Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us, and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. Thank you for joining us for Easter. Everybody looks great in their Easter best. I really do like all the bright colors, and I am of the opinion that Easter is the greatest day in the Christian calendar. It's the greatest holiday. Christmas acknowledges the arrival of our Savior, but it's Easter that acknowledges and signifies the victory of that Savior, of Him doing what He came to do, And it is right and good to be together in church and celebrate this victory. And that's what we're going to talk about this morning. As I was thinking about Easter, I was also thinking about the power of images and how when we see a picture or we see an image or we see a logo, it often carries with it a great amount of emotion for us or at least information from us. There's things that we can see, images that we can see that will immediately conjure up from us stories or nostalgia or emotion or things that we'd like to share or things that make us laugh or whatever. And I think that there is this really remarkable intrinsic power in images. To help you understand my point, I have some for us this morning. Here's a very famous one that all of us have seen before. When we think about images, when you see Mickey Mouse ears, what does it make you think of? It may send you back to your childhood when your dad was wearing short shorts and he took you to Frontier Landing or whatever it is. That's what mine was, mosquitoes and the whole deal and hotlines and everything. And it goes back to my childhood in the 80s. And now more recently, it goes back to taking my daughter Lily. We went earlier this year. We went three years ago. I have great memories there. So when I see those ears, it conjures up with me pages and pages worth of memories that I could share with you. And I'm sure that you do too. Maybe it's just annoyance at Disney World and you don't like that place at all and you wish it would quit showing up in your life. That could be it, but you've got something there with just that image. And there's another, here's another one. Let's look at this one. That's not even a picture, but we all know what that is, right? That's coffee. And when you see that, I don't know where that takes you. It takes me, when I think of coffee, I think of being quiet and being relaxed, often studying, having a book, or just staring out the window in silence. The older I get, the more things I see that make me want to sit somewhere and be still and stare out the window in silence. Maybe it's because I have two young children, but that's what I think of when I see coffee is maybe it takes you to after dinner, to a little dinner and dessert or whatever. But maybe you are a person who has coffee paraphernalia all over your kitchen or your office and coffee is a part of who you are and you feel very seen right now, whatever this image means to you. Speaking of feeling seen, some of you will feel seen with this next one. Yeah, we know what that is. That's the Vince Lombardi trophy. That's the Super Bowl trophy. Now, for some of us, it conjures up memories of great, great success. For others, like me, I'm a Falcons fan, it's great pain that is in that image. For others of you Browns fans, that image means nothing to you. You might not even know what that is. I don't know if you do or not. I probably had to explain it to you. And then lastly, there's this, which is known the world over for excellence, victory, and championships. We can all wholeheartedly agree that Georgia Tech's the greatest at everything. That's such an easy joke because Georgia Tech's the worst. They're the worst at everything. They're the NC State of Georgia. Anyways, whatever the image is, whatever the image is conjures up for us emotions and stories and experiences. And I was learning about the power of visual learning and what images do. And they have this remarkable ability to package and compartmentalize for us knowledge and stories and so much other information that's represented in just that image. And it's funny because God created us that way. He created us to be people who don't learn as well by seeing or by reading or by hearing, but by experiencing and by seeing something and by having an image or an icon that immediately takes our mind to a thing or to a place and immediately begins to unpack all the details that go into that image. And I was thinking about the power of imagery this week because I believe that God designed and created for us an image to last until Jesus comes back to remind us maybe of the most important part of the Bible, which is Easter. It dawned on me that baptism is the image of Easter. The act of baptizing someone is the image of Easter. And so when we had some folks in previous months reach out and say, hey, we think we might be interested in being baptized, I asked them if they would do it on Easter. I mentioned before that the early church would only baptize people on Easter because of the imagery, because of what it meant, because of the symbolism laced into baptism. And so I thought, what better way, what better way to acknowledge Easter than to celebrate Easter than to have baptisms on Easter and talk about the symbolism of those baptisms within, or the symbolism of those baptisms within the act of them themselves. And so as we gather for Easter and we are reminded what it's about, let's also acknowledge that God created for us an image of Easter that we ought to be reminded of as we go throughout our Christian lives and our Christian walk. Baptism is so important, as a matter of fact, that Jesus himself started it. Jesus only started two traditions. The church has a lot of traditions. We're observing Lent right now as a church. I hope that that's been a spiritually nourishing season for you, and I hope that the Lord has spoken to you and moved in your heart and drawn you closer to him. I hope that observing Lent this year has been spiritually beneficial for you. And many churches have many different traditions. Some of you, you're here with friends or you're here with family and your church has different traditions that our church isn't observing this morning. And either I'm sorry for that or you're welcome. I'm not sure how you feel about the traditions that you're not currently experiencing. But the church has a ton of traditions. But only two of them were started by Jesus. The first is communion. Communion celebrates the Last Supper and the breaking of bread and Jesus dying on the cross, which is encapsulated by the image behind me. But the other tradition that he started was baptism. When he left, when he went back up to heaven, his final instructions to the disciples were to go into all the world and make disciples and to baptize them in the name of the Father and great deal to God. And I would argue that it matters a great deal to God because the very act of it, the very image of it is itself a symbol of Easter, which is the greatest victory that is ever won. And this isn't just my idea. I didn't just conjure this up reading scriptures and piecing things together. This comes from Paul himself. The Apostle Paul wrote a letter to the Romans. And in that letter, it says this in chapter 6, beginning in verse 3. So Paul says, in our regular rhythm of faith to remind us of the miraculous victory of Easter. And he walks us through it. And in a few minutes, we're going to have the opportunity to baptize in this service two of our kids, and then in the next service, two of our adults. And I'm very excited about that. And when we do it, when we baptize them, we're going to put them under the water. And when they go under the water, that is a picture of the death of Christ. They are buried with him in death, Paul writes. And so that takes us back, it should take us back to that Friday when Jesus hung on the cross, when hope was lost, when the disciples scattered, when Mary was brokenhearted, when no one knew what to do. And it takes us to the Saturday in that poignant moment before they come back out of the water. It takes us to that sacred Saturday where hope was lost and confusion reigned and disappointment ruled the day. And they didn't know what to do. And they didn't know what to do about their Savior. And they didn't know if he was going to come back. They didn't know what was coming on Sunday. So Saturday they just sat in their sadness and in their depression. And in that moment when they disappear and you can't see them, right before they come back up, that's Friday and Saturday in the baptism imagery in the Easter story. But the story doesn't end there. It doesn't end on that sacred Saturday. It ends on Sunday when Mary goes to the tomb to look for Jesus. And it's that passage that Jordan read to us a little bit earlier in the service. And in that passage, it has to me what is the greatest sentence in the whole Bible. When Mary goes and she's looking for Jesus and the tomb is empty and there's an angel there who looks at her and he says, what are you doing? Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is risen. He's not here, Mary. You're not gonna find him. And I'm telling you, I'm telling you, that's the greatest sentence in the whole Bible. Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He has risen. Because without that sentence, without that sentence, nothing else matters. Do you understand? Nothing else in all of Christendom, nothing else in life matters without that sentence. When we have Christmas, we have the arrival of the Savior. That's good. We should celebrate that. That's hopeful. And that's a fulfilled promise that people clung to for thousands of years. But on Easter at the empty tomb, when Jesus conquered sin and death, that is the greatest victory ever won. That is the greatest sentence in the Bible. And if that sentence isn't true, then everything else fades and nothing else matters. All of Christendom and all religion and all faith is just babbling morality without that sentence, without the reality of the resurrected Jesus and the empty tomb where he conquers sin and death finally. And so when we see the baptized person spring up out of those waters, that's the moment that they're capturing. They're capturing the empty tomb. And it says that they are raised to walk in newness of life. And it reminds us of the victory that Jesus won that day. It reminds us of why this is the greatest holiday. It reminds us of the import of that sentence because in that empty tomb, in resurrecting, in raising to walk again in newness of life, Jesus accomplished for us victory over death and victory over sin. Jesus made it true that old prophecy, oh death, where is your sting? I'm reminded of this old gospel song that's ripped out of the scriptures that says, oh sin, where are your shackles? Oh death, where is your sting? Hell has been defeated. The grave could not hold our king. And when we baptize someone and we pull them out of the water, that's where the moment goes. It's to someone springing forward in newness of life. It's to victory over death. Do you realize, do you realize that this, one of the reasons that this is the greatest day on the Christian calendar is that this is the day that conquered death. This is the day that gives us hope. This is the day that we celebrate, that we cling to, that we hope for, so that when we watch someone we love slowly drift into eternity and eventually we say goodbye to them, because of Easter, we say goodbye for now, but not goodbye forever. Because of Easter, we can hold their hand and we can pray with them and we can know with certainty that they really are going to a better place and that they are waiting for us there. Because of Easter, death has no sting. What hurts about death is missing someone for a little while. What hurts about death is not having them in your life, is not being able to pick up the phone and call them like you used to. But what hurts about death is not the finality of it because Jesus took that away when he raised up out of that tomb. And we celebrate that victory when we raise someone up out of the water. That Easter is the greatest victory of all time. And it gives us incredible amounts of hope. And it takes away the fear of the one thing of which we are all the most fearful, which is what happens when we die. And because of Easter, because Jesus died on the cross, because he was buried, because he rose again and was raised to walk in that newness of life. We know that one day we will go to the marriage supper of the Lamb. We know that one day we will be in heaven with Jesus for all of eternity. We know that one day we will see those that we loved again. We know that one day we will be united with our Savior and we can set down the burdens of hope and faith because Jesus will be right there in front of us because of Easter. And not only in that moment where Jesus sprung out of the tomb, where we come up out of the water, not only is there victory over death, but there's victory over sin as well. Sin has no shackles on us anymore. So not only is there hope for the future, for what will happen one day, but there is hope for right now because scripture teaches us that when we are a new creation, that we come up out of the waters to walk in newness of life, that what that newness of life means is we are no longer shackled to the sins that we carried before we knew Jesus. I preached a couple of weeks ago about repentance, and what I said is that after Jesus, after the Holy Spirit, after we know him, after we become Christians, then repentance is possible. Before that, scripture tells us that we are slaves to sin, that we have no choice but to sin. But with the miracle of Easter, it doesn't just give us hope for the future. It gives us hope for the right now, that the sins and the things in our life that we don't want there anymore can actually be defeated. And we find that hope in Jesus. Easter reminds us of that hope. And it reminds us that we're not chained to the sins that we once carried anymore. So not only does Easter point us towards a future hope, but Easter points us to a present hope, victory over death and sin, future and present. And so, in a few minutes, as we do the baptisms, let's see in these baptisms the picture of Easter. When they go under, let's take ourselves to the Friday and to the Saturday and to the waiting and to the confusion. And let's know that that's just God putting to death your old self. And when we see a raising to walk and newness of life, that that is the victory of hope for all of eternity. That is the victory that Jesus has already won and he's going to come and claim again someday. But as you move through life, as you go through Easter, as you attend other services, as you go to other churches, and some of you back to your own churches, my hope for you is that whenever you see a baptism, that it will carry you right back to Easter, right back to this day, right back to the victory that Jesus won for you and for me, and that it will fill you with a hope, not only for the future, but for the present as well. And let's see baptism for what it is, a picture, an image of Easter itself, of the greatest victory ever won and the greatest day on the Christian calendar. Let's pray and then we're going to baptize some people. Father, thank you so much for the miracle of Easter. Thank you for what it is, for what it represents. God, I pray that as we think of Easter and we think of the images that surround it, that it wouldn't just be bunnies and eggs and pastels and baskets and flowers and all the rest, but that the first thing we would see is your victory. The first thing we would see is how you love us. How you sent your son to die for us and how he resurrected on the third day. God, may we be moved with each baptism that we see with the power and the efficacy of Easter and all that today represents. I pray these things in your son's name. Amen.
Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us, and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. Thank you for joining us for Easter. Everybody looks great in their Easter best. I really do like all the bright colors, and I am of the opinion that Easter is the greatest day in the Christian calendar. It's the greatest holiday. Christmas acknowledges the arrival of our Savior, but it's Easter that acknowledges and signifies the victory of that Savior, of Him doing what He came to do, And it is right and good to be together in church and celebrate this victory. And that's what we're going to talk about this morning. As I was thinking about Easter, I was also thinking about the power of images and how when we see a picture or we see an image or we see a logo, it often carries with it a great amount of emotion for us or at least information from us. There's things that we can see, images that we can see that will immediately conjure up from us stories or nostalgia or emotion or things that we'd like to share or things that make us laugh or whatever. And I think that there is this really remarkable intrinsic power in images. To help you understand my point, I have some for us this morning. Here's a very famous one that all of us have seen before. When we think about images, when you see Mickey Mouse ears, what does it make you think of? It may send you back to your childhood when your dad was wearing short shorts and he took you to Frontier Landing or whatever it is. That's what mine was, mosquitoes and the whole deal and hotlines and everything. And it goes back to my childhood in the 80s. And now more recently, it goes back to taking my daughter Lily. We went earlier this year. We went three years ago. I have great memories there. So when I see those ears, it conjures up with me pages and pages worth of memories that I could share with you. And I'm sure that you do too. Maybe it's just annoyance at Disney World and you don't like that place at all and you wish it would quit showing up in your life. That could be it, but you've got something there with just that image. And there's another, here's another one. Let's look at this one. That's not even a picture, but we all know what that is, right? That's coffee. And when you see that, I don't know where that takes you. It takes me, when I think of coffee, I think of being quiet and being relaxed, often studying, having a book, or just staring out the window in silence. The older I get, the more things I see that make me want to sit somewhere and be still and stare out the window in silence. Maybe it's because I have two young children, but that's what I think of when I see coffee is maybe it takes you to after dinner, to a little dinner and dessert or whatever. But maybe you are a person who has coffee paraphernalia all over your kitchen or your office and coffee is a part of who you are and you feel very seen right now, whatever this image means to you. Speaking of feeling seen, some of you will feel seen with this next one. Yeah, we know what that is. That's the Vince Lombardi trophy. That's the Super Bowl trophy. Now, for some of us, it conjures up memories of great, great success. For others, like me, I'm a Falcons fan, it's great pain that is in that image. For others of you Browns fans, that image means nothing to you. You might not even know what that is. I don't know if you do or not. I probably had to explain it to you. And then lastly, there's this, which is known the world over for excellence, victory, and championships. We can all wholeheartedly agree that Georgia Tech's the greatest at everything. That's such an easy joke because Georgia Tech's the worst. They're the worst at everything. They're the NC State of Georgia. Anyways, whatever the image is, whatever the image is conjures up for us emotions and stories and experiences. And I was learning about the power of visual learning and what images do. And they have this remarkable ability to package and compartmentalize for us knowledge and stories and so much other information that's represented in just that image. And it's funny because God created us that way. He created us to be people who don't learn as well by seeing or by reading or by hearing, but by experiencing and by seeing something and by having an image or an icon that immediately takes our mind to a thing or to a place and immediately begins to unpack all the details that go into that image. And I was thinking about the power of imagery this week because I believe that God designed and created for us an image to last until Jesus comes back to remind us maybe of the most important part of the Bible, which is Easter. It dawned on me that baptism is the image of Easter. The act of baptizing someone is the image of Easter. And so when we had some folks in previous months reach out and say, hey, we think we might be interested in being baptized, I asked them if they would do it on Easter. I mentioned before that the early church would only baptize people on Easter because of the imagery, because of what it meant, because of the symbolism laced into baptism. And so I thought, what better way, what better way to acknowledge Easter than to celebrate Easter than to have baptisms on Easter and talk about the symbolism of those baptisms within, or the symbolism of those baptisms within the act of them themselves. And so as we gather for Easter and we are reminded what it's about, let's also acknowledge that God created for us an image of Easter that we ought to be reminded of as we go throughout our Christian lives and our Christian walk. Baptism is so important, as a matter of fact, that Jesus himself started it. Jesus only started two traditions. The church has a lot of traditions. We're observing Lent right now as a church. I hope that that's been a spiritually nourishing season for you, and I hope that the Lord has spoken to you and moved in your heart and drawn you closer to him. I hope that observing Lent this year has been spiritually beneficial for you. And many churches have many different traditions. Some of you, you're here with friends or you're here with family and your church has different traditions that our church isn't observing this morning. And either I'm sorry for that or you're welcome. I'm not sure how you feel about the traditions that you're not currently experiencing. But the church has a ton of traditions. But only two of them were started by Jesus. The first is communion. Communion celebrates the Last Supper and the breaking of bread and Jesus dying on the cross, which is encapsulated by the image behind me. But the other tradition that he started was baptism. When he left, when he went back up to heaven, his final instructions to the disciples were to go into all the world and make disciples and to baptize them in the name of the Father and great deal to God. And I would argue that it matters a great deal to God because the very act of it, the very image of it is itself a symbol of Easter, which is the greatest victory that is ever won. And this isn't just my idea. I didn't just conjure this up reading scriptures and piecing things together. This comes from Paul himself. The Apostle Paul wrote a letter to the Romans. And in that letter, it says this in chapter 6, beginning in verse 3. So Paul says, in our regular rhythm of faith to remind us of the miraculous victory of Easter. And he walks us through it. And in a few minutes, we're going to have the opportunity to baptize in this service two of our kids, and then in the next service, two of our adults. And I'm very excited about that. And when we do it, when we baptize them, we're going to put them under the water. And when they go under the water, that is a picture of the death of Christ. They are buried with him in death, Paul writes. And so that takes us back, it should take us back to that Friday when Jesus hung on the cross, when hope was lost, when the disciples scattered, when Mary was brokenhearted, when no one knew what to do. And it takes us to the Saturday in that poignant moment before they come back out of the water. It takes us to that sacred Saturday where hope was lost and confusion reigned and disappointment ruled the day. And they didn't know what to do. And they didn't know what to do about their Savior. And they didn't know if he was going to come back. They didn't know what was coming on Sunday. So Saturday they just sat in their sadness and in their depression. And in that moment when they disappear and you can't see them, right before they come back up, that's Friday and Saturday in the baptism imagery in the Easter story. But the story doesn't end there. It doesn't end on that sacred Saturday. It ends on Sunday when Mary goes to the tomb to look for Jesus. And it's that passage that Jordan read to us a little bit earlier in the service. And in that passage, it has to me what is the greatest sentence in the whole Bible. When Mary goes and she's looking for Jesus and the tomb is empty and there's an angel there who looks at her and he says, what are you doing? Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is risen. He's not here, Mary. You're not gonna find him. And I'm telling you, I'm telling you, that's the greatest sentence in the whole Bible. Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He has risen. Because without that sentence, without that sentence, nothing else matters. Do you understand? Nothing else in all of Christendom, nothing else in life matters without that sentence. When we have Christmas, we have the arrival of the Savior. That's good. We should celebrate that. That's hopeful. And that's a fulfilled promise that people clung to for thousands of years. But on Easter at the empty tomb, when Jesus conquered sin and death, that is the greatest victory ever won. That is the greatest sentence in the Bible. And if that sentence isn't true, then everything else fades and nothing else matters. All of Christendom and all religion and all faith is just babbling morality without that sentence, without the reality of the resurrected Jesus and the empty tomb where he conquers sin and death finally. And so when we see the baptized person spring up out of those waters, that's the moment that they're capturing. They're capturing the empty tomb. And it says that they are raised to walk in newness of life. And it reminds us of the victory that Jesus won that day. It reminds us of why this is the greatest holiday. It reminds us of the import of that sentence because in that empty tomb, in resurrecting, in raising to walk again in newness of life, Jesus accomplished for us victory over death and victory over sin. Jesus made it true that old prophecy, oh death, where is your sting? I'm reminded of this old gospel song that's ripped out of the scriptures that says, oh sin, where are your shackles? Oh death, where is your sting? Hell has been defeated. The grave could not hold our king. And when we baptize someone and we pull them out of the water, that's where the moment goes. It's to someone springing forward in newness of life. It's to victory over death. Do you realize, do you realize that this, one of the reasons that this is the greatest day on the Christian calendar is that this is the day that conquered death. This is the day that gives us hope. This is the day that we celebrate, that we cling to, that we hope for, so that when we watch someone we love slowly drift into eternity and eventually we say goodbye to them, because of Easter, we say goodbye for now, but not goodbye forever. Because of Easter, we can hold their hand and we can pray with them and we can know with certainty that they really are going to a better place and that they are waiting for us there. Because of Easter, death has no sting. What hurts about death is missing someone for a little while. What hurts about death is not having them in your life, is not being able to pick up the phone and call them like you used to. But what hurts about death is not the finality of it because Jesus took that away when he raised up out of that tomb. And we celebrate that victory when we raise someone up out of the water. That Easter is the greatest victory of all time. And it gives us incredible amounts of hope. And it takes away the fear of the one thing of which we are all the most fearful, which is what happens when we die. And because of Easter, because Jesus died on the cross, because he was buried, because he rose again and was raised to walk in that newness of life. We know that one day we will go to the marriage supper of the Lamb. We know that one day we will be in heaven with Jesus for all of eternity. We know that one day we will see those that we loved again. We know that one day we will be united with our Savior and we can set down the burdens of hope and faith because Jesus will be right there in front of us because of Easter. And not only in that moment where Jesus sprung out of the tomb, where we come up out of the water, not only is there victory over death, but there's victory over sin as well. Sin has no shackles on us anymore. So not only is there hope for the future, for what will happen one day, but there is hope for right now because scripture teaches us that when we are a new creation, that we come up out of the waters to walk in newness of life, that what that newness of life means is we are no longer shackled to the sins that we carried before we knew Jesus. I preached a couple of weeks ago about repentance, and what I said is that after Jesus, after the Holy Spirit, after we know him, after we become Christians, then repentance is possible. Before that, scripture tells us that we are slaves to sin, that we have no choice but to sin. But with the miracle of Easter, it doesn't just give us hope for the future. It gives us hope for the right now, that the sins and the things in our life that we don't want there anymore can actually be defeated. And we find that hope in Jesus. Easter reminds us of that hope. And it reminds us that we're not chained to the sins that we once carried anymore. So not only does Easter point us towards a future hope, but Easter points us to a present hope, victory over death and sin, future and present. And so, in a few minutes, as we do the baptisms, let's see in these baptisms the picture of Easter. When they go under, let's take ourselves to the Friday and to the Saturday and to the waiting and to the confusion. And let's know that that's just God putting to death your old self. And when we see a raising to walk and newness of life, that that is the victory of hope for all of eternity. That is the victory that Jesus has already won and he's going to come and claim again someday. But as you move through life, as you go through Easter, as you attend other services, as you go to other churches, and some of you back to your own churches, my hope for you is that whenever you see a baptism, that it will carry you right back to Easter, right back to this day, right back to the victory that Jesus won for you and for me, and that it will fill you with a hope, not only for the future, but for the present as well. And let's see baptism for what it is, a picture, an image of Easter itself, of the greatest victory ever won and the greatest day on the Christian calendar. Let's pray and then we're going to baptize some people. Father, thank you so much for the miracle of Easter. Thank you for what it is, for what it represents. God, I pray that as we think of Easter and we think of the images that surround it, that it wouldn't just be bunnies and eggs and pastels and baskets and flowers and all the rest, but that the first thing we would see is your victory. The first thing we would see is how you love us. How you sent your son to die for us and how he resurrected on the third day. God, may we be moved with each baptism that we see with the power and the efficacy of Easter and all that today represents. I pray these things in your son's name. Amen.
Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us, and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Well, good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. Thank you for joining us for Easter. Everybody looks great in their Easter best. I really do like all the bright colors, and I am of the opinion that Easter is the greatest day in the Christian calendar. It's the greatest holiday. Christmas acknowledges the arrival of our Savior, but it's Easter that acknowledges and signifies the victory of that Savior, of Him doing what He came to do, And it is right and good to be together in church and celebrate this victory. And that's what we're going to talk about this morning. As I was thinking about Easter, I was also thinking about the power of images and how when we see a picture or we see an image or we see a logo, it often carries with it a great amount of emotion for us or at least information from us. There's things that we can see, images that we can see that will immediately conjure up from us stories or nostalgia or emotion or things that we'd like to share or things that make us laugh or whatever. And I think that there is this really remarkable intrinsic power in images. To help you understand my point, I have some for us this morning. Here's a very famous one that all of us have seen before. When we think about images, when you see Mickey Mouse ears, what does it make you think of? It may send you back to your childhood when your dad was wearing short shorts and he took you to Frontier Landing or whatever it is. That's what mine was, mosquitoes and the whole deal and hotlines and everything. And it goes back to my childhood in the 80s. And now more recently, it goes back to taking my daughter Lily. We went earlier this year. We went three years ago. I have great memories there. So when I see those ears, it conjures up with me pages and pages worth of memories that I could share with you. And I'm sure that you do too. Maybe it's just annoyance at Disney World and you don't like that place at all and you wish it would quit showing up in your life. That could be it, but you've got something there with just that image. And there's another, here's another one. Let's look at this one. That's not even a picture, but we all know what that is, right? That's coffee. And when you see that, I don't know where that takes you. It takes me, when I think of coffee, I think of being quiet and being relaxed, often studying, having a book, or just staring out the window in silence. The older I get, the more things I see that make me want to sit somewhere and be still and stare out the window in silence. Maybe it's because I have two young children, but that's what I think of when I see coffee is maybe it takes you to after dinner, to a little dinner and dessert or whatever. But maybe you are a person who has coffee paraphernalia all over your kitchen or your office and coffee is a part of who you are and you feel very seen right now, whatever this image means to you. Speaking of feeling seen, some of you will feel seen with this next one. Yeah, we know what that is. That's the Vince Lombardi trophy. That's the Super Bowl trophy. Now, for some of us, it conjures up memories of great, great success. For others, like me, I'm a Falcons fan, it's great pain that is in that image. For others of you Browns fans, that image means nothing to you. You might not even know what that is. I don't know if you do or not. I probably had to explain it to you. And then lastly, there's this, which is known the world over for excellence, victory, and championships. We can all wholeheartedly agree that Georgia Tech's the greatest at everything. That's such an easy joke because Georgia Tech's the worst. They're the worst at everything. They're the NC State of Georgia. Anyways, whatever the image is, whatever the image is conjures up for us emotions and stories and experiences. And I was learning about the power of visual learning and what images do. And they have this remarkable ability to package and compartmentalize for us knowledge and stories and so much other information that's represented in just that image. And it's funny because God created us that way. He created us to be people who don't learn as well by seeing or by reading or by hearing, but by experiencing and by seeing something and by having an image or an icon that immediately takes our mind to a thing or to a place and immediately begins to unpack all the details that go into that image. And I was thinking about the power of imagery this week because I believe that God designed and created for us an image to last until Jesus comes back to remind us maybe of the most important part of the Bible, which is Easter. It dawned on me that baptism is the image of Easter. The act of baptizing someone is the image of Easter. And so when we had some folks in previous months reach out and say, hey, we think we might be interested in being baptized, I asked them if they would do it on Easter. I mentioned before that the early church would only baptize people on Easter because of the imagery, because of what it meant, because of the symbolism laced into baptism. And so I thought, what better way, what better way to acknowledge Easter than to celebrate Easter than to have baptisms on Easter and talk about the symbolism of those baptisms within, or the symbolism of those baptisms within the act of them themselves. And so as we gather for Easter and we are reminded what it's about, let's also acknowledge that God created for us an image of Easter that we ought to be reminded of as we go throughout our Christian lives and our Christian walk. Baptism is so important, as a matter of fact, that Jesus himself started it. Jesus only started two traditions. The church has a lot of traditions. We're observing Lent right now as a church. I hope that that's been a spiritually nourishing season for you, and I hope that the Lord has spoken to you and moved in your heart and drawn you closer to him. I hope that observing Lent this year has been spiritually beneficial for you. And many churches have many different traditions. Some of you, you're here with friends or you're here with family and your church has different traditions that our church isn't observing this morning. And either I'm sorry for that or you're welcome. I'm not sure how you feel about the traditions that you're not currently experiencing. But the church has a ton of traditions. But only two of them were started by Jesus. The first is communion. Communion celebrates the Last Supper and the breaking of bread and Jesus dying on the cross, which is encapsulated by the image behind me. But the other tradition that he started was baptism. When he left, when he went back up to heaven, his final instructions to the disciples were to go into all the world and make disciples and to baptize them in the name of the Father and great deal to God. And I would argue that it matters a great deal to God because the very act of it, the very image of it is itself a symbol of Easter, which is the greatest victory that is ever won. And this isn't just my idea. I didn't just conjure this up reading scriptures and piecing things together. This comes from Paul himself. The Apostle Paul wrote a letter to the Romans. And in that letter, it says this in chapter 6, beginning in verse 3. So Paul says, in our regular rhythm of faith to remind us of the miraculous victory of Easter. And he walks us through it. And in a few minutes, we're going to have the opportunity to baptize in this service two of our kids, and then in the next service, two of our adults. And I'm very excited about that. And when we do it, when we baptize them, we're going to put them under the water. And when they go under the water, that is a picture of the death of Christ. They are buried with him in death, Paul writes. And so that takes us back, it should take us back to that Friday when Jesus hung on the cross, when hope was lost, when the disciples scattered, when Mary was brokenhearted, when no one knew what to do. And it takes us to the Saturday in that poignant moment before they come back out of the water. It takes us to that sacred Saturday where hope was lost and confusion reigned and disappointment ruled the day. And they didn't know what to do. And they didn't know what to do about their Savior. And they didn't know if he was going to come back. They didn't know what was coming on Sunday. So Saturday they just sat in their sadness and in their depression. And in that moment when they disappear and you can't see them, right before they come back up, that's Friday and Saturday in the baptism imagery in the Easter story. But the story doesn't end there. It doesn't end on that sacred Saturday. It ends on Sunday when Mary goes to the tomb to look for Jesus. And it's that passage that Jordan read to us a little bit earlier in the service. And in that passage, it has to me what is the greatest sentence in the whole Bible. When Mary goes and she's looking for Jesus and the tomb is empty and there's an angel there who looks at her and he says, what are you doing? Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is risen. He's not here, Mary. You're not gonna find him. And I'm telling you, I'm telling you, that's the greatest sentence in the whole Bible. Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He has risen. Because without that sentence, without that sentence, nothing else matters. Do you understand? Nothing else in all of Christendom, nothing else in life matters without that sentence. When we have Christmas, we have the arrival of the Savior. That's good. We should celebrate that. That's hopeful. And that's a fulfilled promise that people clung to for thousands of years. But on Easter at the empty tomb, when Jesus conquered sin and death, that is the greatest victory ever won. That is the greatest sentence in the Bible. And if that sentence isn't true, then everything else fades and nothing else matters. All of Christendom and all religion and all faith is just babbling morality without that sentence, without the reality of the resurrected Jesus and the empty tomb where he conquers sin and death finally. And so when we see the baptized person spring up out of those waters, that's the moment that they're capturing. They're capturing the empty tomb. And it says that they are raised to walk in newness of life. And it reminds us of the victory that Jesus won that day. It reminds us of why this is the greatest holiday. It reminds us of the import of that sentence because in that empty tomb, in resurrecting, in raising to walk again in newness of life, Jesus accomplished for us victory over death and victory over sin. Jesus made it true that old prophecy, oh death, where is your sting? I'm reminded of this old gospel song that's ripped out of the scriptures that says, oh sin, where are your shackles? Oh death, where is your sting? Hell has been defeated. The grave could not hold our king. And when we baptize someone and we pull them out of the water, that's where the moment goes. It's to someone springing forward in newness of life. It's to victory over death. Do you realize, do you realize that this, one of the reasons that this is the greatest day on the Christian calendar is that this is the day that conquered death. This is the day that gives us hope. This is the day that we celebrate, that we cling to, that we hope for, so that when we watch someone we love slowly drift into eternity and eventually we say goodbye to them, because of Easter, we say goodbye for now, but not goodbye forever. Because of Easter, we can hold their hand and we can pray with them and we can know with certainty that they really are going to a better place and that they are waiting for us there. Because of Easter, death has no sting. What hurts about death is missing someone for a little while. What hurts about death is not having them in your life, is not being able to pick up the phone and call them like you used to. But what hurts about death is not the finality of it because Jesus took that away when he raised up out of that tomb. And we celebrate that victory when we raise someone up out of the water. That Easter is the greatest victory of all time. And it gives us incredible amounts of hope. And it takes away the fear of the one thing of which we are all the most fearful, which is what happens when we die. And because of Easter, because Jesus died on the cross, because he was buried, because he rose again and was raised to walk in that newness of life. We know that one day we will go to the marriage supper of the Lamb. We know that one day we will be in heaven with Jesus for all of eternity. We know that one day we will see those that we loved again. We know that one day we will be united with our Savior and we can set down the burdens of hope and faith because Jesus will be right there in front of us because of Easter. And not only in that moment where Jesus sprung out of the tomb, where we come up out of the water, not only is there victory over death, but there's victory over sin as well. Sin has no shackles on us anymore. So not only is there hope for the future, for what will happen one day, but there is hope for right now because scripture teaches us that when we are a new creation, that we come up out of the waters to walk in newness of life, that what that newness of life means is we are no longer shackled to the sins that we carried before we knew Jesus. I preached a couple of weeks ago about repentance, and what I said is that after Jesus, after the Holy Spirit, after we know him, after we become Christians, then repentance is possible. Before that, scripture tells us that we are slaves to sin, that we have no choice but to sin. But with the miracle of Easter, it doesn't just give us hope for the future. It gives us hope for the right now, that the sins and the things in our life that we don't want there anymore can actually be defeated. And we find that hope in Jesus. Easter reminds us of that hope. And it reminds us that we're not chained to the sins that we once carried anymore. So not only does Easter point us towards a future hope, but Easter points us to a present hope, victory over death and sin, future and present. And so, in a few minutes, as we do the baptisms, let's see in these baptisms the picture of Easter. When they go under, let's take ourselves to the Friday and to the Saturday and to the waiting and to the confusion. And let's know that that's just God putting to death your old self. And when we see a raising to walk and newness of life, that that is the victory of hope for all of eternity. That is the victory that Jesus has already won and he's going to come and claim again someday. But as you move through life, as you go through Easter, as you attend other services, as you go to other churches, and some of you back to your own churches, my hope for you is that whenever you see a baptism, that it will carry you right back to Easter, right back to this day, right back to the victory that Jesus won for you and for me, and that it will fill you with a hope, not only for the future, but for the present as well. And let's see baptism for what it is, a picture, an image of Easter itself, of the greatest victory ever won and the greatest day on the Christian calendar. Let's pray and then we're going to baptize some people. Father, thank you so much for the miracle of Easter. Thank you for what it is, for what it represents. God, I pray that as we think of Easter and we think of the images that surround it, that it wouldn't just be bunnies and eggs and pastels and baskets and flowers and all the rest, but that the first thing we would see is your victory. The first thing we would see is how you love us. How you sent your son to die for us and how he resurrected on the third day. God, may we be moved with each baptism that we see with the power and the efficacy of Easter and all that today represents. I pray these things in your son's name. Amen.
Thank you. Hear the word of God from the Gospel of Luke. she was greatly troubled at the saying and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. Thank you, Bill. Good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Before I just dive into the sermon, I had a couple preliminary thoughts I just wanted to share with you real quick. If you've been a part of Grace for any number of years, you know that we tend to, at the end of the year, give not necessarily more generously, but we tend to give generously at the end of the year. Our year-end giving is usually pretty good. And so one of the things that we've done since I got here is we do a Christmas offering and we say, hey, as end of the year giving comes in this year, we're going to allocate that to these projects and to these ministries and things like that. Well, this year is a little different in that we are pushing to the end of our building campaign that we launched back in, I guess, February of 2020. We had pledged Sunday on March the 1st of 2020. I announced the pledges on March the 8th of 2020, and then the world ended. And that whole time, we've actually been running concurrent to the pandemic. We've been doing a campaign, and you guys have been so faithful, and God has been so good that we are actually in a really good spot. Now, I sent out details about that this week. So if you didn't get an update email from me on the search for the worship pastor and our search for a building and how the campaign is going. If you didn't get that this week, please let me know. All that means is you're not on the list that you need to be on. If you're watching at home or catch this later, fill out a connection card online and let us know. Fill out a connection card here in the service and we'll make sure and get you on the right list so that you can get those updates. So as we look towards the end of the year, basically what we're asking with end of the year giving is this, either designate it for general offering or designate it for the building campaign. If money comes in undesignated, we will by default put that towards the general offering. And then in the new year, depending on what comes in, the missions committee will make decisions about how we want to allocate those to other ministries that we support. Just as a reminder, we give 10% of what we bring in to missions. And this year it's actually been a little bit bigger. This year we've actually given about 12% to ministries going on outside the walls of the church. And that's something that we're really proud of and hold close to our hearts. The other thing I was going to share with you, I have to be careful how I do this, is last week, you know, Kyle preached. Kyle preached so good that about 15 minutes in, at first I was like, dude, this is great. He's crushing it. Good for Kyle. I love this. And then about 15 minutes in, I was like, yo, Kyle, like, chill out, man Like I have to preach next week. I don't have, I don't have that much on Mary right now. So just, let's just take it easy. He did so good. And the whole experience was fantastic. I texted Kirk and Kyle on Saturday and said, hey, you know, I don't have any responsibilities in the service. So I'm actually going to come to the service with my family. I'll get there about 930 9.45. And so last week I had the opportunity to just wake up, help Jen get the kids ready, come to church together, drop our kids off with some folks who really wanted to hug on John and squeeze his big fat baby cheeks. And then Lily went next door with her friends, some folks that care about her. And then I got to talk to my friends and we sat in the back, which I love sitting in the back. I'm jealous of you guys. Yeah, that's it, Scotty. Like, I love sitting back there, and we sang songs. We snuggled up a little bit during the sermon. I sat next to my wife. I was ministered to by the sermon, ministered to by the songs, particularly that last one. And I left here with my heart just full of Jesus. And I thought to myself, that was great. That church is so fun. You guys who just get to show up and don't have to do anything and be ministered to, you don't know how good you got it, man. So just for the record, I'm very envious of you guys. I almost, I considered this week quitting my job just so I could come to church with my family, but I have no marketable skills. So I'm here until the Lord chooses otherwise. Okay. This week, yes, thank you. Thank you, Elaine. For those watching online, there was thunderous applause. This week, we are in part two of our series called Renewed Wonder, where we simply are focusing on looking at Christmas through the eyes of a child. That's why we're doing lighthearted things. That's why we had Christmas Kyle come and do the announcements. But truth be told, we would make Kyle do that no matter how lighthearted the series was. We're decorating cookies after the service. I hope you'll do that. That's for children and adults, too. I'm particularly excited about next week, Christmas Jammy Sunday. Can't wait to see what you show up in. This is going to be very, very fun and very, very festive. Yes, Mike, even you, buddy. This is going to be great. So I'm really looking forward to that as we kind of just look at Christmas through the eyes of a child and just the wonder and the grandeur that comes with Christmas. And so that's what we're doing in the series. And then the sermons, we're looking at the Christmas story through the eyes of different characters within the story. So last week, like I said, Kyle did a great job of looking at Christmas to the eyes of the shepherds. And this week, we want to look at Christmas to the eyes of Mary. What must it have been like for Mary to experience that first Christmas? And what can we learn from her experience? And what about her experience can shape the way that we approach Christmas this year? So as we think about Christmas through the eyes of Mary, it would probably be good to get some context on her, to understand who Mary was and what kind of person that she was. And we really, we don't know a lot. We know that she was from Nazareth. So that makes her pretty simple. Nazareth was a very small town. There's very little archaeological evidence that Nazareth even ever existed. It's just very, very small. It doesn't mean it didn't exist. It just means it's so small that there's not very much there. It's in the north of Israel. It's in the hill country. Like when Jesus is introduced, one time we hear somebody say, can anything good come from Nazareth? It was like the Mississippi of Israel. Just nothing good came from there. So, sorry, that's a Georgia joke. I don't know what the North Carolina, is it West Virginia? Is that who we make fun of in North Carolina? I always make fun of Mississippi. Tennessee, yeah, that's good. We'll go Tennessee. Thank you very much. She was a simple girl from Nazareth. She was probably, culturally, because she was engaged, she was probably 13 to 15 years old. I know that sounds weird for us, but in that culture, typically men had to grow up and establish themselves and have a career and be able to pay a dowry and be able to prove that they could support a wife. So it's reasonable to think that Joseph was probably closer to 30 and that Mary was probably closer to 15 or so, which sounds super weird to us, but then that was how it goes. So she's betrothed to Joseph. To them, engagement was tantamount to marriage. You're essentially married already. You're just waiting for the ceremony, and then you go move in with the groom and his family. So she's getting ready for that. We know that Mary was a young girl of faith. She knew her scriptures. She prayed to God. She clearly listened to the Lord. And that's important because it tells us that when the angel shows up in the passage that Bill read to us and starts to talk about this Messiah figure that's going to come, she knows who that is. She's been told about the Messiah her whole life. Just like we're waiting on the second coming of Christ that we talked about in Revelation for him to come down out of the clouds and rescue us. So she was waiting on the first coming of the Messiah. So when the angel begins to talk about the Messiah, she knows who that is. She was a young girl of faith. And that's important. But she was a simple girl with a simple faith and a very simple life, and I doubt seriously that she had any visions of anything larger than that. And it's to this girl that the angel appears. And I'm going to finish up the passage that Bill began to read because these are the details that he gives Mary about what is you're going to have the Messiah. You're pregnant. God did it. You're all right. And you're going to carry this baby to term and you're going to have the Messiah and he's going to be called Jesus and he's going to be the Lord. He's going to be the most high. He's going to sit on the throne of David. And when we think about Mary and we think about her role in Jesus's life, we only get snippets of her in scripture. And I wonder how in depth we go in our thought process about her, right? Because I always think of her as just, look how lucky she is. Look how fortunate she is. She was favored, we're told. And I saw one author this week as I was kind of reading up on Mary, who just made the point that Mary was favored then so that we could be favored with the son now. And I think that's a pretty great thought. But Mary, God just plucked her out of obscurity and said, yeah, you're the girl. She wasn't expecting it. She wasn't asking for it. At no point do we have any record of Mary praying a prayer and saying, God, you know, I know you're going to bring a Messiah. I don't know how you plan to get him into the world. But if it's through a teenage virgin, I'll sign up for that. So if that's your plan, God, just consider me. She didn't expect that. And I wonder how much we've thought of how much it radically changed her life and the trajectory of her life to be told that she was going to give birth to the Son of God. The angel didn't tell Joseph until after Joseph and Mary had the conversation. So now Mary knows, I've got to have this super tough conversation with my fiance that I'm pregnant and it's not him. And he's got to believe me that it was God. That's a tough conversation. She's got to carry this baby to term. She's got to raise this baby. You ever think when one and a half year old Jesus is sitting at the table in his high chair and he reaches for the butter knife and he's not supposed to touch the butter knife and he's not understanding. No. And Mary wants to slap his hand. She's got to stop and be like, is this okay? Can I hit the Savior? Is that a thing? I don't know what to do. Is that too hard? Oh gosh, I'm so sorry. Can you imagine losing your patience with infant baby Jesus, with Messiah Jesus? When my kid won't sleep, I will walk into his room and sometimes the passage does not get put into his mouth as gently as possibly. Sometimes it's possible that I mutter things in the middle of the night and give him unkind instructions. What if you're married? What if that's Jesus and you lose your patience with baby Jesus? Like it's just a totally different way to think about motherhood. How about when they're on a play date and one of the other moms leans over and she's like, I tell you what, you're Jesus. He is just so well behaved. He's like a little angel. And Mary's like, well, actually, he's in charge of the angels. And then all the other moms are like, that Mary, she's got rose-colored glasses on about her kid. She does not see him realistically. She thinks way too highly of him. Joseph disappears from the gospel narrative. Because culturally he was likely older than Mary, and because this is a time in which the life expectancy is not very high, we presume, a lot of scholars presume, that Joseph died. That somewhere in there that Jesus lost his father. So Joseph experienced the loss of his earthly father and then we have James, the half-brother of Jesus, who writes a book in the Bible and gives us evidence that at some point or another, Mary remarried. So Jesus was a stepson. So for the stepchildren in the room, I think that's pretty cool. Jesus knew what a blended family was and felt like. Can you imagine being Mary and trying to be a mother of Jesus and a mother of these other kids and love them equally and fairly and feeling that weight of importance your whole life? Like I think that we think, oh, what a blessing that Mary received to be able to have the son of God. But part of me thinks like, but was it all the time? Because it was, had to be pretty stressful. Had to be pretty difficult at times. And in this way, the one thing that I've been thinking this week, the one phrase that's kind of rung through my mind is, how did Mary experience Christmas was this idea that Jesus happened to Mary. He just happened to her. She wasn't looking for him. She didn't pray for him. She didn't expect it. She didn't know. There wasn't a prophecy that this is how Jesus is going to come. She just, she didn't know. And all of a sudden, this angel shows up and says, you're going to be pregnant. You're going to have Jesus. And it's going to radically change your whole life. And I think of Jesus happening to Mary, like the Kool-Aid man just bursting through the wall, right? Like, I don't know if you're old enough to remember in the 80s and 90s, Kool-Aid had this great ad campaign with the Kool-Aid man, this oversized pitcher filled with red Kool-Aid, and these kids would be sitting around playing a game and one of them would be like, I'm thirsty, and then the Kool-Aid man would just barge through the wall and be like, I got some Kool-Aid. I don't know what he actually said, but that's the implication, is now you will thirst no more. There's a Kool-Aid man here. I think there was a Saturday Night Live sketch about people sitting around being like, I'm thirsty. And the Kool-Aid man like broke through the wall. And there's this big, huge opening that's plenty big enough for the Kool-Aid man, like right next to where he broke through. And the people are like, you could have just, could just use the door, man. Like knock it off with crashing through these walls. But that's how Jesus shows up in Mary's life. Just a Kool-Aid man just crashing through the wall, announcing his presence. I'm here. And listen, it radically changes everything in her life. It radically changes her priorities. It radically changes the purpose. She had plans for her life. Forget them. She had goals for her life. Rethink them, Mary. Those of us who have walked through spiritual deserts, which is everyone who's been a Christian for more than 60 days, Mary couldn't do that. She had to be on her game all the time. She's raising the Savior. There's no wandering around for you. When Jesus showed up, he radically changed her life. He happened to her. And he changed everything. And in the middle of this, in her wrestling with this, we pick the story back up. She's now brought Jesus to term. She's had him in a manger, right? They go to Bethlehem, they go to Jerusalem, they end up in Bethlehem, they have Jesus in a manger which looked, we think of it as a sort of like barn or stable, but it's really probably more like a cave that they were in in the hills of Bethlehem. And when Jesus is born, the angels appear to the shepherds. The shepherds go and they go decide to visit baby Jesus. This is what Kyle preached about last week. And so that's where we pick it up this week when we look at Luke chapter 2, I noticed something that I had never, ever noticed before in the Christmas story. It says the shepherds see the angels, they hear them, they're told that the Messiah has been born. They're like, this is great, let's go meet him. They go to the manger where Mary and Joseph are. And when they get there, they tell everybody what the angel said. And it says, need it explained to them. They're not wondering. And then you got Mary and Joseph. They know. The angels have told them personally. They showed up in their house and said, hey, here's the deal. So those people know, which leads me to the conclusion, and you guys can follow me here or not. This is just me thinking, okay? So you buy it or not. But it leads me to the conclusion that we've got a little bit of a DJ Khaled situation going on here. Now, here's what I mean. I was in Times Square a couple years ago by myself. I dropped Jen off at the hotel, and then I went to Times Square by myself because I love being in Times Square at night. It's one of the most special places on the planet. I think it's so cool. And I'm just taking it all in. And I noticed people start to just kind of flock. There's a ton of people there and people just start to flock to this one street on this one side of Times Square. And they're like three and four people deep. And I'm like, I wonder what's going on over here. So I go over there and I kind of make my way up on a wall and I'm looking down on the road and everybody's looking at this car and waving at this one car. And I asked, there's some random couple next to me. I'm like, what's the deal? What's going on? They go, we don't know. We think that's DJ Khaled. And I'm like, cool. There he is. I saw him. You know, and if you'd have told me 10 minutes ago, hey, just a heads up, buddy. Well, DJ Khaled's about to pass the street right here. You can go get a good seat for it before everybody else knows. I'd have been like, I'm good. I think we'll let somebody else see DJ Khaled. I still don't know what he looks like. He could be here and I wouldn't know it. As a matter of fact, Deej, if you're here, we're always looking for volunteers in the worship team. We're actually hiring, so let's talk, man. I don't know where your life's at. That'd be cool. But the thing that happened was it was just a commotion. There was just a bunch of people. And then there was some people walking this way and then other people started this way. And then it occurred to me, Mary and Joseph are here on holiday. They're here for a census. They're here for Passover. Do you think that they're the only ones that couldn't get a room in the end? You think they showed up so late? The whole country is descending on Jerusalem. You think the whole country got there before Mary and Joseph did? No. There was other people around. There was other people who couldn't stay in Jerusalem and had to stay in Bethlehem. Which, this is beside the point, but Joseph, get it together, man. You got a pregnant wife. You can't make reservations. You know you've got to go. You've known for a year. You've known for 10 years there's a census coming. You can't make a reservation in Jerusalem. The level of not planning from Joseph here baffles me. They're the people who are in group C when you board Southwest. That's Mary and Joseph. It's the only airline I know that before you can get on the plane, you have to line up in order of personal responsibility, right? And then the C's are in the back. But there's a bunch of people around. And there's lights in the sky, And then there's shepherds who just left their flock moving through the city. And it seems to me, all those who gathered, all those who are around, it seems to me that there was a commotion and that they've all moved towards this manger. And they're craning and they're trying to see what's going on. And then the shepherds tell everybody, this is the Messiah the angels just told us. This is what they said. He's going to be King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He is Emmanuel, God with us. And they say that. And the crowds are like, okay. What does that mean? What's that going to look like? And what's cool about that is Mary knew. Mary could have told them. She could have made it so that they didn't have to wonder. And instead, we get this response, which is, I think, my favorite verse in the Christmas story, Luke 2, 19. It says, but Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. That's just a mama's joy right there. That's my baby. And I get to be his mama. And he's the savior. He's the Messiah. He's the one we've all been waiting on. He's the one you grew up longing for. He's the one your soul needs and you don't even know it. And she knew. But for some reason, she didn't tell him. She held that one here. She treasured that in her heart. She said, this moment is between me and you, God. And she pondered, she weighed those things for the rest of her life. And I love that moment. Because in that moment, Mary knows something that nobody else knows. Mary understands something that the rest of the world doesn't understand yet. All those crowds gathered, and what's the with the baby and the shepherds who came over and they were told they don't really fully understand it yet. She's had nine months to ruminate on this. She understands something that the rest of them don't understand. And I'm convinced it's this. Mary knew that Jesus was going to happen to them too. She knew. Just stick around. You'll learn who this is. You'll figure it out. How, Mary? I don't know. I don't know how he's going to tell you. But stick around. And Jesus is going to happen to you too. Whether we're paying attention or whether we're not, she knows. All these people wondering, who's this baby? She knows in her head. You'll know. You'll learn. He's going to happen to you just like he happened to me. And here's the part about this that I love. In this moment, in this moment of confidence that Jesus is going to happen to you too, Mary exists in blissful, confident ignorance. Mary exists in blissful, confident ignorance. And here's what I mean. She knows that Jesus is going to happen. She knows that this little boy is going to grow up and he's going to become the Messiah and he's going to sit on the throne of David. Does she know how that's going to happen? Not a chance. Does Mary know that this little boy is going to grow up and at 30 he's going to recruit 12 disciples and he's going to give them the keys to the kingdom and that he's going to be crucified on a cross and she's going to watch him die and that in three days he's going to resurrect and defeat hell and death for the rest of time and win us for eternity and that one day he's going to watch him die. And then in three days, he's going to resurrect and defeat hell and death for the rest of time and win us for eternity. And that one day he's going to crash down out of the clouds on a white horse and be called faithful and true. And he's going to take us all up to heaven because he came to establish an eternal kingdom and not an earthly kingdom. Does Mary know that? No, no chance. She just knows he's Jesus. And that God sent him and that he's going to take care of things. Does Mary know how Jesus is going to show up in the lives of those gathered around wondering what does all this mean? Does she know how Jesus is going to happen to them? No. Does she know that 33 years later, those same crowds and the children of those crowds might be the same ones gathered around Pilate's governor's mansion when Jesus is about to be crucified, yelling, give us Barabbas and crucify Christ? She doesn't know that. She exists in blissful, confident ignorance. Jesus is going to happen here. How, Mary? I don't know. I don't know, but he is. He's going to show up. When? I don't know. I don't know what to tell you, but he's going to happen. And I love that thought so much because if we'll pay attention, Jesus will happen to us too in big and small ways. If you pay attention, Jesus will happen to you too in big and small ways. See, what we know about Mary is that she was faithful. What we know about Mary is that she listened to God. What we know about Mary is that she knew her Scripture. She was listening. And Jesus happened. And so what I know about us and what Mary knew about us is that if we'll listen, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, Jesus will happen to us too in big and small ways. And I think that's an important delineation in big and small ways. He will happen to us in big ways because when Jesus shows up in our life, make no mistake, he Kool-Aid mans that joker. He shows up and he wrecks shop. He rearranges everything. He totally changes your priorities. He totally changes your heart. You had these goals for your life? No. These are your new goals for your life. You had these plans for yourself? No. I'm going to make these plans for you. You have these priorities? You hold these things precious? Forget them. They're nothing. Hold these things precious. When Jesus explodes into our life, he radically changes our hearts. He radically changes everything. Our lives look completely different once he's bound through the wall. And I think that part of our problem sometimes is that we're the Saturday night live actors going, hey, Jesus, do you think maybe you could just use the door? Do you come in like a, is there like a small Jesus? This one's making a lot of demands, pal. I think that sometimes because we hold on so tightly, we don't let Jesus happen to us the way that he could and the way that he wants to. Mary simply said, when she found out that she was going to have Jesus, she said, I'm your servant. Do whatever you're going to do. And I think some of us, and when I say us, I mean us, tend to think like, Jesus, I'm pretty squared away. But I'd love for you to have some say in these areas. That's not the deal that Jesus makes. He explodes into our life and he radically changes everything. And he doesn't ask us for permission before he does it. And Mary knows that Jesus is going to happen to us. Jesus also happens in small ways. Continually through our life when we need him most. In moments when we desperately need him to happen. I remember being in Honduras years ago. When I was a teacher, I took a class of seniors to Siguarapeque, Honduras. And one of the things that we did there was hand out bags of rice to some of the folks in the village. That's not a critical term. It was literally a village in the hillsides of Saguarapeque. And there was one girl that we took with us named Allison. And Allison was this really sharp, bright girl who I really liked a lot. And she told me one of the nights that we were there that she was really struggling with her faith. I'm just not sure if I believe it. I have so many questions and I kind of don't know what to do. And we talked about it for a little bit and I just let it be. And then the day that we were handing out rice, it's predominantly older and younger women who are in the line for the rice. And we've got like this chain. I'm in the back of a truck and I'm picking up boxes. I'm handing the boxes to somebody and they're picking up bags and they're handing bags and they're handing bags and then they're handing them to the people. And it just so happened that Allison was at the end of the conveyor belt and she was the one actually handing the rice to the women. And I was paying attention to her that day and I saw her face light up in a way that I had never seen before. And I saw the joy of connection that she was having with the women to whom she was handing the rice. And it was this spiritual moment. And so I pulled her aside after dinner that night and I said, hey, listen, I know that you're having questions about your faith, but I watched you come alive when you were helping those women today. I watched a joy in your eyes. And she started to cry. She knew I was right. And I said, I just want you to know that that was Jesus. Scripture tells us that whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me. And you were serving Jesus today. And he showed up for you. So you might not always have all the answers that you want for your faith, but you can cling to Jesus. And today you found him. And it resonated with her. She's a nurse in Denver, specifically at a hospital in a low-income area so that she can continue to serve the least of these. She's dedicated her life to that service because Jesus showed up for her that day. And this Christmas season, some of you, you need Jesus to show up. You need Jesus to happen to you. Some of us in big ways. Some of us, we need to quit asking Jesus to simply walk to the door we provided and let him come in and wreck shop. Some of us, we need Jesus to happen in small ways. Some of us are like Allison, we're struggling with our faith. We don't know what to do. We don't have all the answers. And if maybe Jesus could just show up here, if Jesus could just happen here, that would be what we needed to see a clear path forward. Others of us, we have things going on in our families. We're facing a difficult Christmas or we're facing a tight Christmas or we're facing a stressful Christmas or it's just a hard season of life and we need Jesus to show up. I can remember a month or two ago, I was in a place where I was just feeling really discouraged. And I prayed one morning. I was like, God, listen, man, if you're handing out, I didn't say listen, man. I don't say that to God. I try not to anyway. Sometimes I do. God, I'm sorry. But God, if you're handing out encouragement, I'll take some. I could use it. I need Jesus to happen here. That was a Sunday morning. I won't go into the details. But for the next three days, encouragement after encouragement after encouragement that I didn't expect. And Jesus happened to me that week. And some of you need Jesus to happen to you too. And whatever situations you're in, and whatever stresses you're carrying and burdens you're bearing, you need Jesus to happen. And so my prayer for you this week, that in this place, in grace, this month, and this season, that Jesus would happen here as we move through Christmas season together. And my prayer for you is that Jesus would happen to you. And for some of you, my prayer is that he would happen in really big, life-changing, earth-shattering, priority-changing ways that you didn't anticipate that scare the heck out of you. But I hope that Jesus shows up big time in your life. And still for others, I'm praying that Jesus will happen to you in that small way that you need him so desperately to happen. But let's make our prayer at Grace this season that Jesus will happen here and Jesus will happen in our lives. Join me in that prayer. Father, you're good to us. Thank you for your son. Thank you for Christmas. Thank you for how it focuses us on you and your goodness and on your son. Jesus, we invite you into this place. We pray that you would happen here. We pray that you would have your way here. Give us the faith and the courage to not stand in your way. Give us the wisdom to know that your ways are better than our ways. Give us the courage to overcome any fear we might have about handing things over to you. But let us, God, pray courageous prayers and invite you into our life in a big way. And Father, for those of us who need Jesus in the little ways, for those of us who are struggling, who are hurting, who are stressed or anxious, God, I pray that Jesus would happen in those spaces too. Even this week, God, even today, would Jesus happen to us. It's in his name we ask these things. Amen.
Thank you. Hear the word of God from the Gospel of Luke. she was greatly troubled at the saying and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. Thank you, Bill. Good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Before I just dive into the sermon, I had a couple preliminary thoughts I just wanted to share with you real quick. If you've been a part of Grace for any number of years, you know that we tend to, at the end of the year, give not necessarily more generously, but we tend to give generously at the end of the year. Our year-end giving is usually pretty good. And so one of the things that we've done since I got here is we do a Christmas offering and we say, hey, as end of the year giving comes in this year, we're going to allocate that to these projects and to these ministries and things like that. Well, this year is a little different in that we are pushing to the end of our building campaign that we launched back in, I guess, February of 2020. We had pledged Sunday on March the 1st of 2020. I announced the pledges on March the 8th of 2020, and then the world ended. And that whole time, we've actually been running concurrent to the pandemic. We've been doing a campaign, and you guys have been so faithful, and God has been so good that we are actually in a really good spot. Now, I sent out details about that this week. So if you didn't get an update email from me on the search for the worship pastor and our search for a building and how the campaign is going. If you didn't get that this week, please let me know. All that means is you're not on the list that you need to be on. If you're watching at home or catch this later, fill out a connection card online and let us know. Fill out a connection card here in the service and we'll make sure and get you on the right list so that you can get those updates. So as we look towards the end of the year, basically what we're asking with end of the year giving is this, either designate it for general offering or designate it for the building campaign. If money comes in undesignated, we will by default put that towards the general offering. And then in the new year, depending on what comes in, the missions committee will make decisions about how we want to allocate those to other ministries that we support. Just as a reminder, we give 10% of what we bring in to missions. And this year it's actually been a little bit bigger. This year we've actually given about 12% to ministries going on outside the walls of the church. And that's something that we're really proud of and hold close to our hearts. The other thing I was going to share with you, I have to be careful how I do this, is last week, you know, Kyle preached. Kyle preached so good that about 15 minutes in, at first I was like, dude, this is great. He's crushing it. Good for Kyle. I love this. And then about 15 minutes in, I was like, yo, Kyle, like, chill out, man Like I have to preach next week. I don't have, I don't have that much on Mary right now. So just, let's just take it easy. He did so good. And the whole experience was fantastic. I texted Kirk and Kyle on Saturday and said, hey, you know, I don't have any responsibilities in the service. So I'm actually going to come to the service with my family. I'll get there about 930 9.45. And so last week I had the opportunity to just wake up, help Jen get the kids ready, come to church together, drop our kids off with some folks who really wanted to hug on John and squeeze his big fat baby cheeks. And then Lily went next door with her friends, some folks that care about her. And then I got to talk to my friends and we sat in the back, which I love sitting in the back. I'm jealous of you guys. Yeah, that's it, Scotty. Like, I love sitting back there, and we sang songs. We snuggled up a little bit during the sermon. I sat next to my wife. I was ministered to by the sermon, ministered to by the songs, particularly that last one. And I left here with my heart just full of Jesus. And I thought to myself, that was great. That church is so fun. You guys who just get to show up and don't have to do anything and be ministered to, you don't know how good you got it, man. So just for the record, I'm very envious of you guys. I almost, I considered this week quitting my job just so I could come to church with my family, but I have no marketable skills. So I'm here until the Lord chooses otherwise. Okay. This week, yes, thank you. Thank you, Elaine. For those watching online, there was thunderous applause. This week, we are in part two of our series called Renewed Wonder, where we simply are focusing on looking at Christmas through the eyes of a child. That's why we're doing lighthearted things. That's why we had Christmas Kyle come and do the announcements. But truth be told, we would make Kyle do that no matter how lighthearted the series was. We're decorating cookies after the service. I hope you'll do that. That's for children and adults, too. I'm particularly excited about next week, Christmas Jammy Sunday. Can't wait to see what you show up in. This is going to be very, very fun and very, very festive. Yes, Mike, even you, buddy. This is going to be great. So I'm really looking forward to that as we kind of just look at Christmas through the eyes of a child and just the wonder and the grandeur that comes with Christmas. And so that's what we're doing in the series. And then the sermons, we're looking at the Christmas story through the eyes of different characters within the story. So last week, like I said, Kyle did a great job of looking at Christmas to the eyes of the shepherds. And this week, we want to look at Christmas to the eyes of Mary. What must it have been like for Mary to experience that first Christmas? And what can we learn from her experience? And what about her experience can shape the way that we approach Christmas this year? So as we think about Christmas through the eyes of Mary, it would probably be good to get some context on her, to understand who Mary was and what kind of person that she was. And we really, we don't know a lot. We know that she was from Nazareth. So that makes her pretty simple. Nazareth was a very small town. There's very little archaeological evidence that Nazareth even ever existed. It's just very, very small. It doesn't mean it didn't exist. It just means it's so small that there's not very much there. It's in the north of Israel. It's in the hill country. Like when Jesus is introduced, one time we hear somebody say, can anything good come from Nazareth? It was like the Mississippi of Israel. Just nothing good came from there. So, sorry, that's a Georgia joke. I don't know what the North Carolina, is it West Virginia? Is that who we make fun of in North Carolina? I always make fun of Mississippi. Tennessee, yeah, that's good. We'll go Tennessee. Thank you very much. She was a simple girl from Nazareth. She was probably, culturally, because she was engaged, she was probably 13 to 15 years old. I know that sounds weird for us, but in that culture, typically men had to grow up and establish themselves and have a career and be able to pay a dowry and be able to prove that they could support a wife. So it's reasonable to think that Joseph was probably closer to 30 and that Mary was probably closer to 15 or so, which sounds super weird to us, but then that was how it goes. So she's betrothed to Joseph. To them, engagement was tantamount to marriage. You're essentially married already. You're just waiting for the ceremony, and then you go move in with the groom and his family. So she's getting ready for that. We know that Mary was a young girl of faith. She knew her scriptures. She prayed to God. She clearly listened to the Lord. And that's important because it tells us that when the angel shows up in the passage that Bill read to us and starts to talk about this Messiah figure that's going to come, she knows who that is. She's been told about the Messiah her whole life. Just like we're waiting on the second coming of Christ that we talked about in Revelation for him to come down out of the clouds and rescue us. So she was waiting on the first coming of the Messiah. So when the angel begins to talk about the Messiah, she knows who that is. She was a young girl of faith. And that's important. But she was a simple girl with a simple faith and a very simple life, and I doubt seriously that she had any visions of anything larger than that. And it's to this girl that the angel appears. And I'm going to finish up the passage that Bill began to read because these are the details that he gives Mary about what is you're going to have the Messiah. You're pregnant. God did it. You're all right. And you're going to carry this baby to term and you're going to have the Messiah and he's going to be called Jesus and he's going to be the Lord. He's going to be the most high. He's going to sit on the throne of David. And when we think about Mary and we think about her role in Jesus's life, we only get snippets of her in scripture. And I wonder how in depth we go in our thought process about her, right? Because I always think of her as just, look how lucky she is. Look how fortunate she is. She was favored, we're told. And I saw one author this week as I was kind of reading up on Mary, who just made the point that Mary was favored then so that we could be favored with the son now. And I think that's a pretty great thought. But Mary, God just plucked her out of obscurity and said, yeah, you're the girl. She wasn't expecting it. She wasn't asking for it. At no point do we have any record of Mary praying a prayer and saying, God, you know, I know you're going to bring a Messiah. I don't know how you plan to get him into the world. But if it's through a teenage virgin, I'll sign up for that. So if that's your plan, God, just consider me. She didn't expect that. And I wonder how much we've thought of how much it radically changed her life and the trajectory of her life to be told that she was going to give birth to the Son of God. The angel didn't tell Joseph until after Joseph and Mary had the conversation. So now Mary knows, I've got to have this super tough conversation with my fiance that I'm pregnant and it's not him. And he's got to believe me that it was God. That's a tough conversation. She's got to carry this baby to term. She's got to raise this baby. You ever think when one and a half year old Jesus is sitting at the table in his high chair and he reaches for the butter knife and he's not supposed to touch the butter knife and he's not understanding. No. And Mary wants to slap his hand. She's got to stop and be like, is this okay? Can I hit the Savior? Is that a thing? I don't know what to do. Is that too hard? Oh gosh, I'm so sorry. Can you imagine losing your patience with infant baby Jesus, with Messiah Jesus? When my kid won't sleep, I will walk into his room and sometimes the passage does not get put into his mouth as gently as possibly. Sometimes it's possible that I mutter things in the middle of the night and give him unkind instructions. What if you're married? What if that's Jesus and you lose your patience with baby Jesus? Like it's just a totally different way to think about motherhood. How about when they're on a play date and one of the other moms leans over and she's like, I tell you what, you're Jesus. He is just so well behaved. He's like a little angel. And Mary's like, well, actually, he's in charge of the angels. And then all the other moms are like, that Mary, she's got rose-colored glasses on about her kid. She does not see him realistically. She thinks way too highly of him. Joseph disappears from the gospel narrative. Because culturally he was likely older than Mary, and because this is a time in which the life expectancy is not very high, we presume, a lot of scholars presume, that Joseph died. That somewhere in there that Jesus lost his father. So Joseph experienced the loss of his earthly father and then we have James, the half-brother of Jesus, who writes a book in the Bible and gives us evidence that at some point or another, Mary remarried. So Jesus was a stepson. So for the stepchildren in the room, I think that's pretty cool. Jesus knew what a blended family was and felt like. Can you imagine being Mary and trying to be a mother of Jesus and a mother of these other kids and love them equally and fairly and feeling that weight of importance your whole life? Like I think that we think, oh, what a blessing that Mary received to be able to have the son of God. But part of me thinks like, but was it all the time? Because it was, had to be pretty stressful. Had to be pretty difficult at times. And in this way, the one thing that I've been thinking this week, the one phrase that's kind of rung through my mind is, how did Mary experience Christmas was this idea that Jesus happened to Mary. He just happened to her. She wasn't looking for him. She didn't pray for him. She didn't expect it. She didn't know. There wasn't a prophecy that this is how Jesus is going to come. She just, she didn't know. And all of a sudden, this angel shows up and says, you're going to be pregnant. You're going to have Jesus. And it's going to radically change your whole life. And I think of Jesus happening to Mary, like the Kool-Aid man just bursting through the wall, right? Like, I don't know if you're old enough to remember in the 80s and 90s, Kool-Aid had this great ad campaign with the Kool-Aid man, this oversized pitcher filled with red Kool-Aid, and these kids would be sitting around playing a game and one of them would be like, I'm thirsty, and then the Kool-Aid man would just barge through the wall and be like, I got some Kool-Aid. I don't know what he actually said, but that's the implication, is now you will thirst no more. There's a Kool-Aid man here. I think there was a Saturday Night Live sketch about people sitting around being like, I'm thirsty. And the Kool-Aid man like broke through the wall. And there's this big, huge opening that's plenty big enough for the Kool-Aid man, like right next to where he broke through. And the people are like, you could have just, could just use the door, man. Like knock it off with crashing through these walls. But that's how Jesus shows up in Mary's life. Just a Kool-Aid man just crashing through the wall, announcing his presence. I'm here. And listen, it radically changes everything in her life. It radically changes her priorities. It radically changes the purpose. She had plans for her life. Forget them. She had goals for her life. Rethink them, Mary. Those of us who have walked through spiritual deserts, which is everyone who's been a Christian for more than 60 days, Mary couldn't do that. She had to be on her game all the time. She's raising the Savior. There's no wandering around for you. When Jesus showed up, he radically changed her life. He happened to her. And he changed everything. And in the middle of this, in her wrestling with this, we pick the story back up. She's now brought Jesus to term. She's had him in a manger, right? They go to Bethlehem, they go to Jerusalem, they end up in Bethlehem, they have Jesus in a manger which looked, we think of it as a sort of like barn or stable, but it's really probably more like a cave that they were in in the hills of Bethlehem. And when Jesus is born, the angels appear to the shepherds. The shepherds go and they go decide to visit baby Jesus. This is what Kyle preached about last week. And so that's where we pick it up this week when we look at Luke chapter 2, I noticed something that I had never, ever noticed before in the Christmas story. It says the shepherds see the angels, they hear them, they're told that the Messiah has been born. They're like, this is great, let's go meet him. They go to the manger where Mary and Joseph are. And when they get there, they tell everybody what the angel said. And it says, need it explained to them. They're not wondering. And then you got Mary and Joseph. They know. The angels have told them personally. They showed up in their house and said, hey, here's the deal. So those people know, which leads me to the conclusion, and you guys can follow me here or not. This is just me thinking, okay? So you buy it or not. But it leads me to the conclusion that we've got a little bit of a DJ Khaled situation going on here. Now, here's what I mean. I was in Times Square a couple years ago by myself. I dropped Jen off at the hotel, and then I went to Times Square by myself because I love being in Times Square at night. It's one of the most special places on the planet. I think it's so cool. And I'm just taking it all in. And I noticed people start to just kind of flock. There's a ton of people there and people just start to flock to this one street on this one side of Times Square. And they're like three and four people deep. And I'm like, I wonder what's going on over here. So I go over there and I kind of make my way up on a wall and I'm looking down on the road and everybody's looking at this car and waving at this one car. And I asked, there's some random couple next to me. I'm like, what's the deal? What's going on? They go, we don't know. We think that's DJ Khaled. And I'm like, cool. There he is. I saw him. You know, and if you'd have told me 10 minutes ago, hey, just a heads up, buddy. Well, DJ Khaled's about to pass the street right here. You can go get a good seat for it before everybody else knows. I'd have been like, I'm good. I think we'll let somebody else see DJ Khaled. I still don't know what he looks like. He could be here and I wouldn't know it. As a matter of fact, Deej, if you're here, we're always looking for volunteers in the worship team. We're actually hiring, so let's talk, man. I don't know where your life's at. That'd be cool. But the thing that happened was it was just a commotion. There was just a bunch of people. And then there was some people walking this way and then other people started this way. And then it occurred to me, Mary and Joseph are here on holiday. They're here for a census. They're here for Passover. Do you think that they're the only ones that couldn't get a room in the end? You think they showed up so late? The whole country is descending on Jerusalem. You think the whole country got there before Mary and Joseph did? No. There was other people around. There was other people who couldn't stay in Jerusalem and had to stay in Bethlehem. Which, this is beside the point, but Joseph, get it together, man. You got a pregnant wife. You can't make reservations. You know you've got to go. You've known for a year. You've known for 10 years there's a census coming. You can't make a reservation in Jerusalem. The level of not planning from Joseph here baffles me. They're the people who are in group C when you board Southwest. That's Mary and Joseph. It's the only airline I know that before you can get on the plane, you have to line up in order of personal responsibility, right? And then the C's are in the back. But there's a bunch of people around. And there's lights in the sky, And then there's shepherds who just left their flock moving through the city. And it seems to me, all those who gathered, all those who are around, it seems to me that there was a commotion and that they've all moved towards this manger. And they're craning and they're trying to see what's going on. And then the shepherds tell everybody, this is the Messiah the angels just told us. This is what they said. He's going to be King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He is Emmanuel, God with us. And they say that. And the crowds are like, okay. What does that mean? What's that going to look like? And what's cool about that is Mary knew. Mary could have told them. She could have made it so that they didn't have to wonder. And instead, we get this response, which is, I think, my favorite verse in the Christmas story, Luke 2, 19. It says, but Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. That's just a mama's joy right there. That's my baby. And I get to be his mama. And he's the savior. He's the Messiah. He's the one we've all been waiting on. He's the one you grew up longing for. He's the one your soul needs and you don't even know it. And she knew. But for some reason, she didn't tell him. She held that one here. She treasured that in her heart. She said, this moment is between me and you, God. And she pondered, she weighed those things for the rest of her life. And I love that moment. Because in that moment, Mary knows something that nobody else knows. Mary understands something that the rest of the world doesn't understand yet. All those crowds gathered, and what's the with the baby and the shepherds who came over and they were told they don't really fully understand it yet. She's had nine months to ruminate on this. She understands something that the rest of them don't understand. And I'm convinced it's this. Mary knew that Jesus was going to happen to them too. She knew. Just stick around. You'll learn who this is. You'll figure it out. How, Mary? I don't know. I don't know how he's going to tell you. But stick around. And Jesus is going to happen to you too. Whether we're paying attention or whether we're not, she knows. All these people wondering, who's this baby? She knows in her head. You'll know. You'll learn. He's going to happen to you just like he happened to me. And here's the part about this that I love. In this moment, in this moment of confidence that Jesus is going to happen to you too, Mary exists in blissful, confident ignorance. Mary exists in blissful, confident ignorance. And here's what I mean. She knows that Jesus is going to happen. She knows that this little boy is going to grow up and he's going to become the Messiah and he's going to sit on the throne of David. Does she know how that's going to happen? Not a chance. Does Mary know that this little boy is going to grow up and at 30 he's going to recruit 12 disciples and he's going to give them the keys to the kingdom and that he's going to be crucified on a cross and she's going to watch him die and that in three days he's going to resurrect and defeat hell and death for the rest of time and win us for eternity and that one day he's going to watch him die. And then in three days, he's going to resurrect and defeat hell and death for the rest of time and win us for eternity. And that one day he's going to crash down out of the clouds on a white horse and be called faithful and true. And he's going to take us all up to heaven because he came to establish an eternal kingdom and not an earthly kingdom. Does Mary know that? No, no chance. She just knows he's Jesus. And that God sent him and that he's going to take care of things. Does Mary know how Jesus is going to show up in the lives of those gathered around wondering what does all this mean? Does she know how Jesus is going to happen to them? No. Does she know that 33 years later, those same crowds and the children of those crowds might be the same ones gathered around Pilate's governor's mansion when Jesus is about to be crucified, yelling, give us Barabbas and crucify Christ? She doesn't know that. She exists in blissful, confident ignorance. Jesus is going to happen here. How, Mary? I don't know. I don't know, but he is. He's going to show up. When? I don't know. I don't know what to tell you, but he's going to happen. And I love that thought so much because if we'll pay attention, Jesus will happen to us too in big and small ways. If you pay attention, Jesus will happen to you too in big and small ways. See, what we know about Mary is that she was faithful. What we know about Mary is that she listened to God. What we know about Mary is that she knew her Scripture. She was listening. And Jesus happened. And so what I know about us and what Mary knew about us is that if we'll listen, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, Jesus will happen to us too in big and small ways. And I think that's an important delineation in big and small ways. He will happen to us in big ways because when Jesus shows up in our life, make no mistake, he Kool-Aid mans that joker. He shows up and he wrecks shop. He rearranges everything. He totally changes your priorities. He totally changes your heart. You had these goals for your life? No. These are your new goals for your life. You had these plans for yourself? No. I'm going to make these plans for you. You have these priorities? You hold these things precious? Forget them. They're nothing. Hold these things precious. When Jesus explodes into our life, he radically changes our hearts. He radically changes everything. Our lives look completely different once he's bound through the wall. And I think that part of our problem sometimes is that we're the Saturday night live actors going, hey, Jesus, do you think maybe you could just use the door? Do you come in like a, is there like a small Jesus? This one's making a lot of demands, pal. I think that sometimes because we hold on so tightly, we don't let Jesus happen to us the way that he could and the way that he wants to. Mary simply said, when she found out that she was going to have Jesus, she said, I'm your servant. Do whatever you're going to do. And I think some of us, and when I say us, I mean us, tend to think like, Jesus, I'm pretty squared away. But I'd love for you to have some say in these areas. That's not the deal that Jesus makes. He explodes into our life and he radically changes everything. And he doesn't ask us for permission before he does it. And Mary knows that Jesus is going to happen to us. Jesus also happens in small ways. Continually through our life when we need him most. In moments when we desperately need him to happen. I remember being in Honduras years ago. When I was a teacher, I took a class of seniors to Siguarapeque, Honduras. And one of the things that we did there was hand out bags of rice to some of the folks in the village. That's not a critical term. It was literally a village in the hillsides of Saguarapeque. And there was one girl that we took with us named Allison. And Allison was this really sharp, bright girl who I really liked a lot. And she told me one of the nights that we were there that she was really struggling with her faith. I'm just not sure if I believe it. I have so many questions and I kind of don't know what to do. And we talked about it for a little bit and I just let it be. And then the day that we were handing out rice, it's predominantly older and younger women who are in the line for the rice. And we've got like this chain. I'm in the back of a truck and I'm picking up boxes. I'm handing the boxes to somebody and they're picking up bags and they're handing bags and they're handing bags and then they're handing them to the people. And it just so happened that Allison was at the end of the conveyor belt and she was the one actually handing the rice to the women. And I was paying attention to her that day and I saw her face light up in a way that I had never seen before. And I saw the joy of connection that she was having with the women to whom she was handing the rice. And it was this spiritual moment. And so I pulled her aside after dinner that night and I said, hey, listen, I know that you're having questions about your faith, but I watched you come alive when you were helping those women today. I watched a joy in your eyes. And she started to cry. She knew I was right. And I said, I just want you to know that that was Jesus. Scripture tells us that whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me. And you were serving Jesus today. And he showed up for you. So you might not always have all the answers that you want for your faith, but you can cling to Jesus. And today you found him. And it resonated with her. She's a nurse in Denver, specifically at a hospital in a low-income area so that she can continue to serve the least of these. She's dedicated her life to that service because Jesus showed up for her that day. And this Christmas season, some of you, you need Jesus to show up. You need Jesus to happen to you. Some of us in big ways. Some of us, we need to quit asking Jesus to simply walk to the door we provided and let him come in and wreck shop. Some of us, we need Jesus to happen in small ways. Some of us are like Allison, we're struggling with our faith. We don't know what to do. We don't have all the answers. And if maybe Jesus could just show up here, if Jesus could just happen here, that would be what we needed to see a clear path forward. Others of us, we have things going on in our families. We're facing a difficult Christmas or we're facing a tight Christmas or we're facing a stressful Christmas or it's just a hard season of life and we need Jesus to show up. I can remember a month or two ago, I was in a place where I was just feeling really discouraged. And I prayed one morning. I was like, God, listen, man, if you're handing out, I didn't say listen, man. I don't say that to God. I try not to anyway. Sometimes I do. God, I'm sorry. But God, if you're handing out encouragement, I'll take some. I could use it. I need Jesus to happen here. That was a Sunday morning. I won't go into the details. But for the next three days, encouragement after encouragement after encouragement that I didn't expect. And Jesus happened to me that week. And some of you need Jesus to happen to you too. And whatever situations you're in, and whatever stresses you're carrying and burdens you're bearing, you need Jesus to happen. And so my prayer for you this week, that in this place, in grace, this month, and this season, that Jesus would happen here as we move through Christmas season together. And my prayer for you is that Jesus would happen to you. And for some of you, my prayer is that he would happen in really big, life-changing, earth-shattering, priority-changing ways that you didn't anticipate that scare the heck out of you. But I hope that Jesus shows up big time in your life. And still for others, I'm praying that Jesus will happen to you in that small way that you need him so desperately to happen. But let's make our prayer at Grace this season that Jesus will happen here and Jesus will happen in our lives. Join me in that prayer. Father, you're good to us. Thank you for your son. Thank you for Christmas. Thank you for how it focuses us on you and your goodness and on your son. Jesus, we invite you into this place. We pray that you would happen here. We pray that you would have your way here. Give us the faith and the courage to not stand in your way. Give us the wisdom to know that your ways are better than our ways. Give us the courage to overcome any fear we might have about handing things over to you. But let us, God, pray courageous prayers and invite you into our life in a big way. And Father, for those of us who need Jesus in the little ways, for those of us who are struggling, who are hurting, who are stressed or anxious, God, I pray that Jesus would happen in those spaces too. Even this week, God, even today, would Jesus happen to us. It's in his name we ask these things. Amen.
Thank you. Hear the word of God from the Gospel of Luke. she was greatly troubled at the saying and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. Thank you, Bill. Good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Before I just dive into the sermon, I had a couple preliminary thoughts I just wanted to share with you real quick. If you've been a part of Grace for any number of years, you know that we tend to, at the end of the year, give not necessarily more generously, but we tend to give generously at the end of the year. Our year-end giving is usually pretty good. And so one of the things that we've done since I got here is we do a Christmas offering and we say, hey, as end of the year giving comes in this year, we're going to allocate that to these projects and to these ministries and things like that. Well, this year is a little different in that we are pushing to the end of our building campaign that we launched back in, I guess, February of 2020. We had pledged Sunday on March the 1st of 2020. I announced the pledges on March the 8th of 2020, and then the world ended. And that whole time, we've actually been running concurrent to the pandemic. We've been doing a campaign, and you guys have been so faithful, and God has been so good that we are actually in a really good spot. Now, I sent out details about that this week. So if you didn't get an update email from me on the search for the worship pastor and our search for a building and how the campaign is going. If you didn't get that this week, please let me know. All that means is you're not on the list that you need to be on. If you're watching at home or catch this later, fill out a connection card online and let us know. Fill out a connection card here in the service and we'll make sure and get you on the right list so that you can get those updates. So as we look towards the end of the year, basically what we're asking with end of the year giving is this, either designate it for general offering or designate it for the building campaign. If money comes in undesignated, we will by default put that towards the general offering. And then in the new year, depending on what comes in, the missions committee will make decisions about how we want to allocate those to other ministries that we support. Just as a reminder, we give 10% of what we bring in to missions. And this year it's actually been a little bit bigger. This year we've actually given about 12% to ministries going on outside the walls of the church. And that's something that we're really proud of and hold close to our hearts. The other thing I was going to share with you, I have to be careful how I do this, is last week, you know, Kyle preached. Kyle preached so good that about 15 minutes in, at first I was like, dude, this is great. He's crushing it. Good for Kyle. I love this. And then about 15 minutes in, I was like, yo, Kyle, like, chill out, man Like I have to preach next week. I don't have, I don't have that much on Mary right now. So just, let's just take it easy. He did so good. And the whole experience was fantastic. I texted Kirk and Kyle on Saturday and said, hey, you know, I don't have any responsibilities in the service. So I'm actually going to come to the service with my family. I'll get there about 930 9.45. And so last week I had the opportunity to just wake up, help Jen get the kids ready, come to church together, drop our kids off with some folks who really wanted to hug on John and squeeze his big fat baby cheeks. And then Lily went next door with her friends, some folks that care about her. And then I got to talk to my friends and we sat in the back, which I love sitting in the back. I'm jealous of you guys. Yeah, that's it, Scotty. Like, I love sitting back there, and we sang songs. We snuggled up a little bit during the sermon. I sat next to my wife. I was ministered to by the sermon, ministered to by the songs, particularly that last one. And I left here with my heart just full of Jesus. And I thought to myself, that was great. That church is so fun. You guys who just get to show up and don't have to do anything and be ministered to, you don't know how good you got it, man. So just for the record, I'm very envious of you guys. I almost, I considered this week quitting my job just so I could come to church with my family, but I have no marketable skills. So I'm here until the Lord chooses otherwise. Okay. This week, yes, thank you. Thank you, Elaine. For those watching online, there was thunderous applause. This week, we are in part two of our series called Renewed Wonder, where we simply are focusing on looking at Christmas through the eyes of a child. That's why we're doing lighthearted things. That's why we had Christmas Kyle come and do the announcements. But truth be told, we would make Kyle do that no matter how lighthearted the series was. We're decorating cookies after the service. I hope you'll do that. That's for children and adults, too. I'm particularly excited about next week, Christmas Jammy Sunday. Can't wait to see what you show up in. This is going to be very, very fun and very, very festive. Yes, Mike, even you, buddy. This is going to be great. So I'm really looking forward to that as we kind of just look at Christmas through the eyes of a child and just the wonder and the grandeur that comes with Christmas. And so that's what we're doing in the series. And then the sermons, we're looking at the Christmas story through the eyes of different characters within the story. So last week, like I said, Kyle did a great job of looking at Christmas to the eyes of the shepherds. And this week, we want to look at Christmas to the eyes of Mary. What must it have been like for Mary to experience that first Christmas? And what can we learn from her experience? And what about her experience can shape the way that we approach Christmas this year? So as we think about Christmas through the eyes of Mary, it would probably be good to get some context on her, to understand who Mary was and what kind of person that she was. And we really, we don't know a lot. We know that she was from Nazareth. So that makes her pretty simple. Nazareth was a very small town. There's very little archaeological evidence that Nazareth even ever existed. It's just very, very small. It doesn't mean it didn't exist. It just means it's so small that there's not very much there. It's in the north of Israel. It's in the hill country. Like when Jesus is introduced, one time we hear somebody say, can anything good come from Nazareth? It was like the Mississippi of Israel. Just nothing good came from there. So, sorry, that's a Georgia joke. I don't know what the North Carolina, is it West Virginia? Is that who we make fun of in North Carolina? I always make fun of Mississippi. Tennessee, yeah, that's good. We'll go Tennessee. Thank you very much. She was a simple girl from Nazareth. She was probably, culturally, because she was engaged, she was probably 13 to 15 years old. I know that sounds weird for us, but in that culture, typically men had to grow up and establish themselves and have a career and be able to pay a dowry and be able to prove that they could support a wife. So it's reasonable to think that Joseph was probably closer to 30 and that Mary was probably closer to 15 or so, which sounds super weird to us, but then that was how it goes. So she's betrothed to Joseph. To them, engagement was tantamount to marriage. You're essentially married already. You're just waiting for the ceremony, and then you go move in with the groom and his family. So she's getting ready for that. We know that Mary was a young girl of faith. She knew her scriptures. She prayed to God. She clearly listened to the Lord. And that's important because it tells us that when the angel shows up in the passage that Bill read to us and starts to talk about this Messiah figure that's going to come, she knows who that is. She's been told about the Messiah her whole life. Just like we're waiting on the second coming of Christ that we talked about in Revelation for him to come down out of the clouds and rescue us. So she was waiting on the first coming of the Messiah. So when the angel begins to talk about the Messiah, she knows who that is. She was a young girl of faith. And that's important. But she was a simple girl with a simple faith and a very simple life, and I doubt seriously that she had any visions of anything larger than that. And it's to this girl that the angel appears. And I'm going to finish up the passage that Bill began to read because these are the details that he gives Mary about what is you're going to have the Messiah. You're pregnant. God did it. You're all right. And you're going to carry this baby to term and you're going to have the Messiah and he's going to be called Jesus and he's going to be the Lord. He's going to be the most high. He's going to sit on the throne of David. And when we think about Mary and we think about her role in Jesus's life, we only get snippets of her in scripture. And I wonder how in depth we go in our thought process about her, right? Because I always think of her as just, look how lucky she is. Look how fortunate she is. She was favored, we're told. And I saw one author this week as I was kind of reading up on Mary, who just made the point that Mary was favored then so that we could be favored with the son now. And I think that's a pretty great thought. But Mary, God just plucked her out of obscurity and said, yeah, you're the girl. She wasn't expecting it. She wasn't asking for it. At no point do we have any record of Mary praying a prayer and saying, God, you know, I know you're going to bring a Messiah. I don't know how you plan to get him into the world. But if it's through a teenage virgin, I'll sign up for that. So if that's your plan, God, just consider me. She didn't expect that. And I wonder how much we've thought of how much it radically changed her life and the trajectory of her life to be told that she was going to give birth to the Son of God. The angel didn't tell Joseph until after Joseph and Mary had the conversation. So now Mary knows, I've got to have this super tough conversation with my fiance that I'm pregnant and it's not him. And he's got to believe me that it was God. That's a tough conversation. She's got to carry this baby to term. She's got to raise this baby. You ever think when one and a half year old Jesus is sitting at the table in his high chair and he reaches for the butter knife and he's not supposed to touch the butter knife and he's not understanding. No. And Mary wants to slap his hand. She's got to stop and be like, is this okay? Can I hit the Savior? Is that a thing? I don't know what to do. Is that too hard? Oh gosh, I'm so sorry. Can you imagine losing your patience with infant baby Jesus, with Messiah Jesus? When my kid won't sleep, I will walk into his room and sometimes the passage does not get put into his mouth as gently as possibly. Sometimes it's possible that I mutter things in the middle of the night and give him unkind instructions. What if you're married? What if that's Jesus and you lose your patience with baby Jesus? Like it's just a totally different way to think about motherhood. How about when they're on a play date and one of the other moms leans over and she's like, I tell you what, you're Jesus. He is just so well behaved. He's like a little angel. And Mary's like, well, actually, he's in charge of the angels. And then all the other moms are like, that Mary, she's got rose-colored glasses on about her kid. She does not see him realistically. She thinks way too highly of him. Joseph disappears from the gospel narrative. Because culturally he was likely older than Mary, and because this is a time in which the life expectancy is not very high, we presume, a lot of scholars presume, that Joseph died. That somewhere in there that Jesus lost his father. So Joseph experienced the loss of his earthly father and then we have James, the half-brother of Jesus, who writes a book in the Bible and gives us evidence that at some point or another, Mary remarried. So Jesus was a stepson. So for the stepchildren in the room, I think that's pretty cool. Jesus knew what a blended family was and felt like. Can you imagine being Mary and trying to be a mother of Jesus and a mother of these other kids and love them equally and fairly and feeling that weight of importance your whole life? Like I think that we think, oh, what a blessing that Mary received to be able to have the son of God. But part of me thinks like, but was it all the time? Because it was, had to be pretty stressful. Had to be pretty difficult at times. And in this way, the one thing that I've been thinking this week, the one phrase that's kind of rung through my mind is, how did Mary experience Christmas was this idea that Jesus happened to Mary. He just happened to her. She wasn't looking for him. She didn't pray for him. She didn't expect it. She didn't know. There wasn't a prophecy that this is how Jesus is going to come. She just, she didn't know. And all of a sudden, this angel shows up and says, you're going to be pregnant. You're going to have Jesus. And it's going to radically change your whole life. And I think of Jesus happening to Mary, like the Kool-Aid man just bursting through the wall, right? Like, I don't know if you're old enough to remember in the 80s and 90s, Kool-Aid had this great ad campaign with the Kool-Aid man, this oversized pitcher filled with red Kool-Aid, and these kids would be sitting around playing a game and one of them would be like, I'm thirsty, and then the Kool-Aid man would just barge through the wall and be like, I got some Kool-Aid. I don't know what he actually said, but that's the implication, is now you will thirst no more. There's a Kool-Aid man here. I think there was a Saturday Night Live sketch about people sitting around being like, I'm thirsty. And the Kool-Aid man like broke through the wall. And there's this big, huge opening that's plenty big enough for the Kool-Aid man, like right next to where he broke through. And the people are like, you could have just, could just use the door, man. Like knock it off with crashing through these walls. But that's how Jesus shows up in Mary's life. Just a Kool-Aid man just crashing through the wall, announcing his presence. I'm here. And listen, it radically changes everything in her life. It radically changes her priorities. It radically changes the purpose. She had plans for her life. Forget them. She had goals for her life. Rethink them, Mary. Those of us who have walked through spiritual deserts, which is everyone who's been a Christian for more than 60 days, Mary couldn't do that. She had to be on her game all the time. She's raising the Savior. There's no wandering around for you. When Jesus showed up, he radically changed her life. He happened to her. And he changed everything. And in the middle of this, in her wrestling with this, we pick the story back up. She's now brought Jesus to term. She's had him in a manger, right? They go to Bethlehem, they go to Jerusalem, they end up in Bethlehem, they have Jesus in a manger which looked, we think of it as a sort of like barn or stable, but it's really probably more like a cave that they were in in the hills of Bethlehem. And when Jesus is born, the angels appear to the shepherds. The shepherds go and they go decide to visit baby Jesus. This is what Kyle preached about last week. And so that's where we pick it up this week when we look at Luke chapter 2, I noticed something that I had never, ever noticed before in the Christmas story. It says the shepherds see the angels, they hear them, they're told that the Messiah has been born. They're like, this is great, let's go meet him. They go to the manger where Mary and Joseph are. And when they get there, they tell everybody what the angel said. And it says, need it explained to them. They're not wondering. And then you got Mary and Joseph. They know. The angels have told them personally. They showed up in their house and said, hey, here's the deal. So those people know, which leads me to the conclusion, and you guys can follow me here or not. This is just me thinking, okay? So you buy it or not. But it leads me to the conclusion that we've got a little bit of a DJ Khaled situation going on here. Now, here's what I mean. I was in Times Square a couple years ago by myself. I dropped Jen off at the hotel, and then I went to Times Square by myself because I love being in Times Square at night. It's one of the most special places on the planet. I think it's so cool. And I'm just taking it all in. And I noticed people start to just kind of flock. There's a ton of people there and people just start to flock to this one street on this one side of Times Square. And they're like three and four people deep. And I'm like, I wonder what's going on over here. So I go over there and I kind of make my way up on a wall and I'm looking down on the road and everybody's looking at this car and waving at this one car. And I asked, there's some random couple next to me. I'm like, what's the deal? What's going on? They go, we don't know. We think that's DJ Khaled. And I'm like, cool. There he is. I saw him. You know, and if you'd have told me 10 minutes ago, hey, just a heads up, buddy. Well, DJ Khaled's about to pass the street right here. You can go get a good seat for it before everybody else knows. I'd have been like, I'm good. I think we'll let somebody else see DJ Khaled. I still don't know what he looks like. He could be here and I wouldn't know it. As a matter of fact, Deej, if you're here, we're always looking for volunteers in the worship team. We're actually hiring, so let's talk, man. I don't know where your life's at. That'd be cool. But the thing that happened was it was just a commotion. There was just a bunch of people. And then there was some people walking this way and then other people started this way. And then it occurred to me, Mary and Joseph are here on holiday. They're here for a census. They're here for Passover. Do you think that they're the only ones that couldn't get a room in the end? You think they showed up so late? The whole country is descending on Jerusalem. You think the whole country got there before Mary and Joseph did? No. There was other people around. There was other people who couldn't stay in Jerusalem and had to stay in Bethlehem. Which, this is beside the point, but Joseph, get it together, man. You got a pregnant wife. You can't make reservations. You know you've got to go. You've known for a year. You've known for 10 years there's a census coming. You can't make a reservation in Jerusalem. The level of not planning from Joseph here baffles me. They're the people who are in group C when you board Southwest. That's Mary and Joseph. It's the only airline I know that before you can get on the plane, you have to line up in order of personal responsibility, right? And then the C's are in the back. But there's a bunch of people around. And there's lights in the sky, And then there's shepherds who just left their flock moving through the city. And it seems to me, all those who gathered, all those who are around, it seems to me that there was a commotion and that they've all moved towards this manger. And they're craning and they're trying to see what's going on. And then the shepherds tell everybody, this is the Messiah the angels just told us. This is what they said. He's going to be King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He is Emmanuel, God with us. And they say that. And the crowds are like, okay. What does that mean? What's that going to look like? And what's cool about that is Mary knew. Mary could have told them. She could have made it so that they didn't have to wonder. And instead, we get this response, which is, I think, my favorite verse in the Christmas story, Luke 2, 19. It says, but Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. That's just a mama's joy right there. That's my baby. And I get to be his mama. And he's the savior. He's the Messiah. He's the one we've all been waiting on. He's the one you grew up longing for. He's the one your soul needs and you don't even know it. And she knew. But for some reason, she didn't tell him. She held that one here. She treasured that in her heart. She said, this moment is between me and you, God. And she pondered, she weighed those things for the rest of her life. And I love that moment. Because in that moment, Mary knows something that nobody else knows. Mary understands something that the rest of the world doesn't understand yet. All those crowds gathered, and what's the with the baby and the shepherds who came over and they were told they don't really fully understand it yet. She's had nine months to ruminate on this. She understands something that the rest of them don't understand. And I'm convinced it's this. Mary knew that Jesus was going to happen to them too. She knew. Just stick around. You'll learn who this is. You'll figure it out. How, Mary? I don't know. I don't know how he's going to tell you. But stick around. And Jesus is going to happen to you too. Whether we're paying attention or whether we're not, she knows. All these people wondering, who's this baby? She knows in her head. You'll know. You'll learn. He's going to happen to you just like he happened to me. And here's the part about this that I love. In this moment, in this moment of confidence that Jesus is going to happen to you too, Mary exists in blissful, confident ignorance. Mary exists in blissful, confident ignorance. And here's what I mean. She knows that Jesus is going to happen. She knows that this little boy is going to grow up and he's going to become the Messiah and he's going to sit on the throne of David. Does she know how that's going to happen? Not a chance. Does Mary know that this little boy is going to grow up and at 30 he's going to recruit 12 disciples and he's going to give them the keys to the kingdom and that he's going to be crucified on a cross and she's going to watch him die and that in three days he's going to resurrect and defeat hell and death for the rest of time and win us for eternity and that one day he's going to watch him die. And then in three days, he's going to resurrect and defeat hell and death for the rest of time and win us for eternity. And that one day he's going to crash down out of the clouds on a white horse and be called faithful and true. And he's going to take us all up to heaven because he came to establish an eternal kingdom and not an earthly kingdom. Does Mary know that? No, no chance. She just knows he's Jesus. And that God sent him and that he's going to take care of things. Does Mary know how Jesus is going to show up in the lives of those gathered around wondering what does all this mean? Does she know how Jesus is going to happen to them? No. Does she know that 33 years later, those same crowds and the children of those crowds might be the same ones gathered around Pilate's governor's mansion when Jesus is about to be crucified, yelling, give us Barabbas and crucify Christ? She doesn't know that. She exists in blissful, confident ignorance. Jesus is going to happen here. How, Mary? I don't know. I don't know, but he is. He's going to show up. When? I don't know. I don't know what to tell you, but he's going to happen. And I love that thought so much because if we'll pay attention, Jesus will happen to us too in big and small ways. If you pay attention, Jesus will happen to you too in big and small ways. See, what we know about Mary is that she was faithful. What we know about Mary is that she listened to God. What we know about Mary is that she knew her Scripture. She was listening. And Jesus happened. And so what I know about us and what Mary knew about us is that if we'll listen, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, Jesus will happen to us too in big and small ways. And I think that's an important delineation in big and small ways. He will happen to us in big ways because when Jesus shows up in our life, make no mistake, he Kool-Aid mans that joker. He shows up and he wrecks shop. He rearranges everything. He totally changes your priorities. He totally changes your heart. You had these goals for your life? No. These are your new goals for your life. You had these plans for yourself? No. I'm going to make these plans for you. You have these priorities? You hold these things precious? Forget them. They're nothing. Hold these things precious. When Jesus explodes into our life, he radically changes our hearts. He radically changes everything. Our lives look completely different once he's bound through the wall. And I think that part of our problem sometimes is that we're the Saturday night live actors going, hey, Jesus, do you think maybe you could just use the door? Do you come in like a, is there like a small Jesus? This one's making a lot of demands, pal. I think that sometimes because we hold on so tightly, we don't let Jesus happen to us the way that he could and the way that he wants to. Mary simply said, when she found out that she was going to have Jesus, she said, I'm your servant. Do whatever you're going to do. And I think some of us, and when I say us, I mean us, tend to think like, Jesus, I'm pretty squared away. But I'd love for you to have some say in these areas. That's not the deal that Jesus makes. He explodes into our life and he radically changes everything. And he doesn't ask us for permission before he does it. And Mary knows that Jesus is going to happen to us. Jesus also happens in small ways. Continually through our life when we need him most. In moments when we desperately need him to happen. I remember being in Honduras years ago. When I was a teacher, I took a class of seniors to Siguarapeque, Honduras. And one of the things that we did there was hand out bags of rice to some of the folks in the village. That's not a critical term. It was literally a village in the hillsides of Saguarapeque. And there was one girl that we took with us named Allison. And Allison was this really sharp, bright girl who I really liked a lot. And she told me one of the nights that we were there that she was really struggling with her faith. I'm just not sure if I believe it. I have so many questions and I kind of don't know what to do. And we talked about it for a little bit and I just let it be. And then the day that we were handing out rice, it's predominantly older and younger women who are in the line for the rice. And we've got like this chain. I'm in the back of a truck and I'm picking up boxes. I'm handing the boxes to somebody and they're picking up bags and they're handing bags and they're handing bags and then they're handing them to the people. And it just so happened that Allison was at the end of the conveyor belt and she was the one actually handing the rice to the women. And I was paying attention to her that day and I saw her face light up in a way that I had never seen before. And I saw the joy of connection that she was having with the women to whom she was handing the rice. And it was this spiritual moment. And so I pulled her aside after dinner that night and I said, hey, listen, I know that you're having questions about your faith, but I watched you come alive when you were helping those women today. I watched a joy in your eyes. And she started to cry. She knew I was right. And I said, I just want you to know that that was Jesus. Scripture tells us that whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me. And you were serving Jesus today. And he showed up for you. So you might not always have all the answers that you want for your faith, but you can cling to Jesus. And today you found him. And it resonated with her. She's a nurse in Denver, specifically at a hospital in a low-income area so that she can continue to serve the least of these. She's dedicated her life to that service because Jesus showed up for her that day. And this Christmas season, some of you, you need Jesus to show up. You need Jesus to happen to you. Some of us in big ways. Some of us, we need to quit asking Jesus to simply walk to the door we provided and let him come in and wreck shop. Some of us, we need Jesus to happen in small ways. Some of us are like Allison, we're struggling with our faith. We don't know what to do. We don't have all the answers. And if maybe Jesus could just show up here, if Jesus could just happen here, that would be what we needed to see a clear path forward. Others of us, we have things going on in our families. We're facing a difficult Christmas or we're facing a tight Christmas or we're facing a stressful Christmas or it's just a hard season of life and we need Jesus to show up. I can remember a month or two ago, I was in a place where I was just feeling really discouraged. And I prayed one morning. I was like, God, listen, man, if you're handing out, I didn't say listen, man. I don't say that to God. I try not to anyway. Sometimes I do. God, I'm sorry. But God, if you're handing out encouragement, I'll take some. I could use it. I need Jesus to happen here. That was a Sunday morning. I won't go into the details. But for the next three days, encouragement after encouragement after encouragement that I didn't expect. And Jesus happened to me that week. And some of you need Jesus to happen to you too. And whatever situations you're in, and whatever stresses you're carrying and burdens you're bearing, you need Jesus to happen. And so my prayer for you this week, that in this place, in grace, this month, and this season, that Jesus would happen here as we move through Christmas season together. And my prayer for you is that Jesus would happen to you. And for some of you, my prayer is that he would happen in really big, life-changing, earth-shattering, priority-changing ways that you didn't anticipate that scare the heck out of you. But I hope that Jesus shows up big time in your life. And still for others, I'm praying that Jesus will happen to you in that small way that you need him so desperately to happen. But let's make our prayer at Grace this season that Jesus will happen here and Jesus will happen in our lives. Join me in that prayer. Father, you're good to us. Thank you for your son. Thank you for Christmas. Thank you for how it focuses us on you and your goodness and on your son. Jesus, we invite you into this place. We pray that you would happen here. We pray that you would have your way here. Give us the faith and the courage to not stand in your way. Give us the wisdom to know that your ways are better than our ways. Give us the courage to overcome any fear we might have about handing things over to you. But let us, God, pray courageous prayers and invite you into our life in a big way. And Father, for those of us who need Jesus in the little ways, for those of us who are struggling, who are hurting, who are stressed or anxious, God, I pray that Jesus would happen in those spaces too. Even this week, God, even today, would Jesus happen to us. It's in his name we ask these things. Amen.
Thank you. Hear the word of God from the Gospel of Luke. she was greatly troubled at the saying and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. Thank you, Bill. Good morning, everybody. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Before I just dive into the sermon, I had a couple preliminary thoughts I just wanted to share with you real quick. If you've been a part of Grace for any number of years, you know that we tend to, at the end of the year, give not necessarily more generously, but we tend to give generously at the end of the year. Our year-end giving is usually pretty good. And so one of the things that we've done since I got here is we do a Christmas offering and we say, hey, as end of the year giving comes in this year, we're going to allocate that to these projects and to these ministries and things like that. Well, this year is a little different in that we are pushing to the end of our building campaign that we launched back in, I guess, February of 2020. We had pledged Sunday on March the 1st of 2020. I announced the pledges on March the 8th of 2020, and then the world ended. And that whole time, we've actually been running concurrent to the pandemic. We've been doing a campaign, and you guys have been so faithful, and God has been so good that we are actually in a really good spot. Now, I sent out details about that this week. So if you didn't get an update email from me on the search for the worship pastor and our search for a building and how the campaign is going. If you didn't get that this week, please let me know. All that means is you're not on the list that you need to be on. If you're watching at home or catch this later, fill out a connection card online and let us know. Fill out a connection card here in the service and we'll make sure and get you on the right list so that you can get those updates. So as we look towards the end of the year, basically what we're asking with end of the year giving is this, either designate it for general offering or designate it for the building campaign. If money comes in undesignated, we will by default put that towards the general offering. And then in the new year, depending on what comes in, the missions committee will make decisions about how we want to allocate those to other ministries that we support. Just as a reminder, we give 10% of what we bring in to missions. And this year it's actually been a little bit bigger. This year we've actually given about 12% to ministries going on outside the walls of the church. And that's something that we're really proud of and hold close to our hearts. The other thing I was going to share with you, I have to be careful how I do this, is last week, you know, Kyle preached. Kyle preached so good that about 15 minutes in, at first I was like, dude, this is great. He's crushing it. Good for Kyle. I love this. And then about 15 minutes in, I was like, yo, Kyle, like, chill out, man Like I have to preach next week. I don't have, I don't have that much on Mary right now. So just, let's just take it easy. He did so good. And the whole experience was fantastic. I texted Kirk and Kyle on Saturday and said, hey, you know, I don't have any responsibilities in the service. So I'm actually going to come to the service with my family. I'll get there about 930 9.45. And so last week I had the opportunity to just wake up, help Jen get the kids ready, come to church together, drop our kids off with some folks who really wanted to hug on John and squeeze his big fat baby cheeks. And then Lily went next door with her friends, some folks that care about her. And then I got to talk to my friends and we sat in the back, which I love sitting in the back. I'm jealous of you guys. Yeah, that's it, Scotty. Like, I love sitting back there, and we sang songs. We snuggled up a little bit during the sermon. I sat next to my wife. I was ministered to by the sermon, ministered to by the songs, particularly that last one. And I left here with my heart just full of Jesus. And I thought to myself, that was great. That church is so fun. You guys who just get to show up and don't have to do anything and be ministered to, you don't know how good you got it, man. So just for the record, I'm very envious of you guys. I almost, I considered this week quitting my job just so I could come to church with my family, but I have no marketable skills. So I'm here until the Lord chooses otherwise. Okay. This week, yes, thank you. Thank you, Elaine. For those watching online, there was thunderous applause. This week, we are in part two of our series called Renewed Wonder, where we simply are focusing on looking at Christmas through the eyes of a child. That's why we're doing lighthearted things. That's why we had Christmas Kyle come and do the announcements. But truth be told, we would make Kyle do that no matter how lighthearted the series was. We're decorating cookies after the service. I hope you'll do that. That's for children and adults, too. I'm particularly excited about next week, Christmas Jammy Sunday. Can't wait to see what you show up in. This is going to be very, very fun and very, very festive. Yes, Mike, even you, buddy. This is going to be great. So I'm really looking forward to that as we kind of just look at Christmas through the eyes of a child and just the wonder and the grandeur that comes with Christmas. And so that's what we're doing in the series. And then the sermons, we're looking at the Christmas story through the eyes of different characters within the story. So last week, like I said, Kyle did a great job of looking at Christmas to the eyes of the shepherds. And this week, we want to look at Christmas to the eyes of Mary. What must it have been like for Mary to experience that first Christmas? And what can we learn from her experience? And what about her experience can shape the way that we approach Christmas this year? So as we think about Christmas through the eyes of Mary, it would probably be good to get some context on her, to understand who Mary was and what kind of person that she was. And we really, we don't know a lot. We know that she was from Nazareth. So that makes her pretty simple. Nazareth was a very small town. There's very little archaeological evidence that Nazareth even ever existed. It's just very, very small. It doesn't mean it didn't exist. It just means it's so small that there's not very much there. It's in the north of Israel. It's in the hill country. Like when Jesus is introduced, one time we hear somebody say, can anything good come from Nazareth? It was like the Mississippi of Israel. Just nothing good came from there. So, sorry, that's a Georgia joke. I don't know what the North Carolina, is it West Virginia? Is that who we make fun of in North Carolina? I always make fun of Mississippi. Tennessee, yeah, that's good. We'll go Tennessee. Thank you very much. She was a simple girl from Nazareth. She was probably, culturally, because she was engaged, she was probably 13 to 15 years old. I know that sounds weird for us, but in that culture, typically men had to grow up and establish themselves and have a career and be able to pay a dowry and be able to prove that they could support a wife. So it's reasonable to think that Joseph was probably closer to 30 and that Mary was probably closer to 15 or so, which sounds super weird to us, but then that was how it goes. So she's betrothed to Joseph. To them, engagement was tantamount to marriage. You're essentially married already. You're just waiting for the ceremony, and then you go move in with the groom and his family. So she's getting ready for that. We know that Mary was a young girl of faith. She knew her scriptures. She prayed to God. She clearly listened to the Lord. And that's important because it tells us that when the angel shows up in the passage that Bill read to us and starts to talk about this Messiah figure that's going to come, she knows who that is. She's been told about the Messiah her whole life. Just like we're waiting on the second coming of Christ that we talked about in Revelation for him to come down out of the clouds and rescue us. So she was waiting on the first coming of the Messiah. So when the angel begins to talk about the Messiah, she knows who that is. She was a young girl of faith. And that's important. But she was a simple girl with a simple faith and a very simple life, and I doubt seriously that she had any visions of anything larger than that. And it's to this girl that the angel appears. And I'm going to finish up the passage that Bill began to read because these are the details that he gives Mary about what is you're going to have the Messiah. You're pregnant. God did it. You're all right. And you're going to carry this baby to term and you're going to have the Messiah and he's going to be called Jesus and he's going to be the Lord. He's going to be the most high. He's going to sit on the throne of David. And when we think about Mary and we think about her role in Jesus's life, we only get snippets of her in scripture. And I wonder how in depth we go in our thought process about her, right? Because I always think of her as just, look how lucky she is. Look how fortunate she is. She was favored, we're told. And I saw one author this week as I was kind of reading up on Mary, who just made the point that Mary was favored then so that we could be favored with the son now. And I think that's a pretty great thought. But Mary, God just plucked her out of obscurity and said, yeah, you're the girl. She wasn't expecting it. She wasn't asking for it. At no point do we have any record of Mary praying a prayer and saying, God, you know, I know you're going to bring a Messiah. I don't know how you plan to get him into the world. But if it's through a teenage virgin, I'll sign up for that. So if that's your plan, God, just consider me. She didn't expect that. And I wonder how much we've thought of how much it radically changed her life and the trajectory of her life to be told that she was going to give birth to the Son of God. The angel didn't tell Joseph until after Joseph and Mary had the conversation. So now Mary knows, I've got to have this super tough conversation with my fiance that I'm pregnant and it's not him. And he's got to believe me that it was God. That's a tough conversation. She's got to carry this baby to term. She's got to raise this baby. You ever think when one and a half year old Jesus is sitting at the table in his high chair and he reaches for the butter knife and he's not supposed to touch the butter knife and he's not understanding. No. And Mary wants to slap his hand. She's got to stop and be like, is this okay? Can I hit the Savior? Is that a thing? I don't know what to do. Is that too hard? Oh gosh, I'm so sorry. Can you imagine losing your patience with infant baby Jesus, with Messiah Jesus? When my kid won't sleep, I will walk into his room and sometimes the passage does not get put into his mouth as gently as possibly. Sometimes it's possible that I mutter things in the middle of the night and give him unkind instructions. What if you're married? What if that's Jesus and you lose your patience with baby Jesus? Like it's just a totally different way to think about motherhood. How about when they're on a play date and one of the other moms leans over and she's like, I tell you what, you're Jesus. He is just so well behaved. He's like a little angel. And Mary's like, well, actually, he's in charge of the angels. And then all the other moms are like, that Mary, she's got rose-colored glasses on about her kid. She does not see him realistically. She thinks way too highly of him. Joseph disappears from the gospel narrative. Because culturally he was likely older than Mary, and because this is a time in which the life expectancy is not very high, we presume, a lot of scholars presume, that Joseph died. That somewhere in there that Jesus lost his father. So Joseph experienced the loss of his earthly father and then we have James, the half-brother of Jesus, who writes a book in the Bible and gives us evidence that at some point or another, Mary remarried. So Jesus was a stepson. So for the stepchildren in the room, I think that's pretty cool. Jesus knew what a blended family was and felt like. Can you imagine being Mary and trying to be a mother of Jesus and a mother of these other kids and love them equally and fairly and feeling that weight of importance your whole life? Like I think that we think, oh, what a blessing that Mary received to be able to have the son of God. But part of me thinks like, but was it all the time? Because it was, had to be pretty stressful. Had to be pretty difficult at times. And in this way, the one thing that I've been thinking this week, the one phrase that's kind of rung through my mind is, how did Mary experience Christmas was this idea that Jesus happened to Mary. He just happened to her. She wasn't looking for him. She didn't pray for him. She didn't expect it. She didn't know. There wasn't a prophecy that this is how Jesus is going to come. She just, she didn't know. And all of a sudden, this angel shows up and says, you're going to be pregnant. You're going to have Jesus. And it's going to radically change your whole life. And I think of Jesus happening to Mary, like the Kool-Aid man just bursting through the wall, right? Like, I don't know if you're old enough to remember in the 80s and 90s, Kool-Aid had this great ad campaign with the Kool-Aid man, this oversized pitcher filled with red Kool-Aid, and these kids would be sitting around playing a game and one of them would be like, I'm thirsty, and then the Kool-Aid man would just barge through the wall and be like, I got some Kool-Aid. I don't know what he actually said, but that's the implication, is now you will thirst no more. There's a Kool-Aid man here. I think there was a Saturday Night Live sketch about people sitting around being like, I'm thirsty. And the Kool-Aid man like broke through the wall. And there's this big, huge opening that's plenty big enough for the Kool-Aid man, like right next to where he broke through. And the people are like, you could have just, could just use the door, man. Like knock it off with crashing through these walls. But that's how Jesus shows up in Mary's life. Just a Kool-Aid man just crashing through the wall, announcing his presence. I'm here. And listen, it radically changes everything in her life. It radically changes her priorities. It radically changes the purpose. She had plans for her life. Forget them. She had goals for her life. Rethink them, Mary. Those of us who have walked through spiritual deserts, which is everyone who's been a Christian for more than 60 days, Mary couldn't do that. She had to be on her game all the time. She's raising the Savior. There's no wandering around for you. When Jesus showed up, he radically changed her life. He happened to her. And he changed everything. And in the middle of this, in her wrestling with this, we pick the story back up. She's now brought Jesus to term. She's had him in a manger, right? They go to Bethlehem, they go to Jerusalem, they end up in Bethlehem, they have Jesus in a manger which looked, we think of it as a sort of like barn or stable, but it's really probably more like a cave that they were in in the hills of Bethlehem. And when Jesus is born, the angels appear to the shepherds. The shepherds go and they go decide to visit baby Jesus. This is what Kyle preached about last week. And so that's where we pick it up this week when we look at Luke chapter 2, I noticed something that I had never, ever noticed before in the Christmas story. It says the shepherds see the angels, they hear them, they're told that the Messiah has been born. They're like, this is great, let's go meet him. They go to the manger where Mary and Joseph are. And when they get there, they tell everybody what the angel said. And it says, need it explained to them. They're not wondering. And then you got Mary and Joseph. They know. The angels have told them personally. They showed up in their house and said, hey, here's the deal. So those people know, which leads me to the conclusion, and you guys can follow me here or not. This is just me thinking, okay? So you buy it or not. But it leads me to the conclusion that we've got a little bit of a DJ Khaled situation going on here. Now, here's what I mean. I was in Times Square a couple years ago by myself. I dropped Jen off at the hotel, and then I went to Times Square by myself because I love being in Times Square at night. It's one of the most special places on the planet. I think it's so cool. And I'm just taking it all in. And I noticed people start to just kind of flock. There's a ton of people there and people just start to flock to this one street on this one side of Times Square. And they're like three and four people deep. And I'm like, I wonder what's going on over here. So I go over there and I kind of make my way up on a wall and I'm looking down on the road and everybody's looking at this car and waving at this one car. And I asked, there's some random couple next to me. I'm like, what's the deal? What's going on? They go, we don't know. We think that's DJ Khaled. And I'm like, cool. There he is. I saw him. You know, and if you'd have told me 10 minutes ago, hey, just a heads up, buddy. Well, DJ Khaled's about to pass the street right here. You can go get a good seat for it before everybody else knows. I'd have been like, I'm good. I think we'll let somebody else see DJ Khaled. I still don't know what he looks like. He could be here and I wouldn't know it. As a matter of fact, Deej, if you're here, we're always looking for volunteers in the worship team. We're actually hiring, so let's talk, man. I don't know where your life's at. That'd be cool. But the thing that happened was it was just a commotion. There was just a bunch of people. And then there was some people walking this way and then other people started this way. And then it occurred to me, Mary and Joseph are here on holiday. They're here for a census. They're here for Passover. Do you think that they're the only ones that couldn't get a room in the end? You think they showed up so late? The whole country is descending on Jerusalem. You think the whole country got there before Mary and Joseph did? No. There was other people around. There was other people who couldn't stay in Jerusalem and had to stay in Bethlehem. Which, this is beside the point, but Joseph, get it together, man. You got a pregnant wife. You can't make reservations. You know you've got to go. You've known for a year. You've known for 10 years there's a census coming. You can't make a reservation in Jerusalem. The level of not planning from Joseph here baffles me. They're the people who are in group C when you board Southwest. That's Mary and Joseph. It's the only airline I know that before you can get on the plane, you have to line up in order of personal responsibility, right? And then the C's are in the back. But there's a bunch of people around. And there's lights in the sky, And then there's shepherds who just left their flock moving through the city. And it seems to me, all those who gathered, all those who are around, it seems to me that there was a commotion and that they've all moved towards this manger. And they're craning and they're trying to see what's going on. And then the shepherds tell everybody, this is the Messiah the angels just told us. This is what they said. He's going to be King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He is Emmanuel, God with us. And they say that. And the crowds are like, okay. What does that mean? What's that going to look like? And what's cool about that is Mary knew. Mary could have told them. She could have made it so that they didn't have to wonder. And instead, we get this response, which is, I think, my favorite verse in the Christmas story, Luke 2, 19. It says, but Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. That's just a mama's joy right there. That's my baby. And I get to be his mama. And he's the savior. He's the Messiah. He's the one we've all been waiting on. He's the one you grew up longing for. He's the one your soul needs and you don't even know it. And she knew. But for some reason, she didn't tell him. She held that one here. She treasured that in her heart. She said, this moment is between me and you, God. And she pondered, she weighed those things for the rest of her life. And I love that moment. Because in that moment, Mary knows something that nobody else knows. Mary understands something that the rest of the world doesn't understand yet. All those crowds gathered, and what's the with the baby and the shepherds who came over and they were told they don't really fully understand it yet. She's had nine months to ruminate on this. She understands something that the rest of them don't understand. And I'm convinced it's this. Mary knew that Jesus was going to happen to them too. She knew. Just stick around. You'll learn who this is. You'll figure it out. How, Mary? I don't know. I don't know how he's going to tell you. But stick around. And Jesus is going to happen to you too. Whether we're paying attention or whether we're not, she knows. All these people wondering, who's this baby? She knows in her head. You'll know. You'll learn. He's going to happen to you just like he happened to me. And here's the part about this that I love. In this moment, in this moment of confidence that Jesus is going to happen to you too, Mary exists in blissful, confident ignorance. Mary exists in blissful, confident ignorance. And here's what I mean. She knows that Jesus is going to happen. She knows that this little boy is going to grow up and he's going to become the Messiah and he's going to sit on the throne of David. Does she know how that's going to happen? Not a chance. Does Mary know that this little boy is going to grow up and at 30 he's going to recruit 12 disciples and he's going to give them the keys to the kingdom and that he's going to be crucified on a cross and she's going to watch him die and that in three days he's going to resurrect and defeat hell and death for the rest of time and win us for eternity and that one day he's going to watch him die. And then in three days, he's going to resurrect and defeat hell and death for the rest of time and win us for eternity. And that one day he's going to crash down out of the clouds on a white horse and be called faithful and true. And he's going to take us all up to heaven because he came to establish an eternal kingdom and not an earthly kingdom. Does Mary know that? No, no chance. She just knows he's Jesus. And that God sent him and that he's going to take care of things. Does Mary know how Jesus is going to show up in the lives of those gathered around wondering what does all this mean? Does she know how Jesus is going to happen to them? No. Does she know that 33 years later, those same crowds and the children of those crowds might be the same ones gathered around Pilate's governor's mansion when Jesus is about to be crucified, yelling, give us Barabbas and crucify Christ? She doesn't know that. She exists in blissful, confident ignorance. Jesus is going to happen here. How, Mary? I don't know. I don't know, but he is. He's going to show up. When? I don't know. I don't know what to tell you, but he's going to happen. And I love that thought so much because if we'll pay attention, Jesus will happen to us too in big and small ways. If you pay attention, Jesus will happen to you too in big and small ways. See, what we know about Mary is that she was faithful. What we know about Mary is that she listened to God. What we know about Mary is that she knew her Scripture. She was listening. And Jesus happened. And so what I know about us and what Mary knew about us is that if we'll listen, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, Jesus will happen to us too in big and small ways. And I think that's an important delineation in big and small ways. He will happen to us in big ways because when Jesus shows up in our life, make no mistake, he Kool-Aid mans that joker. He shows up and he wrecks shop. He rearranges everything. He totally changes your priorities. He totally changes your heart. You had these goals for your life? No. These are your new goals for your life. You had these plans for yourself? No. I'm going to make these plans for you. You have these priorities? You hold these things precious? Forget them. They're nothing. Hold these things precious. When Jesus explodes into our life, he radically changes our hearts. He radically changes everything. Our lives look completely different once he's bound through the wall. And I think that part of our problem sometimes is that we're the Saturday night live actors going, hey, Jesus, do you think maybe you could just use the door? Do you come in like a, is there like a small Jesus? This one's making a lot of demands, pal. I think that sometimes because we hold on so tightly, we don't let Jesus happen to us the way that he could and the way that he wants to. Mary simply said, when she found out that she was going to have Jesus, she said, I'm your servant. Do whatever you're going to do. And I think some of us, and when I say us, I mean us, tend to think like, Jesus, I'm pretty squared away. But I'd love for you to have some say in these areas. That's not the deal that Jesus makes. He explodes into our life and he radically changes everything. And he doesn't ask us for permission before he does it. And Mary knows that Jesus is going to happen to us. Jesus also happens in small ways. Continually through our life when we need him most. In moments when we desperately need him to happen. I remember being in Honduras years ago. When I was a teacher, I took a class of seniors to Siguarapeque, Honduras. And one of the things that we did there was hand out bags of rice to some of the folks in the village. That's not a critical term. It was literally a village in the hillsides of Saguarapeque. And there was one girl that we took with us named Allison. And Allison was this really sharp, bright girl who I really liked a lot. And she told me one of the nights that we were there that she was really struggling with her faith. I'm just not sure if I believe it. I have so many questions and I kind of don't know what to do. And we talked about it for a little bit and I just let it be. And then the day that we were handing out rice, it's predominantly older and younger women who are in the line for the rice. And we've got like this chain. I'm in the back of a truck and I'm picking up boxes. I'm handing the boxes to somebody and they're picking up bags and they're handing bags and they're handing bags and then they're handing them to the people. And it just so happened that Allison was at the end of the conveyor belt and she was the one actually handing the rice to the women. And I was paying attention to her that day and I saw her face light up in a way that I had never seen before. And I saw the joy of connection that she was having with the women to whom she was handing the rice. And it was this spiritual moment. And so I pulled her aside after dinner that night and I said, hey, listen, I know that you're having questions about your faith, but I watched you come alive when you were helping those women today. I watched a joy in your eyes. And she started to cry. She knew I was right. And I said, I just want you to know that that was Jesus. Scripture tells us that whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me. And you were serving Jesus today. And he showed up for you. So you might not always have all the answers that you want for your faith, but you can cling to Jesus. And today you found him. And it resonated with her. She's a nurse in Denver, specifically at a hospital in a low-income area so that she can continue to serve the least of these. She's dedicated her life to that service because Jesus showed up for her that day. And this Christmas season, some of you, you need Jesus to show up. You need Jesus to happen to you. Some of us in big ways. Some of us, we need to quit asking Jesus to simply walk to the door we provided and let him come in and wreck shop. Some of us, we need Jesus to happen in small ways. Some of us are like Allison, we're struggling with our faith. We don't know what to do. We don't have all the answers. And if maybe Jesus could just show up here, if Jesus could just happen here, that would be what we needed to see a clear path forward. Others of us, we have things going on in our families. We're facing a difficult Christmas or we're facing a tight Christmas or we're facing a stressful Christmas or it's just a hard season of life and we need Jesus to show up. I can remember a month or two ago, I was in a place where I was just feeling really discouraged. And I prayed one morning. I was like, God, listen, man, if you're handing out, I didn't say listen, man. I don't say that to God. I try not to anyway. Sometimes I do. God, I'm sorry. But God, if you're handing out encouragement, I'll take some. I could use it. I need Jesus to happen here. That was a Sunday morning. I won't go into the details. But for the next three days, encouragement after encouragement after encouragement that I didn't expect. And Jesus happened to me that week. And some of you need Jesus to happen to you too. And whatever situations you're in, and whatever stresses you're carrying and burdens you're bearing, you need Jesus to happen. And so my prayer for you this week, that in this place, in grace, this month, and this season, that Jesus would happen here as we move through Christmas season together. And my prayer for you is that Jesus would happen to you. And for some of you, my prayer is that he would happen in really big, life-changing, earth-shattering, priority-changing ways that you didn't anticipate that scare the heck out of you. But I hope that Jesus shows up big time in your life. And still for others, I'm praying that Jesus will happen to you in that small way that you need him so desperately to happen. But let's make our prayer at Grace this season that Jesus will happen here and Jesus will happen in our lives. Join me in that prayer. Father, you're good to us. Thank you for your son. Thank you for Christmas. Thank you for how it focuses us on you and your goodness and on your son. Jesus, we invite you into this place. We pray that you would happen here. We pray that you would have your way here. Give us the faith and the courage to not stand in your way. Give us the wisdom to know that your ways are better than our ways. Give us the courage to overcome any fear we might have about handing things over to you. But let us, God, pray courageous prayers and invite you into our life in a big way. And Father, for those of us who need Jesus in the little ways, for those of us who are struggling, who are hurting, who are stressed or anxious, God, I pray that Jesus would happen in those spaces too. Even this week, God, even today, would Jesus happen to us. It's in his name we ask these things. Amen.
The All right. Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. Thank you for watching online or for catching up later in the week. If you're listening to my voice later in the week and you're planning to just listen to this one in your car, this one is visual. So you might want to wait until you can watch it at home. But we're going to do the best we can to work through this whiteboard today. So I will say this up front. If you are inherently interested in the tribulation and better understanding the events of the tribulation in a concise way, then I think that you're really going to enjoy this morning. If you are not inherently interested in the events of the tribulation, this is going to be terrible. I'm just going to be upfront with you. I've accepted that. My role this morning is to inform more than it is to preach. I don't have a big spiritual point coming at the end of this. So this is not necessarily a sermon proper. This is going to feel more like class. And for a lot of us, that's okay. For some of us, it's not. For you, I'm sorry. Kyle's suggestion to you, who's on a retreat with the students, by the way, is that there's a subtle design on the back of the notes. Take a pen and just kind of trace over that design and start to color things in. That should pass the time nicely for you. Speaking of the notes, even if you're not a notes person, this is a good week to find them and grab them and take a look at them because what we have on the notes is an exact replica of what's up here. And so as I write and fill things in and add to it, you can too. If you're watching online, our great camera person, Drew Turner, is going to do the best he can to pick up what I'm putting down up here. But I also have an electronic version of this available if you want that. You can email it to me. You can email me and I'll just send you this kind of typed out. The reason we're doing it this way is to help you understand the events of the tribulation. We're spending three weeks on the tribulation because it takes up a huge portion of the book of Revelation. We see the tribulation in chapters 6 through 17 of the book of Revelation. You could argue about 18, 19 if they're part of it, not part of it, whatever. But really, the bulk of it is 6 through 17. So it's 11 chapters in the book of Revelation of God pouring out his earned wrath as he returns to reclaim what he rightfully owns. And that's what we talked about last week. Last week, we invested a whole week in explaining this wrath, how it's earned, and how really and truly when we begin to reflect on it, we want a just God who is capable of wrath. That's the God that should be sitting on the throne. And one of the things that we pointed out last week that I'll reiterate a couple of times this morning is that God's wrath is only poured out on those who don't believe God is pouring out his wrath. If you don't want to experience God's wrath, all you have to do is say, God, please don't make me experience this. And then he won't. Okay? So I don't mean to be too flippant with that, but as we move through this, because some of this stuff is pretty awful, let's just keep in mind that God's wrath is only poured out, I believe, on people who obstinately refuse to accept him as God and to admit that he is Lord of the universe and that he is the one actually pouring out this wrath. So as we approach the events of the tribulation, next week we're going to talk about the figures of the tribulation, the antichrist, the beast, the 144,000, the mark of the beast, the unholy Trinity, all that stuff that comes out of revelation that we kind of asked now, who is that? Now, what does that represent? That's next week. This week is simply the events of the tribulation. And I got, I got an email this week that was not necessarily the impetus to the sermon because I knew what this was going to do, but it was certainly telling me that I was headed in the right direction. Somebody emailed me and she said, you know, I've been reading through Revelation and I'm trying to understand it all. There's just a lot going on. There's seals and there's woes and there's trumpets and there's bowls and there's dragons and there's beasts and there's figures and there's angels. There's just a lot going on and I kind of lose track of it. Is there some sort of simple guide to help me understand how I can move through Revelation and understand the tribulation process? And I basically said, come Sunday. I'm gonna preach on that. But years ago, when I had to preach to this the first time, I dove into the research and thought, let me see what's out there to just kind of help me get a bird's eye view of what's happening in the book of Revelation. And as I dove into that research, what I realized is there's nothing out there to help. There's no resource that just says, hey, here's what happens in the tribulation. It's really, really difficult to try to piece it all out of the book and understand it in a succinct way. And listen, I spent four years in undergraduate school. Well, I spent six years in undergraduate school, but I got a four-year degree in pastoral ministries. I've studied theology. I got a master's degree in theology. And still with that training, it was difficult for me to approach scripture and understand what was happening. There was no aids out there to help me out. And so for people who have not had the opportunity to study that much theology and be trained in that way, it's got to be that much more challenging. So I thought that the most helpful thing I could do as a pastor is to kind of spell out the events of the tribulation for us and help us piece them together. So like I said, if that interests you, then you're going to like this. If it doesn't, I'm really sorry. I hope your team wins this afternoon. But let's get started. So the tribulation is broken down into these kind of three categories of items. First, the seals, then the trumpets, and then the bowls. The seals we find in Revelation chapter six. The last one we see in Revelation chapter eight, if you're following along. The trumpets we see in eight through 11, and then the bowls we see in 16. And that kind of lends itself to why it's a little bit difficult to piece all this together. Because you're reading through and the seals are coming one right after another in chapter six. You're like, all right, cool. I'm following along. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. And then after the earthquake at the end of chapter six, there's chapter seven and all this other stuff happens in chapter seven. And you're like, wait, when is this happening? Is that the last seal? No, the last seal is in chapter eight. And you read that. And then that ushers in the trumpets. And then you're reading through the trumpets and they're coming in quick succession. And then all of a sudden you get to chapter nine. And then in chapter 10, there's this vision of a dragon and a space lady and her baby. And you're going, how in the world is this following all of this? And then just randomly in chapter 11, it's like, oh yeah, the last trumpet is the temple of God. And then there's all this interlude of material from chapter 11 through chapter 15 until you get to the bowls that were opened in chapter 11, where it's other visions and things that you're seeing. So if you're just reading Revelation linearly, it's kind of difficult to pick up the events and the narrative of the tribulation. So I've isolated it for us this morning so that we can go through it together. So let's go through it, and I'm going to do the best I can to kind of address the questions I think you would have if we could be doing this one-on-one. And boy, wouldn't it be fun to do this one-on-one for an hour and a half? Yeah, I know you'd love it. All right. So the first thing we see when the seals begin to be opened, remember Jesus has stepped forward in chapters four and five, and he begins to open up the seals. He begins the process of the great tribulation, which we understand is a seven-year process. The first thing that happens is one of the cherubim, one of the angels with the four faces yells, come forth. And the first thing that comes forth is a white horse. And it says that the rider of the white horse comes conquering and to conquer. And a lot of folks think that that might be the Antichrist. A lot of folks think this rider on the white horse might be the Antichrist coming down at the beginning of the tribulation. We're going to talk more about the Antichrist and what his role is next week. But his role is basically to deceive people and make him think he's the actual Jesus and follow him away from heaven instead of towards heaven. So his role is to be a deceiver. He is a tool of Satan to pull people away from God. And so a lot of people believe that this is the Antichrist because when Jesus comes all the way over here in chapter 19, he comes on a white horse to conquer. And so a lot of scholars think that the Antichrist is imitating the Christ that's going to come later in the book of Revelation. Here's the problem. There's no textual evidence to suggest that this is the Antichrist. All right? So we just kind of think maybe. There's plenty of people out there who will write a whole book about how this is definitely the Antichrist and what it means and treat the whole rest of the tribulation as if the Antichrist is present beginning at the very beginning. But we don't know that for sure. So there's a question mark. All right? That's an important question mark. Maybe the Antichrist. Then the red horse comes. The red horse is war. The black horse is famine. And then a pale horse comes. What's the difference between a pale horse and a white horse? I don't know. Maybe it's khaki. I'm not very sure. Maybe it looks like He-Man's horse. I really have no idea. But the pale horse comes, and his rider, this is kind of cool, is death, and Hades is following with him, which sounds pretty ominous, all right? So the pale horse comes, and he brings pestilence and plague. These four horses here, you've probably heard this before. This is the most awkward thing I have to write sideways like this, are the four horsemen of the apocalypse. So if you've ever heard that phrase, this is where it comes from. Revelation chapter six. Those are the four horsemen of the apocalypse. So we'll notice that the angels are the ones that send them. So do these horses come from heaven? Possibly. Do they come from hell? Possibly. But God's angels are the ones that release them. And when they're released, the white horse comes to conquer as a precursor to the rest of them. Then the red horse comes and wars increase. And then the black horse comes and famine increases. And then the pale horse comes and pestilence and plague follows those things. And they happen, it seems, in pretty quick succession. Then we get to the fifth seal, which I talked about last week. The fifth seal is interesting in that it is not a wrathful seal. The fifth seal is the voice of the martyrs. When Jesus opens it, the voices of those below the throne of God who have been killed for his name cry out to God, when are you going to avenge our deaths? And last week we talked about how as believers in creation, we cry out with the martyrs, yeah, God, when are you going to make things right? What's interesting is that the voice of the martyrs is not wrathful. This is not God pouring out his wrath or his vengeance, which makes us think, and we're going to come back to this point. Oh, we're just getting started, man. This is getting hot and heavy, makes the point that this is probably pre-wrath, that the wrath of God hasn't really begun with the horses yet, that they're precursors to the coming wrath. And I'll tell you why we think this in a second. After this, the sixth seal ushers in an earthquake. And the description of this earthquake is incredibly ominous. And it serves as kind of a great equalizer. It's so ominous that I thought it would be worth it for us to take a second and read it together. So I'm going to read the description of the earthquake. And you guys follow along on the screen here or at home as I read, beginning in verse 12. The sky vanished like a scroll that is being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and generals and the rich and the powerful and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come. Who can stand? So this great earthquake comes after the four horsemen of the apocalypse and the voice of the martyrs cry out, then God answers them with a great earthquake. And earthquakes are significant in Revelation because we'll see that there's one at the end of every cycle. So the earthquake comes and it says the mountains and the islands are moved out of place. And I call it the great equalizer because kings and generals and rich and poor and slave and free are all hiding in the rocks together now. And now they are c. Then the seventh seal is opened. And when the seventh seal is opened, one of the most profound things, not in history, but in eternity happens. And if we just read Revelation, and we just read these verses without pausing to reflect on the significance of them, we can miss what's going on here. So I wanted us to read them together and then try to wrap our heads around how significant it is what's going on in heaven at the seventh seal. So in chapter 8, verses 1 through 5, this is what happens. When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. Then I saw the seven angels who stand before God, and seven trumpets were given to them. And another angel came and stood at the altar with a golden censer. And he was given much incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne and the smoke of the incense and the prayers of the saints rose before God from the hand of the angel. Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth. And there were peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake. We're going to talk about this in a second, in more detail. This, these seals are not yet the wrath of the Lord. The trumpets and the bowls are God pouring out his wrath. These are precursors to his wrath. This is to give us a heads up, hey, it's coming. This is God's wrath. And before God pours out his wrath in heaven, when the seventh seal is opened, heaven, who for all of eternity has been an ongoing, never-ending chorus of praise to God, has been bustling with activity, has been bustling with praise, has the angels surrounding the throne of God all time at every moment crying out, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty who was and is and is to come. Holy, holy, holy. It's an unbroken chain of jubilant praise that doesn't go back for all of history,berly prepare for the wrath that is going to be poured out. There's silence in heaven after an unbroken chain of praise for all of eternity. As the culmination of history comes to its apex and God's wrath begins to be poured out and he begins to reclaim what is rightfully his and the wheels of eternity are set in motion. I don't think we can overemphasize how big of a deal the silence in heaven is. As heaven itself braces for the wrath that is going to be poured out on creation. There's a word in the Old Testament called Selah, which means holy pause. This is the holiest of pauses. This is the greatest Selah as we prepare for what's coming next. Because of this pause, and because of the voice of the martyrs that is not wrathful, and because of Matthew 24 and what it tells us to look for, Jesus tells the disciples, you really can't read Revelation without reading Matthew 24, So at some point during this series, you should go back and read at least that chapter to help us understand some of the things going on in Revelation. But Matthew 24 makes it pretty clear that these events are a precursor to God's wrath, that when we start to see these things, we need to start opening our eyes and our ears and looking for what could come. And so a lot of folks, a lot of scholars, this is pretty widely agreed upon, would kind of draw a line of demarcation here and say that this is the portion of the tribulation that is pre-wrath. And I know that you can't see this, but hopefully you can. The other thing is at the end of the service, we're just going to set this over there. This sounds so presumptuous for me to say this out loud. It feels weird. But if you want to take a picture of the things that I write down, you can do that. It'll be over there. You can take a picture of it, take it home with you. But this is pre-wrath. And then this, moving in this direction, is wrath. This is a precursor. This is the actual wrath of God, which also begs the question, because here in chapter 7, between the sixth and seventh seal, we see this scene in heaven. There's 144,000 Jewish males. We may or may not talk about those next week. I just don't know if they're going to make the cut. Also, I don't understand them, so I'm not sure what you expect me to say about them. But I've got a whole week to do some research, and we'll see. But then after that, there's this scene. I've alluded to it before in one of the past sermons, but there's this multitude coming into heaven dressed in white. And John leans over to the angel next to him, and he says, who are they? And the angel says, those are the children of God coming out of the great tribulation. And a lot of people believe that that's the rapture. The rapture, you may know, is the second coming of Christ. The Bible teaches that Jesus is going to appear in the air, that he's going to be announced by trumpets, that the whole world will be aware of his presence, when is the rapture going to happen? And we know that we don't know the day nor the time. But we also know that Jesus gives us signs that it's about to happen. And so a lot of people, based on Revelation chapter 7 and the masses coming into heaven out of the Great Tribulation, that in chapter 7 is actually the rapture. And so we call that a mid-trib rapture or a pre-wrath rapture. But we have to put our question marks. Are we sure the rapture is there? No, we are not sure. Some people, I was talking with somebody last week who grew up in a church that preached a pre-trib rapture. And they said, Jesus comes to get us before the entire tribulation begins because God wouldn't want his children to have to endure any of these things. So he comes to get us long before the tribulation, or right before the tribulation starts. So you don't have to worry about that, which is a nice thought. And there's a lot of schools of thought, particularly Baptist thought, that glom onto that. And they're like, yeah, that's got to be true. The problem is there is zero textual evidence to support this. None. You can do some gymnastics and try to convince yourself that things allude to it, but they don't. So I'm hoping with you in a pre-tribulation rapture, but the text does not support that at all. I really think that the text supports a mid-tribulation pre-wrath rapture. If I had to guess, that's what I would guess. I wouldn't bet you any more than a Chick-fil-A sandwich on it, because I could be wrong, but that would be my guess. But see, if you do go like I asked you to and read Matthew chapter 24, and you do it with an open mind, what you're going to see is that Matthew chapter 24 makes it pretty tough not to believe in a post-trib rapture. I'll write Revelation 7 here. You read Matthew chapter 24 and you're like, well gosh, it really feels like people are getting saved right up to the end and that God is waiting right up until the very end where he's still tormenting his children, and then he pulls them out. And so I texted a friend of mine, another guy who knows Revelation well, and I'm like, man, I think I'm mid-trib, but I read Matthew 24, and it sure seems like post-trib is a thing. And he said, yeah, no matter how well all the puzzle pieces go together, there's still always gonna be some left out. And so that's the fun of Revelation. So which is it? I don't know. But I've just explained to you almost literally everything I know about whether, when that is going to be. So these things occur prior to the silence in heaven, prior to the wrath of God, I think likely prior to the rapture. And as far as the timeline of these events, okay, the tribulation is seven years. So this portion, the seals, is three and a half years. Happens over the course of three and a half years. So do these horses come down together? I don't know. When does the earthquake come in relation to the horses? I'm really not sure. But these events happen over the course of three and a half years. And then these events happen over the course of three and a half years. So you can see that once the wrath of God starts, that things really begin to pick up in pace. Which tells me, if you look over here to the bowls, in the second bowl, the sea is turned into blood and is unusable. Subsequent to that, all the fresh water is turned to blood and is unusable. Which means if you're here during the tribulation and God hasn't yet raptured us and you have a lake house and all the oceans get turned to blood, you probably want to get in a couple of weekends because like your lake's not going to be usable here pretty soon. All right. I'm just, that's just a freebie. Try to enjoy the tribulation, make the most of it. After the silence in heaven, seven angels are given trumpets and they begin to blow their trumpets. And then very quickly, you guys have this on your paper. The first one is hail and fire and it renders a third of the earth uninhabitable. The second is a burning mountain is thrown into the sea and a third of the ocean is rendered unusable. The third is a, it looks like a comet called Wormwood falls from the sky and renders a third of the water, fresh water unusable. If you know your C.S. Lewis, you know that Wormwood is the name of the demon in the screw tape letters. This is where he gets it from. And then the fourth trumpet is the sun is struck and one third of the heavenly light. So moon, stars, things like that are blacked out and we begin to lose the light in the heavens. Then after the fourth one, an eagle flies over heaven and says, whoa, whoa, whoa to those who remain. And these are then, these last three trumpets are also called the three woes. So if you're reading the book of Revelation and you're following through, I'm following the trumpets. I got them, I got them, the first trumpet, second trumpet, third trumpet, I'm following along. And then the woes start and you're like, whoa, I didn't know there was gonna be woes in the trumpets. Then they're the last three trumpets. So the first woe is the fifth trumpet and so on and so forth. That's how we can keep track of it. And it gets a little tricky because the second woe is the sixth trumpet and then we wait two chapters before we get to the third woe and the seventh trumpet. But this is when it starts to get particularly rough. At the fifth trumpet, God himself releases an angel named Apollyon, which is a fantastic name for a scary-sounding angel. And Apollyon has an army of locusts that come out of the earth. They look like locusts, they have tails like scorpions, and they sting humankind, and the sting torments you for five months. Why five months? I do not know. I guess God decided that four months was not enough and that six months was pushing it. I really don't know. Another question about numbers, a third, a third, a third. Why is it a third? Somebody asked me this earlier in the week. We're not sure about that either. What we do know is that when Satan fell, he took a third of the angels with him to form the demons, and that we see that depicted in Revelation chapter 10 when the tail of the dragon sweeps the stars out of the heavens and a third of them fall to the earth. And so it might just be in keeping with that, but I'm not sure that we can assign much significance to a third for those of you wondering. After Apollyon and the locusts torture us for five months, the four angels are released. This is pretty ominous. There's four angels, angels of war, sent from heaven, and the number of their troops, if you do the math, is 200 million. And they are sent to kill a third of mankind, which sounds terrible, which is why I thought this might be a good time to remind you of something that I've already pointed out that we see in Revelation 9, verse 20 and, I am convinced, experiencing the wrath of God are those who refuse to believe that it is the wrath of God. They obstinately refuse to bend the knee and to submit to our creator God. And so, if you're still around here and it seems terrible for the angels to come and kill a third of mankind, I agree with you. There's an out. All you have to do is ask for it. After that, there's an interlude. We see the scene that I just alluded to with the dragon and the woman and the baby. And then in chapter 11, the temple of heaven is opened. There's an earthquake and there's great hail. After the earthquake and the hail, out of the temple is a voice that says, pour out the bowls. There's seven bowls. These are the bowls of God's wrath. This is when it gets really bad. So the first bowl is painful sores for everyone who has the mark of the beast. In Revelation, we're told that there's a mark of the beast that you must get in order to buy and sell and trade goods. And so for everyone who has the mark of the beast and worships him, they get painful sores that torment them. We're going to talk more about the mark of the beast next week. I'm not going to belabor it this week. After that, the sea is turned to blood and then the freshwater is turned to blood. Then the sun scorches the earth. When the sun scorches the earth, it scorches the earth so badly that if you go outside, you catch on fire. It's really, really bad. And people cry out. And there's another time where the text stops and makes sure that we understand the people left here experiencing this are people who have not repented and refused to bow the knee. Okay? Then I just wrote dark kingdom. But what's going on here is this, if you've never heard it before, you might jot down this term, unholy trinity. The unholy trinity consists of the antichrist, the beast, which is probably Satan, and then a false prophet. That's the unholy trinity. We see them throughout the book of Revelation, and next week we'll talk about who they are, what they do, and why they exist. But they have, by this point, established a kingdom on earth, and God darkens everything over their kingdom. As a response to that dark ever heard of, you've ever heard, you've heard of the battle of Armageddon. Thanks to Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck in particular. We know this phrase Armageddon. This is where it happens. It's the battle to end all battles. Once Armageddon is done, God says in heaven, it is done. Which sounds a lot like Jesus on the cross saying it is finished. I'm just saying. There's the greatest earthquake the world has ever known. The great city, Jerusalem, is split into three. And 100 pound tribulation. And it's interesting to me, as I was kind of listing this out this week, this, the hail and the fire makes a third of the earth uninhabitable. It kind of impacts the whole earth. The painful sores seem like a progression of this. A third of the sea is rendered unusable. The whole sea is rendered unusable. Third of the fresh water, all of the fresh water. The sun is struck and now the sun scorches the earth. I don't know. I thought about trying to link Apollyon and the locusts to the dark kingdom. I don't know how to do it. I'm pretty sure it exists, okay, because it's so consistent in other places. But the four angels declare war on mankind, and then it's the war to end all wars, and then earthquake to earthquake. And so it's interesting to me that from the trumpets to the bowls, that God's wrath is progressive, that it gets worse, it builds, it's cyclically more severe. Even from the first, the four horsemen of the apocalypse bring these things in general upon the earth, and then it happens in more specific and worse ways as we go. And the cyclical nature of the worsening of this isn't dissimilar to other places in scripture, most notably the book of Judges, where if you read the book of Judges, it's three cycles of sin and reprisal and punishment and repentance, and then they fall back into sin, and the sin is worse, and so the punishment is worse, and the repentance is greater, and then it's worse and worse and worse. It's three different cycles until it ends in Israel being as evil as any nation that has ever existed. And so the cyclical nature of the process of the tribulation is not lost on me as it finalizes in the worst version of everything that God has already wrought. I think that's interesting and worth at least noting. And then we finish with the great earthquake. After this, in chapters 17 and 18, we see there's dialogue in heaven about what's about to happen next. And then in 19, the greatest scene in the history of history is the marriage supper of the Lamb and Jesus coming as returning conqueror. And I can't wait to preach about that in two weeks. And then after that, eternity begins with the new heaven and the new earth. We'll come back next week and we'll talk about the figures of the tribulation to try to understand those a little bit better. If you got a lot out of this morning, then I would expect that you would like next week. If you did not like this morning, I don't know what to tell you. Come in two weeks, please. That's going to be better than this. And any grace person will tell you if you don't come here often, this is not typical, but I wanted you guys to be able to understand the tribulation and the process of it. As I wrap up, I would simply say this, and I don't mean to open up more questions than I'm going to answer this morning, but in my own personal life, as I've been growing in this last year or so, I've been reflecting a lot on this idea that our God seems to be remarkably resistant to clarity. He doesn't seem to be overly interested in showing us exactly what to do and exactly when to do it. He doesn't seem to be overly interested in telling us what's going to happen and how it's going to happen. Should I take this job or should I not? Should we buy this house or should we not? How do we parent our kids? How do I fix my relationship? How do I honor my wife? How do I honor my husband? God gives us principles that largely leave us kind of lurching for what exactly is it, God, that you want us to do. And I think that that lurching is on purpose because in that groping in the dark, we learn to reach for God. We learn to hear him. We learn to be sensitive to his spirit. Our God is resistant to clarity because he wants you to be drawn to him in the unclarity. Which is why it's super interesting to me that God is so very clear about what's going to happen here. There is no place in the Bible that goes into this much detail at this length about what is going to happen. There are places in the Bible where we find this much detail, maybe a snippet of it here, but we don't find anywhere where God goes into this much detail for this length of time about exactly what's going to happen. And I think it's interesting that God chooses his wrath as a place to be crystal clear. And I think a smart Christian will wonder, well, why, God, are you so clear here? Why is it so important to you that we understand this with that level of clarity? And I would tell you, after a week of thinking about it, I don't know. But if you want to talk about this sermon in your small groups, that's the question I would begin with this week as you meet in your groups. Why is it, do you think, that God goes through that much trouble to give us that much clarity in a unique way about the end of time? Let's pray, and we'll worship together, and then we'll be done. Father, thank you so much for this morning. Thank you for who you are and the clarity that you give us. Lord, thank you for telling us what's coming. I pray that we would understand it better and in understanding that we would understand you. God, this may be complicated or dizzying for some, but I pray that you would create and maintain within all of us this burning desire to really understand you and your word. I pray that our spirits would actually be enlivened by learning more about you and what you've shared with us. Father, we thank you for your clarity here, and we ask that we would learn to properly deal with and process that. More than anything, God, if there is anybody within the sound of my voice who doesn't know you, who might be subject to that wrath, would they simply ask you to spare them? And in doing that, look forward to spending eternity in heaven with you, which is the whole point of the exercise anyway. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.
The All right. Well, good morning. Thank you for being here. Thank you for watching online or for catching up later in the week. If you're listening to my voice later in the week and you're planning to just listen to this one in your car, this one is visual. So you might want to wait until you can watch it at home. But we're going to do the best we can to work through this whiteboard today. So I will say this up front. If you are inherently interested in the tribulation and better understanding the events of the tribulation in a concise way, then I think that you're really going to enjoy this morning. If you are not inherently interested in the events of the tribulation, this is going to be terrible. I'm just going to be upfront with you. I've accepted that. My role this morning is to inform more than it is to preach. I don't have a big spiritual point coming at the end of this. So this is not necessarily a sermon proper. This is going to feel more like class. And for a lot of us, that's okay. For some of us, it's not. For you, I'm sorry. Kyle's suggestion to you, who's on a retreat with the students, by the way, is that there's a subtle design on the back of the notes. Take a pen and just kind of trace over that design and start to color things in. That should pass the time nicely for you. Speaking of the notes, even if you're not a notes person, this is a good week to find them and grab them and take a look at them because what we have on the notes is an exact replica of what's up here. And so as I write and fill things in and add to it, you can too. If you're watching online, our great camera person, Drew Turner, is going to do the best he can to pick up what I'm putting down up here. But I also have an electronic version of this available if you want that. You can email it to me. You can email me and I'll just send you this kind of typed out. The reason we're doing it this way is to help you understand the events of the tribulation. We're spending three weeks on the tribulation because it takes up a huge portion of the book of Revelation. We see the tribulation in chapters 6 through 17 of the book of Revelation. You could argue about 18, 19 if they're part of it, not part of it, whatever. But really, the bulk of it is 6 through 17. So it's 11 chapters in the book of Revelation of God pouring out his earned wrath as he returns to reclaim what he rightfully owns. And that's what we talked about last week. Last week, we invested a whole week in explaining this wrath, how it's earned, and how really and truly when we begin to reflect on it, we want a just God who is capable of wrath. That's the God that should be sitting on the throne. And one of the things that we pointed out last week that I'll reiterate a couple of times this morning is that God's wrath is only poured out on those who don't believe God is pouring out his wrath. If you don't want to experience God's wrath, all you have to do is say, God, please don't make me experience this. And then he won't. Okay? So I don't mean to be too flippant with that, but as we move through this, because some of this stuff is pretty awful, let's just keep in mind that God's wrath is only poured out, I believe, on people who obstinately refuse to accept him as God and to admit that he is Lord of the universe and that he is the one actually pouring out this wrath. So as we approach the events of the tribulation, next week we're going to talk about the figures of the tribulation, the antichrist, the beast, the 144,000, the mark of the beast, the unholy Trinity, all that stuff that comes out of revelation that we kind of asked now, who is that? Now, what does that represent? That's next week. This week is simply the events of the tribulation. And I got, I got an email this week that was not necessarily the impetus to the sermon because I knew what this was going to do, but it was certainly telling me that I was headed in the right direction. Somebody emailed me and she said, you know, I've been reading through Revelation and I'm trying to understand it all. There's just a lot going on. There's seals and there's woes and there's trumpets and there's bowls and there's dragons and there's beasts and there's figures and there's angels. There's just a lot going on and I kind of lose track of it. Is there some sort of simple guide to help me understand how I can move through Revelation and understand the tribulation process? And I basically said, come Sunday. I'm gonna preach on that. But years ago, when I had to preach to this the first time, I dove into the research and thought, let me see what's out there to just kind of help me get a bird's eye view of what's happening in the book of Revelation. And as I dove into that research, what I realized is there's nothing out there to help. There's no resource that just says, hey, here's what happens in the tribulation. It's really, really difficult to try to piece it all out of the book and understand it in a succinct way. And listen, I spent four years in undergraduate school. Well, I spent six years in undergraduate school, but I got a four-year degree in pastoral ministries. I've studied theology. I got a master's degree in theology. And still with that training, it was difficult for me to approach scripture and understand what was happening. There was no aids out there to help me out. And so for people who have not had the opportunity to study that much theology and be trained in that way, it's got to be that much more challenging. So I thought that the most helpful thing I could do as a pastor is to kind of spell out the events of the tribulation for us and help us piece them together. So like I said, if that interests you, then you're going to like this. If it doesn't, I'm really sorry. I hope your team wins this afternoon. But let's get started. So the tribulation is broken down into these kind of three categories of items. First, the seals, then the trumpets, and then the bowls. The seals we find in Revelation chapter six. The last one we see in Revelation chapter eight, if you're following along. The trumpets we see in eight through 11, and then the bowls we see in 16. And that kind of lends itself to why it's a little bit difficult to piece all this together. Because you're reading through and the seals are coming one right after another in chapter six. You're like, all right, cool. I'm following along. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. And then after the earthquake at the end of chapter six, there's chapter seven and all this other stuff happens in chapter seven. And you're like, wait, when is this happening? Is that the last seal? No, the last seal is in chapter eight. And you read that. And then that ushers in the trumpets. And then you're reading through the trumpets and they're coming in quick succession. And then all of a sudden you get to chapter nine. And then in chapter 10, there's this vision of a dragon and a space lady and her baby. And you're going, how in the world is this following all of this? And then just randomly in chapter 11, it's like, oh yeah, the last trumpet is the temple of God. And then there's all this interlude of material from chapter 11 through chapter 15 until you get to the bowls that were opened in chapter 11, where it's other visions and things that you're seeing. So if you're just reading Revelation linearly, it's kind of difficult to pick up the events and the narrative of the tribulation. So I've isolated it for us this morning so that we can go through it together. So let's go through it, and I'm going to do the best I can to kind of address the questions I think you would have if we could be doing this one-on-one. And boy, wouldn't it be fun to do this one-on-one for an hour and a half? Yeah, I know you'd love it. All right. So the first thing we see when the seals begin to be opened, remember Jesus has stepped forward in chapters four and five, and he begins to open up the seals. He begins the process of the great tribulation, which we understand is a seven-year process. The first thing that happens is one of the cherubim, one of the angels with the four faces yells, come forth. And the first thing that comes forth is a white horse. And it says that the rider of the white horse comes conquering and to conquer. And a lot of folks think that that might be the Antichrist. A lot of folks think this rider on the white horse might be the Antichrist coming down at the beginning of the tribulation. We're going to talk more about the Antichrist and what his role is next week. But his role is basically to deceive people and make him think he's the actual Jesus and follow him away from heaven instead of towards heaven. So his role is to be a deceiver. He is a tool of Satan to pull people away from God. And so a lot of people believe that this is the Antichrist because when Jesus comes all the way over here in chapter 19, he comes on a white horse to conquer. And so a lot of scholars think that the Antichrist is imitating the Christ that's going to come later in the book of Revelation. Here's the problem. There's no textual evidence to suggest that this is the Antichrist. All right? So we just kind of think maybe. There's plenty of people out there who will write a whole book about how this is definitely the Antichrist and what it means and treat the whole rest of the tribulation as if the Antichrist is present beginning at the very beginning. But we don't know that for sure. So there's a question mark. All right? That's an important question mark. Maybe the Antichrist. Then the red horse comes. The red horse is war. The black horse is famine. And then a pale horse comes. What's the difference between a pale horse and a white horse? I don't know. Maybe it's khaki. I'm not very sure. Maybe it looks like He-Man's horse. I really have no idea. But the pale horse comes, and his rider, this is kind of cool, is death, and Hades is following with him, which sounds pretty ominous, all right? So the pale horse comes, and he brings pestilence and plague. These four horses here, you've probably heard this before. This is the most awkward thing I have to write sideways like this, are the four horsemen of the apocalypse. So if you've ever heard that phrase, this is where it comes from. Revelation chapter six. Those are the four horsemen of the apocalypse. So we'll notice that the angels are the ones that send them. So do these horses come from heaven? Possibly. Do they come from hell? Possibly. But God's angels are the ones that release them. And when they're released, the white horse comes to conquer as a precursor to the rest of them. Then the red horse comes and wars increase. And then the black horse comes and famine increases. And then the pale horse comes and pestilence and plague follows those things. And they happen, it seems, in pretty quick succession. Then we get to the fifth seal, which I talked about last week. The fifth seal is interesting in that it is not a wrathful seal. The fifth seal is the voice of the martyrs. When Jesus opens it, the voices of those below the throne of God who have been killed for his name cry out to God, when are you going to avenge our deaths? And last week we talked about how as believers in creation, we cry out with the martyrs, yeah, God, when are you going to make things right? What's interesting is that the voice of the martyrs is not wrathful. This is not God pouring out his wrath or his vengeance, which makes us think, and we're going to come back to this point. Oh, we're just getting started, man. This is getting hot and heavy, makes the point that this is probably pre-wrath, that the wrath of God hasn't really begun with the horses yet, that they're precursors to the coming wrath. And I'll tell you why we think this in a second. After this, the sixth seal ushers in an earthquake. And the description of this earthquake is incredibly ominous. And it serves as kind of a great equalizer. It's so ominous that I thought it would be worth it for us to take a second and read it together. So I'm going to read the description of the earthquake. And you guys follow along on the screen here or at home as I read, beginning in verse 12. The sky vanished like a scroll that is being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. Then the kings of the earth and the great ones and generals and the rich and the powerful and everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come. Who can stand? So this great earthquake comes after the four horsemen of the apocalypse and the voice of the martyrs cry out, then God answers them with a great earthquake. And earthquakes are significant in Revelation because we'll see that there's one at the end of every cycle. So the earthquake comes and it says the mountains and the islands are moved out of place. And I call it the great equalizer because kings and generals and rich and poor and slave and free are all hiding in the rocks together now. And now they are c. Then the seventh seal is opened. And when the seventh seal is opened, one of the most profound things, not in history, but in eternity happens. And if we just read Revelation, and we just read these verses without pausing to reflect on the significance of them, we can miss what's going on here. So I wanted us to read them together and then try to wrap our heads around how significant it is what's going on in heaven at the seventh seal. So in chapter 8, verses 1 through 5, this is what happens. When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. Then I saw the seven angels who stand before God, and seven trumpets were given to them. And another angel came and stood at the altar with a golden censer. And he was given much incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne and the smoke of the incense and the prayers of the saints rose before God from the hand of the angel. Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth. And there were peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake. We're going to talk about this in a second, in more detail. This, these seals are not yet the wrath of the Lord. The trumpets and the bowls are God pouring out his wrath. These are precursors to his wrath. This is to give us a heads up, hey, it's coming. This is God's wrath. And before God pours out his wrath in heaven, when the seventh seal is opened, heaven, who for all of eternity has been an ongoing, never-ending chorus of praise to God, has been bustling with activity, has been bustling with praise, has the angels surrounding the throne of God all time at every moment crying out, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty who was and is and is to come. Holy, holy, holy. It's an unbroken chain of jubilant praise that doesn't go back for all of history,berly prepare for the wrath that is going to be poured out. There's silence in heaven after an unbroken chain of praise for all of eternity. As the culmination of history comes to its apex and God's wrath begins to be poured out and he begins to reclaim what is rightfully his and the wheels of eternity are set in motion. I don't think we can overemphasize how big of a deal the silence in heaven is. As heaven itself braces for the wrath that is going to be poured out on creation. There's a word in the Old Testament called Selah, which means holy pause. This is the holiest of pauses. This is the greatest Selah as we prepare for what's coming next. Because of this pause, and because of the voice of the martyrs that is not wrathful, and because of Matthew 24 and what it tells us to look for, Jesus tells the disciples, you really can't read Revelation without reading Matthew 24, So at some point during this series, you should go back and read at least that chapter to help us understand some of the things going on in Revelation. But Matthew 24 makes it pretty clear that these events are a precursor to God's wrath, that when we start to see these things, we need to start opening our eyes and our ears and looking for what could come. And so a lot of folks, a lot of scholars, this is pretty widely agreed upon, would kind of draw a line of demarcation here and say that this is the portion of the tribulation that is pre-wrath. And I know that you can't see this, but hopefully you can. The other thing is at the end of the service, we're just going to set this over there. This sounds so presumptuous for me to say this out loud. It feels weird. But if you want to take a picture of the things that I write down, you can do that. It'll be over there. You can take a picture of it, take it home with you. But this is pre-wrath. And then this, moving in this direction, is wrath. This is a precursor. This is the actual wrath of God, which also begs the question, because here in chapter 7, between the sixth and seventh seal, we see this scene in heaven. There's 144,000 Jewish males. We may or may not talk about those next week. I just don't know if they're going to make the cut. Also, I don't understand them, so I'm not sure what you expect me to say about them. But I've got a whole week to do some research, and we'll see. But then after that, there's this scene. I've alluded to it before in one of the past sermons, but there's this multitude coming into heaven dressed in white. And John leans over to the angel next to him, and he says, who are they? And the angel says, those are the children of God coming out of the great tribulation. And a lot of people believe that that's the rapture. The rapture, you may know, is the second coming of Christ. The Bible teaches that Jesus is going to appear in the air, that he's going to be announced by trumpets, that the whole world will be aware of his presence, when is the rapture going to happen? And we know that we don't know the day nor the time. But we also know that Jesus gives us signs that it's about to happen. And so a lot of people, based on Revelation chapter 7 and the masses coming into heaven out of the Great Tribulation, that in chapter 7 is actually the rapture. And so we call that a mid-trib rapture or a pre-wrath rapture. But we have to put our question marks. Are we sure the rapture is there? No, we are not sure. Some people, I was talking with somebody last week who grew up in a church that preached a pre-trib rapture. And they said, Jesus comes to get us before the entire tribulation begins because God wouldn't want his children to have to endure any of these things. So he comes to get us long before the tribulation, or right before the tribulation starts. So you don't have to worry about that, which is a nice thought. And there's a lot of schools of thought, particularly Baptist thought, that glom onto that. And they're like, yeah, that's got to be true. The problem is there is zero textual evidence to support this. None. You can do some gymnastics and try to convince yourself that things allude to it, but they don't. So I'm hoping with you in a pre-tribulation rapture, but the text does not support that at all. I really think that the text supports a mid-tribulation pre-wrath rapture. If I had to guess, that's what I would guess. I wouldn't bet you any more than a Chick-fil-A sandwich on it, because I could be wrong, but that would be my guess. But see, if you do go like I asked you to and read Matthew chapter 24, and you do it with an open mind, what you're going to see is that Matthew chapter 24 makes it pretty tough not to believe in a post-trib rapture. I'll write Revelation 7 here. You read Matthew chapter 24 and you're like, well gosh, it really feels like people are getting saved right up to the end and that God is waiting right up until the very end where he's still tormenting his children, and then he pulls them out. And so I texted a friend of mine, another guy who knows Revelation well, and I'm like, man, I think I'm mid-trib, but I read Matthew 24, and it sure seems like post-trib is a thing. And he said, yeah, no matter how well all the puzzle pieces go together, there's still always gonna be some left out. And so that's the fun of Revelation. So which is it? I don't know. But I've just explained to you almost literally everything I know about whether, when that is going to be. So these things occur prior to the silence in heaven, prior to the wrath of God, I think likely prior to the rapture. And as far as the timeline of these events, okay, the tribulation is seven years. So this portion, the seals, is three and a half years. Happens over the course of three and a half years. So do these horses come down together? I don't know. When does the earthquake come in relation to the horses? I'm really not sure. But these events happen over the course of three and a half years. And then these events happen over the course of three and a half years. So you can see that once the wrath of God starts, that things really begin to pick up in pace. Which tells me, if you look over here to the bowls, in the second bowl, the sea is turned into blood and is unusable. Subsequent to that, all the fresh water is turned to blood and is unusable. Which means if you're here during the tribulation and God hasn't yet raptured us and you have a lake house and all the oceans get turned to blood, you probably want to get in a couple of weekends because like your lake's not going to be usable here pretty soon. All right. I'm just, that's just a freebie. Try to enjoy the tribulation, make the most of it. After the silence in heaven, seven angels are given trumpets and they begin to blow their trumpets. And then very quickly, you guys have this on your paper. The first one is hail and fire and it renders a third of the earth uninhabitable. The second is a burning mountain is thrown into the sea and a third of the ocean is rendered unusable. The third is a, it looks like a comet called Wormwood falls from the sky and renders a third of the water, fresh water unusable. If you know your C.S. Lewis, you know that Wormwood is the name of the demon in the screw tape letters. This is where he gets it from. And then the fourth trumpet is the sun is struck and one third of the heavenly light. So moon, stars, things like that are blacked out and we begin to lose the light in the heavens. Then after the fourth one, an eagle flies over heaven and says, whoa, whoa, whoa to those who remain. And these are then, these last three trumpets are also called the three woes. So if you're reading the book of Revelation and you're following through, I'm following the trumpets. I got them, I got them, the first trumpet, second trumpet, third trumpet, I'm following along. And then the woes start and you're like, whoa, I didn't know there was gonna be woes in the trumpets. Then they're the last three trumpets. So the first woe is the fifth trumpet and so on and so forth. That's how we can keep track of it. And it gets a little tricky because the second woe is the sixth trumpet and then we wait two chapters before we get to the third woe and the seventh trumpet. But this is when it starts to get particularly rough. At the fifth trumpet, God himself releases an angel named Apollyon, which is a fantastic name for a scary-sounding angel. And Apollyon has an army of locusts that come out of the earth. They look like locusts, they have tails like scorpions, and they sting humankind, and the sting torments you for five months. Why five months? I do not know. I guess God decided that four months was not enough and that six months was pushing it. I really don't know. Another question about numbers, a third, a third, a third. Why is it a third? Somebody asked me this earlier in the week. We're not sure about that either. What we do know is that when Satan fell, he took a third of the angels with him to form the demons, and that we see that depicted in Revelation chapter 10 when the tail of the dragon sweeps the stars out of the heavens and a third of them fall to the earth. And so it might just be in keeping with that, but I'm not sure that we can assign much significance to a third for those of you wondering. After Apollyon and the locusts torture us for five months, the four angels are released. This is pretty ominous. There's four angels, angels of war, sent from heaven, and the number of their troops, if you do the math, is 200 million. And they are sent to kill a third of mankind, which sounds terrible, which is why I thought this might be a good time to remind you of something that I've already pointed out that we see in Revelation 9, verse 20 and, I am convinced, experiencing the wrath of God are those who refuse to believe that it is the wrath of God. They obstinately refuse to bend the knee and to submit to our creator God. And so, if you're still around here and it seems terrible for the angels to come and kill a third of mankind, I agree with you. There's an out. All you have to do is ask for it. After that, there's an interlude. We see the scene that I just alluded to with the dragon and the woman and the baby. And then in chapter 11, the temple of heaven is opened. There's an earthquake and there's great hail. After the earthquake and the hail, out of the temple is a voice that says, pour out the bowls. There's seven bowls. These are the bowls of God's wrath. This is when it gets really bad. So the first bowl is painful sores for everyone who has the mark of the beast. In Revelation, we're told that there's a mark of the beast that you must get in order to buy and sell and trade goods. And so for everyone who has the mark of the beast and worships him, they get painful sores that torment them. We're going to talk more about the mark of the beast next week. I'm not going to belabor it this week. After that, the sea is turned to blood and then the freshwater is turned to blood. Then the sun scorches the earth. When the sun scorches the earth, it scorches the earth so badly that if you go outside, you catch on fire. It's really, really bad. And people cry out. And there's another time where the text stops and makes sure that we understand the people left here experiencing this are people who have not repented and refused to bow the knee. Okay? Then I just wrote dark kingdom. But what's going on here is this, if you've never heard it before, you might jot down this term, unholy trinity. The unholy trinity consists of the antichrist, the beast, which is probably Satan, and then a false prophet. That's the unholy trinity. We see them throughout the book of Revelation, and next week we'll talk about who they are, what they do, and why they exist. But they have, by this point, established a kingdom on earth, and God darkens everything over their kingdom. As a response to that dark ever heard of, you've ever heard, you've heard of the battle of Armageddon. Thanks to Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck in particular. We know this phrase Armageddon. This is where it happens. It's the battle to end all battles. Once Armageddon is done, God says in heaven, it is done. Which sounds a lot like Jesus on the cross saying it is finished. I'm just saying. There's the greatest earthquake the world has ever known. The great city, Jerusalem, is split into three. And 100 pound tribulation. And it's interesting to me, as I was kind of listing this out this week, this, the hail and the fire makes a third of the earth uninhabitable. It kind of impacts the whole earth. The painful sores seem like a progression of this. A third of the sea is rendered unusable. The whole sea is rendered unusable. Third of the fresh water, all of the fresh water. The sun is struck and now the sun scorches the earth. I don't know. I thought about trying to link Apollyon and the locusts to the dark kingdom. I don't know how to do it. I'm pretty sure it exists, okay, because it's so consistent in other places. But the four angels declare war on mankind, and then it's the war to end all wars, and then earthquake to earthquake. And so it's interesting to me that from the trumpets to the bowls, that God's wrath is progressive, that it gets worse, it builds, it's cyclically more severe. Even from the first, the four horsemen of the apocalypse bring these things in general upon the earth, and then it happens in more specific and worse ways as we go. And the cyclical nature of the worsening of this isn't dissimilar to other places in scripture, most notably the book of Judges, where if you read the book of Judges, it's three cycles of sin and reprisal and punishment and repentance, and then they fall back into sin, and the sin is worse, and so the punishment is worse, and the repentance is greater, and then it's worse and worse and worse. It's three different cycles until it ends in Israel being as evil as any nation that has ever existed. And so the cyclical nature of the process of the tribulation is not lost on me as it finalizes in the worst version of everything that God has already wrought. I think that's interesting and worth at least noting. And then we finish with the great earthquake. After this, in chapters 17 and 18, we see there's dialogue in heaven about what's about to happen next. And then in 19, the greatest scene in the history of history is the marriage supper of the Lamb and Jesus coming as returning conqueror. And I can't wait to preach about that in two weeks. And then after that, eternity begins with the new heaven and the new earth. We'll come back next week and we'll talk about the figures of the tribulation to try to understand those a little bit better. If you got a lot out of this morning, then I would expect that you would like next week. If you did not like this morning, I don't know what to tell you. Come in two weeks, please. That's going to be better than this. And any grace person will tell you if you don't come here often, this is not typical, but I wanted you guys to be able to understand the tribulation and the process of it. As I wrap up, I would simply say this, and I don't mean to open up more questions than I'm going to answer this morning, but in my own personal life, as I've been growing in this last year or so, I've been reflecting a lot on this idea that our God seems to be remarkably resistant to clarity. He doesn't seem to be overly interested in showing us exactly what to do and exactly when to do it. He doesn't seem to be overly interested in telling us what's going to happen and how it's going to happen. Should I take this job or should I not? Should we buy this house or should we not? How do we parent our kids? How do I fix my relationship? How do I honor my wife? How do I honor my husband? God gives us principles that largely leave us kind of lurching for what exactly is it, God, that you want us to do. And I think that that lurching is on purpose because in that groping in the dark, we learn to reach for God. We learn to hear him. We learn to be sensitive to his spirit. Our God is resistant to clarity because he wants you to be drawn to him in the unclarity. Which is why it's super interesting to me that God is so very clear about what's going to happen here. There is no place in the Bible that goes into this much detail at this length about what is going to happen. There are places in the Bible where we find this much detail, maybe a snippet of it here, but we don't find anywhere where God goes into this much detail for this length of time about exactly what's going to happen. And I think it's interesting that God chooses his wrath as a place to be crystal clear. And I think a smart Christian will wonder, well, why, God, are you so clear here? Why is it so important to you that we understand this with that level of clarity? And I would tell you, after a week of thinking about it, I don't know. But if you want to talk about this sermon in your small groups, that's the question I would begin with this week as you meet in your groups. Why is it, do you think, that God goes through that much trouble to give us that much clarity in a unique way about the end of time? Let's pray, and we'll worship together, and then we'll be done. Father, thank you so much for this morning. Thank you for who you are and the clarity that you give us. Lord, thank you for telling us what's coming. I pray that we would understand it better and in understanding that we would understand you. God, this may be complicated or dizzying for some, but I pray that you would create and maintain within all of us this burning desire to really understand you and your word. I pray that our spirits would actually be enlivened by learning more about you and what you've shared with us. Father, we thank you for your clarity here, and we ask that we would learn to properly deal with and process that. More than anything, God, if there is anybody within the sound of my voice who doesn't know you, who might be subject to that wrath, would they simply ask you to spare them? And in doing that, look forward to spending eternity in heaven with you, which is the whole point of the exercise anyway. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.
Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Good for you for being here today. It's Super Bowl Sunday. Do we have anybody here who particularly cares who wins, feels very stridently about the Eagles or the Chiefs? No one's willing to admit. Okay. All right. I saw one fist up indicating neither team, but go your team, Kay. I will be cheering for them tonight on your behalf. This is literally, in my opinion, the worst weather possible. It's almost freezing and it's raining, but it's not cold enough to actually have anything fun happen, so we just trudged through it together, and here you are. Thanks for being here. This morning, we are appropriately talking, based on the weather, appropriately talking about mourning and grief and sadness. As we go through our series, The Blessed Life, where we're looking at the Beatitudes that come at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus's first recorded public address. And he opens up that address, that sermon, with a list of nine blessings in the book of Matthew. You find them in chapter five, and then the following sermon in five, six, and seven. And when he opens up with these blessings, he's speaking exactly to where the Israeli people are at the time. And he says, if this is you, then you're blessed. And so last week we opened up the series and we talked about that word blessed. And it's important that we define that and understand what it means to be built, to be blessed by God. And what it means very simply is to be fully satisfied, is to have all that you need, to be lacking for nothing, which when you think about it is a pretty profound definition of blessing. Because we can be in all different stages and all different instances in life, in all different situations, we can have plenty, we can have a little, we can be hurting, we can be exuberant, and in that moment we have all that we need, God says we are blessed. So this morning we look at one of the blessings, and it's probably the blessing that I find to be the most counterintuitive. It's when Jesus says this in Matthew chapter 5 verse 4 very simply, blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. When this blessing is recounted in Luke, it says blessed are those who weep for they will laugh. Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. And I don't know what you think of when you think of mourning, people who mourn. And maybe my perspective as a pastor is a little bit different than others. I don't know. I don't have another perspective. But there's things in life that we are sad about that cause us to grieve, right? The loss of a relationship when you're in middle school or high school. The person you like doesn't like you back. That's devastating. This causes us great mourning and teenage angst. We know about this. The loss of a job, the loss of an opportunity to get a promotion. Something bad happens to your kid and you mourn that. There's a little bit of sadness. There's different degrees of sadness and mourning. But what I think Jesus is talking about here, where my mind goes, what I think is implied in the Luke version of it, blessed are those who weep, what I think of is this deep, soul-aching sadness that there really are no words for. If you've lived life long enough, you have walked through a grief like that. Or you've walked with others or seen others as they walk through a grief so deep and so profound that words fail you. What do you say to parents whose eight-year-old had an adverse reaction to a prescription drug that they were given for a simple illness and it causes them to die and you have to do their funeral, what do you say to those parents? What do you say to people who are young who lose their parents way too early in a profoundly sad way. What do you say? What do you say to people who sit in the midst of the wreckage of their marriage? Sometimes because of decisions they did not make, and now they are grieving not just their marriage, but the future they had always envisioned for them and their kids. What do you say in the midst of that grief? What do you say to the wife with three kids under five who just lost her husband? What do you say when your friends have miscarried for the third time. When I think of mourning, grief, sadness, that's what I think of. Those times in life when the sadness is so profound, the ache is so present, that words fail you. And it would feel altogether stupid to hug them and say everything's going to be okay. Because it just doesn't seem sufficient. What do we say in those moments? Well, here's what Jesus said. That you're blessed if you're there. Because you will be comforted. Now, all those situations I just listed out for you are situations that I've been in. Situations I've seen. Situations I've walked with other people through. And it never occurred to me in those moments, nor will it occur to me in the future moments, to say to them, you know what, I know you're hurting right now, but you are blessed because God's coming for you. And yet, this is what Jesus says to a grief-stricken people, to dads who can't afford to feed their children, to a society in which the average age of death and infant mortality rate were respectively incredibly low and incredibly high. They knew pain and sorrow and grief. And Jesus says to them, you're blessed for you will be comforted. How is it that Jesus can say that to those people? How is it that Jesus can say that to us in the midst of our grief and our pain? And how is it that mourning can be a blessing? That in our mourning, we can see that we actually have all that we need. I think one thing that is helpful for me, it might not be helpful for everyone, but one thing that is helpful for me based on the Luke iteration of the Sermon on the Mount. In Luke's version of the Sermon on the Mount, there are blessings and then there are woes. There are woes to counterbalance those blessings. So when Luke records it, he remembers that Jesus says, blessed are those who weep, for they will laugh. And then later when he gets to the woes, he says, woe to those who laugh, for they shall weep and mourn. And so he introduces kind of this cyclical nature of life. There will be seasons of mourning and there will be seasons of laughter. There will be seasons of celebration. There will be seasons of sadness. And so what we see in life, what we see in Ecclesiastes, what we see in the biblical text over and over and over again, and what we know experientially is that morning is as natural as morning. Morning in life is as natural as morning in the day. What we know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that 18 hours from now, if Jesus doesn't come back and stop it, morning's coming, right? I don't know if I did the math right. I'm just throwing out 18 hours. You might disagree. I don't know when sun rises tomorrow, but technically speaking, if we don't have any more UFOs invading our country, Lord knows what's going on there. As long as Jesus doesn't come back, in 18 hours, it'll be morning. It's coming. There's nothing we can do about it. Whether we can see it or not, like today, whether we want it or not, unless Jesus stops time or returns and breaks the cycle, morning is coming. And in life, until Jesus returns, until he breaks in and breaks the cycle, mourning is coming. So when we mourn, when we hurt, when life is hard, we ought not be surprised by that. We ought to just think, it's my turn. This is inevitable. Everyone mourns. And I think it's really important to point this out. It's one of the large reasons. I had nine blessings to choose from. I chose this one, and it's one of the big reasons I chose to spend the morning highlighting mourning and the fact that it is cyclical and inevitable and will happen. Because as long as I am your pastor, I will do whatever I can from this small stage to beat back the idea that once we sign up for God's agenda, that he gives us a get out of grief free card. There is this pernicious idea in Christian history that when I begin to follow God, everything else is going to go okay for me. I'm going to close the sale and I'm going to avoid the big hurts and I'm going to avoid the big things and the raindrops of grief will miss my head and my family's heads. And yeah, sure, I mean, I'm going to have to go through some sadness at some times, but it's not going to be too bad. He'll never give me more than I can handle. The Bible has nothing to say about that. Nowhere does Scripture indicate that following God is a get-out-of-grief-free card for his children. And it's an incredibly damaging thing to teach otherwise. Because what happens is we find ourselves in the midst of mourning and we think, my God has betrayed me and let me down. Because he's allowing me to hurt this much. And what right and good theology says is, no, no, no. God never promised that those things wouldn't happen to you. But he does make a lot of promises to us in the midst of that morning. One of my favorite ones, it's one that I mention in funerals when I do them. It's one that buoys me that I am reminded of. There's a passage in Isaiah that says, the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. It's this idea that when we hurt the most, God is closest to us. When we are crushed in spirit, when we are weeping, when we are mourning, when it's that soul ache is when God himself sees us most and clings to us hardest. I can't ever hear that verse without thinking of the dynamic, and maybe it's because we're in the season where we have young kids. I can't ever hear that verse without thinking of the dynamic of how a young kid, when they hurt, runs to mama or runs to daddy, right? How the only thing they want in the world is the shelter of their parents. Jen was able this week to see this play out in real time. Lily was involved in a spelling bee, and it was an off-campus spelling bee. So Lily, or Jen had to take her to another school. Jen is my wife, by the way. Lily's my daughter. They're not just two random people I talk about. So Jen was taking Lily to the spelling bee, and they get there. And the way that this thing was set up is they gather all the kids together, and they take them into the classrooms, and the parents sit in the gym. And they just silently watch these double doors. And it's grades one through eight. And as it's your kid's turn, you don't know what's happening in the classroom. As it's your kid's turn, they spell and you know, they get it right and they stay in the classroom or they miss it and they have to do the walk of shame in front of all the parents. They come trickling through the double doors, dejected, and everyone knows you're not very smart. And then here they come. And so the parents are just sitting there staring at the doors. I'm, I'm at the house hanging out with John, who is my son. And, and just, I can't get enough. I'm just texting Jen nonstop. I'm on, I'm on the edge over here. I can't take it. What's going on? What's going on? Who's coming out? She's giving me live updates. Oh, but someone like someone's been defeated from our little school. Uh, the, the, this little boy, this little girl, they've come out. They said, Lily's hanging in there. It's round 15. She's fighting hard. I'm like, go, Lily, you know. But as these kids come out one by one, they come through the door. And what do they do? They're scanning the room for their parents. And they run to mama, and they hug mama. And the first kids who get out, they're fine, you know. They didn't have high expectations for the day. They're good. Let's hit the road, mom. Maybe there's a Shake Shack down here. But the kids who lasted longer, man, they were in it, right? It gets stressful in that room, first grade for two and a half hours spelling words. They start to hope. Lily wore her gold shoes that morning. She thought she was going to win. And so gradually they start to come out. When they hug mama, they're crying, they're hurting. They're releasing the stress of the day, the disappointment, maybe a little embarrassment. And the only one in the world who can comfort them is their parent, right? They're hurting. They're mourning. And sure enough, Lily comes out of there. She looks around for Jen, runs to her. They cry together. Lily cries because she's disappointed. Jen cries because she's a mom. And she sees that she has a different perspective on the pain than Lily does. She has a different perspective on the disappointment that Lily does. And she cries mostly because she just hurts for Lily. And after a minute or two, classmates start to gather around, and everyone gives their condolences, and then one little girl tells Lily very happily, they have cake pops here. And then suddenly, the spelling bee fades, and we're cake pops and grilled cheese at Zaxby's, and the world is right. But this is what we do when we hurt. We come through the gym doors and we scan the horizon for our Heavenly Father. We're drawn to Him. And He's drawn to us. And He sees us in those moments. And then, in those moments, when we need him, when we need his arms to wrap around us, when our soul aches, and we will never be too big, and we will never be too tough, and we will never be too manly, or whatever other stupid adjective we could put there to need our heavenly father to wrap his arms around us. We will never be beyond that. And when we hurt the most, He offers Himself the most. He comforts those who are crushed in spirit. He is close to the brokenhearted. And when He is close to us, do you know what He does? John 11, 35, He weeps with us. He holds us and he weeps too because his perspective on our pain is a little different. Because he knows that we don't really understand what it is we're walking through, but he sees it for what it is. And he holds us and he comforts us. This is what Jesus does in John 11, 35 that I mentioned. His best friend Mary has lost her brother Lazarus who's very close to him too. And she weeps to Jesus, why'd you let this happen? And he doesn't answer her, he just weeps with her. I will never get over the idea that there is an all-powerful, divine being who spoke the vast universe into existence, who knows who I am, and he knows the hairs on my head, and when I weep and when I hurt, he weeps with me. He is that intimately involved in our lives. Whether it's a small hurt or a big one. He's there. And what I find interesting about the way that God comforts us is that so often if you say, well, how does God wrap his arms around me? I think so often he does that through his other children, right? So often God comforts us by sending his children to be the ones who are the vehicles of that comfort, to wrap their arms around you, and maybe to say everything's going to be okay, and maybe just to say, I know it seems like everything isn't going to be okay, and I don't know what to tell you, but I'm here and I love you. And I'm pretty sure God loves you too. And let's just let that be enough right now. So often when we hurt and it says that God is close to the brokenhearted and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit. How does he do that? By sending his children, his hands and his feet into our lives to comfort us. And what's so amazing about this comfort when they offer it is that the best comfort, and you know it if you've been through it, the best comfort when our soul aches only comes from people who have walked that path too. Many of you know that part of our story is that in 2019, Jen's dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and he fought that battle hard until the end of 2020. And it was in early December of 2020 that we were about to have a service and I got a call just before the service. Jen's uncle was down there with her dad in Athens and outside of Atlanta. And he called me and he said, hey, it's time. You need to get the family down here. And I said, okay. Did the service. Went home. Jen was packing up the kids, getting things ready. And in our scramble to get out of town, there was a knock on the front door. And it was her friend Lisa. She had heard that it was time to go. And she came over. And she knocked on the door and she hugged Jen. And I don't know exactly what she said, but it was not much. But she essentially just said, I'm so very sorry. And they hugged and they cried. And Lisa left and we went to Georgia. Now what makes that hug and those words so profound from Lisa is that she had just walked through that with her own mother. So when she looked Jen in the eye and she said, I am so very sorry. She knew exactly the path that Jen had walked for those previous two years. The ups and downs and the good phone calls and the bad phone calls and the hoping and the praying and the staying up at night. She knew all that. She knew how terrible that was. And she knew how terrible the next few weeks were going to be and what we were going to see and witness and walk through. She knew that. And all of that went into, I'm so very sorry. And those words brought Jen better comfort than the dozens, if not hundreds of people, including me, all along the process who had hugged her tearfully and said, I'm so very sorry. Because if you haven't walked that path, that's great. I'm glad that you're sorry. I know you are. I appreciate that. I received that. But you don't know. So when someone who has walked that path of grief, who's been through that divorce, who's been through that dejection or disappointment, who has experienced that loss, can look you in the eye and say, I'm so very sorry. It carries a different weight. And so it occurs to me that one of the things that makes us blessed when we mourn is because when we get to the other side of that mourning and we are comforted and we have all that we need and we move through it and our heart and our soul heal in whatever way they can, that we will also get to be the hands and feet of Jesus as God himself comforts his hurting children down the road. So you could almost say, blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted and comfort. That in the midst of your mourning, it is cold solace. But the reality is for the rest of your life, you will be able to offer empathy and tears that will mean more to people because of the path you've walked than any other empathy and tears they might get. The hardest thing I've ever walked through from a mourning perspective is our miscarriage. The first time we got pregnant, the time before Lily, we miscarried. And before that, as a pastor, and I'm also just ridiculously pragmatic and stupid sometimes, as a pastor, when I would hear that couples had miscarried, my honest, dumb thought was, oh, well, that's too bad. They'll have another one. Which is just mind-numbing, but I was also in my 20s. I just hadn't experienced enough life to know that that's not what a miscarriage means. It's the loss of a dream. It's the loss of hope fulfilled. It's incredibly devastating to walk through that. Particularly if you've tried really, really hard to get pregnant. Particularly if it's not your first one. And in some ways I'm glad that we have walked through that because I know beyond a shadow of a doubt it has made me a better pastor for couples who are walking through that as well. And I would never again cheapen that grief by trying to move past it and look ahead. But I can hug them and look them in the eye and know their pain and say, I'm so sorry. And so in that small way, through our grief, God allows Jen and I to be blessings to others when the time comes. And so part of the blessing of mourning is knowing that in this cycle of weeping and laughing, when other people enter into a mourning phase, we can walk with them and be used by God to bring them comfort. And here's what's really interesting about the comfort that he brings us when we are hurting. When he brings a person along, when a song shows up in an unexpected place, when we are scrolling and we just happen to see something that touches us, whatever it might be, whatever that temporal comfort is that he gives us, that temporal comfort is intended to point us to our eternal comfort. This comfort that God offers us as we hurt is temporary. It's a salve. It's a balm. It's a band-aid. It helps our scarred souls, but it does not fully heal us. It is a temporal comfort intended to point us to and remind us of the eternal comfort that we cling to. As I was preparing this sermon, I sat down with Jen and I just said, listen, you've been through profound grief and I feel like I have not. What do I say? What do I talk about? I actually pitched a couple of ideas. I said, here's what I was thinking about saying. And she looked at me and she was like, those are not helpful to me. All right, cool. Well, then what should I say? And she shared this verse with me and told me that this is something that sustained her and continues to sustain her. And I think that there is tremendous power to this idea. And honestly, she said, it's that Hebrews verse that talks about hope being our anchor. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's a good verse. Googling off to the side. Which verse is this? It's one that had not stuck out to me before, but it is now one that I will never forget. But it says this in Hebrews chapter 6 I want us to hold on to is this idea that this hope anchors us. It anchors us. And one of the things that she kind of pointed out to me is that that cycle of mourning, that cycle of weeping and laughing, of mourning and celebration, of times of plenty and times of little, That's inevitable. Those things are artificial. Life ebbs and flows around us. But the thing that keeps her anchored, that keeps her steady, that keeps her pointed at God is the hope that she clings to. Whether life would seek to buoy you in exuberance or drown you in sorrow. There is an anchor that holds us there in the middle, and that anchor is our hope in Jesus. That's what our hope is placed in. The anchor is the hope, and the hope is placed in Jesus. In Jesus doing what? In Jesus doing what he says he's going to do. I say all the time that to be a Christian means to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. He did what he said he did. He died on the cross and he rose again on the third day. And that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And the way that I always say it, and it's particularly applicable this morning, is that he's going to come back one day and he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. In the midst of our mourning, and for that matter, in the midst of our celebrations, the comfort that we have in each scenario reminds us of the eternal comfort that Jesus has promised us. That one day he's coming back. And one day he's going to break the cycle. There's not going to be any more weeping and laughing. There's only going to be laughing. What God's promise is and what our hope is, is that one morning there will be no more mourning. There will be a day that breaks at some point in the future. We don't know when and we don't know how long we have to wait, but there will be a day that breaks. And when that day breaks, the only mourning that's left is the next day. There will be no more mourning with the children of God. And one of the great solaces we have is that if our grief is related to loss, the loss of a loved one, if they know Jesus, they are experiencing that mourning already. And so in the midst of the ebbs and flows of life, when our soul aches, we can hold on to that anchor of hope that reminds us of who Jesus is and what he came to do. That reminds us that Jesus promises us in Revelation 19 that he's gonna come back and on his thigh is gonna be written righteous and true and he's gonna conquer death and sin once and for all and there will be no more mourning. Revelation 21, I love to remind you of it. There is coming a day where God will be with his people and his people will be with their God and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things, the things that bring you grief, the things that scar your soul, the things that make your heart ache, that make you wonder if you can go another day. Those things will never happen again because they will have passed away. That is the promise of Jesus and that is the hope that anchors our souls as we go through the ebbs and flows of life. And as Christians, that is our greatest hope. That is our greatest encouragement. That is what we cling to. I'm reminded of one of my favorite quotes that I share every Easter. I believe it's Pope John Paul II who says, we do not give way to despair for we are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song. Because Jesus died and rose again on the third day and conquered sin and death and promises us a day, promises us a morning where there will be no more mourning, we believe that he will come again and do what he says he's going to do. And so what we can say for sure, when we find ourselves in the depths of despair, when we find our friends drowning in sorrow, is that we can whisper into their ear, hang on, cling to the hope that one day things like this will not happen anymore and that one day you will be healed and that one day, because of the hope that Jesus gives us, you will be reunited, you will be restored, you will be made right. So how is it that Jesus can say, blessed are those who mourn? Because he knew what he was going to do. And he knew that one day he would take away all of that mourning and make sure that for eternity we exist in joy and laughter. And so we cling to that hope in Christ. Let's pray. Father, I just pray for those right now who hurt. Those of us who are walking through a season of mourning and hurt and grief. I pray that they would feel your presence. That they would feel your love. That they would feel your comfort, that your church would serve them well. God, I pray for those who are in seasons of joy and celebration. Would we honor you well in those? Would we use those seasons to comfort others when we can? Thank you for the hope that you give us in Jesus. God, if there's anyone here today who doesn't know you, who hasn't yet professed a belief in your son, who hasn't yet claimed that future that you promised, I pray that they would. Even right now as we pray and sing and finish up, stir our souls and our hearts to you. Bring comfort to those who need it. Give the rest of us eyes to see that need. And give us the strength as we need it to cling to that anchor of hope. That one day you're going to come get us. And you're going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. In Jesus' name, amen.
