that she does not need to be slamming doors in our house. So I go upstairs, and I open that door, and I start getting on to her for the way that she's expressing her anger. And she, again, I don't want to talk to you right now, and leaves the room and goes into the guest room and slams that door. Now listen. Here's what I know. I don't know what we were fighting about. But if I make that sweet woman act like that, it's my fault. I was wrong. I don't know what we were fighting about. I know I was wrong. That's what I know. Now when she went into the second room and shut that door, did I leave her be? No. Because I wanted to poke it. So I walk up to the guest bedroom and I open that door. And I said, you know, I can open this door too. I can open all the doors. I don't know what happened after that. Things just kind of went red, I guess. It was just a blur. That's what we do, isn't it? Someone's mad at us. Oh, I'm going to get mad at you. Some cab driver hangs you the bird, you're like, hey man, forget you. You know, like whatever. Your kid snaps at you, you've had a stressful day, you meet them there and you snap at them. Your spouse, your co-worker, your parent. That's what we do, isn't it? Someone's angry with us, we raise to meet that anger. Well, James tells us, don't do that. Don't do that. Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. It's important to be quick to listen and slow to speak too, because in those moments when we're frustrated, we have things that we want to say. But if we'll calm down and listen, we'll probably learn new information that may change what we want to say, that may help us be slower to anger. So when someone's angry with us, wisdom says, I'm going to be quiet, I'm going to be patient, I'm going to listen, and I will not meet anger with anger. This is what David does. The second thing that David does is David was quick to forgive. He was slow to listen and quick to forgive. He moves to forgiveness very, very quickly. We see no evidence whatsoever in any of the texts that David was ever angry with Saul or that David could not forgive Saul ever through the rest of his life. We see David offer Saul quick forgiveness, which is right in line with what Jesus teaches Peter in Matthew chapter 18. When it says that Peter came up to him and said, Lord, how often will my brother sin against me that should I forgive him? As many as seven times? And Jesus says to as many times as you need to. Forgive again, forgive again, forgive again, forgive again. And it feels pretty generous for Peter to ask that. How many times, when my brother commits the same offense against me, how many times should I forgive him? Up to seven, which makes sense. Your friend comes over to your house, he gets too rowdy, he breaks your new TV. You forgive him that one time. How many more times should I forgive him? Seven? That's a lot of breaking TVs. And Jesus says, no, as many times as you need to forgive them, forgive them. The way that I think about it is, as many times as we hope God forgives us, forgive other people that many times. When someone offends us, when someone lashes out at us, when we are the object of someone's unfair anger and unfair frustration, we should as quickly as we can move to forgive that person. Because holding that grudge is only going to hurt us. It's not going to hurt them. Now, I will also say this. Last year at Lent, during the Lent season, I did a sermon on forgiveness. And I basically just preached to you from the perspective of my good friend, whose husband was having an affair on her, and she had to really learn what forgiveness looked like because they had five kids, and that was really, really tough. And one of the things that she said that was super helpful, if you're a person who's struggling with forgiveness or wants a more robust explanation of forgiveness and what it looks like, then I would encourage you to go back and listen to that sermon. But one of the things she said that I found very helpful and others have commented to me too that was very helpful is forgiving someone does not mean that you have to trust them again. And so I would say this to you. If the person who is blowing up at you is making a habit of that, if they do it regularly, if it's not just a one-off that you can ascribe to a set of circumstances that are no longer true, but you have someone in your life who's blowing up at you again and again and again, you should be slow to anger in those situations, and you should be quick to find a path to forgiveness in those situations. But let me tell you what David did not do. He did not go back into Saul's palace again. He did not make himself vulnerable to a spear the fourth time. He did not trust Saul again. Did he forgive him? Yes. Did he honor him? Yes. Did he give him grace? Absolutely. But did he put himself back in that home? No. No. If you have someone in your life who is habitually blowing up at you, it is perfectly good and wise to remove yourself from that situation until something changes and you feel like you can trust that that's not going to keep happening. As we talk about what do we do when someone blows up on us, it's... I'm mostly talking about people who aren't our spouses. If it's our spouse and they do it all the time, if it's our brother or sister or friend or mom or dad and they do it all the time, that's a separate sermon. But what I would say to that separate sermon is, it's okay to not put yourself back in a situation where someone's going to blow up at you all the time, where you feel like you're just around a ticking time bomb. We should seek to forgive, but we don't have to trust and keep putting ourself in a place where that is going to happen over and over and over again until we believe that something is going to be different. The last thing David does is David was a conduit of grace. He was a conduit of grace. He was connected to God's grace. He was pouring grace out onto others. Back in the fall, I did a series called The Five Traits of Grace, the five characteristics that make us who we are, The five things that we want every partner to exhibit. And one of those things is to be a conduit of grace. To be attached to the grace of God so that the grace that we receive flows out onto others. This is the verse that I think of when I think of this. This is probably, if you're going to memorize any verse at all, if you don't know any of these, start with this one. Start with this verse. Put it on your mirror where you get dressed. Put it on your dashboard if you get angry in the car. Put it next to where your emails are if those things make you angry. Whatever sets you off, whatever stokes your fire, just put this verse so that you can see it. And it's super easy to memorize and it's super impactful. For from his fullness, John says, we have all received grace upon grace. From God's fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From the fullness of God's grace that pours out on us, we have all received grace upon grace. When we think about a couple of weeks ago on Palm Sunday, I did a sermon about the earned wrath of God on us for placing his son on the cross and that Jesus on the cross exhausts the wrath of God for his children. When we think of the wrath that we don't have to experience because God poured it out on Jesus instead of us, that's grace. And God knew, as I said, God knew that we were going to cheapen the blood of Christ by presuming upon the grace of God. He knew that we were going to do that. He knew what you were going to do after you prayed the prayer and after you accepted Jesus as your Savior. He knew that you were going to move through that awful season of your life that you'd like to forget. He knew that and he forgave that. He knows what lies ahead and he's forgiven that. When we think about the grace that we feel every week when we come to church and we sit here and we sing the songs and we have this voice in our head that reminds us of who we are and what we've done and where we've been and that if the people here knew what I was capable of, if the people here knew what I know, then I would have to find a different church to go to. And yet God chooses me and God loves me and God blesses me and he's given me grace upon grace. When we realize that, that that God is so good to us, that that God is so patient with us, that that God will watch us go through years where we don't have quiet times, where we're not praying to him, where we're not seeking him, where everything about our Christian life is compulsory and cursory. He will watch that zombie walk through life and still try to breathe spiritual life into us at all times, calling us back to him. He is excited every time we come home. He is excited every time we utter the words, dear God, and we begin to pray. He is thrilled in his heart every time he hears your voice praise your creator. When we receive from his fullness that much grace, it is very easy to pour grace out onto others. And this is what David did. He had grace for Saul. I think he understood Saul's plight. I think he had patience for him and his depressions and his moods, even in understanding his desire for his own son to be on the throne. And one of the best pictures of grace we see, maybe in the Bible, but definitely in the life of David, is once Saul has passed away, David has ascended to the throne. Anybody who's watched the History Channel or read any books about old kings and kingdoms knows that once a king takes over, one of the first acts of orders of business is to kill everyone associated with the bloodline that preceded him so that there's no threats to his throne. And there was no one left that they knew of, but then one day somebody found a relative of Saul's. It was a nephew or a cousin or something, I can't remember which. Named Mephibosheth. Mephibosheth, it says, had a disability. And that's important because that made it more difficult for Mephibosheth to earn money and provide for himself. So he was a person who needed help. And they brought him to David, expecting David to kill him, to put him to death, to be done with the line of Saul and move on. Instead, David, learning who he was, had mercy and grace on him, made a seat at his table for him, and invited Mephibosheth to live in the palace and dine with him and be with him and considered him a family member for the rest of his life. That was how David showed grace and honor to Saul. That's the kind of grace that we're to show to others. The grace that says, I'm not saying I did this in the moment, I'm not trying to give myself credit, but the grace that says, you know what? It would be super stressful to be a cab driver. I don't know how they do it. I went to Chick-fil-A and Home Depot the other day. I was about to lose my mind, and that's like five minutes away. I don't know how they do it to be a cab driver. And you know what? I bet I did something inconsiderate that I wasn't even thinking of. So I'm going to give them them that. Somebody cuts you off in traffic. They're probably in a hurry. They probably need to get where they're going. Or, if this helps, life would be really hard to be that dumb. So I'm glad that God didn't make me that dumb. Whatever you need. We offer others grace. And I'll tell you who's the world's best at offering other people grace. It's Jen, my wife. She will do this all the time. We will be in traffic. Someone will cut me off, cause me to have to slam on the brakes. Our children are crying. We're terrified. And I'll say, my gosh, can you believe that person? And she'll say, now, Nady, because she calls me Nady. If you want to call me Nady, too, you can. It'd just be weird. She says, now, Nady, you don't know. His wife could be in the passenger seat in labor right now. And we just need, tell me I'm lying. And we just, we don't know what's going on in their life. I could be walking down the road, I promise you. I could be walking down the road and some guy could just come up to me and dog cuss me in front of my family. And then I could get out of the situation and walk down there and be like, can you believe that guy? What a jerk. And she'd be like, now, lady, you don't know what's going on in his life. His wife may have just left him and his parents may have just passed away. You don't know. That kind of grace. And when we remind ourselves of God's goodness and grace to us every day, it is easy to pour that out onto others. And I say start with that one, memorize that one, because if we're full of grace and we're offering other people grace, can't we be more quick to forgive when they mess up? Can't we remember that hurt people hurt people and just assume that they're hurting and maybe actually help them get to the bottom of their hurt rather than piling on and making them feel shame for blowing up in a way that they regret? If we're full of grace, won't we be slow to be angry? Won't we stay here longer? Because we're trying to see the best in them and we're trying to give them the benefit of the doubt in the situation. I think if we just abound in grace that it takes care of the rest. And then the amazing thing that happens when we do this, when someone blows up at us unfairly or unjustly, if we do what this says, when someone blows up on you, be slow to anger, quick to forgive, and abound in grace. When we do that, what are the people around you going to notice? What are your children going to pick up on? It's the easiest thing in the world to match anger for anger. It's the easiest thing in the world to lash back out. It's the easiest thing in the world to let someone say something nasty to you, say something mean to you, to have a server who's curt with you, one of those servers who acts like they don't even want to be there that day. It's perfectly human to let them walk away and then you venture frustration to the people around you. But what if you meet them with grace? What if you're slow to anger when other people would meet? What if you're quick to forgive when other people would hold on? What if you're abounding in grace when other people would abound in suspicion and doubt? Then not only have you brought that person who blew up at you a little bit closer to Jesus, not only do you bring yourself closer to Jesus, but you bring the people around you who see that and who marvel at that closer to Jesus too. Simply by being someone who, like David, is slow to anger, quick to forgive, and always abounding in grace. Let's pray. Father, would we in this way be more like David? And so be men and women after your own heart. God, when we are the subject of unfair anger, unfair frustration, when people treat us in ways that we don't deserve to be treated, would you help us to be slow to anger? Would you help us to stop and to listen? Not meet frustration with frustration? Would you help us to be quick to forgive where we can, to give us an earnest desire to find a path to that forgiveness? And God, more than those things, would you help us be people who abound in grace, who walk in this acute awareness of the grace and the love and the mercy that we have from you. Let us be people who walk in an acute awareness that from your fullness we have received grace upon grace, and let us freely and excitedly and happily give that grace to those around us, even when those around us treat us unfairly. In Jesus' name, amen.