Matthew

Good morning. My name is Doug Bergeson and I'm a partner here at Grace. It's exciting and a privilege to be up here this morning. So thank you all for coming and thanks as well to all those who are listening elsewhere. Although I probably shouldn't admit this, I wasn't initially excited about the prospect of speaking this morning. In fact, and as my wife Debbie will attest, when Nate first texted me to ask, my initial gut reaction was pretty much the same as it's always been when asked to speak. Texting Nate back, I wrote, hey, I was thinking that with Kyle and Aaron in the bullpen, perhaps my speaking days were coming to a close. And Nate replied, and I quote, we have a lot in the bullpen to be sure, but I think the church is best served through multiple voices, and I'd like for Grace to hear from you again, if possible. Now, I totally subscribe to the idea that hearing from a variety of voices is a healthy and good thing. But after a few moments, I thought to myself, hey, wait a minute, he didn't really answer my question. Why ask me and not the other more capable and willing voices? And this is where, if you're squeamish and like your safe spaces, you should cover your ears and avert your eyes, because I'm going to give you a glimpse into the seeming underbelly of church life. Nate's a gifted speaker and does a great job of conveying the truth of Scripture. He's also pretty smart. Not super smart, but pretty smart. And he's very clever. But most of all, he's cunning. Not pretty cunning. I mean really, really cunning. And he understands that no matter how good his sermons might be, it's an inevitable human tendency as night follows day for people to start taking things for granted, including his sermons. So for Nate, what better way to solve this problem than to remind everyone just how dry, pointless, and uninspiring a sermon can be if not done well. And what better way to do that than to trot me up here every six months or so. Voila. Presto change-o. Problem solved. Next Sunday morning, people will be streaming early to Grace just to get a seat, chomping at the bit to hear what Nate has to say. Not to worry, though. Despite being used in this way, it's not all bad for me. In fact, selfishly, two very good things have happened. The first is that I find preparing a sermon a big responsibility and a bit nerve-wracking, which in turn compels me to read more, study more, think more, pray more. I always feel completely inadequate, and that, paradoxically, turns out to be a very good place to be. So despite my early misgivings, by the time I'm finally ready and up here on stage, it's been such a spiritually rich experience for me that I'm truly excited and deeply grateful for the opportunity. Trying to get a little more light, excuse me. The other really good thing that's happened is that even though we are now in our third week of the sermon series on Jesus' Beatitudes, I got to pick which Beatitude to talk about. And I picked Jesus' first one, my favorite one. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. It's the first Beatitude and my favorite because it reveals an absolutely essential truth for each of us, regardless of station or circumstance. I was raised in a modern split-level suburban house wedged between Chicago Proper and O'Hare Airport. Down in the family room, my father had a large bookshelf filled with all sorts of fabulous books. Works of Shakespeare, Winston Churchill's six-volume set on World War II, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Contiki by Thor Heyerdahl, Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and on and on. I didn't actually read many of them, and for sure none of the Shakespeare's. I could not make head nor tail of his Elizabethan English. But I loved taking the books down and paging through them. However, there was one book I actually did read a lot. This little book, 101 Famous Poems. I came to treasure this little book so much that when I was leaving home for good, I just took it from my parents' house without a word, and obviously have kept it since. I have many weaknesses and vices, some of which I freely admit and openly share, and others which I only acknowledge to God as they are embarrassing and a source of personal disappointment and even shame. But I can confidently say that stealing is not one of them, except perhaps this one time. Vice of mine or not, I couldn't think of a more fitting way to introduce today's beatitude than by reading the following poem from a book that I stole from my own parents. The Fool's Prayer by Edward Sill. The royal feast was done. The king sought some new sport to banish care, and to his jester cried, Sir fool, kneel down and make for us a prayer. The jester doffed his cap and bells and stood the mocking court before. They could not see the bitter smile behind the painted grin he wore. He bowed his head and bent his knee upon the monarch's silken stool. His pleading voice arose, O Lord, be merciful to me, a fool. No pity, Lord, can change the heart from red with wrong to white as wool. The rod must heal the sin, but Lord, be merciful to me, a fool. Tis not by guilt the onward sweep of truth and right, O Lord, we stay. Tis by our follies that so long we hold the earth from heaven away. These clumsy feet still in the mire go crushing blossoms without end. These hard, well-meaning hands we thrust among the heartstrings of a friend. The old-time truth we might have kept, who knows how sharp it pierced and stung. The word we had not sense to say, who knows how grandly it had rung. Our faults no tenderness should ask, the chastening stripes must cleanse them all, but for our blunders, oh, and shame, before the eyes of heaven we fall. Earth bears no balsam for mistakes. Men crown the knave and scourge the tool that did his will. But thou, O Lord, be merciful to me, a fool. The rooms hushed, and silence rose the king and sought his gardens cool, and walked apart and murmured low, be merciful to me, a fool. There are a million reasons why I love that poem. It tells of a surprise, a reversal in the accepted order. The greater brought low and it is the jester, not the king, who is wise. Everyone is equal before God. Everyone is lost. Everyone in need. It resonates because in our heart of hearts, we know it's true. It is the Upside down and inside out in virtually every way imaginable. And if I was in a court of law having to prove that point, I might start with the Beatitudes as my exhibit A. or the happy and healthy or the beautiful or the self-sufficient. But blessed are those who know that before God, they are a spiritual dumpster fire without merit and utterly undeserving of God's favor and blessing. That is what it means biblically to be poor in spirit. And that is a radically different take on how one goes about getting on God's good side. But a bit differently, the only thing that qualifies you or me to experience God's blessing is to honestly confess that we don't deserve to experience it at all. And why is that admission that we are utterly undeserving and without merit such a big deal? Because it's an acknowledgement that we are not okay, that we are separated from God and in desperate straits. And that, although it might seem initially like a depressing admission, in fact is a magnificent, mind-blowing blessing from God because it creates and fosters in us a posture receptive to his free offer of mercy, grace, and forgiveness through his son, Jesus Christ. In the book of Luke, Jesus tells a very famous story, the parable of the prodigal son that illustrates precisely this point. As many of you might recall, a man has two sons. The younger son asks for his inheritance, an act of enormous disrespect and outright rebellion in those days given that the father was still alive. The younger son then takes his share to a distant land where he proceeds to completely squander it on wild living. Predictably, he eventually falls on to hard times. Poverty, hunger, utter destitution. When he finally hits rock bottom, he has an epiphany. Realizing that he had sinned against his father and was no longer worthy of being called his father's son, he decides to return home and beg for mercy. But the father, seeing his son approaching in the distance, runs to him and hugs and kisses him and then throws a lavish party in the younger son's honor. All the while, the older son was having a fit, refusing to go into the party despite his father coming out and pleading with him to do so. The father tried to explain that everything he had was the older son's and that he was always with him. But all the older son could think about was the unfairness of it all. How obedient and hardworking he had been, how deserving, certainly compared to his brother. Although the extravagant, unmerited love and forgiveness the father offered his youngest son is breathtaking in that story, there is another key takeaway, the remarkable contrast between the fates of the two sons, a complete reversal of what we would suspect. The younger son failed spectacularly, but in so doing was brought to a place in which he clearly acknowledged that he stood before his father without a claim. Albeit not by his design, and certainly not something he signed up for, the younger son, through his ordeal, had become poor in spirit. And as a result of that condition, that posture, he experienced the mercy, forgiveness, and grace freely offered to him by his father. Tragically, his older son, convinced of his own righteousness and merit, was blinded to what his father was always offering him. And at the end of the day, it was the younger, the prodigal son who was advantaged and blessed, and it was the older who remained lost. Admittedly, those takeaways are somewhat nuanced and subtle, so I'll read another parable from Luke This is in Luke 18. some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked downterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get. But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Jesus goes on to say, I tell you that this man, the tax collector, rather than the other, went home justified before God. That word means made right before him, declared not guilty. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. It's pretty straightforward. The Pharisee thought he was okay and was not. The tax collector knew he was not and was blessed. Over the previous two weeks, Nates explained that our English translation of blessed doesn't do justice to what Jesus was talking about in the Beatitudes. More than happy, more than good fortune, more than favorable circumstances. Biblically, the word refers to an eternal security and well-being that aren't at all dependent on our feelings and circumstances. Regardless how difficult or unpromising things might seem at the time. And to be given the kingdom of heaven is simply another way of referring to salvation, redeemed by God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It's the ultimate blessedness, beginning first in this life, but ultimately culminating in an eternity with God. So this first beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, is second to none in importance as all roads to God's blessing and favor run through it. And there's a lot at stake, as it's my belief, that realizing one's desperate need is the single biggest stumbling block for people coming to faith to Jesus Christ. After all, salvation doesn't mean much if you're not convinced you need saving. But as critical as it is to recognize one's need, it's not sufficient. It's necessary, but just like in the story of the prodigal son, one must, in faith, return to the father to experience his goodness. Now, some may feel the urge to protest. Hey, Doug, I'm not that bad a person. In fact, I'm a pretty good person. In response, I'd say, that may very well be true. You may be a good person. Not only is that a very low bar, it's also the wrong bar. So why do we have to admit that we're spiritually bankrupt? The simplest answer is that it's true. I've often made the point that if I ever meet someone who seems like they have their act totally together, I simply conclude that I must not know them well enough. Although trying to be funny when I say that, I believe it's true. You might accuse me of being overly cynical, but I don't think so, and neither does Scripture. As the Apostle Paul writes in the book of Romans, there is no one righteous, not even one. And a few verses later, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified, there's that word again, declared not guilty, made right with God, freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Jesus Christ. And in his letter to the Ephesians, Paul makes the so that no one can boast. The kingdom of heaven, God's ultimate blessing and desire for each of us is simply not attained by the good things we might do, no matter how many or how good. Rather, it's reserved for the poor in spirit. Now, why is it so hard for us to admit our poverty and desperate need? There are lots of reasons, but the biggest is sin itself. In a massive, universal catch-22, it's our own sinfulness which keeps us from seeing how sinful we actually are. Virtually everything in our nature is singing a different tune. Hey, I'm really not that bad, and I'm certainly not totally helpless. I have agency. At its core, it's human pride, an implicit assertion of our own sovereignty, that we can steer our own ship. Thank you very much. We can figure out what's best for us. Confessing one's spiritual bankruptcy and abject need so completely rubs against the grain of everything our world tells us that even among the world's great religions, Christianity alone invokes such a confession. In all the others, there are things one can and even must do to get in God's good graces. It's transactional in a sense. I've done this or that. I've earned it, so God owes me. And I should get at least some of the credit. In essence, I'm the one in the driver's seat. Whereas the Christian gospel in polar opposition asserts that God did it. Everything. And he gets the credit. All of it. I did absolutely nothing and am in his debt. Truly being poor in spirit has always been a challenge for humankind, and it's not getting any easier. Virtue signaling is a term that's gained a lot of traction in our popular culture, and although the term may be relatively new, the concept is not. As human beings, since time immemorial, have sought ways to assert their own virtue. Perhaps it's where we live, who we associate with, the church we attend, the good things we do, our families, our social setting, our vocation, our possessions, our education, our politics, you name it, we find a way to do it and have always found ways to do it. But But the temptation of virtue signal today is greater than ever. Advances in technology and communication, though life-changing and transformative in many, many ways, have a dark side. The platform, audience, and access each of us is now afforded are unrivaled in human history, and not all for the good. Without a doubt, there's great value in having a marketplace for ideas, social discourse, advocacy, and the like. But the ease with which we can now signal our virtue is nectar to our innate human desire to build ourselves up. It seems as if our entire society, certainly our media, entertainment, politics, commerce, have all become performance art. Everyone morphing into little Torquemadas, Spanish inquisitors, casting about, looking for those not thinking right, not speaking right, not acting right, not looking right, not voting right, not caring enough about the right things, caring too much about the wrong things, we've become quicker than ever to accuse and condemn. I'm not even on social media to speak of, yet I'm still caught up in this overall mood of the times. On my news feed each morning, I'll read something about an entertainer or politician or businessman or some journalist, and I'll immediately think to myself, what a twit. What a moron, an idiot. It's judgment. It's pride. An implicit comparison between me and the object of my ridicule and scorn. An assertion of my own virtue. I'm marinating in my rightness, goodness, and wisdom when I do that. How different is that from the Pharisee and the parable I read earlier? Thank God I'm not like that tax collector. I'll tell you what virtue signaling is not. It's not like anything resembling Jesus Christ and is absolutely antithetical to the gospel news, excuse me, to the good news of the gospel. Virtue signaling has a corrosive effect on us and social media hasn't helped but only amplified. After all, I already have these impulses to want to be right and viewed as smart and virtuous. I don't need them so easily catered to. It turns out the Pharisees, the Jewish religious leaders of the day, were the first century's poster children for what today we call virtue signaling. Everything they did was performative for others to see and admire, totally wrapped up in an external righteousness rather than the real deal. And if one reads a little further in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reserved his harshest and most withering criticism and contempt for them, declaring that when Pharisees gave, prayed, and fasted in public for the praise and affirmation of men that they had received their reward in full. Convinced and satisfied with their own righteousness, they could not see their desperate need. They were far, far away from being poor in spirit and far, far away from the kingdom of heaven. Personally, I do not find these times we live in very helpful if I genuinely desire to walk the walk rather than just talk the talk of my faith. They do not cultivate in me a posture receptive to grace, nor encourage me to offer grace, empathy, and mercy to others. Rather, what is cultivated in me is a spirit of judgment, superiority, and disdain. Very hard to reconcile with Jesus' words, for whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. Although we all virtue signal in some form or fashion, it's especially harmful when done by believers, those of us who profess to be followers of Christ. The temptation to signal our virtue has always been and continues to be an enormous Achilles heel for Christians and for the church. We are susceptible, because we still sin, to moving away over time from our initial confession of brokenness and need, of being poor in spirit, to something quite different. For example, I'm an elder here at Grace. I lead a couple of small groups. I volunteer in the toddler room. Man, I even went on a mission trip last fall. Sure, Christ died for my sins, but look at me now. I think we can all safely agree that I'm nailing it, right? Go me! Now those things I'm doing aren't bad. In fact, they're good things. It's my pride that's a problem. My lens has moved stealthily, covertly from my need to my merit. What I'm now presenting in my life is not the gospel and it's not the truth and is terribly misleading to anyone genuinely searching for the truth. So what can we do about this state of things? As I reflect on today's beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. I'm convinced we'd be better off signaling our vices more and our virtues less. More emphasis on what Christ has done on our behalf and less of what we've done on his. Being poor in spirit, confessing our spiritual poverty and need is not intended to be a one-time event, but only the beginning of a lifelong transformation empowered by God's Holy Spirit. We tend to underestimate the amazing power and ongoing blessing being poor in spirit offers to each of us individually and to the church as a whole. When we embrace our weakness and need, it's a much more honest and compelling witness of Jesus Christ than when we don't. I find it very revealing that the following brief little episode was deemed important enough to be included in three of the four Gospels, accounts of Jesus' life and ministry. Matthew, the disciple and former tax collector, was hosting a great banquet at his house for Jesus, along with a large crowd of tax collectors and other unsavory sorts. The Pharisees complained. Of course they did. Every party needs a poop. Asking why Jesus was dining and hanging out with these sinners, Jesus answered them as follows. It's not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. If the church is to be a welcoming, grace-filled infirmary that it's designed to be, rather than an exclusive enclave for the moral and virtuous. It's a shame that we so often act and are perceived as if we're the latter rather than the former. There is no advantage to clinging to these pretenses. We in the church are far more appealing and credible when we don't. One of the things I've always loved and valued most about grace is that we have, for the most part, leaned into the notion that we do not have our act together and hold such a confession to not only be self-evident, but hopeful, attractive, and life-giving. And though admitting one's abject spiritual poverty and desperate need might be a giant, depressing downer in the world's eyes, it offers great comfort and new life to those who actually know themselves to be sinners. Now, it's important to note that we can't make ourselves poor in spirit. It's not something we can do or become on our own. It's the work of God's Holy Spirit who convicts us of our sin and draws us to Jesus. But we can certainly cooperate with the Spirit. How we respond matters. We can remind ourselves through prayer, study, and worship that we are now in Jesus Christ not through anything we've done. When we embrace that defining fact that we are not Christ due to our being either moral or good, but because we've been forgiven, rescued, and redeemed, it unlocks the door to the magnificence of grace and grows our appetite to extend grace to others. Speaking only for myself, when I'm poor in spirit, there is a softening in my heart, a little more empathy and tolerance of others, a little less focused on others' deficiencies, a little more patient, a little more inclined to forgive. I'd like to close with one final remarkable and eye-opening parable from the book of Luke, which has such profound implications that I don't think it gets the attention that it deserves. Jesus was invited to dine at one of the Pharisees' houses. Learning of this, a woman from town who had led an immoral life brought perfume and stood behind Jesus at his feet, weeping. Wetting his feet with her tears, she then wiped them with her hair, kissed, and poured perfume on them. The Pharisee was indignant, thinking to himself that if Jesus was truly a prophet, he would have known that the woman touching him was a sinner and how wrong this entire situation was. Knowing what his host was thinking, Jesus asked the Pharisee a question. He supposed the one who had the bigger debt canceled. You have judged correctly, Nor did she put oil on my head, but she has covered my feet with perfume. Therefore I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven, for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little, loves little. Jesus then said to the woman, your sins are forgiven. Once again, the gospel turns everything we know on its head. It's not the upstanding and righteous who are most inclined and most able to love, but those who most appreciate the depth of their need for forgiveness, mercy, and grace, the poor in spirit. It literally is the gift that keeps on giving and the blessing that keeps on blessing. This moment in our culture, with all its acrimony and angst, presents an opportune time for us to offer something different, to truly be salt and light in a lost world that really just seems like it's thrashing about. In addition to being biblical and true, it's a lot more attractive and inviting to others when our lives reflect a healthy circumspection and wariness of our own virtue. And a well-founded confidence and well-placed trust in the righteousness and redemption offered through Jesus Christ. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Not only is poorness in spirit key to God's kingdom for us, it's the key to the kingdom for the world. There's a lot at stake. Let's pray. Dear Lord, thank you for this morning. Thank you for your love. Thank you for the fact that we can stand before you without a claim, and you love us. That's what you expect. You're our God. You, your righteousness, your love, your grace and mercy are sufficient for us. Thank you for this morning. Pray that you'll use it to however you see fit. And I thank you for being merciful to me, a fool. Amen.

Good morning. My name is Doug Bergeson and I'm a partner here at Grace. It's exciting and a privilege to be up here this morning. So thank you all for coming and thanks as well to all those who are listening elsewhere. Although I probably shouldn't admit this, I wasn't initially excited about the prospect of speaking this morning. In fact, and as my wife Debbie will attest, when Nate first texted me to ask, my initial gut reaction was pretty much the same as it's always been when asked to speak. Texting Nate back, I wrote, hey, I was thinking that with Kyle and Aaron in the bullpen, perhaps my speaking days were coming to a close. And Nate replied, and I quote, we have a lot in the bullpen to be sure, but I think the church is best served through multiple voices, and I'd like for Grace to hear from you again, if possible. Now, I totally subscribe to the idea that hearing from a variety of voices is a healthy and good thing. But after a few moments, I thought to myself, hey, wait a minute, he didn't really answer my question. Why ask me and not the other more capable and willing voices? And this is where, if you're squeamish and like your safe spaces, you should cover your ears and avert your eyes, because I'm going to give you a glimpse into the seeming underbelly of church life. Nate's a gifted speaker and does a great job of conveying the truth of Scripture. He's also pretty smart. Not super smart, but pretty smart. And he's very clever. But most of all, he's cunning. Not pretty cunning. I mean really, really cunning. And he understands that no matter how good his sermons might be, it's an inevitable human tendency as night follows day for people to start taking things for granted, including his sermons. So for Nate, what better way to solve this problem than to remind everyone just how dry, pointless, and uninspiring a sermon can be if not done well. And what better way to do that than to trot me up here every six months or so. Voila. Presto change-o. Problem solved. Next Sunday morning, people will be streaming early to Grace just to get a seat, chomping at the bit to hear what Nate has to say. Not to worry, though. Despite being used in this way, it's not all bad for me. In fact, selfishly, two very good things have happened. The first is that I find preparing a sermon a big responsibility and a bit nerve-wracking, which in turn compels me to read more, study more, think more, pray more. I always feel completely inadequate, and that, paradoxically, turns out to be a very good place to be. So despite my early misgivings, by the time I'm finally ready and up here on stage, it's been such a spiritually rich experience for me that I'm truly excited and deeply grateful for the opportunity. Trying to get a little more light, excuse me. The other really good thing that's happened is that even though we are now in our third week of the sermon series on Jesus' Beatitudes, I got to pick which Beatitude to talk about. And I picked Jesus' first one, my favorite one. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. It's the first Beatitude and my favorite because it reveals an absolutely essential truth for each of us, regardless of station or circumstance. I was raised in a modern split-level suburban house wedged between Chicago Proper and O'Hare Airport. Down in the family room, my father had a large bookshelf filled with all sorts of fabulous books. Works of Shakespeare, Winston Churchill's six-volume set on World War II, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Contiki by Thor Heyerdahl, Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and on and on. I didn't actually read many of them, and for sure none of the Shakespeare's. I could not make head nor tail of his Elizabethan English. But I loved taking the books down and paging through them. However, there was one book I actually did read a lot. This little book, 101 Famous Poems. I came to treasure this little book so much that when I was leaving home for good, I just took it from my parents' house without a word, and obviously have kept it since. I have many weaknesses and vices, some of which I freely admit and openly share, and others which I only acknowledge to God as they are embarrassing and a source of personal disappointment and even shame. But I can confidently say that stealing is not one of them, except perhaps this one time. Vice of mine or not, I couldn't think of a more fitting way to introduce today's beatitude than by reading the following poem from a book that I stole from my own parents. The Fool's Prayer by Edward Sill. The royal feast was done. The king sought some new sport to banish care, and to his jester cried, Sir fool, kneel down and make for us a prayer. The jester doffed his cap and bells and stood the mocking court before. They could not see the bitter smile behind the painted grin he wore. He bowed his head and bent his knee upon the monarch's silken stool. His pleading voice arose, O Lord, be merciful to me, a fool. No pity, Lord, can change the heart from red with wrong to white as wool. The rod must heal the sin, but Lord, be merciful to me, a fool. Tis not by guilt the onward sweep of truth and right, O Lord, we stay. Tis by our follies that so long we hold the earth from heaven away. These clumsy feet still in the mire go crushing blossoms without end. These hard, well-meaning hands we thrust among the heartstrings of a friend. The old-time truth we might have kept, who knows how sharp it pierced and stung. The word we had not sense to say, who knows how grandly it had rung. Our faults no tenderness should ask, the chastening stripes must cleanse them all, but for our blunders, oh, and shame, before the eyes of heaven we fall. Earth bears no balsam for mistakes. Men crown the knave and scourge the tool that did his will. But thou, O Lord, be merciful to me, a fool. The rooms hushed, and silence rose the king and sought his gardens cool, and walked apart and murmured low, be merciful to me, a fool. There are a million reasons why I love that poem. It tells of a surprise, a reversal in the accepted order. The greater brought low and it is the jester, not the king, who is wise. Everyone is equal before God. Everyone is lost. Everyone in need. It resonates because in our heart of hearts, we know it's true. It is the Upside down and inside out in virtually every way imaginable. And if I was in a court of law having to prove that point, I might start with the Beatitudes as my exhibit A. or the happy and healthy or the beautiful or the self-sufficient. But blessed are those who know that before God, they are a spiritual dumpster fire without merit and utterly undeserving of God's favor and blessing. That is what it means biblically to be poor in spirit. And that is a radically different take on how one goes about getting on God's good side. But a bit differently, the only thing that qualifies you or me to experience God's blessing is to honestly confess that we don't deserve to experience it at all. And why is that admission that we are utterly undeserving and without merit such a big deal? Because it's an acknowledgement that we are not okay, that we are separated from God and in desperate straits. And that, although it might seem initially like a depressing admission, in fact is a magnificent, mind-blowing blessing from God because it creates and fosters in us a posture receptive to his free offer of mercy, grace, and forgiveness through his son, Jesus Christ. In the book of Luke, Jesus tells a very famous story, the parable of the prodigal son that illustrates precisely this point. As many of you might recall, a man has two sons. The younger son asks for his inheritance, an act of enormous disrespect and outright rebellion in those days given that the father was still alive. The younger son then takes his share to a distant land where he proceeds to completely squander it on wild living. Predictably, he eventually falls on to hard times. Poverty, hunger, utter destitution. When he finally hits rock bottom, he has an epiphany. Realizing that he had sinned against his father and was no longer worthy of being called his father's son, he decides to return home and beg for mercy. But the father, seeing his son approaching in the distance, runs to him and hugs and kisses him and then throws a lavish party in the younger son's honor. All the while, the older son was having a fit, refusing to go into the party despite his father coming out and pleading with him to do so. The father tried to explain that everything he had was the older son's and that he was always with him. But all the older son could think about was the unfairness of it all. How obedient and hardworking he had been, how deserving, certainly compared to his brother. Although the extravagant, unmerited love and forgiveness the father offered his youngest son is breathtaking in that story, there is another key takeaway, the remarkable contrast between the fates of the two sons, a complete reversal of what we would suspect. The younger son failed spectacularly, but in so doing was brought to a place in which he clearly acknowledged that he stood before his father without a claim. Albeit not by his design, and certainly not something he signed up for, the younger son, through his ordeal, had become poor in spirit. And as a result of that condition, that posture, he experienced the mercy, forgiveness, and grace freely offered to him by his father. Tragically, his older son, convinced of his own righteousness and merit, was blinded to what his father was always offering him. And at the end of the day, it was the younger, the prodigal son who was advantaged and blessed, and it was the older who remained lost. Admittedly, those takeaways are somewhat nuanced and subtle, so I'll read another parable from Luke This is in Luke 18. some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked downterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get. But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Jesus goes on to say, I tell you that this man, the tax collector, rather than the other, went home justified before God. That word means made right before him, declared not guilty. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted. It's pretty straightforward. The Pharisee thought he was okay and was not. The tax collector knew he was not and was blessed. Over the previous two weeks, Nates explained that our English translation of blessed doesn't do justice to what Jesus was talking about in the Beatitudes. More than happy, more than good fortune, more than favorable circumstances. Biblically, the word refers to an eternal security and well-being that aren't at all dependent on our feelings and circumstances. Regardless how difficult or unpromising things might seem at the time. And to be given the kingdom of heaven is simply another way of referring to salvation, redeemed by God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It's the ultimate blessedness, beginning first in this life, but ultimately culminating in an eternity with God. So this first beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, is second to none in importance as all roads to God's blessing and favor run through it. And there's a lot at stake, as it's my belief, that realizing one's desperate need is the single biggest stumbling block for people coming to faith to Jesus Christ. After all, salvation doesn't mean much if you're not convinced you need saving. But as critical as it is to recognize one's need, it's not sufficient. It's necessary, but just like in the story of the prodigal son, one must, in faith, return to the father to experience his goodness. Now, some may feel the urge to protest. Hey, Doug, I'm not that bad a person. In fact, I'm a pretty good person. In response, I'd say, that may very well be true. You may be a good person. Not only is that a very low bar, it's also the wrong bar. So why do we have to admit that we're spiritually bankrupt? The simplest answer is that it's true. I've often made the point that if I ever meet someone who seems like they have their act totally together, I simply conclude that I must not know them well enough. Although trying to be funny when I say that, I believe it's true. You might accuse me of being overly cynical, but I don't think so, and neither does Scripture. As the Apostle Paul writes in the book of Romans, there is no one righteous, not even one. And a few verses later, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified, there's that word again, declared not guilty, made right with God, freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Jesus Christ. And in his letter to the Ephesians, Paul makes the so that no one can boast. The kingdom of heaven, God's ultimate blessing and desire for each of us is simply not attained by the good things we might do, no matter how many or how good. Rather, it's reserved for the poor in spirit. Now, why is it so hard for us to admit our poverty and desperate need? There are lots of reasons, but the biggest is sin itself. In a massive, universal catch-22, it's our own sinfulness which keeps us from seeing how sinful we actually are. Virtually everything in our nature is singing a different tune. Hey, I'm really not that bad, and I'm certainly not totally helpless. I have agency. At its core, it's human pride, an implicit assertion of our own sovereignty, that we can steer our own ship. Thank you very much. We can figure out what's best for us. Confessing one's spiritual bankruptcy and abject need so completely rubs against the grain of everything our world tells us that even among the world's great religions, Christianity alone invokes such a confession. In all the others, there are things one can and even must do to get in God's good graces. It's transactional in a sense. I've done this or that. I've earned it, so God owes me. And I should get at least some of the credit. In essence, I'm the one in the driver's seat. Whereas the Christian gospel in polar opposition asserts that God did it. Everything. And he gets the credit. All of it. I did absolutely nothing and am in his debt. Truly being poor in spirit has always been a challenge for humankind, and it's not getting any easier. Virtue signaling is a term that's gained a lot of traction in our popular culture, and although the term may be relatively new, the concept is not. As human beings, since time immemorial, have sought ways to assert their own virtue. Perhaps it's where we live, who we associate with, the church we attend, the good things we do, our families, our social setting, our vocation, our possessions, our education, our politics, you name it, we find a way to do it and have always found ways to do it. But But the temptation of virtue signal today is greater than ever. Advances in technology and communication, though life-changing and transformative in many, many ways, have a dark side. The platform, audience, and access each of us is now afforded are unrivaled in human history, and not all for the good. Without a doubt, there's great value in having a marketplace for ideas, social discourse, advocacy, and the like. But the ease with which we can now signal our virtue is nectar to our innate human desire to build ourselves up. It seems as if our entire society, certainly our media, entertainment, politics, commerce, have all become performance art. Everyone morphing into little Torquemadas, Spanish inquisitors, casting about, looking for those not thinking right, not speaking right, not acting right, not looking right, not voting right, not caring enough about the right things, caring too much about the wrong things, we've become quicker than ever to accuse and condemn. I'm not even on social media to speak of, yet I'm still caught up in this overall mood of the times. On my news feed each morning, I'll read something about an entertainer or politician or businessman or some journalist, and I'll immediately think to myself, what a twit. What a moron, an idiot. It's judgment. It's pride. An implicit comparison between me and the object of my ridicule and scorn. An assertion of my own virtue. I'm marinating in my rightness, goodness, and wisdom when I do that. How different is that from the Pharisee and the parable I read earlier? Thank God I'm not like that tax collector. I'll tell you what virtue signaling is not. It's not like anything resembling Jesus Christ and is absolutely antithetical to the gospel news, excuse me, to the good news of the gospel. Virtue signaling has a corrosive effect on us and social media hasn't helped but only amplified. After all, I already have these impulses to want to be right and viewed as smart and virtuous. I don't need them so easily catered to. It turns out the Pharisees, the Jewish religious leaders of the day, were the first century's poster children for what today we call virtue signaling. Everything they did was performative for others to see and admire, totally wrapped up in an external righteousness rather than the real deal. And if one reads a little further in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reserved his harshest and most withering criticism and contempt for them, declaring that when Pharisees gave, prayed, and fasted in public for the praise and affirmation of men that they had received their reward in full. Convinced and satisfied with their own righteousness, they could not see their desperate need. They were far, far away from being poor in spirit and far, far away from the kingdom of heaven. Personally, I do not find these times we live in very helpful if I genuinely desire to walk the walk rather than just talk the talk of my faith. They do not cultivate in me a posture receptive to grace, nor encourage me to offer grace, empathy, and mercy to others. Rather, what is cultivated in me is a spirit of judgment, superiority, and disdain. Very hard to reconcile with Jesus' words, for whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. Although we all virtue signal in some form or fashion, it's especially harmful when done by believers, those of us who profess to be followers of Christ. The temptation to signal our virtue has always been and continues to be an enormous Achilles heel for Christians and for the church. We are susceptible, because we still sin, to moving away over time from our initial confession of brokenness and need, of being poor in spirit, to something quite different. For example, I'm an elder here at Grace. I lead a couple of small groups. I volunteer in the toddler room. Man, I even went on a mission trip last fall. Sure, Christ died for my sins, but look at me now. I think we can all safely agree that I'm nailing it, right? Go me! Now those things I'm doing aren't bad. In fact, they're good things. It's my pride that's a problem. My lens has moved stealthily, covertly from my need to my merit. What I'm now presenting in my life is not the gospel and it's not the truth and is terribly misleading to anyone genuinely searching for the truth. So what can we do about this state of things? As I reflect on today's beatitude, blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. I'm convinced we'd be better off signaling our vices more and our virtues less. More emphasis on what Christ has done on our behalf and less of what we've done on his. Being poor in spirit, confessing our spiritual poverty and need is not intended to be a one-time event, but only the beginning of a lifelong transformation empowered by God's Holy Spirit. We tend to underestimate the amazing power and ongoing blessing being poor in spirit offers to each of us individually and to the church as a whole. When we embrace our weakness and need, it's a much more honest and compelling witness of Jesus Christ than when we don't. I find it very revealing that the following brief little episode was deemed important enough to be included in three of the four Gospels, accounts of Jesus' life and ministry. Matthew, the disciple and former tax collector, was hosting a great banquet at his house for Jesus, along with a large crowd of tax collectors and other unsavory sorts. The Pharisees complained. Of course they did. Every party needs a poop. Asking why Jesus was dining and hanging out with these sinners, Jesus answered them as follows. It's not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. If the church is to be a welcoming, grace-filled infirmary that it's designed to be, rather than an exclusive enclave for the moral and virtuous. It's a shame that we so often act and are perceived as if we're the latter rather than the former. There is no advantage to clinging to these pretenses. We in the church are far more appealing and credible when we don't. One of the things I've always loved and valued most about grace is that we have, for the most part, leaned into the notion that we do not have our act together and hold such a confession to not only be self-evident, but hopeful, attractive, and life-giving. And though admitting one's abject spiritual poverty and desperate need might be a giant, depressing downer in the world's eyes, it offers great comfort and new life to those who actually know themselves to be sinners. Now, it's important to note that we can't make ourselves poor in spirit. It's not something we can do or become on our own. It's the work of God's Holy Spirit who convicts us of our sin and draws us to Jesus. But we can certainly cooperate with the Spirit. How we respond matters. We can remind ourselves through prayer, study, and worship that we are now in Jesus Christ not through anything we've done. When we embrace that defining fact that we are not Christ due to our being either moral or good, but because we've been forgiven, rescued, and redeemed, it unlocks the door to the magnificence of grace and grows our appetite to extend grace to others. Speaking only for myself, when I'm poor in spirit, there is a softening in my heart, a little more empathy and tolerance of others, a little less focused on others' deficiencies, a little more patient, a little more inclined to forgive. I'd like to close with one final remarkable and eye-opening parable from the book of Luke, which has such profound implications that I don't think it gets the attention that it deserves. Jesus was invited to dine at one of the Pharisees' houses. Learning of this, a woman from town who had led an immoral life brought perfume and stood behind Jesus at his feet, weeping. Wetting his feet with her tears, she then wiped them with her hair, kissed, and poured perfume on them. The Pharisee was indignant, thinking to himself that if Jesus was truly a prophet, he would have known that the woman touching him was a sinner and how wrong this entire situation was. Knowing what his host was thinking, Jesus asked the Pharisee a question. He supposed the one who had the bigger debt canceled. You have judged correctly, Nor did she put oil on my head, but she has covered my feet with perfume. Therefore I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven, for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little, loves little. Jesus then said to the woman, your sins are forgiven. Once again, the gospel turns everything we know on its head. It's not the upstanding and righteous who are most inclined and most able to love, but those who most appreciate the depth of their need for forgiveness, mercy, and grace, the poor in spirit. It literally is the gift that keeps on giving and the blessing that keeps on blessing. This moment in our culture, with all its acrimony and angst, presents an opportune time for us to offer something different, to truly be salt and light in a lost world that really just seems like it's thrashing about. In addition to being biblical and true, it's a lot more attractive and inviting to others when our lives reflect a healthy circumspection and wariness of our own virtue. And a well-founded confidence and well-placed trust in the righteousness and redemption offered through Jesus Christ. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Not only is poorness in spirit key to God's kingdom for us, it's the key to the kingdom for the world. There's a lot at stake. Let's pray. Dear Lord, thank you for this morning. Thank you for your love. Thank you for the fact that we can stand before you without a claim, and you love us. That's what you expect. You're our God. You, your righteousness, your love, your grace and mercy are sufficient for us. Thank you for this morning. Pray that you'll use it to however you see fit. And I thank you for being merciful to me, a fool. Amen.

All right, Grace, well, good afternoon and Merry Christmas. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to do that. Christmas Eve is my favorite day of the year, particularly at Grace. I love seeing old and new faces. I love seeing, looking out and seeing families sitting together, three generations sometimes. What a blessing that is. I'm sentimental and hokey, and I think that that's really, really wonderful. So if you get to be here with your family, I'm so happy for you. And I also wanted to express a sincere thank you and my gratitude for choosing to spend your Christmas with grace. I hope that you're blessed by what we're doing and singing and talking about. In this sermon this afternoon, I'm supposed to finish up with our series called Foretold, where we've been going through some prophecies in the Old Testament, seeing their fulfillment in Christ in the New Testament, and kind of reflecting on that impact for Christmas. And as I was writing this week's sermon for the Christmas Eve service, I hated it. I just didn't like it at all. I didn't know why I chose it. I mean, I knew why I chose it. It was Jesus is the light of the world. Jesus' light shines brightly at Christmas. And I just, I couldn't, I couldn't make it work. And so finally, I just decided to scrap it and take a minute, the platform that I'm afforded as the pastor, to just tell you what's on my heart at Christmas. What do I want to say to Grace that, it came to me very quickly what I wanted to talk about with you guys. Because I don't know about you. I can speak for a few because I've confirmed this with some people around me. But this December has not felt very Christmassy. This is the least feeling Christmas I think that I've ever experienced. I've never been in a December that felt less like Christmas than this one. And that may resonate with you, it may not. But for me, I'm sitting here going, I can't believe it's Christmas Eve. We just finished up with Thanksgiving. We just got done with that. And now the decorations are up and we're doing all the things and you're rushing to all the meetings and all the plans and all the parties, but it doesn't feel very much like Christmas. And really, if I'm being honest, I just feel harried and hurried and exhausted. And increasingly, we do this to ourselves and our culture does this to us where December, as merry and jolly as it is, as happy as it is, as much of this as this feigned joy as we are supposed to experience at Christmas time and walk around with a dumb smile on our face saying Merry Christmas to everyone. Happy Holidays, this is the best time of year. That's not necessarily true. And increasingly, December becomes a remarkable source of stress, right? In our workplaces, we're trying to do what we've got to do to meet the year end. There's some things we've got to get out the door, there's some things we've got to ship, there's some deals we have to close, there's's some stuff that we got to get done. There's some emails that we have to get out. There's some reports that we have to file. There's so much to do at the end of the year, and we're working late nights. My wife has been working until midnight trying to get some deadlines done a lot of nights in the last couple of weeks. We turn in extra time. I've watched my staff turn in extra time in the months of December working weekends and stuff like that, and I know that you've done that as well. We have parties to get to. We have gifts to buy. We have gifts to wrap. We have things to host, which means houses to clean. We have meals to prepare and to deliver. We have children's recitals to attend. I have to go to John's preschool and watch him stand there still while the rest of the children sing and then pretend like I'm having a fun time. This is how I wanted to spend my Thursday. I'm glad I'm not working right now and getting actual things done. I like to go sit in a room where I can barely see my son. He doesn't do anything for 10 minutes, and then I have to go tell him he did a great job. That's fun. And we had to do three of those, plus a piano recital. But we all, we do it. And we just run through life harried and hurried. And I just thought, the rate at which we are going, we are about to careen into 2025. No more prepared for that and for that year than we are for this Christmas. And if we're being honest, at least for me, I don't think it was just December that has exhausted me. I know for many of us, 2024 has been a difficult year. For some of us, 2024 will forever mark a year of profound loss. And so as we approach this Christmas, that loss echoes and resonates with us. And we can't help but carry it into these places where we are supposed to be merry. In 2024, things, let's just say it out loud, life continues to get more expensive and wages do not continue to be commensurate with that expense. And many of us and many of our families feel that pressure. And that exerts a unique pressure on an individual and on a marriage and on a family, and that's hard. The political year, no matter where you sit, was hard. You have to watch your words. You can't say this thing to that person. You can't bring up this topic in these circles. You have to be very careful and very measured. There's just a low, lying, simmering tension in a lot of the circles in which we exist. It has stressed us out and it has taxed us. And for me, personally, I'm going into 2025 hoping it's just a lot better than 2024 because this wasn't my favorite year. We have private struggles. We have private stresses. I can see the strain of this year on the people who are closest to me. A lot of times when I think about a sermon, I think about what I imagine to be the average person of grace. And I try to aim at that person. And then people to the left and the right, inward and outward, further along, less farther along, have attended a long time, have attended less time, they can catch something as I talk to the mean. But as I wrote this, I thought about the people who are closest to me. So if you don't know me, I hope this helps you. I hope this resonates with you. And I'm not foolish enough to think that it will resonate with everyone. Some of you have had a wonderful December. You're like, no, dude, Christmas has been great. Some of you have had a wonderful 2024, and I'm so glad you have. But a lot of us have not. And a lot of us, if we're being honest, just kind of feel defeated and exhausted and tired. And it's weird to roll into Christmas feeling like that. Because of that, I think it will help us to reflect on the week after Christmas for the Holy Family. The Holy Family is how our Catholic brothers and sisters refer to the earthly family of Christ, Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. And I want to turn our attention to thinking about what life must have been like for that week following Christmas. And I know it's probably not typical. I don't have the luxury of going to Christmas Eve services. I only attend the ones I'm paid to speak at. So I don't know what other guys and girls pick to talk about, but I'm guessing it's not typically the week after Christmas. So if you'll indulge me this, what do you think that week was like for them? They have this baby in a manger. Scripture doesn't tell us how long they tarried in Bethlehem. It doesn't tell us if they continued to participate in the high holidays in Jerusalem. It doesn't tell us how long they waited to go back to Nazareth. But my guess is that as soon as she was able to get on a donkey or get in a cart being pulled by a donkey, that Joseph loaded his young family up and got them back to the comforts of Nazareth and to home as quickly as he could. And when they got back to Nazareth, this is what is so amazing to me, I think. Their world became so very small. Their world becomes tiny. It's all about this baby. Joseph, I'm sure, had things to do. I'm sure he had cabinets to build and shelves to hang and closets to arrange. Actually, I hesitate to do this because it's nerdy, but it's important to get things right. Joseph probably won the carp carpenter, okay? Mason and carpenter are interchangeable in the original language. Nazareth is surrounded by stone quarries, not trees, so he probably was a mason, all right? I'm just saying. So he had bricks to build and walls to erect. But he put that on hold because all Joseph cared about that week after Christmas was caring for his wife and caring for this baby and sitting still together and beholding and reveling in the blessings of God. And everything else in the world faded and got very small and life got very still. And for Mary, who must have had all of these thoughts of preparing a house for a baby, when you had your first baby, remember, this is so funny, remember when you had your first baby, your mamas, and the most important thing, you go into this weird nesting thing, and the most important thing in the world is to get that nursery ready. And you just, you ride your husband like a rented mule to get that thing ready on time. And we put, we buy new Allen wrenches, we put together all the things, we paint the room, we hang the stuff, and it's ready. It's month five. It is ready. We're good to go. And then you have that baby and you don't use that stuff for four months. That baby sleeps in your room. You had plenty of time. I'm sure that Mary had all these thoughts about getting the house ready for this child. And she had a wedding to plan. She had things to do. But for that week, when she got home with that baby, all those things faded. And her life got very still and very small. And what I and to reflect on that first week after Christmas. Because I think for many of us, we need to, in this upcoming week, seek to emulate the Holy Family in our life. And seek to be still. And seek to be small. And seek to focus on the blessings of God. I think that most of you in here have been burning it at both ends. I think that most of you in here are tired. I think that most of you in here, if you had a way to hit pause and go to a hotel room and exist in 65 degrees and pitch black for 12 hours, you'd take it running, man. And you would sleep. The sleep of angels. And I wonder when the last time was that you allowed yourself to be still and focus on God's blessings. And I know that it might seem impossible to do this. But what did you do when you had your first baby? For some of you, it's been a lot of years. And those things are cloudy. I think God intentionally erases our memories so we don't warn the next generation about how miserable it is to have a kid. Because I always laugh at people who don't have children who say that they're tired. And I'm like, buddy, I used to think I knew what tired was, too. Bring home a newborn. You bring home the newborn exhausted, and then it hits you, oh, yeah, no one's coming. Like, I'm still not sleeping for three years, right? But when you have that baby, first one, second one, third one, doesn't your world get very still and very small? All the things at work, dad that you had to do and get done and mom that you had to do and get done, don't those things fade away? Aren't you for just this blink in time, just the snapshot, finally able to see things in a perspective that puts work where it actually belongs and stops it from being a five alarm fire in your head because you have more urgent matters at hand. Don't you, moms and dads, see that when you bring home that first baby all the social calendars all the obligations all the half twos and the ought tos all the appointments and all the meetings and all the deals and all the lunches you have this remarkable ability all of the sudden to see them for what they are and to set them aside and focus on what's important to you. We have the ability to make our lives still and small. And so this week coming up, I want to encourage you to make this verse your mantra. It's a very simple verse in Psalm 4610. I'm going to say it to you, and I'm positive that you can memorize it. And I want you to say it to yourself this week. Psalm 4610. Be still and know that I am God. Psalm 46, 10. Be still and know that I am God. I don't know what your plans are this week. I know that for us, we're going to get up tomorrow, we're going to have Christmas morning, and then we're going to load up with my mother-in-law and we're going to drive to Atlanta. And we're going to spend the week there. And that week is filled with different stressors and different appointments. We've got to get the kids loaded up. We've got to get them down there. We've got to go see mom and dad. We've got to do the thing. We've got to open the presents. I've got to look at Lily and make sure she's adequately grateful for the crap she doesn't need. And then we've got to do all the stuff, right? And I have to smile when I get the things. you got to do all that stuff. And then you got to go to the other family and I don't know what your family dynamics are. You got to watch your words so you don't offend anybody, so you don't give off the wrong kind of vibes or whatever it is. It carries stress. But when I feel myself get stressed this week, I'm going to slow down and I'm going to say in my head, be still and know that I am God. Calm down. I'm with you. Be still. When my head spins forward to the sermon in January, to the series coming up, to the things that we need to do, to what's waiting on me when I get home, I'm going to stop and tell myself, be still and know that I am God. Just for a week, be still. I don't know what your plans are. But my encouragement to you and what I want to say to you today, what I want to say to Grace and to the friends of Grace, is this week, as much as you can, in every moment that you can steal, be still, be small, and behold. Be still, be small, and behold. Let Christmas be a gift to you that re-centers you and refocuses you on Christ. Let Christmas be a pause button in your life. A divinely ordained break. Where you agree with God that this week we will be like the Holy Family. And I will be still. I will let things go. Let the dishes, listen to me, let the dishes pile up longer than you want and sit present with your families while you can. Let the email go. It'll be there in January. I know you think it's going to be the end of the world if you don't respond and that person's going to judge you. Who cares? We don't like them anyways. Let it go. Be still and allow God to speak into your life. Be small. And I mean this. When I say that Mary and Joseph's world got very small when they had Christ, what I meant is it's just them. It's just the family. It's just mom, dad, and son. And so this week, I want to encourage you, like the Holy Family, to be small. Keep your circle small. Focus on who you have around you. Be grateful for your family. Be grateful for your intimate friends. Be grateful for who you find yourself in circle with. And try to keep yourself from enlarging your world beyond these simple blessings of God. Try to keep yourself from enlarging your world to external concerns, to what's going on at work and what's going on socially and what's going on dramatically and what's going on in the rest of the areas of the world. And try the best you can, Grace, to let your world for just this week be small and focus on the blessings that you have around you. And as you're being still and being small, behold. Behold. Behold the blessings of God that sit in your life. Behold the beauty of children. Behold the beauty of a spouse. And listen, some of us have wonderful marriages. And when I say behold the beauty of your spouse, that's a simple thing for you to do. Some of you have really bad marriages. They're rough. And when I say behold the beauty of a spouse, you're like, I don't know. I don't think that's not for me this year. Behold the beauty that you're still together, that you're still fighting, that you still care about each other enough to keep working on this, and behold the beauty of the possibility that it could get better. But if we don't stop and pause, if we just keep running into 2025 like we handled 2024, if we go into it as harried and hurried and exhausted as we are, that will not get better. Sometimes things need a pause to heal. So behold the beauty of the presence of your spouse. At some point in the next day or two, I'd be willing to bet that you find yourself around a tree. When you're there, let me just put this thought in your head. When you're there, you're around your tree and people are opening gifts and you're doing the thing with family. Can you take some time to be still and to behold each person in that room? Can you take some time to express to God gratitude that they exist in your life for who they are and for what they represent? Can you stop and acknowledge God's incredible goodness in your life? If you're a grandparent and you're lucky enough to sit around the tree with grandbabies, can you just pause and don't worry if the temperature's right or if they liked your fruit salad. They didn't. Nobody does. Stop serving it, please. Stop worrying about if they liked your gift. It doesn't matter. It's going to get thrown away in a year or two. Stop worrying about all the things that distract us from the moment and just simply praise God that you have grandbabies and they're there with you. If you're lucky enough to sit around the tree with parents, even if the relationship is difficult, even if they're not who they used to be, will you please pause and behold that blessing from God and praise him for their presence in your life? If there is a seat around that tree that is empty this year and wasn't last year, or is empty now and that absence still resounds, and it causes you grief, can you behold that grief and be grateful for that empty seat? Because the more it hurts, the harder they left you, and the bigger blessing they were. Can we stop and be grateful for the years that God gave us with them? Mamas and daddies, can we be grateful for our kids? Grateful for our brothers and sisters and our friends and our family that are around. Pause around that tree and behold God's goodness in your life. And then this week, I don't know what the rest of your schedule is. I hope for most of you, it has wound down. There's nothing really important happening. If you're going to work, there are cursory hours that don't really matter anyways, and you're going to get it done. You're just going to coast through, and then you're going to go home. You're going to do about 10 full minutes of work a day, and then you're going to call it. I hope that's that's your work week if that's what you're doing I hope you're not frenzied and harried I hope that's not the case and I hope that this week you will steal all the moments you can to be still and be small and behold and just pause with your family and the people that you love. And reflect on God's goodness in your life. And allow that to rejuvenate you. And replenish you. And restore you. As we move into yet another year. And listen, I know that some of you may be thinking, if you have not checked out already, that, yeah, Nate, that sounds like a decent idea. I mean, I like the idea, like, pause, just take a beat and reflect on things. I've got things to do. I'm busy. I've got appointments to hit. I've got things to go to. I've got houses to clean. I have things to get accomplished. All right. If I can't convince you to take a time out, allow Christmas to do that for you, then let's see if Jesus can. In Matthew chapter 6, starting in verse 25, in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus addresses this exact issue, and he says this. Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air. They do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you, by worrying, add a single hour to your life? Can any one of you, by worrying, add a single hour to your life? No. Just to help you out, no. So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. Let the words of Christ resonate with you today. Do not worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow has its own troubles. Each day has troubles of its own. Grace, I want to urge you as your pastor or pastor for the day. In the upcoming week, to be like the Holy Family. And at the end of what for many of us has been a difficult year, be still, be small, and behold the blessings of God in your life. And in that way, let him replenish and restore you for the upcoming year. Let Christmas be that gift to you. Let's pray. Father, we thank you so much for the gift of Christmas. We thank you for the time that it is and represents. We thank you for the family that we celebrate, that we spend time with. I pray for joy and laughter and hugs and tears. God, we pray for those who have lost. We pray that you would comfort them in what is a time full of mixed emotions. God, I know that there are people even now in our church who are suffering. I know that we have folks watching from the hospital right now and we pray for them and for Darlene. God, for a lot of us, this doesn't feel like Christmas yet, but we are trusting you and we are hoping in you. And Lord, I pray that we would find the strength and the wisdom at some point or another in the coming days to be like the family that you entrusted Jesus to. That we would be still and small and that we would behold you and your blessings. Help us to receive this gift. Jesus, we love you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see all of you. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that after the service. This is, as Kyle said, the second part of our series called Grace is Going Home. This is going to culminate in Pledge Sunday on March the 1st. And so the idea is that we're going to kind of spend five weeks thinking, dreaming, praying, talking about this. We're going to have the rhythm of the business meetings or the informational meetings over the course of the next five weeks. And then on March the 1st, what we're asking everyone to do is to bring a sealed pledge card with you. So those are in your seats today. Those are very likely going to get emailed or mailed out to you maybe in the middle of this week or next week if you'd like them to come to your home if you can't be encumbered with carrying that to your car. I understand. If it were me, I would be nervous that I would bend the corners and that it wouldn't be perfectly flat when I had it at my house, and I would prefer it show up in an envelope. So I totally understand that. I'm like that. But what we're asking is that even if you can't be here on March the 1st, that you, if you want to participate, would mail yours in and we'll keep those. And then we are on March the 1st, Tom Ledoux, our finance guy, is flying in from Florida. I've asked him specifically to bring a briefcase so it looks very official. And he will be totaling those up and we'll just see what God is going to do here. We'll find out how he's moved in our hearts. So that's how that's going to work. And if you want to take one of those home and begin to pray about that, that's fine. I also want to be very clear that if you're new here, you're just coming into Grace, and you're not yet sure if this is your home, or if you've been here for forever, we don't want anybody to feel any pressure. I don't want it to feel awkward for anyone as we go through this, but hopefully this is something that if we call grace home, this is something that we're excited about. So that's what we're going to be looking at for the next five weeks. You may be wondering, what in the world am I going to preach about for five weeks? Am I just going to do like giving and campaign and vision for the next four weeks? That would be a real bummer. I don't want to prepare for that any more than you want to hear it. So that's not what we're going to be doing. For the next two weeks, actually, we're going to be answering what I believe is the greatest question facing grace. I believe that we're in a new season as a church, that we have new things to think about, new dreams to form, a new direction to go in. And so that as a church, collectively, we have a question facing us that, as I think about the church, I believe that we are posing this to God, whether we realize this or not. I think that this is the best thing to be asking God right now as grace, which is simply this, Father, what would you have us do in hell? I think that's the greatest question facing us right now. I think that pursuing a permanent home is the first step to walk in obedience to answer this question, but that really isn't the point of the campaign. That really isn't the point of the next five weeks. The point of the next five weeks, honestly, is to answer this question and have us move as a culture and as a church into what God would have for us in health. The reason I think that this is the question facing grace is that for many years, I don't know exactly how many, I wouldn't try to make a guess about that, but for many years, by necessity, the mission of grace has been grace. The mission of our church has been our church. The leaders of the church, the core of the church, those who have loved grace over the years, really our goal has been to get grace to a place where it was simply healthy, was to survive. By necessity for many years, the focus of grace has been turned inward on grace, going, how do we get healthy? How do we put the right structures and the right leadership in place so that we can be in a position where we are thriving? So for many years, the mission of grace has been grace. And now, in God's goodness, He's brought us to this place of health. He's brought us to a place where as a church, we are thriving. And I don't want to be gross about it, but by almost any statistical measure that you would look at a church and measure it, we're doing well. God is blessing us. And so we sit now in a place of health for the first time in a while. And instead of scrambling to get healthy and try to thrive one day, I think that we need to acknowledge as a body of believers that call this place home, that we are healthy, that we are thriving. And because of that, the question becomes, Father, what would you have us do in this health? On this foundation of health that he's built here, what would he have us do? And I believe his answer to that question is actually biblical. I believe it's the same for every church. And I believe that Jesus really gives us the outline of this answer in what's become known as the Great Commission. If you have a Bible, you can turn to Matthew chapter 28. This is the last chapter of the gospel of Matthew. The gospels tell the story of the life of Jesus. And at this portion of the Gospel, Jesus has been crucified for our sins. He has come back to life, risen from the grave. He has ministered to people for an amount of days. He's ministered to the disciples, set them about their task, and now he's going back up into heaven. And these are the final instructions that Jesus leaves for the disciples. These are the marching orders from God himself to his church. Jesus came, he stayed for three years, not only to die for our sins, but to establish his kingdom on earth, which is the church. And these are the marching orders that he gives to the church. He says, beginning in verse 18, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And it continues teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And then he says, I will be with you always. So if you were to ask Jesus, what would you have churches do in health? What do you want for your healthy churches? What should they set about doing? I think what he would tell us, I think his answer based on this passage, and not just this passage, but what he says over and over again about his kingdom, and what Paul and the rest of the New Testament, who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament, what he teaches us about God's kingdom and what we see in what's called the general epistles or the general letters after those from the other New Testament writers, I think what they would all say is that what God wants for his church is to grow in depth and in breadth. I think what Jesus wants for us, if we say, God, what would you have us do in health? I think Jesus would say, I want you to grow deep and I want you to grow wide. I want you to grow in your spiritual depth, in your walks with the Lord, in your intimacy with God. I want a church that is full of mature, seasoned, loving, obedient, compassionate, gracious believers. And I want a church that reaches out into the community and grows wide. I think a healthy church is growing in both of those directions. So often churches do one well and not the other. They go deep. They teach the scripture. Everyone there is mature. The problem is they don't reach out into their communities and share the love of Christ with those in their different circles of influences. Other churches are great at reaching out, but not so great at growing deep. And I think that Jesus's answer to what would you have a healthy church do is to grow both in depth and in breadth. That's why in that verse, I highlighted, make disciples, grow deep, of all nations. Why? Everybody. And really, this is the goal of every church, and this is what we're going to talk about for the next two weeks. This week, we're going to talk about growing deep, and next week, we're going to talk about growing wide, and how we want to do that at at Grace and what the biblical model is for those things. So today, what we're really asking is, as we focus on growing deep, is God, how would you have us make disciples at Grace? What does it mean to be a disciple? How would you have us make disciples? And really, this is the goal of every church. Every Bible-believing church ever says that their goal is to make disciples. They say it in different ways. If you've been in church world at all, you've heard mission statements of different churches. You've heard it preached about a bunch of different times. Some churches just come out right and say it. They're very direct. Our goal is to make disciple-making disciples. Other churches will say, know God and make God known, or dominate the community with the love of Jesus Christ. Love your neighbor, love Jesus, and live faithfully, or connecting people to Jesus and connecting people to people. Churches say it in different ways, but the goal is to make disciples. That's what we all want to do. Every church shares that in common. It is like the white whale of all ministry. It's what everybody is going for, but here's the secret of church world that you may or may not have figured out already in your adult life. Churches tend to be not very good at it. It is really hard to make disciples. And the more conversations I've had with other pastors, not me because I'm excellent at it and my church never fails at anything, but with other pastors, what I learn is that this is a hard process. It's a difficult task. In my last church, I was there for seven years. When I started there, it was a church of about 11 or 1200. By the time I moved on to here, it was a church of about 2000. They kept me in the corner. I did nothing. And none of that growth has anything to do with me. So I'm not bragging. I'm just telling you, that's the season of the church that I walked through. And during that season, we would go to conferences with other churches that were similar in size and oftentimes larger. And I can't tell you how many times at these conferences, we had our little breakout sessions and you discuss all the things that are happening. And I would sit around a table with other people who were small groups pastors, or if you have a conservative church that's adult education pastor, some churches call it a discipleship pastor, whatever you want to call it. My job was to think about the discipleship process at my church. My job was to answer the question, when someone walks in that door for the very first time and they are far from God, but they're spiritually curious, what systems and programs do we have in place to move that person from spiritually curious to spiritually mature disciple, walking with the Lord, reproducing themselves and making disciples? That was my job. What's the process? Someone comes in, they don't even know if they're a believer yet, but they're curious. What do we do as a church to take them from spiritually curious to elder of the church? That's what we do. It was my job to think about that process. And I would sit around the table with other people who their entire job was to think about that process too. And we would talk about the different things that we're doing, the different structures in our church, how we do small groups, and what discipleship means, and all of those things. And inevitably, somebody would ask, what are you guys doing to make disciples? I never really heard that great of an answer. Very few churches had a good answer for that. I thought I had a good answer. It will surprise you none to know that I just bowled right in there with what we were doing, thinking this was the greatest thing in the world. But after seven years of doing it, what I realized is it seemed good on paper, but we're not really producing disciples. And it's kind of a discouraging thing to think about. It's not that the church isn't making disciples, it's just that it's inefficient and ineffective, and there's no systematic way to do it, and it gets messy, and it gets difficult. And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about when we commit to something at Grace, how do we want to make disciples here? What should that process look like? And because I've thought about that a lot, and frankly a lot and listened to whatever I can consume, I've tried my best to think through, well, what are the reasons that it struggles? What are the reasons that I see that churches so often struggle to produce disciples in a meaningful and in an effective and efficient way? And I think that so many churches struggle because our definition of discipleship is unclear and our expectations around discipleship are unrealistic. I think so many churches struggle because our definition is unclear and our expectations are unrealistic. Now, what I mean is, when I say our definition is unclear, I mean our definition of both the process, what does discipleship look like, and of the actual term. What does it mean to be a disciple? I think we're unclear about the process. Y'all, I have seen so many different discipleship programs, right? I remember one, and it's a good program out of a church called Twelve Stone near where I'm from, and it's called Joshua's Men. And it's this beefed up three-year study. You sign up for it, and you go like every week at the same time, and you go through this curriculum, and there's a guy that leads you, and there's like groups of six to eight men, and you go through this curriculum, and at the end of it, you're a disciple. And I just thought, what a corporate America way to approach discipleship. What a bunch of dudes getting in a room. We want to make disciples. What do we need to do? What do we need to know? How do we need to learn? What are the blanks we need to fill in? How do we systematize this nebulous relational thing? Joshua's men. And it works sometimes, but not all the time. Most of the time, people crap out. Very few people make it through all three years, right? Or I want to be discipled, and so we'll look for that one person that we're going to have coffee with every week. And we sit down and we say, will you disciple me? And they say yes, and then we don't know what to do from there. So you just get into a small group, and we get into a small group, and we're not sure if discipleship is happening. I've seen so many programs and so many efforts that I think we're unclear on the process. What does it take to produce a disciple? And I know that we're unclear at Grace, because over the past, I would say, year and a half, two years, I've had multiple conversations with people here who have wanted to meet with me. And when they meet with me, they say, hey, I'm looking for someone to disciple me. I'm looking for someone to mentor me. I'm ready to take the next steps in my faith. I'm ready to grow in my walk. What do I need to do? Who do you think I can talk to? Who would you recommend? Do you have, like, just a bank of disciple makers that you can just, like, plug me into? Do you have, like, a catalog I can talk to? Who would you recommend? Do you have like just a bank of disciple makers that you can just like plug me into? Do you have like a catalog I can choose from? And I'll have other people who will come to me and they'll go, hey, I'd love to disciple somebody. Do you have any young people who are just clamoring for it? And what those conversations tell me is that I have not been clear about our process at Grace. And so I wanted to try to bring some clarity this morning to both what the process is and what the definition of it is. Because on Tuesday, we had an elder meeting. And at the elder meeting, I just brought up the point, I think that there were six elders in the room. And I'm not being overly flattering. I mean this with all sincerity. I love our elders. I have a great amount of respect for our elders. I would put our elders up against any other, not that it's a competition, but I just think we have some really capable, smart people in that room, and I'm grateful for them. And to those people, I said, if I asked you guys to define discipleship, what are the chances I would get if I set each of them down, all six of them that happened to be there that night, and I got to talk with them individually and ask them, how would you define discipleship and what a disciple is? They all agreed that I would get six very different, likely meandering, probably unclear, lacking precision, lacking concision answers about what discipleship is. They would all be different versions of right. They would all wander there eventually. And these are people who love the church and who are committed to the idea of making disciples, but collectively as a group, we didn't have a concise way to explain it. And I think in so many places, the definition of what a disciple is and what discipleship, the process is, is unclear. So I wanted to try to bring some clarity to it for grace and come up with a new way for us to think about as we seek to become disciples and make disciples, which are God's instructions to us. About a year and a half ago, I went to a conference. It was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. It was a guy named Larry Osborne that was putting on the conference. He's got a big, huge church out there. He's in his mid-60s. I love the way this guy thinks about ministry. And he gave me a definition of discipleship that I had never heard before. I had spent most of my vocational life thinking about it, studying it, learning about it, trying to frame it up. And he gave me a definition that was so simple that it totally changed the way I thought about discipleship. And I've been waiting to kind of spring it on you and make this how we think about it at Grace. So this isn't from me, this is from him, but this is what he said. And this is how I want to define the process of discipleship at Grace. Discipleship is simply taking your next step of obedience. That's what discipleship is. Now, you're adults, you love Jesus, you can poke that and prod that, and you can think through that, and you can take it home and work it out and see if it makes sense to you, but to me it makes perfect sense that discipleship is simply taking your next step of obedience. That's what it is. We are on that course. It's a process of simply taking our next step of obedience. And with every step, we get closer to God. With every step, we sacrifice more of who we are and accept more of what God wants. With every step, we admit more and more that I am not the Lord of my life, that God is the authority in my life. So with every step, we are getting closer to God. So being on the course of discipleship simply means taking our next step of obedience. And if you think about it, this is what Jesus taught the whole time. In the scriptures, our love of God is irrevocably coupled with our obedience to him. Look at what Jesus says in the Gospel of John in two different places, a chapter apart. I love the happenstance of the references of these verses, 14, 15, and 15, 14. He says, if you love me, this is Jesus speaking, if you love me, keep my commandments. And the very next chapter, if you are my friends, do what I command. It's not complicated. Jesus wasn't trying to shroud discipleship in mystery. He wasn't trying to make spiritual growth difficult or hard to grasp or understand. He wasn't even trying to make it for the spiritually elite. He just said, if you love me, you know how I know? You obey me. You know who my friends are? The people that are close to me? The people who obey my father. In Mark that I'm going through with my men's group, his mom and his siblings show up to try to stop him from teaching because they thought he was crazy. This was early on in his ministry. And he's in the middle of teaching and they say, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here. And he said, my mother and my brothers are those who obey the will of my Father. Jesus himself couples our love of God with our obedience to him. So discipleship is simply walking, taking steps of that obedience. John, the disciple, was, I would argue, the closest disciple to Jesus. I don't know that he was like the best believer. I have no idea to measure that. But relationally, he seems closer to Jesus than anybody else who is living. And at the end of his life, he wrote letters to the churches. And in the second letter that he wrote to the church, in 2 John 6, verse 1, he says, and this is love. He's talking about if we say that we know Jesus, but we don't have love, then we are liars. And then he defines love. This is love, that we walk in obedience to his commands. It is one thing to say that we love God. It is one thing to say that we believe. It is one thing to say that we love God above all else, heart, soul, and mind, amen. That's another thing to walk in obedience. That's why I'm increasingly convinced that what it means to be discipled is to simply take our next step of obedience. And here's what this means, and I love this. This means that discipleship is for everyone. Discipleship is for all of us. I think if you're in the church, sometimes you've heard the word discipleship. You may have been here long enough to have heard that word or been in Christian culture long enough to have heard that word but not really know what it means. I think some of us see that something like far off, that it's like the spiritual equivalent to buds training for the seals in the Navy, that it's like for the military elite, that it's for Christian black belts, and that's not the deal. Disciples are not people on mountainsides who don't talk to anybody but Jesus and just like eat grass. That's not what disciples are. Disciples are not unattainable figures like Elijah or Abraham. Those are pictures of disciples, but those are pictures of people who have been walking and taking steps of obedience for their entire life. But discipleship is for everyone. Has it ever occurred to you that the disciples were disciples before they were Christians? You ever thought about that? When Jesus goes to Matthew, the tax collector, and he says, hey, I want you to follow me. And Matthew puts down his instruments and he leaves his table and he follows Jesus. I don't think he yet fully understood that this is the Messiah, the Savior of the world. And one day he's going to die and I'm going to place my faith in that death so that it covers over my guilt and God accepts me and my relationship is restored. Matthew didn't know all that, but you know what he did do? He took a step of obedience. He said, okay, I'm going to follow you. Peter and James and John, when they put down their fishing nets, they didn't yet know the full magnitude of who this man was that they were following. I would argue that they weren't even yet believers. They simply took a step of obedience. And so what that means for you today is, even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, discipleship is still an option for you because it's simply an invitation to take your next step of obedience. And everybody has one of those. Your next step might be, okay, I've had some nagging questions about spiritual things for a long time. I'm going to take the step to begin to learn about answers to those questions. Maybe you've been gathering and learned some information about those questions. And maybe your next step is to get more serious about what it might look like to take on a faith. Maybe your next step is to accept Christ. Maybe it's to get baptized. Maybe your next step is to have that hard conversation that you've been needing to have. Maybe your next step is to confess something to your spouse or to someone you care about. Maybe your next step is to finally get locked into the discipline of waking up early and spending time in God's Word and spending time in prayer. Everybody's next step is different, but here's the thing about the Holy Spirit. I don't have to stand up here and guess at what they might be until I hit yours because he's already telling you. If you're a believer, we all have a next step of obedience at all times. So discipleship is for everyone, and it always beckons, and it always invites. It is not for the spiritually elite. It's for everybody. And if that's the process of discipleship, if that's what it means to be being discipled, then this is how we define a disciple at grace. This is actually something that I talked over with the elders. This is not my definition. This is our definition. The one that I presented to them at first, they said was too absolute and exclusive, and I came around to agreeing with them. So this is a result of a group think of not just me, but the leadership of the church. And what we believe that a disciple is, and how we want to define it as grace, is a disciple is one who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. A disciple is someone who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. Have you taken more steps this year than last year? As you progressed last year, did you continue to progress or did you stop? A disciple is one who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. At some points, we get off the train. At some points, we stop walking in obedience. At some points, we get into a bit of a spiritual rut, but when we get back onto it and we begin to take those steps again, then we are walking in discipleship again, which means that at grace, what we want to do, if we want to make disciples like Jesus told us to do, then what we want to do is constantly be showing ourselves and one another what our next step of obedience is, constantly encouraging one another to take those next steps of obedience and define a disciple as someone who is simply walking and increasing obedience to the Father. That's how we want to define those things. So that's how I want to bring clarity. If we say that one of the reasons that churches struggle is because we're unclear, I want to do what I can to bring some clarity to how we think about the process and the definition of the term at grace. But I also said that our expectations are unrealistic. I think what we expect around discipleship is something that doesn't always work in adult life. I think often we get locked into the single mentor paradigm is what I'm calling it. Often in church we get locked into the single mentor paradigm. We look at the way that Jesus discipled the disciples. And because the disciples had one person that was pouring into them for three years, then our expectation of discipleship is that we'll find this one spiritual mentor that we look up to in every way in life and that will sit under them and they'll teach us. It's this life-on-life model where they followed Jesus around and lived with him. It says, foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head. So the disciples just followed him around couch surfing for three years. I know it's crude, but it's true. That's life-on-life discipleship. We can't in our culture really mimic that. But we still exist in this single mentor paradigm that as adults, we're supposed to find the one person to follow and pour into us. And I've even said things. You've heard pastors say things like this before. I've said it. We see the model of it with Paul and Timothy. I've said before, everyone needs to have their Paul and everyone needs to have their Timothy. Everybody needs to have someone who's pouring into them and everybody needs to have someone that they're pouring into. This kind of single mentor paradigm. The problem is, in 2020, that's not very effective. With the staff this week, the full-time staff, Kyle and Steve and Aaron, in our staff meeting, I said, which of you have ever gone to someone and asked them to disciple you? And because there are people who care about their walk with the Lord, because it matters to them, all of them said, yeah, multiple times. And I said, how'd that go for you? And they said, eh, it was all right. I said, how many of you have had somebody come to you and ask you to disciple them? And they all said, yeah, we've had that before. How'd that go? They said, I don't really know what to do. I had somebody this week that I had coffee with, and he shared with me that years ago, there was a group of guys who were in their 20s, and he was in his 30s or maybe early 40s, and they went to him and they said, hey, will you disciple us? And he said, sure, and he started meeting with them, and then they didn't know what to do. We have a lack of clarity around the process. Our hope and our desire is to find the single mentor that can lead us for the next however many years and guide us through all things in life. And the truth of it is, that's a really rare find, particularly in adulthood. It's not impossible. It's not bad. It's great. And it happens. But if any of you have ever had someone that you said, yeah, I feel like that person discipled me, I would be willing to bet that nine out of 10 of us in the room, it was in high school or in college. I feel like I've discipled people, but they were always in high school or in college. It's a unique season of life that allows for that. But as adults, finding a single mentor to lead us in perpetuity becomes an ineffective thing. And I think hoping for that and expecting that is one of the reasons that we fail to make disciples. So instead of that, I want to propose to you guys the idea of seasons, topics, and communities of discipleship. Seasons of discipleship, topics of discipleship, and communities of discipleship. And here's what I mean. If you think about the disciples, if we understand discipleship as simply taking our next step of obedience towards God, yes, Jesus was the mentor. He was the guy pouring into those. He was the chief minister to the disciples in those three years. But do you mean to tell me that during those three years, the community that they had together of accountability and of encouragement and of challenge didn't help some of them take their next steps of obedience? Do you mean to tell me that as Jesus put different things in front of them, as he put different steps of obedience in front of them, go two by two and go into the surrounding towns and teach what I've taught you and perform the miracles that I've performed, do you mean to tell me that they didn't lean on each other to be encouraged towards that obedience? Do you mean to tell me that that wasn't a community of discipleship? I would argue that the disciples discipled the disciples. I think that's what they did. Furthermore, Jesus only spent three years with them. They had the rest of their lives to live. If you believe some research, they were at the latest in their early 20s when Jesus ascended into heaven. They had a long way to go. Who discipled Peter for those remaining years? Who discipled James and John? They did. They continued to encourage one another to take their next step of obedience towards God. So we want to have communities of discipleship here. We want to have topics and seasons of discipleship. I believe in seasons of discipleship because I believe that God puts people in our path for a season that we learn from during that time, and then at some point or another, that season's in, and each of you move into your next phase. We see that in Jesus's ministry and the disciples' ministry. We see Paul enter into John Mark's life and disciple him for a season. We see Paul disciple Timothy for a season. We see Paul and Barnabas work together for a season. I think that there are seasons of people in our life and things that God wants us to work on, and I believe that there are topics of discipleship. A great example of this is the small group that meets this afternoon. This afternoon, Steve, our worship leader, and his wife, Lisa, start their marriage small group. It's going to last for about six weeks, and then after that, they may continue to meet and discuss other things. But for those six weeks, absolutely what they are doing is discipling those couples in marriage. It's a topic of discipleship. What they're going to do is show them how to take their next steps of obedience in their marriage. It's a community of discipleship because it's 16 to 20 people who are getting together every week, and they're going to encourage one another in that direction. It's a season of discipleship. It's not going to go on forever. It's going to happen now, and then move on to another thing. I want us to reshape the way we think about discipleship, to move away from the single mentor paradigm. We might find that, but discipleship can happen outside of that. And start looking for people and communities and opportunities that can encourage us to take our next step in obedience to God. This is why we have small groups shaped up the way that we do. We sign up for our small groups every January and every August. And part of the design of that is to give you easy in-ramps and easy off-ramps. You try a small group for a semester. It works for you as a community of discipleship and a season of discipleship, maybe even a topic of discipleship then. And then the next semester, you do what seems most helpful to you. So maybe we stay in our small groups in perpetuity, and that becomes a community of discipleship for years to come. And maybe we shift into a different group. But our small groups are structured in such a way that we can move into and out of whichever groups are going to help us along our path the best. Which is again why I want us to start thinking about discipleship in terms of seasons and community and topics. And as we think about, man, I wish somebody would disciple me. If you're thinking about meeting with someone, if you're thinking about approaching someone, if you see someone and you respect some of the things that they do, I would encourage you to think in terms of a question, to think in terms of a topic. Don't go to someone and say, hey, would you disciple me? That's weird for everybody because we don't know what to do after that. But you may notice that this lady loves her husband in a way that I have not seen. So you might go to her and you might say, hey, I see the way that you love your husband. Will you teach me to be a wife the way that you are? It's a topic. It's an easy expectation. She can disciple you in that for a season. You may look at somebody and you may see the way that they run their business or the way that they orchestrate their career. And you may go, hey, listen, I see the way that you honor God, but you still achieve success. Will you disciple me in what it means to be a godly professional or a godly entrepreneur? That's a question. That's a topic. That's a season. You might, as a couple, go to another couple and say, hey, we see your kids. They're in college or they're adults and they seem to have their act together. We'd love to have kids that look like yours. Will you tell us your secrets? Can we have dinner at our house and you'll just tell us, we'll ask you questions about being parents. That's discipleship. It's a topic. It's a season. And if you do that, those things might morph into ongoing relationships of long-term discipleship, and that's great. But for those of us who are seeking to grow, I want us to start to think in terms of topics and seasons. For those of you who would seek to make disciples, your goal and your job is to simply help them see their next step of obedience and give them the courage and the ability to take it. And if someone does come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? I would encourage you to try to get them to reframe the question in, what do you want to know? How can I help you best? What specifically do you want to get out of this to make sure it's fruitful for everyone? So at Grace, let's make disciples. Let's be disciples. Understanding that means we are a people who are committed to increasingly walk in obedience to the Father, that we are constantly thinking about our next step. I'm going to begin incorporating next step language in my sermons and pose to us what's the next step of obedience for us. What's your next step of obedience here? We want to see that language show up in our small groups. Small group leaders, as you shepherd the people who are in your groups, disciple them. Your job is to think for them. What is their next step of obedience and how can I help them take it? People who volunteer in the children's ministry every week, those kids that you love so much that you see once a month or every other week or however often it is, you're thinking actively for them. What is their next step of obedience and how can I help them take it? If you volunteer in the student ministry, if you pour into anybody in this church or anybody in your life, if you have kids, you are the chief discipler of them. Let me encourage you to shape up your parenting in such a way where you're thinking, what is their next step of obedience, Father, and how can I encourage them to take it? And in doing those things with clarity, let's be a church that grows deep. Let's be a church that is full of disciples, that is full of kind, generous, loving, knowledgeable, gracious believers who can all say that we are increasingly walking in obedience to our God together. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We thank you for loving us. God, I pray that Grace would be a church that makes disciples. Help us, God, from the leadership, to the partners, the volunteers, small group leaders, small group members, from people who would consider themselves on the periphery and even considering, help us all to take steps of obedience towards you. God, make us good at making disciples. If nothing else, God, if we stink at everything else as a church, I pray that this would be a place where if you come here, you will grow in a deeper knowledge of you. Father, for those of us who are facing steps of obedience that are difficult, please give us courage. Give us a faith to believe that even though we can't see what's on the other side of that step, even though we might fear bad consequences on the other side of that step, that ultimately, God, what you have for us when we take that step is better. Help us trust that you came to give us life to the full. God, build at grace a church of disciples that love you and help other people towards you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see all of you. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that after the service. This is, as Kyle said, the second part of our series called Grace is Going Home. This is going to culminate in Pledge Sunday on March the 1st. And so the idea is that we're going to kind of spend five weeks thinking, dreaming, praying, talking about this. We're going to have the rhythm of the business meetings or the informational meetings over the course of the next five weeks. And then on March the 1st, what we're asking everyone to do is to bring a sealed pledge card with you. So those are in your seats today. Those are very likely going to get emailed or mailed out to you maybe in the middle of this week or next week if you'd like them to come to your home if you can't be encumbered with carrying that to your car. I understand. If it were me, I would be nervous that I would bend the corners and that it wouldn't be perfectly flat when I had it at my house, and I would prefer it show up in an envelope. So I totally understand that. I'm like that. But what we're asking is that even if you can't be here on March the 1st, that you, if you want to participate, would mail yours in and we'll keep those. And then we are on March the 1st, Tom Ledoux, our finance guy, is flying in from Florida. I've asked him specifically to bring a briefcase so it looks very official. And he will be totaling those up and we'll just see what God is going to do here. We'll find out how he's moved in our hearts. So that's how that's going to work. And if you want to take one of those home and begin to pray about that, that's fine. I also want to be very clear that if you're new here, you're just coming into Grace, and you're not yet sure if this is your home, or if you've been here for forever, we don't want anybody to feel any pressure. I don't want it to feel awkward for anyone as we go through this, but hopefully this is something that if we call grace home, this is something that we're excited about. So that's what we're going to be looking at for the next five weeks. You may be wondering, what in the world am I going to preach about for five weeks? Am I just going to do like giving and campaign and vision for the next four weeks? That would be a real bummer. I don't want to prepare for that any more than you want to hear it. So that's not what we're going to be doing. For the next two weeks, actually, we're going to be answering what I believe is the greatest question facing grace. I believe that we're in a new season as a church, that we have new things to think about, new dreams to form, a new direction to go in. And so that as a church, collectively, we have a question facing us that, as I think about the church, I believe that we are posing this to God, whether we realize this or not. I think that this is the best thing to be asking God right now as grace, which is simply this, Father, what would you have us do in hell? I think that's the greatest question facing us right now. I think that pursuing a permanent home is the first step to walk in obedience to answer this question, but that really isn't the point of the campaign. That really isn't the point of the next five weeks. The point of the next five weeks, honestly, is to answer this question and have us move as a culture and as a church into what God would have for us in health. The reason I think that this is the question facing grace is that for many years, I don't know exactly how many, I wouldn't try to make a guess about that, but for many years, by necessity, the mission of grace has been grace. The mission of our church has been our church. The leaders of the church, the core of the church, those who have loved grace over the years, really our goal has been to get grace to a place where it was simply healthy, was to survive. By necessity for many years, the focus of grace has been turned inward on grace, going, how do we get healthy? How do we put the right structures and the right leadership in place so that we can be in a position where we are thriving? So for many years, the mission of grace has been grace. And now, in God's goodness, He's brought us to this place of health. He's brought us to a place where as a church, we are thriving. And I don't want to be gross about it, but by almost any statistical measure that you would look at a church and measure it, we're doing well. God is blessing us. And so we sit now in a place of health for the first time in a while. And instead of scrambling to get healthy and try to thrive one day, I think that we need to acknowledge as a body of believers that call this place home, that we are healthy, that we are thriving. And because of that, the question becomes, Father, what would you have us do in this health? On this foundation of health that he's built here, what would he have us do? And I believe his answer to that question is actually biblical. I believe it's the same for every church. And I believe that Jesus really gives us the outline of this answer in what's become known as the Great Commission. If you have a Bible, you can turn to Matthew chapter 28. This is the last chapter of the gospel of Matthew. The gospels tell the story of the life of Jesus. And at this portion of the Gospel, Jesus has been crucified for our sins. He has come back to life, risen from the grave. He has ministered to people for an amount of days. He's ministered to the disciples, set them about their task, and now he's going back up into heaven. And these are the final instructions that Jesus leaves for the disciples. These are the marching orders from God himself to his church. Jesus came, he stayed for three years, not only to die for our sins, but to establish his kingdom on earth, which is the church. And these are the marching orders that he gives to the church. He says, beginning in verse 18, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And it continues teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And then he says, I will be with you always. So if you were to ask Jesus, what would you have churches do in health? What do you want for your healthy churches? What should they set about doing? I think what he would tell us, I think his answer based on this passage, and not just this passage, but what he says over and over again about his kingdom, and what Paul and the rest of the New Testament, who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament, what he teaches us about God's kingdom and what we see in what's called the general epistles or the general letters after those from the other New Testament writers, I think what they would all say is that what God wants for his church is to grow in depth and in breadth. I think what Jesus wants for us, if we say, God, what would you have us do in health? I think Jesus would say, I want you to grow deep and I want you to grow wide. I want you to grow in your spiritual depth, in your walks with the Lord, in your intimacy with God. I want a church that is full of mature, seasoned, loving, obedient, compassionate, gracious believers. And I want a church that reaches out into the community and grows wide. I think a healthy church is growing in both of those directions. So often churches do one well and not the other. They go deep. They teach the scripture. Everyone there is mature. The problem is they don't reach out into their communities and share the love of Christ with those in their different circles of influences. Other churches are great at reaching out, but not so great at growing deep. And I think that Jesus's answer to what would you have a healthy church do is to grow both in depth and in breadth. That's why in that verse, I highlighted, make disciples, grow deep, of all nations. Why? Everybody. And really, this is the goal of every church, and this is what we're going to talk about for the next two weeks. This week, we're going to talk about growing deep, and next week, we're going to talk about growing wide, and how we want to do that at at Grace and what the biblical model is for those things. So today, what we're really asking is, as we focus on growing deep, is God, how would you have us make disciples at Grace? What does it mean to be a disciple? How would you have us make disciples? And really, this is the goal of every church. Every Bible-believing church ever says that their goal is to make disciples. They say it in different ways. If you've been in church world at all, you've heard mission statements of different churches. You've heard it preached about a bunch of different times. Some churches just come out right and say it. They're very direct. Our goal is to make disciple-making disciples. Other churches will say, know God and make God known, or dominate the community with the love of Jesus Christ. Love your neighbor, love Jesus, and live faithfully, or connecting people to Jesus and connecting people to people. Churches say it in different ways, but the goal is to make disciples. That's what we all want to do. Every church shares that in common. It is like the white whale of all ministry. It's what everybody is going for, but here's the secret of church world that you may or may not have figured out already in your adult life. Churches tend to be not very good at it. It is really hard to make disciples. And the more conversations I've had with other pastors, not me because I'm excellent at it and my church never fails at anything, but with other pastors, what I learn is that this is a hard process. It's a difficult task. In my last church, I was there for seven years. When I started there, it was a church of about 11 or 1200. By the time I moved on to here, it was a church of about 2000. They kept me in the corner. I did nothing. And none of that growth has anything to do with me. So I'm not bragging. I'm just telling you, that's the season of the church that I walked through. And during that season, we would go to conferences with other churches that were similar in size and oftentimes larger. And I can't tell you how many times at these conferences, we had our little breakout sessions and you discuss all the things that are happening. And I would sit around a table with other people who were small groups pastors, or if you have a conservative church that's adult education pastor, some churches call it a discipleship pastor, whatever you want to call it. My job was to think about the discipleship process at my church. My job was to answer the question, when someone walks in that door for the very first time and they are far from God, but they're spiritually curious, what systems and programs do we have in place to move that person from spiritually curious to spiritually mature disciple, walking with the Lord, reproducing themselves and making disciples? That was my job. What's the process? Someone comes in, they don't even know if they're a believer yet, but they're curious. What do we do as a church to take them from spiritually curious to elder of the church? That's what we do. It was my job to think about that process. And I would sit around the table with other people who their entire job was to think about that process too. And we would talk about the different things that we're doing, the different structures in our church, how we do small groups, and what discipleship means, and all of those things. And inevitably, somebody would ask, what are you guys doing to make disciples? I never really heard that great of an answer. Very few churches had a good answer for that. I thought I had a good answer. It will surprise you none to know that I just bowled right in there with what we were doing, thinking this was the greatest thing in the world. But after seven years of doing it, what I realized is it seemed good on paper, but we're not really producing disciples. And it's kind of a discouraging thing to think about. It's not that the church isn't making disciples, it's just that it's inefficient and ineffective, and there's no systematic way to do it, and it gets messy, and it gets difficult. And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about when we commit to something at Grace, how do we want to make disciples here? What should that process look like? And because I've thought about that a lot, and frankly a lot and listened to whatever I can consume, I've tried my best to think through, well, what are the reasons that it struggles? What are the reasons that I see that churches so often struggle to produce disciples in a meaningful and in an effective and efficient way? And I think that so many churches struggle because our definition of discipleship is unclear and our expectations around discipleship are unrealistic. I think so many churches struggle because our definition is unclear and our expectations are unrealistic. Now, what I mean is, when I say our definition is unclear, I mean our definition of both the process, what does discipleship look like, and of the actual term. What does it mean to be a disciple? I think we're unclear about the process. Y'all, I have seen so many different discipleship programs, right? I remember one, and it's a good program out of a church called Twelve Stone near where I'm from, and it's called Joshua's Men. And it's this beefed up three-year study. You sign up for it, and you go like every week at the same time, and you go through this curriculum, and there's a guy that leads you, and there's like groups of six to eight men, and you go through this curriculum, and at the end of it, you're a disciple. And I just thought, what a corporate America way to approach discipleship. What a bunch of dudes getting in a room. We want to make disciples. What do we need to do? What do we need to know? How do we need to learn? What are the blanks we need to fill in? How do we systematize this nebulous relational thing? Joshua's men. And it works sometimes, but not all the time. Most of the time, people crap out. Very few people make it through all three years, right? Or I want to be discipled, and so we'll look for that one person that we're going to have coffee with every week. And we sit down and we say, will you disciple me? And they say yes, and then we don't know what to do from there. So you just get into a small group, and we get into a small group, and we're not sure if discipleship is happening. I've seen so many programs and so many efforts that I think we're unclear on the process. What does it take to produce a disciple? And I know that we're unclear at Grace, because over the past, I would say, year and a half, two years, I've had multiple conversations with people here who have wanted to meet with me. And when they meet with me, they say, hey, I'm looking for someone to disciple me. I'm looking for someone to mentor me. I'm ready to take the next steps in my faith. I'm ready to grow in my walk. What do I need to do? Who do you think I can talk to? Who would you recommend? Do you have, like, just a bank of disciple makers that you can just, like, plug me into? Do you have, like, a catalog I can talk to? Who would you recommend? Do you have like just a bank of disciple makers that you can just like plug me into? Do you have like a catalog I can choose from? And I'll have other people who will come to me and they'll go, hey, I'd love to disciple somebody. Do you have any young people who are just clamoring for it? And what those conversations tell me is that I have not been clear about our process at Grace. And so I wanted to try to bring some clarity this morning to both what the process is and what the definition of it is. Because on Tuesday, we had an elder meeting. And at the elder meeting, I just brought up the point, I think that there were six elders in the room. And I'm not being overly flattering. I mean this with all sincerity. I love our elders. I have a great amount of respect for our elders. I would put our elders up against any other, not that it's a competition, but I just think we have some really capable, smart people in that room, and I'm grateful for them. And to those people, I said, if I asked you guys to define discipleship, what are the chances I would get if I set each of them down, all six of them that happened to be there that night, and I got to talk with them individually and ask them, how would you define discipleship and what a disciple is? They all agreed that I would get six very different, likely meandering, probably unclear, lacking precision, lacking concision answers about what discipleship is. They would all be different versions of right. They would all wander there eventually. And these are people who love the church and who are committed to the idea of making disciples, but collectively as a group, we didn't have a concise way to explain it. And I think in so many places, the definition of what a disciple is and what discipleship, the process is, is unclear. So I wanted to try to bring some clarity to it for grace and come up with a new way for us to think about as we seek to become disciples and make disciples, which are God's instructions to us. About a year and a half ago, I went to a conference. It was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. It was a guy named Larry Osborne that was putting on the conference. He's got a big, huge church out there. He's in his mid-60s. I love the way this guy thinks about ministry. And he gave me a definition of discipleship that I had never heard before. I had spent most of my vocational life thinking about it, studying it, learning about it, trying to frame it up. And he gave me a definition that was so simple that it totally changed the way I thought about discipleship. And I've been waiting to kind of spring it on you and make this how we think about it at Grace. So this isn't from me, this is from him, but this is what he said. And this is how I want to define the process of discipleship at Grace. Discipleship is simply taking your next step of obedience. That's what discipleship is. Now, you're adults, you love Jesus, you can poke that and prod that, and you can think through that, and you can take it home and work it out and see if it makes sense to you, but to me it makes perfect sense that discipleship is simply taking your next step of obedience. That's what it is. We are on that course. It's a process of simply taking our next step of obedience. And with every step, we get closer to God. With every step, we sacrifice more of who we are and accept more of what God wants. With every step, we admit more and more that I am not the Lord of my life, that God is the authority in my life. So with every step, we are getting closer to God. So being on the course of discipleship simply means taking our next step of obedience. And if you think about it, this is what Jesus taught the whole time. In the scriptures, our love of God is irrevocably coupled with our obedience to him. Look at what Jesus says in the Gospel of John in two different places, a chapter apart. I love the happenstance of the references of these verses, 14, 15, and 15, 14. He says, if you love me, this is Jesus speaking, if you love me, keep my commandments. And the very next chapter, if you are my friends, do what I command. It's not complicated. Jesus wasn't trying to shroud discipleship in mystery. He wasn't trying to make spiritual growth difficult or hard to grasp or understand. He wasn't even trying to make it for the spiritually elite. He just said, if you love me, you know how I know? You obey me. You know who my friends are? The people that are close to me? The people who obey my father. In Mark that I'm going through with my men's group, his mom and his siblings show up to try to stop him from teaching because they thought he was crazy. This was early on in his ministry. And he's in the middle of teaching and they say, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here. And he said, my mother and my brothers are those who obey the will of my Father. Jesus himself couples our love of God with our obedience to him. So discipleship is simply walking, taking steps of that obedience. John, the disciple, was, I would argue, the closest disciple to Jesus. I don't know that he was like the best believer. I have no idea to measure that. But relationally, he seems closer to Jesus than anybody else who is living. And at the end of his life, he wrote letters to the churches. And in the second letter that he wrote to the church, in 2 John 6, verse 1, he says, and this is love. He's talking about if we say that we know Jesus, but we don't have love, then we are liars. And then he defines love. This is love, that we walk in obedience to his commands. It is one thing to say that we love God. It is one thing to say that we believe. It is one thing to say that we love God above all else, heart, soul, and mind, amen. That's another thing to walk in obedience. That's why I'm increasingly convinced that what it means to be discipled is to simply take our next step of obedience. And here's what this means, and I love this. This means that discipleship is for everyone. Discipleship is for all of us. I think if you're in the church, sometimes you've heard the word discipleship. You may have been here long enough to have heard that word or been in Christian culture long enough to have heard that word but not really know what it means. I think some of us see that something like far off, that it's like the spiritual equivalent to buds training for the seals in the Navy, that it's like for the military elite, that it's for Christian black belts, and that's not the deal. Disciples are not people on mountainsides who don't talk to anybody but Jesus and just like eat grass. That's not what disciples are. Disciples are not unattainable figures like Elijah or Abraham. Those are pictures of disciples, but those are pictures of people who have been walking and taking steps of obedience for their entire life. But discipleship is for everyone. Has it ever occurred to you that the disciples were disciples before they were Christians? You ever thought about that? When Jesus goes to Matthew, the tax collector, and he says, hey, I want you to follow me. And Matthew puts down his instruments and he leaves his table and he follows Jesus. I don't think he yet fully understood that this is the Messiah, the Savior of the world. And one day he's going to die and I'm going to place my faith in that death so that it covers over my guilt and God accepts me and my relationship is restored. Matthew didn't know all that, but you know what he did do? He took a step of obedience. He said, okay, I'm going to follow you. Peter and James and John, when they put down their fishing nets, they didn't yet know the full magnitude of who this man was that they were following. I would argue that they weren't even yet believers. They simply took a step of obedience. And so what that means for you today is, even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, discipleship is still an option for you because it's simply an invitation to take your next step of obedience. And everybody has one of those. Your next step might be, okay, I've had some nagging questions about spiritual things for a long time. I'm going to take the step to begin to learn about answers to those questions. Maybe you've been gathering and learned some information about those questions. And maybe your next step is to get more serious about what it might look like to take on a faith. Maybe your next step is to accept Christ. Maybe it's to get baptized. Maybe your next step is to have that hard conversation that you've been needing to have. Maybe your next step is to confess something to your spouse or to someone you care about. Maybe your next step is to finally get locked into the discipline of waking up early and spending time in God's Word and spending time in prayer. Everybody's next step is different, but here's the thing about the Holy Spirit. I don't have to stand up here and guess at what they might be until I hit yours because he's already telling you. If you're a believer, we all have a next step of obedience at all times. So discipleship is for everyone, and it always beckons, and it always invites. It is not for the spiritually elite. It's for everybody. And if that's the process of discipleship, if that's what it means to be being discipled, then this is how we define a disciple at grace. This is actually something that I talked over with the elders. This is not my definition. This is our definition. The one that I presented to them at first, they said was too absolute and exclusive, and I came around to agreeing with them. So this is a result of a group think of not just me, but the leadership of the church. And what we believe that a disciple is, and how we want to define it as grace, is a disciple is one who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. A disciple is someone who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. Have you taken more steps this year than last year? As you progressed last year, did you continue to progress or did you stop? A disciple is one who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. At some points, we get off the train. At some points, we stop walking in obedience. At some points, we get into a bit of a spiritual rut, but when we get back onto it and we begin to take those steps again, then we are walking in discipleship again, which means that at grace, what we want to do, if we want to make disciples like Jesus told us to do, then what we want to do is constantly be showing ourselves and one another what our next step of obedience is, constantly encouraging one another to take those next steps of obedience and define a disciple as someone who is simply walking and increasing obedience to the Father. That's how we want to define those things. So that's how I want to bring clarity. If we say that one of the reasons that churches struggle is because we're unclear, I want to do what I can to bring some clarity to how we think about the process and the definition of the term at grace. But I also said that our expectations are unrealistic. I think what we expect around discipleship is something that doesn't always work in adult life. I think often we get locked into the single mentor paradigm is what I'm calling it. Often in church we get locked into the single mentor paradigm. We look at the way that Jesus discipled the disciples. And because the disciples had one person that was pouring into them for three years, then our expectation of discipleship is that we'll find this one spiritual mentor that we look up to in every way in life and that will sit under them and they'll teach us. It's this life-on-life model where they followed Jesus around and lived with him. It says, foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head. So the disciples just followed him around couch surfing for three years. I know it's crude, but it's true. That's life-on-life discipleship. We can't in our culture really mimic that. But we still exist in this single mentor paradigm that as adults, we're supposed to find the one person to follow and pour into us. And I've even said things. You've heard pastors say things like this before. I've said it. We see the model of it with Paul and Timothy. I've said before, everyone needs to have their Paul and everyone needs to have their Timothy. Everybody needs to have someone who's pouring into them and everybody needs to have someone that they're pouring into. This kind of single mentor paradigm. The problem is, in 2020, that's not very effective. With the staff this week, the full-time staff, Kyle and Steve and Aaron, in our staff meeting, I said, which of you have ever gone to someone and asked them to disciple you? And because there are people who care about their walk with the Lord, because it matters to them, all of them said, yeah, multiple times. And I said, how'd that go for you? And they said, eh, it was all right. I said, how many of you have had somebody come to you and ask you to disciple them? And they all said, yeah, we've had that before. How'd that go? They said, I don't really know what to do. I had somebody this week that I had coffee with, and he shared with me that years ago, there was a group of guys who were in their 20s, and he was in his 30s or maybe early 40s, and they went to him and they said, hey, will you disciple us? And he said, sure, and he started meeting with them, and then they didn't know what to do. We have a lack of clarity around the process. Our hope and our desire is to find the single mentor that can lead us for the next however many years and guide us through all things in life. And the truth of it is, that's a really rare find, particularly in adulthood. It's not impossible. It's not bad. It's great. And it happens. But if any of you have ever had someone that you said, yeah, I feel like that person discipled me, I would be willing to bet that nine out of 10 of us in the room, it was in high school or in college. I feel like I've discipled people, but they were always in high school or in college. It's a unique season of life that allows for that. But as adults, finding a single mentor to lead us in perpetuity becomes an ineffective thing. And I think hoping for that and expecting that is one of the reasons that we fail to make disciples. So instead of that, I want to propose to you guys the idea of seasons, topics, and communities of discipleship. Seasons of discipleship, topics of discipleship, and communities of discipleship. And here's what I mean. If you think about the disciples, if we understand discipleship as simply taking our next step of obedience towards God, yes, Jesus was the mentor. He was the guy pouring into those. He was the chief minister to the disciples in those three years. But do you mean to tell me that during those three years, the community that they had together of accountability and of encouragement and of challenge didn't help some of them take their next steps of obedience? Do you mean to tell me that as Jesus put different things in front of them, as he put different steps of obedience in front of them, go two by two and go into the surrounding towns and teach what I've taught you and perform the miracles that I've performed, do you mean to tell me that they didn't lean on each other to be encouraged towards that obedience? Do you mean to tell me that that wasn't a community of discipleship? I would argue that the disciples discipled the disciples. I think that's what they did. Furthermore, Jesus only spent three years with them. They had the rest of their lives to live. If you believe some research, they were at the latest in their early 20s when Jesus ascended into heaven. They had a long way to go. Who discipled Peter for those remaining years? Who discipled James and John? They did. They continued to encourage one another to take their next step of obedience towards God. So we want to have communities of discipleship here. We want to have topics and seasons of discipleship. I believe in seasons of discipleship because I believe that God puts people in our path for a season that we learn from during that time, and then at some point or another, that season's in, and each of you move into your next phase. We see that in Jesus's ministry and the disciples' ministry. We see Paul enter into John Mark's life and disciple him for a season. We see Paul disciple Timothy for a season. We see Paul and Barnabas work together for a season. I think that there are seasons of people in our life and things that God wants us to work on, and I believe that there are topics of discipleship. A great example of this is the small group that meets this afternoon. This afternoon, Steve, our worship leader, and his wife, Lisa, start their marriage small group. It's going to last for about six weeks, and then after that, they may continue to meet and discuss other things. But for those six weeks, absolutely what they are doing is discipling those couples in marriage. It's a topic of discipleship. What they're going to do is show them how to take their next steps of obedience in their marriage. It's a community of discipleship because it's 16 to 20 people who are getting together every week, and they're going to encourage one another in that direction. It's a season of discipleship. It's not going to go on forever. It's going to happen now, and then move on to another thing. I want us to reshape the way we think about discipleship, to move away from the single mentor paradigm. We might find that, but discipleship can happen outside of that. And start looking for people and communities and opportunities that can encourage us to take our next step in obedience to God. This is why we have small groups shaped up the way that we do. We sign up for our small groups every January and every August. And part of the design of that is to give you easy in-ramps and easy off-ramps. You try a small group for a semester. It works for you as a community of discipleship and a season of discipleship, maybe even a topic of discipleship then. And then the next semester, you do what seems most helpful to you. So maybe we stay in our small groups in perpetuity, and that becomes a community of discipleship for years to come. And maybe we shift into a different group. But our small groups are structured in such a way that we can move into and out of whichever groups are going to help us along our path the best. Which is again why I want us to start thinking about discipleship in terms of seasons and community and topics. And as we think about, man, I wish somebody would disciple me. If you're thinking about meeting with someone, if you're thinking about approaching someone, if you see someone and you respect some of the things that they do, I would encourage you to think in terms of a question, to think in terms of a topic. Don't go to someone and say, hey, would you disciple me? That's weird for everybody because we don't know what to do after that. But you may notice that this lady loves her husband in a way that I have not seen. So you might go to her and you might say, hey, I see the way that you love your husband. Will you teach me to be a wife the way that you are? It's a topic. It's an easy expectation. She can disciple you in that for a season. You may look at somebody and you may see the way that they run their business or the way that they orchestrate their career. And you may go, hey, listen, I see the way that you honor God, but you still achieve success. Will you disciple me in what it means to be a godly professional or a godly entrepreneur? That's a question. That's a topic. That's a season. You might, as a couple, go to another couple and say, hey, we see your kids. They're in college or they're adults and they seem to have their act together. We'd love to have kids that look like yours. Will you tell us your secrets? Can we have dinner at our house and you'll just tell us, we'll ask you questions about being parents. That's discipleship. It's a topic. It's a season. And if you do that, those things might morph into ongoing relationships of long-term discipleship, and that's great. But for those of us who are seeking to grow, I want us to start to think in terms of topics and seasons. For those of you who would seek to make disciples, your goal and your job is to simply help them see their next step of obedience and give them the courage and the ability to take it. And if someone does come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? I would encourage you to try to get them to reframe the question in, what do you want to know? How can I help you best? What specifically do you want to get out of this to make sure it's fruitful for everyone? So at Grace, let's make disciples. Let's be disciples. Understanding that means we are a people who are committed to increasingly walk in obedience to the Father, that we are constantly thinking about our next step. I'm going to begin incorporating next step language in my sermons and pose to us what's the next step of obedience for us. What's your next step of obedience here? We want to see that language show up in our small groups. Small group leaders, as you shepherd the people who are in your groups, disciple them. Your job is to think for them. What is their next step of obedience and how can I help them take it? People who volunteer in the children's ministry every week, those kids that you love so much that you see once a month or every other week or however often it is, you're thinking actively for them. What is their next step of obedience and how can I help them take it? If you volunteer in the student ministry, if you pour into anybody in this church or anybody in your life, if you have kids, you are the chief discipler of them. Let me encourage you to shape up your parenting in such a way where you're thinking, what is their next step of obedience, Father, and how can I encourage them to take it? And in doing those things with clarity, let's be a church that grows deep. Let's be a church that is full of disciples, that is full of kind, generous, loving, knowledgeable, gracious believers who can all say that we are increasingly walking in obedience to our God together. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We thank you for loving us. God, I pray that Grace would be a church that makes disciples. Help us, God, from the leadership, to the partners, the volunteers, small group leaders, small group members, from people who would consider themselves on the periphery and even considering, help us all to take steps of obedience towards you. God, make us good at making disciples. If nothing else, God, if we stink at everything else as a church, I pray that this would be a place where if you come here, you will grow in a deeper knowledge of you. Father, for those of us who are facing steps of obedience that are difficult, please give us courage. Give us a faith to believe that even though we can't see what's on the other side of that step, even though we might fear bad consequences on the other side of that step, that ultimately, God, what you have for us when we take that step is better. Help us trust that you came to give us life to the full. God, build at grace a church of disciples that love you and help other people towards you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see all of you. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that after the service. This is, as Kyle said, the second part of our series called Grace is Going Home. This is going to culminate in Pledge Sunday on March the 1st. And so the idea is that we're going to kind of spend five weeks thinking, dreaming, praying, talking about this. We're going to have the rhythm of the business meetings or the informational meetings over the course of the next five weeks. And then on March the 1st, what we're asking everyone to do is to bring a sealed pledge card with you. So those are in your seats today. Those are very likely going to get emailed or mailed out to you maybe in the middle of this week or next week if you'd like them to come to your home if you can't be encumbered with carrying that to your car. I understand. If it were me, I would be nervous that I would bend the corners and that it wouldn't be perfectly flat when I had it at my house, and I would prefer it show up in an envelope. So I totally understand that. I'm like that. But what we're asking is that even if you can't be here on March the 1st, that you, if you want to participate, would mail yours in and we'll keep those. And then we are on March the 1st, Tom Ledoux, our finance guy, is flying in from Florida. I've asked him specifically to bring a briefcase so it looks very official. And he will be totaling those up and we'll just see what God is going to do here. We'll find out how he's moved in our hearts. So that's how that's going to work. And if you want to take one of those home and begin to pray about that, that's fine. I also want to be very clear that if you're new here, you're just coming into Grace, and you're not yet sure if this is your home, or if you've been here for forever, we don't want anybody to feel any pressure. I don't want it to feel awkward for anyone as we go through this, but hopefully this is something that if we call grace home, this is something that we're excited about. So that's what we're going to be looking at for the next five weeks. You may be wondering, what in the world am I going to preach about for five weeks? Am I just going to do like giving and campaign and vision for the next four weeks? That would be a real bummer. I don't want to prepare for that any more than you want to hear it. So that's not what we're going to be doing. For the next two weeks, actually, we're going to be answering what I believe is the greatest question facing grace. I believe that we're in a new season as a church, that we have new things to think about, new dreams to form, a new direction to go in. And so that as a church, collectively, we have a question facing us that, as I think about the church, I believe that we are posing this to God, whether we realize this or not. I think that this is the best thing to be asking God right now as grace, which is simply this, Father, what would you have us do in hell? I think that's the greatest question facing us right now. I think that pursuing a permanent home is the first step to walk in obedience to answer this question, but that really isn't the point of the campaign. That really isn't the point of the next five weeks. The point of the next five weeks, honestly, is to answer this question and have us move as a culture and as a church into what God would have for us in health. The reason I think that this is the question facing grace is that for many years, I don't know exactly how many, I wouldn't try to make a guess about that, but for many years, by necessity, the mission of grace has been grace. The mission of our church has been our church. The leaders of the church, the core of the church, those who have loved grace over the years, really our goal has been to get grace to a place where it was simply healthy, was to survive. By necessity for many years, the focus of grace has been turned inward on grace, going, how do we get healthy? How do we put the right structures and the right leadership in place so that we can be in a position where we are thriving? So for many years, the mission of grace has been grace. And now, in God's goodness, He's brought us to this place of health. He's brought us to a place where as a church, we are thriving. And I don't want to be gross about it, but by almost any statistical measure that you would look at a church and measure it, we're doing well. God is blessing us. And so we sit now in a place of health for the first time in a while. And instead of scrambling to get healthy and try to thrive one day, I think that we need to acknowledge as a body of believers that call this place home, that we are healthy, that we are thriving. And because of that, the question becomes, Father, what would you have us do in this health? On this foundation of health that he's built here, what would he have us do? And I believe his answer to that question is actually biblical. I believe it's the same for every church. And I believe that Jesus really gives us the outline of this answer in what's become known as the Great Commission. If you have a Bible, you can turn to Matthew chapter 28. This is the last chapter of the gospel of Matthew. The gospels tell the story of the life of Jesus. And at this portion of the Gospel, Jesus has been crucified for our sins. He has come back to life, risen from the grave. He has ministered to people for an amount of days. He's ministered to the disciples, set them about their task, and now he's going back up into heaven. And these are the final instructions that Jesus leaves for the disciples. These are the marching orders from God himself to his church. Jesus came, he stayed for three years, not only to die for our sins, but to establish his kingdom on earth, which is the church. And these are the marching orders that he gives to the church. He says, beginning in verse 18, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And it continues teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And then he says, I will be with you always. So if you were to ask Jesus, what would you have churches do in health? What do you want for your healthy churches? What should they set about doing? I think what he would tell us, I think his answer based on this passage, and not just this passage, but what he says over and over again about his kingdom, and what Paul and the rest of the New Testament, who wrote two-thirds of the New Testament, what he teaches us about God's kingdom and what we see in what's called the general epistles or the general letters after those from the other New Testament writers, I think what they would all say is that what God wants for his church is to grow in depth and in breadth. I think what Jesus wants for us, if we say, God, what would you have us do in health? I think Jesus would say, I want you to grow deep and I want you to grow wide. I want you to grow in your spiritual depth, in your walks with the Lord, in your intimacy with God. I want a church that is full of mature, seasoned, loving, obedient, compassionate, gracious believers. And I want a church that reaches out into the community and grows wide. I think a healthy church is growing in both of those directions. So often churches do one well and not the other. They go deep. They teach the scripture. Everyone there is mature. The problem is they don't reach out into their communities and share the love of Christ with those in their different circles of influences. Other churches are great at reaching out, but not so great at growing deep. And I think that Jesus's answer to what would you have a healthy church do is to grow both in depth and in breadth. That's why in that verse, I highlighted, make disciples, grow deep, of all nations. Why? Everybody. And really, this is the goal of every church, and this is what we're going to talk about for the next two weeks. This week, we're going to talk about growing deep, and next week, we're going to talk about growing wide, and how we want to do that at at Grace and what the biblical model is for those things. So today, what we're really asking is, as we focus on growing deep, is God, how would you have us make disciples at Grace? What does it mean to be a disciple? How would you have us make disciples? And really, this is the goal of every church. Every Bible-believing church ever says that their goal is to make disciples. They say it in different ways. If you've been in church world at all, you've heard mission statements of different churches. You've heard it preached about a bunch of different times. Some churches just come out right and say it. They're very direct. Our goal is to make disciple-making disciples. Other churches will say, know God and make God known, or dominate the community with the love of Jesus Christ. Love your neighbor, love Jesus, and live faithfully, or connecting people to Jesus and connecting people to people. Churches say it in different ways, but the goal is to make disciples. That's what we all want to do. Every church shares that in common. It is like the white whale of all ministry. It's what everybody is going for, but here's the secret of church world that you may or may not have figured out already in your adult life. Churches tend to be not very good at it. It is really hard to make disciples. And the more conversations I've had with other pastors, not me because I'm excellent at it and my church never fails at anything, but with other pastors, what I learn is that this is a hard process. It's a difficult task. In my last church, I was there for seven years. When I started there, it was a church of about 11 or 1200. By the time I moved on to here, it was a church of about 2000. They kept me in the corner. I did nothing. And none of that growth has anything to do with me. So I'm not bragging. I'm just telling you, that's the season of the church that I walked through. And during that season, we would go to conferences with other churches that were similar in size and oftentimes larger. And I can't tell you how many times at these conferences, we had our little breakout sessions and you discuss all the things that are happening. And I would sit around a table with other people who were small groups pastors, or if you have a conservative church that's adult education pastor, some churches call it a discipleship pastor, whatever you want to call it. My job was to think about the discipleship process at my church. My job was to answer the question, when someone walks in that door for the very first time and they are far from God, but they're spiritually curious, what systems and programs do we have in place to move that person from spiritually curious to spiritually mature disciple, walking with the Lord, reproducing themselves and making disciples? That was my job. What's the process? Someone comes in, they don't even know if they're a believer yet, but they're curious. What do we do as a church to take them from spiritually curious to elder of the church? That's what we do. It was my job to think about that process. And I would sit around the table with other people who their entire job was to think about that process too. And we would talk about the different things that we're doing, the different structures in our church, how we do small groups, and what discipleship means, and all of those things. And inevitably, somebody would ask, what are you guys doing to make disciples? I never really heard that great of an answer. Very few churches had a good answer for that. I thought I had a good answer. It will surprise you none to know that I just bowled right in there with what we were doing, thinking this was the greatest thing in the world. But after seven years of doing it, what I realized is it seemed good on paper, but we're not really producing disciples. And it's kind of a discouraging thing to think about. It's not that the church isn't making disciples, it's just that it's inefficient and ineffective, and there's no systematic way to do it, and it gets messy, and it gets difficult. And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about when we commit to something at Grace, how do we want to make disciples here? What should that process look like? And because I've thought about that a lot, and frankly a lot and listened to whatever I can consume, I've tried my best to think through, well, what are the reasons that it struggles? What are the reasons that I see that churches so often struggle to produce disciples in a meaningful and in an effective and efficient way? And I think that so many churches struggle because our definition of discipleship is unclear and our expectations around discipleship are unrealistic. I think so many churches struggle because our definition is unclear and our expectations are unrealistic. Now, what I mean is, when I say our definition is unclear, I mean our definition of both the process, what does discipleship look like, and of the actual term. What does it mean to be a disciple? I think we're unclear about the process. Y'all, I have seen so many different discipleship programs, right? I remember one, and it's a good program out of a church called Twelve Stone near where I'm from, and it's called Joshua's Men. And it's this beefed up three-year study. You sign up for it, and you go like every week at the same time, and you go through this curriculum, and there's a guy that leads you, and there's like groups of six to eight men, and you go through this curriculum, and at the end of it, you're a disciple. And I just thought, what a corporate America way to approach discipleship. What a bunch of dudes getting in a room. We want to make disciples. What do we need to do? What do we need to know? How do we need to learn? What are the blanks we need to fill in? How do we systematize this nebulous relational thing? Joshua's men. And it works sometimes, but not all the time. Most of the time, people crap out. Very few people make it through all three years, right? Or I want to be discipled, and so we'll look for that one person that we're going to have coffee with every week. And we sit down and we say, will you disciple me? And they say yes, and then we don't know what to do from there. So you just get into a small group, and we get into a small group, and we're not sure if discipleship is happening. I've seen so many programs and so many efforts that I think we're unclear on the process. What does it take to produce a disciple? And I know that we're unclear at Grace, because over the past, I would say, year and a half, two years, I've had multiple conversations with people here who have wanted to meet with me. And when they meet with me, they say, hey, I'm looking for someone to disciple me. I'm looking for someone to mentor me. I'm ready to take the next steps in my faith. I'm ready to grow in my walk. What do I need to do? Who do you think I can talk to? Who would you recommend? Do you have, like, just a bank of disciple makers that you can just, like, plug me into? Do you have, like, a catalog I can talk to? Who would you recommend? Do you have like just a bank of disciple makers that you can just like plug me into? Do you have like a catalog I can choose from? And I'll have other people who will come to me and they'll go, hey, I'd love to disciple somebody. Do you have any young people who are just clamoring for it? And what those conversations tell me is that I have not been clear about our process at Grace. And so I wanted to try to bring some clarity this morning to both what the process is and what the definition of it is. Because on Tuesday, we had an elder meeting. And at the elder meeting, I just brought up the point, I think that there were six elders in the room. And I'm not being overly flattering. I mean this with all sincerity. I love our elders. I have a great amount of respect for our elders. I would put our elders up against any other, not that it's a competition, but I just think we have some really capable, smart people in that room, and I'm grateful for them. And to those people, I said, if I asked you guys to define discipleship, what are the chances I would get if I set each of them down, all six of them that happened to be there that night, and I got to talk with them individually and ask them, how would you define discipleship and what a disciple is? They all agreed that I would get six very different, likely meandering, probably unclear, lacking precision, lacking concision answers about what discipleship is. They would all be different versions of right. They would all wander there eventually. And these are people who love the church and who are committed to the idea of making disciples, but collectively as a group, we didn't have a concise way to explain it. And I think in so many places, the definition of what a disciple is and what discipleship, the process is, is unclear. So I wanted to try to bring some clarity to it for grace and come up with a new way for us to think about as we seek to become disciples and make disciples, which are God's instructions to us. About a year and a half ago, I went to a conference. It was a pastor's conference out in San Diego. It was a guy named Larry Osborne that was putting on the conference. He's got a big, huge church out there. He's in his mid-60s. I love the way this guy thinks about ministry. And he gave me a definition of discipleship that I had never heard before. I had spent most of my vocational life thinking about it, studying it, learning about it, trying to frame it up. And he gave me a definition that was so simple that it totally changed the way I thought about discipleship. And I've been waiting to kind of spring it on you and make this how we think about it at Grace. So this isn't from me, this is from him, but this is what he said. And this is how I want to define the process of discipleship at Grace. Discipleship is simply taking your next step of obedience. That's what discipleship is. Now, you're adults, you love Jesus, you can poke that and prod that, and you can think through that, and you can take it home and work it out and see if it makes sense to you, but to me it makes perfect sense that discipleship is simply taking your next step of obedience. That's what it is. We are on that course. It's a process of simply taking our next step of obedience. And with every step, we get closer to God. With every step, we sacrifice more of who we are and accept more of what God wants. With every step, we admit more and more that I am not the Lord of my life, that God is the authority in my life. So with every step, we are getting closer to God. So being on the course of discipleship simply means taking our next step of obedience. And if you think about it, this is what Jesus taught the whole time. In the scriptures, our love of God is irrevocably coupled with our obedience to him. Look at what Jesus says in the Gospel of John in two different places, a chapter apart. I love the happenstance of the references of these verses, 14, 15, and 15, 14. He says, if you love me, this is Jesus speaking, if you love me, keep my commandments. And the very next chapter, if you are my friends, do what I command. It's not complicated. Jesus wasn't trying to shroud discipleship in mystery. He wasn't trying to make spiritual growth difficult or hard to grasp or understand. He wasn't even trying to make it for the spiritually elite. He just said, if you love me, you know how I know? You obey me. You know who my friends are? The people that are close to me? The people who obey my father. In Mark that I'm going through with my men's group, his mom and his siblings show up to try to stop him from teaching because they thought he was crazy. This was early on in his ministry. And he's in the middle of teaching and they say, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here. And he said, my mother and my brothers are those who obey the will of my Father. Jesus himself couples our love of God with our obedience to him. So discipleship is simply walking, taking steps of that obedience. John, the disciple, was, I would argue, the closest disciple to Jesus. I don't know that he was like the best believer. I have no idea to measure that. But relationally, he seems closer to Jesus than anybody else who is living. And at the end of his life, he wrote letters to the churches. And in the second letter that he wrote to the church, in 2 John 6, verse 1, he says, and this is love. He's talking about if we say that we know Jesus, but we don't have love, then we are liars. And then he defines love. This is love, that we walk in obedience to his commands. It is one thing to say that we love God. It is one thing to say that we believe. It is one thing to say that we love God above all else, heart, soul, and mind, amen. That's another thing to walk in obedience. That's why I'm increasingly convinced that what it means to be discipled is to simply take our next step of obedience. And here's what this means, and I love this. This means that discipleship is for everyone. Discipleship is for all of us. I think if you're in the church, sometimes you've heard the word discipleship. You may have been here long enough to have heard that word or been in Christian culture long enough to have heard that word but not really know what it means. I think some of us see that something like far off, that it's like the spiritual equivalent to buds training for the seals in the Navy, that it's like for the military elite, that it's for Christian black belts, and that's not the deal. Disciples are not people on mountainsides who don't talk to anybody but Jesus and just like eat grass. That's not what disciples are. Disciples are not unattainable figures like Elijah or Abraham. Those are pictures of disciples, but those are pictures of people who have been walking and taking steps of obedience for their entire life. But discipleship is for everyone. Has it ever occurred to you that the disciples were disciples before they were Christians? You ever thought about that? When Jesus goes to Matthew, the tax collector, and he says, hey, I want you to follow me. And Matthew puts down his instruments and he leaves his table and he follows Jesus. I don't think he yet fully understood that this is the Messiah, the Savior of the world. And one day he's going to die and I'm going to place my faith in that death so that it covers over my guilt and God accepts me and my relationship is restored. Matthew didn't know all that, but you know what he did do? He took a step of obedience. He said, okay, I'm going to follow you. Peter and James and John, when they put down their fishing nets, they didn't yet know the full magnitude of who this man was that they were following. I would argue that they weren't even yet believers. They simply took a step of obedience. And so what that means for you today is, even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, discipleship is still an option for you because it's simply an invitation to take your next step of obedience. And everybody has one of those. Your next step might be, okay, I've had some nagging questions about spiritual things for a long time. I'm going to take the step to begin to learn about answers to those questions. Maybe you've been gathering and learned some information about those questions. And maybe your next step is to get more serious about what it might look like to take on a faith. Maybe your next step is to accept Christ. Maybe it's to get baptized. Maybe your next step is to have that hard conversation that you've been needing to have. Maybe your next step is to confess something to your spouse or to someone you care about. Maybe your next step is to finally get locked into the discipline of waking up early and spending time in God's Word and spending time in prayer. Everybody's next step is different, but here's the thing about the Holy Spirit. I don't have to stand up here and guess at what they might be until I hit yours because he's already telling you. If you're a believer, we all have a next step of obedience at all times. So discipleship is for everyone, and it always beckons, and it always invites. It is not for the spiritually elite. It's for everybody. And if that's the process of discipleship, if that's what it means to be being discipled, then this is how we define a disciple at grace. This is actually something that I talked over with the elders. This is not my definition. This is our definition. The one that I presented to them at first, they said was too absolute and exclusive, and I came around to agreeing with them. So this is a result of a group think of not just me, but the leadership of the church. And what we believe that a disciple is, and how we want to define it as grace, is a disciple is one who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. A disciple is someone who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. Have you taken more steps this year than last year? As you progressed last year, did you continue to progress or did you stop? A disciple is one who is increasingly walking in obedience to God. At some points, we get off the train. At some points, we stop walking in obedience. At some points, we get into a bit of a spiritual rut, but when we get back onto it and we begin to take those steps again, then we are walking in discipleship again, which means that at grace, what we want to do, if we want to make disciples like Jesus told us to do, then what we want to do is constantly be showing ourselves and one another what our next step of obedience is, constantly encouraging one another to take those next steps of obedience and define a disciple as someone who is simply walking and increasing obedience to the Father. That's how we want to define those things. So that's how I want to bring clarity. If we say that one of the reasons that churches struggle is because we're unclear, I want to do what I can to bring some clarity to how we think about the process and the definition of the term at grace. But I also said that our expectations are unrealistic. I think what we expect around discipleship is something that doesn't always work in adult life. I think often we get locked into the single mentor paradigm is what I'm calling it. Often in church we get locked into the single mentor paradigm. We look at the way that Jesus discipled the disciples. And because the disciples had one person that was pouring into them for three years, then our expectation of discipleship is that we'll find this one spiritual mentor that we look up to in every way in life and that will sit under them and they'll teach us. It's this life-on-life model where they followed Jesus around and lived with him. It says, foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the son of man has no place to lay his head. So the disciples just followed him around couch surfing for three years. I know it's crude, but it's true. That's life-on-life discipleship. We can't in our culture really mimic that. But we still exist in this single mentor paradigm that as adults, we're supposed to find the one person to follow and pour into us. And I've even said things. You've heard pastors say things like this before. I've said it. We see the model of it with Paul and Timothy. I've said before, everyone needs to have their Paul and everyone needs to have their Timothy. Everybody needs to have someone who's pouring into them and everybody needs to have someone that they're pouring into. This kind of single mentor paradigm. The problem is, in 2020, that's not very effective. With the staff this week, the full-time staff, Kyle and Steve and Aaron, in our staff meeting, I said, which of you have ever gone to someone and asked them to disciple you? And because there are people who care about their walk with the Lord, because it matters to them, all of them said, yeah, multiple times. And I said, how'd that go for you? And they said, eh, it was all right. I said, how many of you have had somebody come to you and ask you to disciple them? And they all said, yeah, we've had that before. How'd that go? They said, I don't really know what to do. I had somebody this week that I had coffee with, and he shared with me that years ago, there was a group of guys who were in their 20s, and he was in his 30s or maybe early 40s, and they went to him and they said, hey, will you disciple us? And he said, sure, and he started meeting with them, and then they didn't know what to do. We have a lack of clarity around the process. Our hope and our desire is to find the single mentor that can lead us for the next however many years and guide us through all things in life. And the truth of it is, that's a really rare find, particularly in adulthood. It's not impossible. It's not bad. It's great. And it happens. But if any of you have ever had someone that you said, yeah, I feel like that person discipled me, I would be willing to bet that nine out of 10 of us in the room, it was in high school or in college. I feel like I've discipled people, but they were always in high school or in college. It's a unique season of life that allows for that. But as adults, finding a single mentor to lead us in perpetuity becomes an ineffective thing. And I think hoping for that and expecting that is one of the reasons that we fail to make disciples. So instead of that, I want to propose to you guys the idea of seasons, topics, and communities of discipleship. Seasons of discipleship, topics of discipleship, and communities of discipleship. And here's what I mean. If you think about the disciples, if we understand discipleship as simply taking our next step of obedience towards God, yes, Jesus was the mentor. He was the guy pouring into those. He was the chief minister to the disciples in those three years. But do you mean to tell me that during those three years, the community that they had together of accountability and of encouragement and of challenge didn't help some of them take their next steps of obedience? Do you mean to tell me that as Jesus put different things in front of them, as he put different steps of obedience in front of them, go two by two and go into the surrounding towns and teach what I've taught you and perform the miracles that I've performed, do you mean to tell me that they didn't lean on each other to be encouraged towards that obedience? Do you mean to tell me that that wasn't a community of discipleship? I would argue that the disciples discipled the disciples. I think that's what they did. Furthermore, Jesus only spent three years with them. They had the rest of their lives to live. If you believe some research, they were at the latest in their early 20s when Jesus ascended into heaven. They had a long way to go. Who discipled Peter for those remaining years? Who discipled James and John? They did. They continued to encourage one another to take their next step of obedience towards God. So we want to have communities of discipleship here. We want to have topics and seasons of discipleship. I believe in seasons of discipleship because I believe that God puts people in our path for a season that we learn from during that time, and then at some point or another, that season's in, and each of you move into your next phase. We see that in Jesus's ministry and the disciples' ministry. We see Paul enter into John Mark's life and disciple him for a season. We see Paul disciple Timothy for a season. We see Paul and Barnabas work together for a season. I think that there are seasons of people in our life and things that God wants us to work on, and I believe that there are topics of discipleship. A great example of this is the small group that meets this afternoon. This afternoon, Steve, our worship leader, and his wife, Lisa, start their marriage small group. It's going to last for about six weeks, and then after that, they may continue to meet and discuss other things. But for those six weeks, absolutely what they are doing is discipling those couples in marriage. It's a topic of discipleship. What they're going to do is show them how to take their next steps of obedience in their marriage. It's a community of discipleship because it's 16 to 20 people who are getting together every week, and they're going to encourage one another in that direction. It's a season of discipleship. It's not going to go on forever. It's going to happen now, and then move on to another thing. I want us to reshape the way we think about discipleship, to move away from the single mentor paradigm. We might find that, but discipleship can happen outside of that. And start looking for people and communities and opportunities that can encourage us to take our next step in obedience to God. This is why we have small groups shaped up the way that we do. We sign up for our small groups every January and every August. And part of the design of that is to give you easy in-ramps and easy off-ramps. You try a small group for a semester. It works for you as a community of discipleship and a season of discipleship, maybe even a topic of discipleship then. And then the next semester, you do what seems most helpful to you. So maybe we stay in our small groups in perpetuity, and that becomes a community of discipleship for years to come. And maybe we shift into a different group. But our small groups are structured in such a way that we can move into and out of whichever groups are going to help us along our path the best. Which is again why I want us to start thinking about discipleship in terms of seasons and community and topics. And as we think about, man, I wish somebody would disciple me. If you're thinking about meeting with someone, if you're thinking about approaching someone, if you see someone and you respect some of the things that they do, I would encourage you to think in terms of a question, to think in terms of a topic. Don't go to someone and say, hey, would you disciple me? That's weird for everybody because we don't know what to do after that. But you may notice that this lady loves her husband in a way that I have not seen. So you might go to her and you might say, hey, I see the way that you love your husband. Will you teach me to be a wife the way that you are? It's a topic. It's an easy expectation. She can disciple you in that for a season. You may look at somebody and you may see the way that they run their business or the way that they orchestrate their career. And you may go, hey, listen, I see the way that you honor God, but you still achieve success. Will you disciple me in what it means to be a godly professional or a godly entrepreneur? That's a question. That's a topic. That's a season. You might, as a couple, go to another couple and say, hey, we see your kids. They're in college or they're adults and they seem to have their act together. We'd love to have kids that look like yours. Will you tell us your secrets? Can we have dinner at our house and you'll just tell us, we'll ask you questions about being parents. That's discipleship. It's a topic. It's a season. And if you do that, those things might morph into ongoing relationships of long-term discipleship, and that's great. But for those of us who are seeking to grow, I want us to start to think in terms of topics and seasons. For those of you who would seek to make disciples, your goal and your job is to simply help them see their next step of obedience and give them the courage and the ability to take it. And if someone does come to you and say, hey, would you disciple me? I would encourage you to try to get them to reframe the question in, what do you want to know? How can I help you best? What specifically do you want to get out of this to make sure it's fruitful for everyone? So at Grace, let's make disciples. Let's be disciples. Understanding that means we are a people who are committed to increasingly walk in obedience to the Father, that we are constantly thinking about our next step. I'm going to begin incorporating next step language in my sermons and pose to us what's the next step of obedience for us. What's your next step of obedience here? We want to see that language show up in our small groups. Small group leaders, as you shepherd the people who are in your groups, disciple them. Your job is to think for them. What is their next step of obedience and how can I help them take it? People who volunteer in the children's ministry every week, those kids that you love so much that you see once a month or every other week or however often it is, you're thinking actively for them. What is their next step of obedience and how can I help them take it? If you volunteer in the student ministry, if you pour into anybody in this church or anybody in your life, if you have kids, you are the chief discipler of them. Let me encourage you to shape up your parenting in such a way where you're thinking, what is their next step of obedience, Father, and how can I encourage them to take it? And in doing those things with clarity, let's be a church that grows deep. Let's be a church that is full of disciples, that is full of kind, generous, loving, knowledgeable, gracious believers who can all say that we are increasingly walking in obedience to our God together. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We thank you for loving us. God, I pray that Grace would be a church that makes disciples. Help us, God, from the leadership, to the partners, the volunteers, small group leaders, small group members, from people who would consider themselves on the periphery and even considering, help us all to take steps of obedience towards you. God, make us good at making disciples. If nothing else, God, if we stink at everything else as a church, I pray that this would be a place where if you come here, you will grow in a deeper knowledge of you. Father, for those of us who are facing steps of obedience that are difficult, please give us courage. Give us a faith to believe that even though we can't see what's on the other side of that step, even though we might fear bad consequences on the other side of that step, that ultimately, God, what you have for us when we take that step is better. Help us trust that you came to give us life to the full. God, build at grace a church of disciples that love you and help other people towards you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. But thanks for being here on this July weekend. It feels fun and full and energetic. I loved the worship this morning, and I'll just admit up front, I'm at risk today. Whenever I'm feeling good and happy and energetic, I'm going to say some crazy stuff. So I'm going to try to keep it concise. This is the second part of our series called Obscure Heroes. Now, to spend any time in church, to spend any time around the Bible, even to be in the South, in the Southern Christian culture, is to be aware of some of the heavy hitters in the Bible, of Moses, and of David, and of Ruth, and Paul, and all those different figures. But in Scripture, there's so many different people and so many different examples, and I love getting into the nitty-gritty of it and finding it for ourselves. I love uncovering new people and new examples and new stories. And so for eight weeks this summer, that's what we're doing, is we're going to look at some of the lesser-known figures in the Bible and see what we can learn from them and their example. And really, why did God include this story in the Bible? What can we learn from it? So this morning, we're going to look at somebody in the book of Judges, Judges chapter 4. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn there. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. There's also myriad free options online. So, you know, take your pick there. But before we do that, before we get to the book of Judges, I want to tell you about something that happened in my house this week. I think this was Wednesday night. Jen starts texting with her sister. And I'm saying, what's going on? What are you texting about? And she said, they've found, her sister's name is Lauren, her husband's name is Rusty. They have a daughter named Meredith. She's my niece, for those playing along at home. And she said, Lauren and Rusty have found this app called State Stack. And I said, what's that? And they said, well, it's just, it's like for learning. It's just a map of the United States with no borders on the inside of it. And then the app gives you a state, and you have to tap on the map where it goes to test your geographical knowledge. And my niece, Meredith, is super smart. Like not the kind of smart like, oh, she's going to be sharp one day. Like the kind of smart where you're like, she's going to create rockets. Like she's really smart. And they were texting because Meredith had beaten her parents. She's three. But she loves maps and she beats her parents at this. And listen, her parents may listen to this podcast. They're not dumb people. They're smart. They're as smart as anybody in this room. But Meredith's a genius at this app, so they're texting back and forth about it. And so Jen says, I want to try it. So she tries it. I'm not going to tell you. You can ask her what she got later. I'm not going to tell you. That's between her and Jesus. And of course, what do I want to do? I know my states. Give me a thing. I want to try it. I got to try this thing. And listen, normally I don't brag on stage. I got a perfect score. First try, right? I got an 80, which bummed me out. It bummed me out. That's the max score. Max score's an 80. Who makes an app with a max score of an 80? It's got to be 100. That's terrible. It's so dissatisfying. That's as high as it goes. In my mind, it's 100, but that's what I got. So I do it really quickly, and I just hand it back to Jen and walk off like, yeah, that's right, you know, waiting for her to kind of acknowledge it. Then, because I'm such a me monster, because I have such a fragile ego that I need the affirmation of others so desperately, after like three minutes, we're sitting there watching the British baking show, and I kind of look over, and I'm like, did you text your sister? Has she heard tale of my victories yet? Does she know that I'm smarter than her three-year-old daughter? Have we covered this? My ego needs to know that they have responded to this. So eventually she's like, yes, Nate, they're very impressed. And once I was adequately stroked, this is good. Great, everybody knows I'm good at states, right? And now listen, that's pathetic. But that all exists in us. We all need the praise of others. We all like to know that we did a good job. We all like to be told that you're important, that you're enough, that you're special, that what you did is exceptional. We all need that. We all want that, which is why I think Saul is such a relatable character for us. We're going to get to Deborah, who we're going to talk about today, but we're going to do that by contrasting her with Saul because we have a picture in the Old Testament of two leaders of Israel and two people who handled it in a very different way. Saul was the first king of Israel. He followed up a period known as the period of the judges that I'll tell you a little bit more about in a second. But he was the first king of Israel. Israel collectively acted like a seventh grade child and stomped their foot and looked at God and said, we want a king too because everybody else has one. And God says, fine, I'll give you a king, but you're going to regret this choice. So he named Saul the king. And Saul was from the smallest clan and the smallest tribe. He was a Benjaminite or Benjamite or whatever. I don't really know how to say that. But he belonged to the tribe of Benjamin. He was of the smallest clan. And so in that way, he was an unusual choice. But scripture tells us that Saul stood head and shoulders above everybody else. If you were to look through a room, he was the most impressive looking guy. He's the one that you would look at and go, that guy's probably the one that needs to be leading us. He probably looked a lot like me. And so that's who God chose was Saul. Saul became the first king. The problem with Saul is that he had this fatal flaw. Here's a man with tremendous opportunity, tremendous choice by God to be named the very first king to lead his nation. He's got the whole world in front of him. He is the first choice by God to lead God's chosen people. But Saul messes up and he continually makes it about him. He continually leverages all of his power and all of his authority and all of his ability to make it about himself, to put the praise on him, to get the attention of other people looking at him and going, Saul, aren't you good? Saul, aren't you wonderful? Aren't you a good king? And we see some big sins in his life. There's one time where he goes out to battle. Samuel is the prophet, and he's the earpiece to God and the mouthpiece to Saul. And he tells Saul, take the men out for battle. Stay here for seven days. On the seventh day, I'm going to come perform a sacrifice, and then you can attack the Philistines, and God will give you favor. So Saul says, okay. So he goes out, and he waits seven days. Well, it's the seventh day. Samuel's still not there. Saul looks around. He feels like people are starting to scatter. We don't know if that's true, if that's an excuse. But he takes matters into his own hands and he gathers everybody around and he grabs the sacrifices and he performs them himself without Samuel. And Samuel shows up as this is happening or right after it's over. And this is in the first part of the book of Samuel. You can see all this stuff. And he says, Saul, what are you doing? And Saul tells him, he gives his excuses. Well, you weren't here when I thought you would be. And the people were scattering and I got scared and we needed to go ahead and do this. And now we can attack. And I was just trying to do the right thing. And really what's happening in the heart of Saul, I think is he's got military authority. People respect him as a military leader. People respect him as a political leader. But Samuel's the religious leader. But now he's not here. So what does scheming Saul get to do? Well, now I get to step into this void and I get to be seen as a religious leader. I get to grab myself a piece of that pie too. And now people are going to respect me politically and militarily and religiously. I can step into that and we don't need Samuel as much anymore. Now we can just be me. And now people are going to think that I'm a religious leader too. They're going to respect me for my faith because the respect that I have already is not enough. I need more, right? And so he steps into that and Samuel says, what are you doing? And because of that sin, God tells Samuel, I'm going to take the kingdom away from Saul. And Saul's made aware of this, but he doesn't seem to change anything in his life. He continues to live and lead and guide that way and continue to make everything about him. Another time later on, he's going into battle and God says,, I want you to go in, and I want you to completely conquer these people. And a lot of us know, particularly if we're interested in military history, that in that day when an army would sweep into a country or a city, that when they would conquer an army or an enemy, they would plunder. They would take for themselves all of their goods. Anything that was there that was of any value at all, they would claim for themselves. And kings had first dibs. And so God says, when you go in and you conquer them, you don't take anything for yourself. You destroy them. Don't touch it. But what did Saul do? There's some stuff there that he wanted. He wanted to build himself up. He wanted to be the guy with the wealth. He wanted to be the guy with the stuff. I don't know why he took the things, but he took it, and part of it was, look at me, look at how great I am, look at my great kingdom, look at my vast wealth. And so he couldn't keep his grubby hands off of it, and he made it about himself again. Later, when David comes on the scene, and he's anointed as the next king of Israel and Saul has to deal with that reality, there was this song that used to just drive him crazy. It incensed him with rage to the point where he tried to kill David. And I'm sure that it sounds better in the Hebrew, but in the English it's Saul has slain his thousands and David has slain his tens of thousands. Saul's getting credit, but it's not enough. He needs more. He's jealous of David. Look at me, look at me, look at me. Saul would definitely wanted to know what his sister-in-law's response was to state stack. He absolutely would have needed to know that. When he got home from battle, he would have to know from his wives, did you text the other wives and tell them about my great accomplishments on the battlefield today? He would have to know that stuff because it was about him and it was about getting praise of man. Saul sought the praise of man. That's what we see in his example. He sought the praise of man. Everything that he did, every avenue that he took, even when he was sorry, when he feigned sorrow to Samuel, when he was confronted with his sin, was this feigned sorrow. He was really just sorry that he got caught. All he wanted is for everybody to like him. Saul sought the praise of men. And this, I believe, stands in direct contrast with the story of Deborah. We find the story of Deborah in Judges chapter four. Judges is the seventh book of the Bible if you're trying to turn there. And I'm not gonna go verse by verse. I will read a portion of it, but I'm just gonna tell you the story. Now, a judge at this time in Israel, they wandered around in the desert and then Joshua came in and he conquered the land of Canaan that we know as modern-day Israel. And then the tribes got scattered to their different states, as we would understand them, or territories. And then Israel had no king. God was their king. But every now and again, the Israelites would go through a pattern that we go through. We see this pattern over and over again in the book of Judges. We see it all throughout the Old Testament, and we see it in our own lives. Sin, slavery, sorrow, salvation. God sets them up in the promised land. Everything's good. He's their king. Everything's wonderful. They have their laws. They love God. He loves them. But eventually, after things went well enough, they would kind of forget about God and be like, God, we're good. We're going to take it from here. Thanks for getting us into the promised land. Thanks for getting us through that hairy spot. But we're fine now. They would forget about God. They'd start to do what was right in their own eyes, the Bible says. None of us can relate to this. So let's all just judge the Israelites together as they failed in this way. And sure enough, when that happens and we go, I'm good, God, I don't need you anymore, what happens? They fall into sin. When they would fall into sin and forget about God, God would allow an oppressor to come in, the Amalekites and the Amorites or some ites, and they would come in, the Canaanites, and they would oppress them. And they would cry out to God, oh my gosh, God, we have sinned, we have forgotten about you, and because of you, we're under the rule of this people. Will you please throw them off? Will you please save us? And God would respond to them, and he would send a judge. He would appoint a judge, and the judge's role was to overthrow the oppressors. When there's a judge in the Old Testament, there's a whole book of them here, their entire job is to overthrow the oppressors. That is their appointed job by God. And so in Judges chapter 4, we see a woman named Deborah. And we're told some stuff about Deborah. First of all, she's a prophetess. Second of all, she's a judge. She's the only lady judge, female judge, that I know of in the Bible. She's the only one, the only judge that was both a prophet and a judge that had both military and religious authority. And to me, I don't know about you, but in this time for a woman to rise to power, anytime somebody rises to power who doesn't look like all the people before them who have risen to power, that's an interesting person to talk to. Deborah's awesome. Love to talk to Deborah. She's a prophetess and she's a judge and the Canaanites are oppressing them and it's her job to get rid of the Canaanites. So she calls on a guy named Barak. From what we can see in the text, Barak seems like a general. She calls on a guy named Barak to come talk to her and the very first thing she does is she kind of gets on to him a little bit. Barak, didn't God tell you to go to assemble 10,000 men and go up against Sisera? Sisera was the general of the king of Canaan, and he had 900 chariots, the Bible tells us, which in contrast with Israel's zero chariots, is overwhelming odds. And apparently incredibly intimidating. And you get the sense that Barak has not assembled the men that he's supposed to assemble because he was scared. He felt like that was an unwinnable battle. It was an unwise choice. He was leading people to their death if he did that, so he kind of shied away from it. And Deborah's like, hey, did God tell you to do this or not? She's just got so much faith. And he's like, yeah, I guess so. And she goes, well, go assemble your men and let's go. And then Barak says this, because I think Barak's a little bit of a coward. He says, I'll do it if you go with me. Because he thinks that this is a bad deal. He thinks that he's going to die if he goes. He thinks there's no way that they can win this. So he says, okay, Deborah, you put your money where your mouth is, and then I'll do it. And I would love to have been in Barack's head when she said, okay, let's go. Right? I would love, like, what did he go? Oh, well, good. Here we go. This is super. That's not what I was planning on, Deborah. So they go. Now, here's what's interesting on stuff right here. Think about this. What would Saul do if he were Deborah? What would I probably do if I were Deborah? Barak comes to me. Didn't God tell you to take your army? Yeah, but I'm scared. What would Saul have done? Saul, knowing that God was going to deliver the victory, that there was glory to be had in this victory, I think would have told Barak, that's all right, dude, go home. Just give me your army. I'll lead them. You don't have to. It's going to be good. Conniving Saul, conniving Nate, some of us, is that not what we would do is look for a way to leverage that for our own power and authority? Let me grab the glory. I don't have any troops, but if you're scared to take yours, I'll take them. You don't have to do it. Barak, don't worry about it. I got this. That's not what she did. She said, this is something that God has asked you to do. You need to go do it. Irrespective of what it meant for her. She's not going to leave the troops. She's not going to get anything from this. And then she says this incredible thing. I love this line. She tells Brack to go and let's attack Sisera. And so they're on their way to go, but before they go, she says this in verse 9. Barak said to her in verse 8, if you will go with me, I will go, but if you will not go with me, I will not go. Okay, so that's his gamble, right? And then she says this, and she said, I'll go with you. Nevertheless, the road on which you But you are not going to get the glory for this. No one's going to know about this. No one's going to know what you did. There's a woman. It's not me. We find out later her name's Jael. She gets to kill Sisera, not you. So you're just doing this to be obedient. And I don't think Barak hears her because they go into battle and they defeat the chariots. It's amazing God gives them victory on that day. During the battle, Sisera jumps off of his chariot and takes off to survive. And while he's running, it says that Barak is still chasing him. Barak is still chasing that glory. He still wants the victory. He's still like Saul. He's still that me monster that needs people to look at him and give him the glory for what he's doing and say, you were great. That was a great victory that you won that day. He's still chasing the glory. There's no indication that Deborah's doing that. Deborah's chilled out. She already knows how this is going to play out. She doesn't care. And here's the cool thing about Deborah. Deborah has no idea that this story is going to end up in the Bible. She doesn't even know what the Bible is. It's not like there's some journalist embedded with her who's getting quotes from her as they do this. She has no clue that this is going to be recorded for posterity. But here we are thousands of years later and we know about Deborah because God saw her faithfulness and rewarded her. So Barak is chasing Sisera, and there's a woman named Jael who's married to a king that's buddies with Sisera's king. And she sees Barak running, and she's like, hey, come in here. This is a very loose paraphrase of what's in Judges. She says, come in here. I got a spot for you. So he comes in there. He lays down. He's exhausted. She covers him up with a rug, which I guess will do if you need a blanket. And he asks for some water. She gives him warm milk and dude falls asleep. And then, now I'm sorry if you don't like this part, but it's in the Bible and I like it. I think it's neat that it's in the Bible. She takes a tent peg. It says that she went to him softly, but she did. She put the tent peg against his temple and she drove his head into the ground. Yeah, it's in the Bible. You deal with it, okay? Judges 4. Go read it. Super fun. Now, then she goes to the entrance. Barak and his army are still chasing him. She's like, hey, Barak, you should come see a thing. And he goes in there and she's killed Sisera and God has defeated their oppressors and Israel is free. And we're told that Deborah provided a peace of 40 years. Now, there are so many different places where Deborah could have solved that and made it all about her. She could have taken the army. She could have gotten word of Jael. She knew who was going to kill him. She could have gotten word of Jael. When you get him, just secure him in your tent. I'm going to come and I'm going to kill him. She could have taken any of that stuff for herself. She could have made it about her. In fact, after Judges 4 and the next chapter, Judges 5, there's a song called The Song of Deborah and Barak. And if you read it, she writes it. It's in her voice and all of the credit goes to God. The day that God won, the day that God defeated, the day that God delivered into the hands. None of the credit. She didn't care. She wasn't looking for admiration for other people. She wasn't looking for other people to notice her. Sometimes it just takes a woman to teach us men that lesson that she was just doing the right thing because it was the right thing. Deborah sought the praise of God. Saul sought the praise of man. Deborah sought the praise of God. She did what she did to an audience of one. So to her, it didn't matter who defeated. It didn't matter who killed. It didn't matter who the glory went to. She sought the praise of God. And in that way, I think personifies a principle that we see Jesus lay out in Matthew chapter 6. I think that she is the personification or the best example of this. In chapter 6, Jesus is in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, his first recorded public address, and he says this. He's talking to people about practicing giving. When you give, he says this. Pick it up in verse 2. Can you imagine? You're sitting here having a church service. Some dude, it would have to be a dude, kicks open the doors. Then trumpets sound. He's like, I'm going to give you guys 50 grand. And we're all like, great, thank you. That would be ridiculous. But he says, don't do that like the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be seen in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. I love that. I love the matter-of-factness of that statement. Don't be like the people who seek the praise of men for the good things that they do because I tell you the truth, that's their reward. You want to give something away to somebody? You want to buy somebody a meal? You want to do something nice and altruistic? That's fine. Post on your Instagram story and the likes that you get, that's your reward, God says. Congratulations. You got this from someone you talk to twice a year. Good. When you do something good and we do it for other people, we do it to be noticed and we put it out there, God says, that's your reward. But if you'll do it in secret and not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, then your Father in heaven will see and he will reward you. And can't we admit that we like people who have this figured out? We admire people who have the character to do good things because God has laid it on their heart to do them, and not for any other reason than because they believe it's the right thing to do. Don't we admire people like that? I told you before about my father-in-law and how much respect I have for him. One of my favorite stories about him, he's just like this in a lot of ways. I could tell a lot of stories, but one Christmas, Jen and I gave him a North Face fleece, which was like, I don't know, like a hundred bucks. It was a big deal for us to give that kind of gift. Like, look at us. This is what we're getting to give her dad, my father-in-law. So we give him this North Face fleece. He worked downtown. He worked in an office, but he liked to wear that to work. And he called it pretty, and it was good looking, and whatever. It's a nice fleece where everyone's very happy. Well, a couple months later, or maybe the next winter, I don't know, he's not wearing this fleece anymore. And Terry, his wife, is like, John, what did you do with that fleece? And he says, oh, I don't know. I'm just not wearing it today. He keeps not wearing it. She's pressing him. John, come on. Nate and Jen gave that to you. Where is that fleece? He's like, ah, it's not cold outside. She's like, John, it's like 12 degrees. You need something. She presses him and presses him and finally he confesses. He's driving down the road one day coming back from work and it was a particularly cold day which in Georgia is probably like 56, 57 degrees. It was a particularly cold day and there's somebody on the side of the road spinning a sign which when I see somebody on the side of the road spinning a sign, which when I see people on the side of the road spinning a sign, I'm like big on technique. I want to see what you're bringing to the table, man. Like, I want to see what you got over there. Like, sometimes it's pretty impressive what they can do. I do not notice what they're wearing, but John noticed that this person just had a hoodie. They just had a thin sweatshirt. And their job was really cold. So what's he do? He pulls off to the side of the road. He gets out, takes off his fleece and walks it over and hands it to the person and says, your job requires this a lot more than mine does. You take this. And he gets in his car and he goes home and he never tells a soul. He only tells anybody because his wife bugged him about it long enough to learn the story. We love stories like that. We want to be like that. Deborah lived her life like that. Jesus says when we do that, that God the Father sees us and that great is our reward. And so listen, what I want us to understand today is this. The praise of man intoxicates. The praise of man intoxicates, but the praise of God satisfies. The praise of man intoxicates, but the praise of God satisfies. Here's what I mean. When you're intoxicated, you're not thinking clearly. You're not making the best decisions. You're not the best version of yourself. You probably say some stuff and do some things that you don't mean. It causes you to act in ways that are not reflective of who you really want to be. The other thing about being intoxicated is it always takes what? It always takes a little bit more. If one drink did it this time, then it won't be long before you need two. Right? If one pill, if one whatever does it this time, if I get this feeling for one, then eventually I'm going to need two. And eventually two's not going to be enough and and I'm gonna need three. And isn't this what happened to Saul? He gets appointed as the king, he gets anointed, and people are giving him attention in his little clan and then he continues to get elevated and people continue to acknowledge him and continue to heap praise on him. And it's never enough. So he steps in and he says, I want religious praise too. It's never enough. He steps in and he takes more wealth too. It's never enough. When we live for the praise of man, it's never enough. We can never hear enough good things about ourselves to be satisfied. We always want more. It causes us to act in ways that are not reflective of who we want to be. It causes us to not be the best version of ourself. And we always need just a little bit more, just a little bit more praise, just a little bit more pats on the back, and no one can ever make us feel like we are enough. And God's praise satisfies. And when I say satisfies, I think of it like this. Every now and again, I eat healthy. And when I do, one of my favorite things to eat is just grilled chicken and grilled vegetables. I just put a skewer of grilled vegetables on the grill. Sometimes we roast them in the oven, a little bit of salt and pepper, and then chicken with salt and pepper. I like that meal. I like that meal because I can eat as much of it as I want and I don't feel bad. Now, if you know something about dieting and you would say to me in the lobby, well, actually, it's not good to eat that. Listen, just let me have my chicken, okay? I'm not at that level yet. Just keep it to yourself. When I eat that grilled chicken and I eat those grilled vegetables, I can eat as much of it as I want and I don't feel bad. I just feel full. I feel good. I feel healthy. And if you were to come to me after that and you go, hey, you want a piece of this pie? You want cinnamon roll? I would tell you, no, I'm good, thanks. I'm fine. I'm satisfied. That's what the praise of God does for you. When God has acknowledged that what you're doing is good, when between you and the Heavenly Father, He says, I'm proud of you. That's good. That's enough. You don't need to take the troops and go to conquer anybody yourself. Deborah says, I'm squared away. I'm fine. You don't need to get the credit for winning the battle that day. I'm good. I'm fine. I'm squared away. I'm good. John didn't need to tell anybody that he gave his fleece to anyone. Why? Because between him and God, he's good. I'm satisfied. When we live for the praise of God, it satisfies us. We don't need anything else. Because the one who created us is looking at us, telling us, you're enough. I'm proud of you. I love you. For some of us, that's all we need to hear. If we keep fighting and scratching and clawing to get other people to tell us that, it's never going to satisfy. Even when you get what you think you want, you're going to get there and find out it's not enough. But God's reward satisfies. And so listen, it's not about stamping out this need to be known. It's a very natural need to need somebody to say, you're good and I appreciate you and you're enough. Lily has started in with this. Like yesterday, for an hour. It was the first time it happened. Jen and I were looking at each other like, oh my goodness. Daddy, look at me, look at me, watch this. Daddy, watch this. Daddy, watch this. And I'm like, I'm watching, buddy. Let's go. And listen, Jen's going to be mad at me. It wasn't even that good. I mean, she's just like, she's just running and jumping into a chair. Get back to me when you memorize the states, kid. But she wants to be noticed. She wants to be known. She wants somebody to tell her, that's good. I'm proud of you. So the Christian life isn't about stamping that out. It's just about focusing it on the right thing. Moving from trying to get our affirmation and our praise from man to seeking our praise and our affirmation from God. And when we do, we're told we will get a reward. And I thought about this. If I'm going to make the whole point of the sermon, obeying God so that we get a reward, I should probably be able to define what the reward is. I don't know what it is. For Deborah, it's being in the Bible and us knowing her story thousands of years later. For some of us, it's some sort of arrangement in heaven. I don't know. Great is your reward in heaven. I don't really know what that means, and I can't really define for you what it is for God to reward you for operating for his praise, but here's what I know. God's reward is better than your friend's reward. God rewarding you, noticing your good behavior, and affirming you is better than the reward you're going to get from Mitch in accounting that you talk to twice a year. It's better than these online. God's reward is better than your friends. It's better than your spouses. God's reward is better. And that's what we should be living for. So I hope that as we look at the story of Deborah and we compare it to Saul, that we'll be honest about where we sit and that we'll have a desire to live for the praise of God and be satisfied in that and let that be enough. And in light of those things, I would ask you as we finish, for you to consider as you go into your week this week, for whose praise are you living? For whose praise are you living? Another way of thinking about that is, the next time you feel compelled to do something good, ask yourself, why do I want to do this? Do I want to do it so that other people will see me be good and I'll get their appreciation for that? Because God says, that'll be your reward. Or do I want to do this because it's the right thing to do and I want my Father in Heaven to see me and be proud of me? For whose praise are you living? Let's pray. Father, you're so good to us. You see us and you know us and you tell us that we are enough. You see everything that we do in secret, God. I know that there are good people here who have done so much in their lives that nobody knows, that they feel like nobody sees, that they feel like they're never going to get credit for. And I pray that they would hear loud and clear this morning, God, that you see them. You notice. And their reward is great. God, for people who are like me, or like Saul, and struggle so much with wanting other people to tell them how good they are, would you just help us make you enough? Would you help us live for your praise? Would you help us hold out for your reward? God, we pray these things in your son's name. Amen.

My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. But thanks for being here on this July weekend. It feels fun and full and energetic. I loved the worship this morning, and I'll just admit up front, I'm at risk today. Whenever I'm feeling good and happy and energetic, I'm going to say some crazy stuff. So I'm going to try to keep it concise. This is the second part of our series called Obscure Heroes. Now, to spend any time in church, to spend any time around the Bible, even to be in the South, in the Southern Christian culture, is to be aware of some of the heavy hitters in the Bible, of Moses, and of David, and of Ruth, and Paul, and all those different figures. But in Scripture, there's so many different people and so many different examples, and I love getting into the nitty-gritty of it and finding it for ourselves. I love uncovering new people and new examples and new stories. And so for eight weeks this summer, that's what we're doing, is we're going to look at some of the lesser-known figures in the Bible and see what we can learn from them and their example. And really, why did God include this story in the Bible? What can we learn from it? So this morning, we're going to look at somebody in the book of Judges, Judges chapter 4. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn there. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. There's also myriad free options online. So, you know, take your pick there. But before we do that, before we get to the book of Judges, I want to tell you about something that happened in my house this week. I think this was Wednesday night. Jen starts texting with her sister. And I'm saying, what's going on? What are you texting about? And she said, they've found, her sister's name is Lauren, her husband's name is Rusty. They have a daughter named Meredith. She's my niece, for those playing along at home. And she said, Lauren and Rusty have found this app called State Stack. And I said, what's that? And they said, well, it's just, it's like for learning. It's just a map of the United States with no borders on the inside of it. And then the app gives you a state, and you have to tap on the map where it goes to test your geographical knowledge. And my niece, Meredith, is super smart. Like not the kind of smart like, oh, she's going to be sharp one day. Like the kind of smart where you're like, she's going to create rockets. Like she's really smart. And they were texting because Meredith had beaten her parents. She's three. But she loves maps and she beats her parents at this. And listen, her parents may listen to this podcast. They're not dumb people. They're smart. They're as smart as anybody in this room. But Meredith's a genius at this app, so they're texting back and forth about it. And so Jen says, I want to try it. So she tries it. I'm not going to tell you. You can ask her what she got later. I'm not going to tell you. That's between her and Jesus. And of course, what do I want to do? I know my states. Give me a thing. I want to try it. I got to try this thing. And listen, normally I don't brag on stage. I got a perfect score. First try, right? I got an 80, which bummed me out. It bummed me out. That's the max score. Max score's an 80. Who makes an app with a max score of an 80? It's got to be 100. That's terrible. It's so dissatisfying. That's as high as it goes. In my mind, it's 100, but that's what I got. So I do it really quickly, and I just hand it back to Jen and walk off like, yeah, that's right, you know, waiting for her to kind of acknowledge it. Then, because I'm such a me monster, because I have such a fragile ego that I need the affirmation of others so desperately, after like three minutes, we're sitting there watching the British baking show, and I kind of look over, and I'm like, did you text your sister? Has she heard tale of my victories yet? Does she know that I'm smarter than her three-year-old daughter? Have we covered this? My ego needs to know that they have responded to this. So eventually she's like, yes, Nate, they're very impressed. And once I was adequately stroked, this is good. Great, everybody knows I'm good at states, right? And now listen, that's pathetic. But that all exists in us. We all need the praise of others. We all like to know that we did a good job. We all like to be told that you're important, that you're enough, that you're special, that what you did is exceptional. We all need that. We all want that, which is why I think Saul is such a relatable character for us. We're going to get to Deborah, who we're going to talk about today, but we're going to do that by contrasting her with Saul because we have a picture in the Old Testament of two leaders of Israel and two people who handled it in a very different way. Saul was the first king of Israel. He followed up a period known as the period of the judges that I'll tell you a little bit more about in a second. But he was the first king of Israel. Israel collectively acted like a seventh grade child and stomped their foot and looked at God and said, we want a king too because everybody else has one. And God says, fine, I'll give you a king, but you're going to regret this choice. So he named Saul the king. And Saul was from the smallest clan and the smallest tribe. He was a Benjaminite or Benjamite or whatever. I don't really know how to say that. But he belonged to the tribe of Benjamin. He was of the smallest clan. And so in that way, he was an unusual choice. But scripture tells us that Saul stood head and shoulders above everybody else. If you were to look through a room, he was the most impressive looking guy. He's the one that you would look at and go, that guy's probably the one that needs to be leading us. He probably looked a lot like me. And so that's who God chose was Saul. Saul became the first king. The problem with Saul is that he had this fatal flaw. Here's a man with tremendous opportunity, tremendous choice by God to be named the very first king to lead his nation. He's got the whole world in front of him. He is the first choice by God to lead God's chosen people. But Saul messes up and he continually makes it about him. He continually leverages all of his power and all of his authority and all of his ability to make it about himself, to put the praise on him, to get the attention of other people looking at him and going, Saul, aren't you good? Saul, aren't you wonderful? Aren't you a good king? And we see some big sins in his life. There's one time where he goes out to battle. Samuel is the prophet, and he's the earpiece to God and the mouthpiece to Saul. And he tells Saul, take the men out for battle. Stay here for seven days. On the seventh day, I'm going to come perform a sacrifice, and then you can attack the Philistines, and God will give you favor. So Saul says, okay. So he goes out, and he waits seven days. Well, it's the seventh day. Samuel's still not there. Saul looks around. He feels like people are starting to scatter. We don't know if that's true, if that's an excuse. But he takes matters into his own hands and he gathers everybody around and he grabs the sacrifices and he performs them himself without Samuel. And Samuel shows up as this is happening or right after it's over. And this is in the first part of the book of Samuel. You can see all this stuff. And he says, Saul, what are you doing? And Saul tells him, he gives his excuses. Well, you weren't here when I thought you would be. And the people were scattering and I got scared and we needed to go ahead and do this. And now we can attack. And I was just trying to do the right thing. And really what's happening in the heart of Saul, I think is he's got military authority. People respect him as a military leader. People respect him as a political leader. But Samuel's the religious leader. But now he's not here. So what does scheming Saul get to do? Well, now I get to step into this void and I get to be seen as a religious leader. I get to grab myself a piece of that pie too. And now people are going to respect me politically and militarily and religiously. I can step into that and we don't need Samuel as much anymore. Now we can just be me. And now people are going to think that I'm a religious leader too. They're going to respect me for my faith because the respect that I have already is not enough. I need more, right? And so he steps into that and Samuel says, what are you doing? And because of that sin, God tells Samuel, I'm going to take the kingdom away from Saul. And Saul's made aware of this, but he doesn't seem to change anything in his life. He continues to live and lead and guide that way and continue to make everything about him. Another time later on, he's going into battle and God says,, I want you to go in, and I want you to completely conquer these people. And a lot of us know, particularly if we're interested in military history, that in that day when an army would sweep into a country or a city, that when they would conquer an army or an enemy, they would plunder. They would take for themselves all of their goods. Anything that was there that was of any value at all, they would claim for themselves. And kings had first dibs. And so God says, when you go in and you conquer them, you don't take anything for yourself. You destroy them. Don't touch it. But what did Saul do? There's some stuff there that he wanted. He wanted to build himself up. He wanted to be the guy with the wealth. He wanted to be the guy with the stuff. I don't know why he took the things, but he took it, and part of it was, look at me, look at how great I am, look at my great kingdom, look at my vast wealth. And so he couldn't keep his grubby hands off of it, and he made it about himself again. Later, when David comes on the scene, and he's anointed as the next king of Israel and Saul has to deal with that reality, there was this song that used to just drive him crazy. It incensed him with rage to the point where he tried to kill David. And I'm sure that it sounds better in the Hebrew, but in the English it's Saul has slain his thousands and David has slain his tens of thousands. Saul's getting credit, but it's not enough. He needs more. He's jealous of David. Look at me, look at me, look at me. Saul would definitely wanted to know what his sister-in-law's response was to state stack. He absolutely would have needed to know that. When he got home from battle, he would have to know from his wives, did you text the other wives and tell them about my great accomplishments on the battlefield today? He would have to know that stuff because it was about him and it was about getting praise of man. Saul sought the praise of man. That's what we see in his example. He sought the praise of man. Everything that he did, every avenue that he took, even when he was sorry, when he feigned sorrow to Samuel, when he was confronted with his sin, was this feigned sorrow. He was really just sorry that he got caught. All he wanted is for everybody to like him. Saul sought the praise of men. And this, I believe, stands in direct contrast with the story of Deborah. We find the story of Deborah in Judges chapter four. Judges is the seventh book of the Bible if you're trying to turn there. And I'm not gonna go verse by verse. I will read a portion of it, but I'm just gonna tell you the story. Now, a judge at this time in Israel, they wandered around in the desert and then Joshua came in and he conquered the land of Canaan that we know as modern-day Israel. And then the tribes got scattered to their different states, as we would understand them, or territories. And then Israel had no king. God was their king. But every now and again, the Israelites would go through a pattern that we go through. We see this pattern over and over again in the book of Judges. We see it all throughout the Old Testament, and we see it in our own lives. Sin, slavery, sorrow, salvation. God sets them up in the promised land. Everything's good. He's their king. Everything's wonderful. They have their laws. They love God. He loves them. But eventually, after things went well enough, they would kind of forget about God and be like, God, we're good. We're going to take it from here. Thanks for getting us into the promised land. Thanks for getting us through that hairy spot. But we're fine now. They would forget about God. They'd start to do what was right in their own eyes, the Bible says. None of us can relate to this. So let's all just judge the Israelites together as they failed in this way. And sure enough, when that happens and we go, I'm good, God, I don't need you anymore, what happens? They fall into sin. When they would fall into sin and forget about God, God would allow an oppressor to come in, the Amalekites and the Amorites or some ites, and they would come in, the Canaanites, and they would oppress them. And they would cry out to God, oh my gosh, God, we have sinned, we have forgotten about you, and because of you, we're under the rule of this people. Will you please throw them off? Will you please save us? And God would respond to them, and he would send a judge. He would appoint a judge, and the judge's role was to overthrow the oppressors. When there's a judge in the Old Testament, there's a whole book of them here, their entire job is to overthrow the oppressors. That is their appointed job by God. And so in Judges chapter 4, we see a woman named Deborah. And we're told some stuff about Deborah. First of all, she's a prophetess. Second of all, she's a judge. She's the only lady judge, female judge, that I know of in the Bible. She's the only one, the only judge that was both a prophet and a judge that had both military and religious authority. And to me, I don't know about you, but in this time for a woman to rise to power, anytime somebody rises to power who doesn't look like all the people before them who have risen to power, that's an interesting person to talk to. Deborah's awesome. Love to talk to Deborah. She's a prophetess and she's a judge and the Canaanites are oppressing them and it's her job to get rid of the Canaanites. So she calls on a guy named Barak. From what we can see in the text, Barak seems like a general. She calls on a guy named Barak to come talk to her and the very first thing she does is she kind of gets on to him a little bit. Barak, didn't God tell you to go to assemble 10,000 men and go up against Sisera? Sisera was the general of the king of Canaan, and he had 900 chariots, the Bible tells us, which in contrast with Israel's zero chariots, is overwhelming odds. And apparently incredibly intimidating. And you get the sense that Barak has not assembled the men that he's supposed to assemble because he was scared. He felt like that was an unwinnable battle. It was an unwise choice. He was leading people to their death if he did that, so he kind of shied away from it. And Deborah's like, hey, did God tell you to do this or not? She's just got so much faith. And he's like, yeah, I guess so. And she goes, well, go assemble your men and let's go. And then Barak says this, because I think Barak's a little bit of a coward. He says, I'll do it if you go with me. Because he thinks that this is a bad deal. He thinks that he's going to die if he goes. He thinks there's no way that they can win this. So he says, okay, Deborah, you put your money where your mouth is, and then I'll do it. And I would love to have been in Barack's head when she said, okay, let's go. Right? I would love, like, what did he go? Oh, well, good. Here we go. This is super. That's not what I was planning on, Deborah. So they go. Now, here's what's interesting on stuff right here. Think about this. What would Saul do if he were Deborah? What would I probably do if I were Deborah? Barak comes to me. Didn't God tell you to take your army? Yeah, but I'm scared. What would Saul have done? Saul, knowing that God was going to deliver the victory, that there was glory to be had in this victory, I think would have told Barak, that's all right, dude, go home. Just give me your army. I'll lead them. You don't have to. It's going to be good. Conniving Saul, conniving Nate, some of us, is that not what we would do is look for a way to leverage that for our own power and authority? Let me grab the glory. I don't have any troops, but if you're scared to take yours, I'll take them. You don't have to do it. Barak, don't worry about it. I got this. That's not what she did. She said, this is something that God has asked you to do. You need to go do it. Irrespective of what it meant for her. She's not going to leave the troops. She's not going to get anything from this. And then she says this incredible thing. I love this line. She tells Brack to go and let's attack Sisera. And so they're on their way to go, but before they go, she says this in verse 9. Barak said to her in verse 8, if you will go with me, I will go, but if you will not go with me, I will not go. Okay, so that's his gamble, right? And then she says this, and she said, I'll go with you. Nevertheless, the road on which you But you are not going to get the glory for this. No one's going to know about this. No one's going to know what you did. There's a woman. It's not me. We find out later her name's Jael. She gets to kill Sisera, not you. So you're just doing this to be obedient. And I don't think Barak hears her because they go into battle and they defeat the chariots. It's amazing God gives them victory on that day. During the battle, Sisera jumps off of his chariot and takes off to survive. And while he's running, it says that Barak is still chasing him. Barak is still chasing that glory. He still wants the victory. He's still like Saul. He's still that me monster that needs people to look at him and give him the glory for what he's doing and say, you were great. That was a great victory that you won that day. He's still chasing the glory. There's no indication that Deborah's doing that. Deborah's chilled out. She already knows how this is going to play out. She doesn't care. And here's the cool thing about Deborah. Deborah has no idea that this story is going to end up in the Bible. She doesn't even know what the Bible is. It's not like there's some journalist embedded with her who's getting quotes from her as they do this. She has no clue that this is going to be recorded for posterity. But here we are thousands of years later and we know about Deborah because God saw her faithfulness and rewarded her. So Barak is chasing Sisera, and there's a woman named Jael who's married to a king that's buddies with Sisera's king. And she sees Barak running, and she's like, hey, come in here. This is a very loose paraphrase of what's in Judges. She says, come in here. I got a spot for you. So he comes in there. He lays down. He's exhausted. She covers him up with a rug, which I guess will do if you need a blanket. And he asks for some water. She gives him warm milk and dude falls asleep. And then, now I'm sorry if you don't like this part, but it's in the Bible and I like it. I think it's neat that it's in the Bible. She takes a tent peg. It says that she went to him softly, but she did. She put the tent peg against his temple and she drove his head into the ground. Yeah, it's in the Bible. You deal with it, okay? Judges 4. Go read it. Super fun. Now, then she goes to the entrance. Barak and his army are still chasing him. She's like, hey, Barak, you should come see a thing. And he goes in there and she's killed Sisera and God has defeated their oppressors and Israel is free. And we're told that Deborah provided a peace of 40 years. Now, there are so many different places where Deborah could have solved that and made it all about her. She could have taken the army. She could have gotten word of Jael. She knew who was going to kill him. She could have gotten word of Jael. When you get him, just secure him in your tent. I'm going to come and I'm going to kill him. She could have taken any of that stuff for herself. She could have made it about her. In fact, after Judges 4 and the next chapter, Judges 5, there's a song called The Song of Deborah and Barak. And if you read it, she writes it. It's in her voice and all of the credit goes to God. The day that God won, the day that God defeated, the day that God delivered into the hands. None of the credit. She didn't care. She wasn't looking for admiration for other people. She wasn't looking for other people to notice her. Sometimes it just takes a woman to teach us men that lesson that she was just doing the right thing because it was the right thing. Deborah sought the praise of God. Saul sought the praise of man. Deborah sought the praise of God. She did what she did to an audience of one. So to her, it didn't matter who defeated. It didn't matter who killed. It didn't matter who the glory went to. She sought the praise of God. And in that way, I think personifies a principle that we see Jesus lay out in Matthew chapter 6. I think that she is the personification or the best example of this. In chapter 6, Jesus is in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, his first recorded public address, and he says this. He's talking to people about practicing giving. When you give, he says this. Pick it up in verse 2. Can you imagine? You're sitting here having a church service. Some dude, it would have to be a dude, kicks open the doors. Then trumpets sound. He's like, I'm going to give you guys 50 grand. And we're all like, great, thank you. That would be ridiculous. But he says, don't do that like the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be seen in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. I love that. I love the matter-of-factness of that statement. Don't be like the people who seek the praise of men for the good things that they do because I tell you the truth, that's their reward. You want to give something away to somebody? You want to buy somebody a meal? You want to do something nice and altruistic? That's fine. Post on your Instagram story and the likes that you get, that's your reward, God says. Congratulations. You got this from someone you talk to twice a year. Good. When you do something good and we do it for other people, we do it to be noticed and we put it out there, God says, that's your reward. But if you'll do it in secret and not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, then your Father in heaven will see and he will reward you. And can't we admit that we like people who have this figured out? We admire people who have the character to do good things because God has laid it on their heart to do them, and not for any other reason than because they believe it's the right thing to do. Don't we admire people like that? I told you before about my father-in-law and how much respect I have for him. One of my favorite stories about him, he's just like this in a lot of ways. I could tell a lot of stories, but one Christmas, Jen and I gave him a North Face fleece, which was like, I don't know, like a hundred bucks. It was a big deal for us to give that kind of gift. Like, look at us. This is what we're getting to give her dad, my father-in-law. So we give him this North Face fleece. He worked downtown. He worked in an office, but he liked to wear that to work. And he called it pretty, and it was good looking, and whatever. It's a nice fleece where everyone's very happy. Well, a couple months later, or maybe the next winter, I don't know, he's not wearing this fleece anymore. And Terry, his wife, is like, John, what did you do with that fleece? And he says, oh, I don't know. I'm just not wearing it today. He keeps not wearing it. She's pressing him. John, come on. Nate and Jen gave that to you. Where is that fleece? He's like, ah, it's not cold outside. She's like, John, it's like 12 degrees. You need something. She presses him and presses him and finally he confesses. He's driving down the road one day coming back from work and it was a particularly cold day which in Georgia is probably like 56, 57 degrees. It was a particularly cold day and there's somebody on the side of the road spinning a sign which when I see somebody on the side of the road spinning a sign, which when I see people on the side of the road spinning a sign, I'm like big on technique. I want to see what you're bringing to the table, man. Like, I want to see what you got over there. Like, sometimes it's pretty impressive what they can do. I do not notice what they're wearing, but John noticed that this person just had a hoodie. They just had a thin sweatshirt. And their job was really cold. So what's he do? He pulls off to the side of the road. He gets out, takes off his fleece and walks it over and hands it to the person and says, your job requires this a lot more than mine does. You take this. And he gets in his car and he goes home and he never tells a soul. He only tells anybody because his wife bugged him about it long enough to learn the story. We love stories like that. We want to be like that. Deborah lived her life like that. Jesus says when we do that, that God the Father sees us and that great is our reward. And so listen, what I want us to understand today is this. The praise of man intoxicates. The praise of man intoxicates, but the praise of God satisfies. The praise of man intoxicates, but the praise of God satisfies. Here's what I mean. When you're intoxicated, you're not thinking clearly. You're not making the best decisions. You're not the best version of yourself. You probably say some stuff and do some things that you don't mean. It causes you to act in ways that are not reflective of who you really want to be. The other thing about being intoxicated is it always takes what? It always takes a little bit more. If one drink did it this time, then it won't be long before you need two. Right? If one pill, if one whatever does it this time, if I get this feeling for one, then eventually I'm going to need two. And eventually two's not going to be enough and and I'm gonna need three. And isn't this what happened to Saul? He gets appointed as the king, he gets anointed, and people are giving him attention in his little clan and then he continues to get elevated and people continue to acknowledge him and continue to heap praise on him. And it's never enough. So he steps in and he says, I want religious praise too. It's never enough. He steps in and he takes more wealth too. It's never enough. When we live for the praise of man, it's never enough. We can never hear enough good things about ourselves to be satisfied. We always want more. It causes us to act in ways that are not reflective of who we want to be. It causes us to not be the best version of ourself. And we always need just a little bit more, just a little bit more praise, just a little bit more pats on the back, and no one can ever make us feel like we are enough. And God's praise satisfies. And when I say satisfies, I think of it like this. Every now and again, I eat healthy. And when I do, one of my favorite things to eat is just grilled chicken and grilled vegetables. I just put a skewer of grilled vegetables on the grill. Sometimes we roast them in the oven, a little bit of salt and pepper, and then chicken with salt and pepper. I like that meal. I like that meal because I can eat as much of it as I want and I don't feel bad. Now, if you know something about dieting and you would say to me in the lobby, well, actually, it's not good to eat that. Listen, just let me have my chicken, okay? I'm not at that level yet. Just keep it to yourself. When I eat that grilled chicken and I eat those grilled vegetables, I can eat as much of it as I want and I don't feel bad. I just feel full. I feel good. I feel healthy. And if you were to come to me after that and you go, hey, you want a piece of this pie? You want cinnamon roll? I would tell you, no, I'm good, thanks. I'm fine. I'm satisfied. That's what the praise of God does for you. When God has acknowledged that what you're doing is good, when between you and the Heavenly Father, He says, I'm proud of you. That's good. That's enough. You don't need to take the troops and go to conquer anybody yourself. Deborah says, I'm squared away. I'm fine. You don't need to get the credit for winning the battle that day. I'm good. I'm fine. I'm squared away. I'm good. John didn't need to tell anybody that he gave his fleece to anyone. Why? Because between him and God, he's good. I'm satisfied. When we live for the praise of God, it satisfies us. We don't need anything else. Because the one who created us is looking at us, telling us, you're enough. I'm proud of you. I love you. For some of us, that's all we need to hear. If we keep fighting and scratching and clawing to get other people to tell us that, it's never going to satisfy. Even when you get what you think you want, you're going to get there and find out it's not enough. But God's reward satisfies. And so listen, it's not about stamping out this need to be known. It's a very natural need to need somebody to say, you're good and I appreciate you and you're enough. Lily has started in with this. Like yesterday, for an hour. It was the first time it happened. Jen and I were looking at each other like, oh my goodness. Daddy, look at me, look at me, watch this. Daddy, watch this. Daddy, watch this. And I'm like, I'm watching, buddy. Let's go. And listen, Jen's going to be mad at me. It wasn't even that good. I mean, she's just like, she's just running and jumping into a chair. Get back to me when you memorize the states, kid. But she wants to be noticed. She wants to be known. She wants somebody to tell her, that's good. I'm proud of you. So the Christian life isn't about stamping that out. It's just about focusing it on the right thing. Moving from trying to get our affirmation and our praise from man to seeking our praise and our affirmation from God. And when we do, we're told we will get a reward. And I thought about this. If I'm going to make the whole point of the sermon, obeying God so that we get a reward, I should probably be able to define what the reward is. I don't know what it is. For Deborah, it's being in the Bible and us knowing her story thousands of years later. For some of us, it's some sort of arrangement in heaven. I don't know. Great is your reward in heaven. I don't really know what that means, and I can't really define for you what it is for God to reward you for operating for his praise, but here's what I know. God's reward is better than your friend's reward. God rewarding you, noticing your good behavior, and affirming you is better than the reward you're going to get from Mitch in accounting that you talk to twice a year. It's better than these online. God's reward is better than your friends. It's better than your spouses. God's reward is better. And that's what we should be living for. So I hope that as we look at the story of Deborah and we compare it to Saul, that we'll be honest about where we sit and that we'll have a desire to live for the praise of God and be satisfied in that and let that be enough. And in light of those things, I would ask you as we finish, for you to consider as you go into your week this week, for whose praise are you living? For whose praise are you living? Another way of thinking about that is, the next time you feel compelled to do something good, ask yourself, why do I want to do this? Do I want to do it so that other people will see me be good and I'll get their appreciation for that? Because God says, that'll be your reward. Or do I want to do this because it's the right thing to do and I want my Father in Heaven to see me and be proud of me? For whose praise are you living? Let's pray. Father, you're so good to us. You see us and you know us and you tell us that we are enough. You see everything that we do in secret, God. I know that there are good people here who have done so much in their lives that nobody knows, that they feel like nobody sees, that they feel like they're never going to get credit for. And I pray that they would hear loud and clear this morning, God, that you see them. You notice. And their reward is great. God, for people who are like me, or like Saul, and struggle so much with wanting other people to tell them how good they are, would you just help us make you enough? Would you help us live for your praise? Would you help us hold out for your reward? God, we pray these things in your son's name. Amen.

My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. But thanks for being here on this July weekend. It feels fun and full and energetic. I loved the worship this morning, and I'll just admit up front, I'm at risk today. Whenever I'm feeling good and happy and energetic, I'm going to say some crazy stuff. So I'm going to try to keep it concise. This is the second part of our series called Obscure Heroes. Now, to spend any time in church, to spend any time around the Bible, even to be in the South, in the Southern Christian culture, is to be aware of some of the heavy hitters in the Bible, of Moses, and of David, and of Ruth, and Paul, and all those different figures. But in Scripture, there's so many different people and so many different examples, and I love getting into the nitty-gritty of it and finding it for ourselves. I love uncovering new people and new examples and new stories. And so for eight weeks this summer, that's what we're doing, is we're going to look at some of the lesser-known figures in the Bible and see what we can learn from them and their example. And really, why did God include this story in the Bible? What can we learn from it? So this morning, we're going to look at somebody in the book of Judges, Judges chapter 4. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn there. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. There's also myriad free options online. So, you know, take your pick there. But before we do that, before we get to the book of Judges, I want to tell you about something that happened in my house this week. I think this was Wednesday night. Jen starts texting with her sister. And I'm saying, what's going on? What are you texting about? And she said, they've found, her sister's name is Lauren, her husband's name is Rusty. They have a daughter named Meredith. She's my niece, for those playing along at home. And she said, Lauren and Rusty have found this app called State Stack. And I said, what's that? And they said, well, it's just, it's like for learning. It's just a map of the United States with no borders on the inside of it. And then the app gives you a state, and you have to tap on the map where it goes to test your geographical knowledge. And my niece, Meredith, is super smart. Like not the kind of smart like, oh, she's going to be sharp one day. Like the kind of smart where you're like, she's going to create rockets. Like she's really smart. And they were texting because Meredith had beaten her parents. She's three. But she loves maps and she beats her parents at this. And listen, her parents may listen to this podcast. They're not dumb people. They're smart. They're as smart as anybody in this room. But Meredith's a genius at this app, so they're texting back and forth about it. And so Jen says, I want to try it. So she tries it. I'm not going to tell you. You can ask her what she got later. I'm not going to tell you. That's between her and Jesus. And of course, what do I want to do? I know my states. Give me a thing. I want to try it. I got to try this thing. And listen, normally I don't brag on stage. I got a perfect score. First try, right? I got an 80, which bummed me out. It bummed me out. That's the max score. Max score's an 80. Who makes an app with a max score of an 80? It's got to be 100. That's terrible. It's so dissatisfying. That's as high as it goes. In my mind, it's 100, but that's what I got. So I do it really quickly, and I just hand it back to Jen and walk off like, yeah, that's right, you know, waiting for her to kind of acknowledge it. Then, because I'm such a me monster, because I have such a fragile ego that I need the affirmation of others so desperately, after like three minutes, we're sitting there watching the British baking show, and I kind of look over, and I'm like, did you text your sister? Has she heard tale of my victories yet? Does she know that I'm smarter than her three-year-old daughter? Have we covered this? My ego needs to know that they have responded to this. So eventually she's like, yes, Nate, they're very impressed. And once I was adequately stroked, this is good. Great, everybody knows I'm good at states, right? And now listen, that's pathetic. But that all exists in us. We all need the praise of others. We all like to know that we did a good job. We all like to be told that you're important, that you're enough, that you're special, that what you did is exceptional. We all need that. We all want that, which is why I think Saul is such a relatable character for us. We're going to get to Deborah, who we're going to talk about today, but we're going to do that by contrasting her with Saul because we have a picture in the Old Testament of two leaders of Israel and two people who handled it in a very different way. Saul was the first king of Israel. He followed up a period known as the period of the judges that I'll tell you a little bit more about in a second. But he was the first king of Israel. Israel collectively acted like a seventh grade child and stomped their foot and looked at God and said, we want a king too because everybody else has one. And God says, fine, I'll give you a king, but you're going to regret this choice. So he named Saul the king. And Saul was from the smallest clan and the smallest tribe. He was a Benjaminite or Benjamite or whatever. I don't really know how to say that. But he belonged to the tribe of Benjamin. He was of the smallest clan. And so in that way, he was an unusual choice. But scripture tells us that Saul stood head and shoulders above everybody else. If you were to look through a room, he was the most impressive looking guy. He's the one that you would look at and go, that guy's probably the one that needs to be leading us. He probably looked a lot like me. And so that's who God chose was Saul. Saul became the first king. The problem with Saul is that he had this fatal flaw. Here's a man with tremendous opportunity, tremendous choice by God to be named the very first king to lead his nation. He's got the whole world in front of him. He is the first choice by God to lead God's chosen people. But Saul messes up and he continually makes it about him. He continually leverages all of his power and all of his authority and all of his ability to make it about himself, to put the praise on him, to get the attention of other people looking at him and going, Saul, aren't you good? Saul, aren't you wonderful? Aren't you a good king? And we see some big sins in his life. There's one time where he goes out to battle. Samuel is the prophet, and he's the earpiece to God and the mouthpiece to Saul. And he tells Saul, take the men out for battle. Stay here for seven days. On the seventh day, I'm going to come perform a sacrifice, and then you can attack the Philistines, and God will give you favor. So Saul says, okay. So he goes out, and he waits seven days. Well, it's the seventh day. Samuel's still not there. Saul looks around. He feels like people are starting to scatter. We don't know if that's true, if that's an excuse. But he takes matters into his own hands and he gathers everybody around and he grabs the sacrifices and he performs them himself without Samuel. And Samuel shows up as this is happening or right after it's over. And this is in the first part of the book of Samuel. You can see all this stuff. And he says, Saul, what are you doing? And Saul tells him, he gives his excuses. Well, you weren't here when I thought you would be. And the people were scattering and I got scared and we needed to go ahead and do this. And now we can attack. And I was just trying to do the right thing. And really what's happening in the heart of Saul, I think is he's got military authority. People respect him as a military leader. People respect him as a political leader. But Samuel's the religious leader. But now he's not here. So what does scheming Saul get to do? Well, now I get to step into this void and I get to be seen as a religious leader. I get to grab myself a piece of that pie too. And now people are going to respect me politically and militarily and religiously. I can step into that and we don't need Samuel as much anymore. Now we can just be me. And now people are going to think that I'm a religious leader too. They're going to respect me for my faith because the respect that I have already is not enough. I need more, right? And so he steps into that and Samuel says, what are you doing? And because of that sin, God tells Samuel, I'm going to take the kingdom away from Saul. And Saul's made aware of this, but he doesn't seem to change anything in his life. He continues to live and lead and guide that way and continue to make everything about him. Another time later on, he's going into battle and God says,, I want you to go in, and I want you to completely conquer these people. And a lot of us know, particularly if we're interested in military history, that in that day when an army would sweep into a country or a city, that when they would conquer an army or an enemy, they would plunder. They would take for themselves all of their goods. Anything that was there that was of any value at all, they would claim for themselves. And kings had first dibs. And so God says, when you go in and you conquer them, you don't take anything for yourself. You destroy them. Don't touch it. But what did Saul do? There's some stuff there that he wanted. He wanted to build himself up. He wanted to be the guy with the wealth. He wanted to be the guy with the stuff. I don't know why he took the things, but he took it, and part of it was, look at me, look at how great I am, look at my great kingdom, look at my vast wealth. And so he couldn't keep his grubby hands off of it, and he made it about himself again. Later, when David comes on the scene, and he's anointed as the next king of Israel and Saul has to deal with that reality, there was this song that used to just drive him crazy. It incensed him with rage to the point where he tried to kill David. And I'm sure that it sounds better in the Hebrew, but in the English it's Saul has slain his thousands and David has slain his tens of thousands. Saul's getting credit, but it's not enough. He needs more. He's jealous of David. Look at me, look at me, look at me. Saul would definitely wanted to know what his sister-in-law's response was to state stack. He absolutely would have needed to know that. When he got home from battle, he would have to know from his wives, did you text the other wives and tell them about my great accomplishments on the battlefield today? He would have to know that stuff because it was about him and it was about getting praise of man. Saul sought the praise of man. That's what we see in his example. He sought the praise of man. Everything that he did, every avenue that he took, even when he was sorry, when he feigned sorrow to Samuel, when he was confronted with his sin, was this feigned sorrow. He was really just sorry that he got caught. All he wanted is for everybody to like him. Saul sought the praise of men. And this, I believe, stands in direct contrast with the story of Deborah. We find the story of Deborah in Judges chapter four. Judges is the seventh book of the Bible if you're trying to turn there. And I'm not gonna go verse by verse. I will read a portion of it, but I'm just gonna tell you the story. Now, a judge at this time in Israel, they wandered around in the desert and then Joshua came in and he conquered the land of Canaan that we know as modern-day Israel. And then the tribes got scattered to their different states, as we would understand them, or territories. And then Israel had no king. God was their king. But every now and again, the Israelites would go through a pattern that we go through. We see this pattern over and over again in the book of Judges. We see it all throughout the Old Testament, and we see it in our own lives. Sin, slavery, sorrow, salvation. God sets them up in the promised land. Everything's good. He's their king. Everything's wonderful. They have their laws. They love God. He loves them. But eventually, after things went well enough, they would kind of forget about God and be like, God, we're good. We're going to take it from here. Thanks for getting us into the promised land. Thanks for getting us through that hairy spot. But we're fine now. They would forget about God. They'd start to do what was right in their own eyes, the Bible says. None of us can relate to this. So let's all just judge the Israelites together as they failed in this way. And sure enough, when that happens and we go, I'm good, God, I don't need you anymore, what happens? They fall into sin. When they would fall into sin and forget about God, God would allow an oppressor to come in, the Amalekites and the Amorites or some ites, and they would come in, the Canaanites, and they would oppress them. And they would cry out to God, oh my gosh, God, we have sinned, we have forgotten about you, and because of you, we're under the rule of this people. Will you please throw them off? Will you please save us? And God would respond to them, and he would send a judge. He would appoint a judge, and the judge's role was to overthrow the oppressors. When there's a judge in the Old Testament, there's a whole book of them here, their entire job is to overthrow the oppressors. That is their appointed job by God. And so in Judges chapter 4, we see a woman named Deborah. And we're told some stuff about Deborah. First of all, she's a prophetess. Second of all, she's a judge. She's the only lady judge, female judge, that I know of in the Bible. She's the only one, the only judge that was both a prophet and a judge that had both military and religious authority. And to me, I don't know about you, but in this time for a woman to rise to power, anytime somebody rises to power who doesn't look like all the people before them who have risen to power, that's an interesting person to talk to. Deborah's awesome. Love to talk to Deborah. She's a prophetess and she's a judge and the Canaanites are oppressing them and it's her job to get rid of the Canaanites. So she calls on a guy named Barak. From what we can see in the text, Barak seems like a general. She calls on a guy named Barak to come talk to her and the very first thing she does is she kind of gets on to him a little bit. Barak, didn't God tell you to go to assemble 10,000 men and go up against Sisera? Sisera was the general of the king of Canaan, and he had 900 chariots, the Bible tells us, which in contrast with Israel's zero chariots, is overwhelming odds. And apparently incredibly intimidating. And you get the sense that Barak has not assembled the men that he's supposed to assemble because he was scared. He felt like that was an unwinnable battle. It was an unwise choice. He was leading people to their death if he did that, so he kind of shied away from it. And Deborah's like, hey, did God tell you to do this or not? She's just got so much faith. And he's like, yeah, I guess so. And she goes, well, go assemble your men and let's go. And then Barak says this, because I think Barak's a little bit of a coward. He says, I'll do it if you go with me. Because he thinks that this is a bad deal. He thinks that he's going to die if he goes. He thinks there's no way that they can win this. So he says, okay, Deborah, you put your money where your mouth is, and then I'll do it. And I would love to have been in Barack's head when she said, okay, let's go. Right? I would love, like, what did he go? Oh, well, good. Here we go. This is super. That's not what I was planning on, Deborah. So they go. Now, here's what's interesting on stuff right here. Think about this. What would Saul do if he were Deborah? What would I probably do if I were Deborah? Barak comes to me. Didn't God tell you to take your army? Yeah, but I'm scared. What would Saul have done? Saul, knowing that God was going to deliver the victory, that there was glory to be had in this victory, I think would have told Barak, that's all right, dude, go home. Just give me your army. I'll lead them. You don't have to. It's going to be good. Conniving Saul, conniving Nate, some of us, is that not what we would do is look for a way to leverage that for our own power and authority? Let me grab the glory. I don't have any troops, but if you're scared to take yours, I'll take them. You don't have to do it. Barak, don't worry about it. I got this. That's not what she did. She said, this is something that God has asked you to do. You need to go do it. Irrespective of what it meant for her. She's not going to leave the troops. She's not going to get anything from this. And then she says this incredible thing. I love this line. She tells Brack to go and let's attack Sisera. And so they're on their way to go, but before they go, she says this in verse 9. Barak said to her in verse 8, if you will go with me, I will go, but if you will not go with me, I will not go. Okay, so that's his gamble, right? And then she says this, and she said, I'll go with you. Nevertheless, the road on which you But you are not going to get the glory for this. No one's going to know about this. No one's going to know what you did. There's a woman. It's not me. We find out later her name's Jael. She gets to kill Sisera, not you. So you're just doing this to be obedient. And I don't think Barak hears her because they go into battle and they defeat the chariots. It's amazing God gives them victory on that day. During the battle, Sisera jumps off of his chariot and takes off to survive. And while he's running, it says that Barak is still chasing him. Barak is still chasing that glory. He still wants the victory. He's still like Saul. He's still that me monster that needs people to look at him and give him the glory for what he's doing and say, you were great. That was a great victory that you won that day. He's still chasing the glory. There's no indication that Deborah's doing that. Deborah's chilled out. She already knows how this is going to play out. She doesn't care. And here's the cool thing about Deborah. Deborah has no idea that this story is going to end up in the Bible. She doesn't even know what the Bible is. It's not like there's some journalist embedded with her who's getting quotes from her as they do this. She has no clue that this is going to be recorded for posterity. But here we are thousands of years later and we know about Deborah because God saw her faithfulness and rewarded her. So Barak is chasing Sisera, and there's a woman named Jael who's married to a king that's buddies with Sisera's king. And she sees Barak running, and she's like, hey, come in here. This is a very loose paraphrase of what's in Judges. She says, come in here. I got a spot for you. So he comes in there. He lays down. He's exhausted. She covers him up with a rug, which I guess will do if you need a blanket. And he asks for some water. She gives him warm milk and dude falls asleep. And then, now I'm sorry if you don't like this part, but it's in the Bible and I like it. I think it's neat that it's in the Bible. She takes a tent peg. It says that she went to him softly, but she did. She put the tent peg against his temple and she drove his head into the ground. Yeah, it's in the Bible. You deal with it, okay? Judges 4. Go read it. Super fun. Now, then she goes to the entrance. Barak and his army are still chasing him. She's like, hey, Barak, you should come see a thing. And he goes in there and she's killed Sisera and God has defeated their oppressors and Israel is free. And we're told that Deborah provided a peace of 40 years. Now, there are so many different places where Deborah could have solved that and made it all about her. She could have taken the army. She could have gotten word of Jael. She knew who was going to kill him. She could have gotten word of Jael. When you get him, just secure him in your tent. I'm going to come and I'm going to kill him. She could have taken any of that stuff for herself. She could have made it about her. In fact, after Judges 4 and the next chapter, Judges 5, there's a song called The Song of Deborah and Barak. And if you read it, she writes it. It's in her voice and all of the credit goes to God. The day that God won, the day that God defeated, the day that God delivered into the hands. None of the credit. She didn't care. She wasn't looking for admiration for other people. She wasn't looking for other people to notice her. Sometimes it just takes a woman to teach us men that lesson that she was just doing the right thing because it was the right thing. Deborah sought the praise of God. Saul sought the praise of man. Deborah sought the praise of God. She did what she did to an audience of one. So to her, it didn't matter who defeated. It didn't matter who killed. It didn't matter who the glory went to. She sought the praise of God. And in that way, I think personifies a principle that we see Jesus lay out in Matthew chapter 6. I think that she is the personification or the best example of this. In chapter 6, Jesus is in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, his first recorded public address, and he says this. He's talking to people about practicing giving. When you give, he says this. Pick it up in verse 2. Can you imagine? You're sitting here having a church service. Some dude, it would have to be a dude, kicks open the doors. Then trumpets sound. He's like, I'm going to give you guys 50 grand. And we're all like, great, thank you. That would be ridiculous. But he says, don't do that like the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be seen in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. I love that. I love the matter-of-factness of that statement. Don't be like the people who seek the praise of men for the good things that they do because I tell you the truth, that's their reward. You want to give something away to somebody? You want to buy somebody a meal? You want to do something nice and altruistic? That's fine. Post on your Instagram story and the likes that you get, that's your reward, God says. Congratulations. You got this from someone you talk to twice a year. Good. When you do something good and we do it for other people, we do it to be noticed and we put it out there, God says, that's your reward. But if you'll do it in secret and not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, then your Father in heaven will see and he will reward you. And can't we admit that we like people who have this figured out? We admire people who have the character to do good things because God has laid it on their heart to do them, and not for any other reason than because they believe it's the right thing to do. Don't we admire people like that? I told you before about my father-in-law and how much respect I have for him. One of my favorite stories about him, he's just like this in a lot of ways. I could tell a lot of stories, but one Christmas, Jen and I gave him a North Face fleece, which was like, I don't know, like a hundred bucks. It was a big deal for us to give that kind of gift. Like, look at us. This is what we're getting to give her dad, my father-in-law. So we give him this North Face fleece. He worked downtown. He worked in an office, but he liked to wear that to work. And he called it pretty, and it was good looking, and whatever. It's a nice fleece where everyone's very happy. Well, a couple months later, or maybe the next winter, I don't know, he's not wearing this fleece anymore. And Terry, his wife, is like, John, what did you do with that fleece? And he says, oh, I don't know. I'm just not wearing it today. He keeps not wearing it. She's pressing him. John, come on. Nate and Jen gave that to you. Where is that fleece? He's like, ah, it's not cold outside. She's like, John, it's like 12 degrees. You need something. She presses him and presses him and finally he confesses. He's driving down the road one day coming back from work and it was a particularly cold day which in Georgia is probably like 56, 57 degrees. It was a particularly cold day and there's somebody on the side of the road spinning a sign which when I see somebody on the side of the road spinning a sign, which when I see people on the side of the road spinning a sign, I'm like big on technique. I want to see what you're bringing to the table, man. Like, I want to see what you got over there. Like, sometimes it's pretty impressive what they can do. I do not notice what they're wearing, but John noticed that this person just had a hoodie. They just had a thin sweatshirt. And their job was really cold. So what's he do? He pulls off to the side of the road. He gets out, takes off his fleece and walks it over and hands it to the person and says, your job requires this a lot more than mine does. You take this. And he gets in his car and he goes home and he never tells a soul. He only tells anybody because his wife bugged him about it long enough to learn the story. We love stories like that. We want to be like that. Deborah lived her life like that. Jesus says when we do that, that God the Father sees us and that great is our reward. And so listen, what I want us to understand today is this. The praise of man intoxicates. The praise of man intoxicates, but the praise of God satisfies. The praise of man intoxicates, but the praise of God satisfies. Here's what I mean. When you're intoxicated, you're not thinking clearly. You're not making the best decisions. You're not the best version of yourself. You probably say some stuff and do some things that you don't mean. It causes you to act in ways that are not reflective of who you really want to be. The other thing about being intoxicated is it always takes what? It always takes a little bit more. If one drink did it this time, then it won't be long before you need two. Right? If one pill, if one whatever does it this time, if I get this feeling for one, then eventually I'm going to need two. And eventually two's not going to be enough and and I'm gonna need three. And isn't this what happened to Saul? He gets appointed as the king, he gets anointed, and people are giving him attention in his little clan and then he continues to get elevated and people continue to acknowledge him and continue to heap praise on him. And it's never enough. So he steps in and he says, I want religious praise too. It's never enough. He steps in and he takes more wealth too. It's never enough. When we live for the praise of man, it's never enough. We can never hear enough good things about ourselves to be satisfied. We always want more. It causes us to act in ways that are not reflective of who we want to be. It causes us to not be the best version of ourself. And we always need just a little bit more, just a little bit more praise, just a little bit more pats on the back, and no one can ever make us feel like we are enough. And God's praise satisfies. And when I say satisfies, I think of it like this. Every now and again, I eat healthy. And when I do, one of my favorite things to eat is just grilled chicken and grilled vegetables. I just put a skewer of grilled vegetables on the grill. Sometimes we roast them in the oven, a little bit of salt and pepper, and then chicken with salt and pepper. I like that meal. I like that meal because I can eat as much of it as I want and I don't feel bad. Now, if you know something about dieting and you would say to me in the lobby, well, actually, it's not good to eat that. Listen, just let me have my chicken, okay? I'm not at that level yet. Just keep it to yourself. When I eat that grilled chicken and I eat those grilled vegetables, I can eat as much of it as I want and I don't feel bad. I just feel full. I feel good. I feel healthy. And if you were to come to me after that and you go, hey, you want a piece of this pie? You want cinnamon roll? I would tell you, no, I'm good, thanks. I'm fine. I'm satisfied. That's what the praise of God does for you. When God has acknowledged that what you're doing is good, when between you and the Heavenly Father, He says, I'm proud of you. That's good. That's enough. You don't need to take the troops and go to conquer anybody yourself. Deborah says, I'm squared away. I'm fine. You don't need to get the credit for winning the battle that day. I'm good. I'm fine. I'm squared away. I'm good. John didn't need to tell anybody that he gave his fleece to anyone. Why? Because between him and God, he's good. I'm satisfied. When we live for the praise of God, it satisfies us. We don't need anything else. Because the one who created us is looking at us, telling us, you're enough. I'm proud of you. I love you. For some of us, that's all we need to hear. If we keep fighting and scratching and clawing to get other people to tell us that, it's never going to satisfy. Even when you get what you think you want, you're going to get there and find out it's not enough. But God's reward satisfies. And so listen, it's not about stamping out this need to be known. It's a very natural need to need somebody to say, you're good and I appreciate you and you're enough. Lily has started in with this. Like yesterday, for an hour. It was the first time it happened. Jen and I were looking at each other like, oh my goodness. Daddy, look at me, look at me, watch this. Daddy, watch this. Daddy, watch this. And I'm like, I'm watching, buddy. Let's go. And listen, Jen's going to be mad at me. It wasn't even that good. I mean, she's just like, she's just running and jumping into a chair. Get back to me when you memorize the states, kid. But she wants to be noticed. She wants to be known. She wants somebody to tell her, that's good. I'm proud of you. So the Christian life isn't about stamping that out. It's just about focusing it on the right thing. Moving from trying to get our affirmation and our praise from man to seeking our praise and our affirmation from God. And when we do, we're told we will get a reward. And I thought about this. If I'm going to make the whole point of the sermon, obeying God so that we get a reward, I should probably be able to define what the reward is. I don't know what it is. For Deborah, it's being in the Bible and us knowing her story thousands of years later. For some of us, it's some sort of arrangement in heaven. I don't know. Great is your reward in heaven. I don't really know what that means, and I can't really define for you what it is for God to reward you for operating for his praise, but here's what I know. God's reward is better than your friend's reward. God rewarding you, noticing your good behavior, and affirming you is better than the reward you're going to get from Mitch in accounting that you talk to twice a year. It's better than these online. God's reward is better than your friends. It's better than your spouses. God's reward is better. And that's what we should be living for. So I hope that as we look at the story of Deborah and we compare it to Saul, that we'll be honest about where we sit and that we'll have a desire to live for the praise of God and be satisfied in that and let that be enough. And in light of those things, I would ask you as we finish, for you to consider as you go into your week this week, for whose praise are you living? For whose praise are you living? Another way of thinking about that is, the next time you feel compelled to do something good, ask yourself, why do I want to do this? Do I want to do it so that other people will see me be good and I'll get their appreciation for that? Because God says, that'll be your reward. Or do I want to do this because it's the right thing to do and I want my Father in Heaven to see me and be proud of me? For whose praise are you living? Let's pray. Father, you're so good to us. You see us and you know us and you tell us that we are enough. You see everything that we do in secret, God. I know that there are good people here who have done so much in their lives that nobody knows, that they feel like nobody sees, that they feel like they're never going to get credit for. And I pray that they would hear loud and clear this morning, God, that you see them. You notice. And their reward is great. God, for people who are like me, or like Saul, and struggle so much with wanting other people to tell them how good they are, would you just help us make you enough? Would you help us live for your praise? Would you help us hold out for your reward? God, we pray these things in your son's name. Amen.

Well, good morning, everyone. It's good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. Thanks for braving the treacherous roads to be here. We hope that we will make it worth your while. Just a point of clarity, when Michelle said that Nate and Aaron are going to be sharing some stuff with the parents at the end of the month, that's Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, not Aaron Gibson, our worship leader. No one cares. So it's the Aaron with some heft. So like Michelle said, this is the second part of our series called Prayers for You. I keep calling it Prayers for Grace. It's called Prayers for You, where we're opening up the year with some prayers over different aspects of our life. Last week, we talked about just grace in general. We looked at a prayer in the book of Colossians, and I invited you to kind of make that your prayer over yourselves and your families for this year. We're making it the prayer of grace this year. And this week, we're going to, and so now for the next three weeks, we're going to look at different aspects of our life and see if we can find a prayer in scripture that we can pray this year over that area of our life. And so this week, I want us to look at a prayer for our families and in particular, a prayer for our children and for their children. And so just up front, as I say that, and I tell you what the topic is this morning, I understand that not everybody in the room has genetic children. I understand that. And I know that for some of you, it's because you don't want them. For some of you, it's because you haven't had the opportunity. You'd love to have the opportunity. You really want kids. And so this might be a painful topic to bring up. And for that, I'm sorry. But I hope that those of you who do not have genetic children have some people in your life somewhere that you can love on and pour into and think about what kind of legacy you can leave for them. But for a lot of us, we have kids or we have plans to have them and we have every reason to believe that we can and we will. So this sermon is for you guys. As I think about families, I wanted to start off by sharing with you probably the greatest way that my parents have disappointed me in my life. And full disclosure, I'm going to have to mention them a couple of times today because of the nature of the topic, but I scheduled this sermon on this week and then wrote this sermon not knowing that they were going to be here. They're right over there. There's like no one even next to them. They're just sitting there. It's like there's a spotlight on them. They're in town this week for my daughter Lily's birthday. But I would say my biggest disappointment in you guys is that you're not billionaires. I really am envious of billionaire trust fund babies. I mean, what a life to be born into where you just get everything you want. You're rich as all heck. You can do whatever you want, you get the nicest of everything. I think that sounds amazing. And some of you may be like, no, that doesn't sound amazing. I want to pick myself up by my bootstraps. I don't. I want my grandfather to have picked himself up by his bootstraps and left me enough money to buy bootstraps that up themselves. That's what I want. Like, I love, like, if I'm scrolling just mindlessly, and someone wants to give me a tour of their yacht, I'll take a yacht tour. Let's see it. Let's go. A real estate agent wants to show me a $26 million penthouse in Manhattan, yeah, I'm in. Let's take a look at the fountain in the middle of the bathroom. I want to see it. I think that sounds like a really amazing life, and there'd be a lot of things that would be good about that to never have to worry about money one day in your life. But I tell you what I really want. If I were rich, I don't really care about having a yacht that seems wildly impractical and whatever. But I do think if I won the lottery, if I was just independently wealthy and I could buy whatever I wanted, you know what I'd do? This is true. Jen will tell you if I'm lying. Tomorrow morning, maybe even this afternoon, I would go to Leith Honda, and I would say, I want the nicest Odyssey you have. I want it to have everything. Everything. And I don't want there to be a single mile on it. I want someone to push it onto the truck from the factory, and I want you to back it into my driveway. That's more than anything. That would be sweet. That's what I wish. And so, thanks for nothing, Dale and Donna. Because I'm not rich. I'm not rich in that way. But I say all that to say this. I'm incredibly wealthy in another way. I'm not showing you how many Bibles I can purchase. These Bibles sit in my office. They sit in the corner, and I see them every day. And I see them, they're right next to the whiteboard that I write sermons on. This Bible is my papa's Bible, Don Green. This Bible is my dad's Bible that he was given for being some sort of star student or something like that at his high school. Nobody cares. But this is the Bible that he got for doing that. This is my dad's Bible. This is mine. Every time I look at these Bibles in the corner of my office, I'm reminded of the shoulders that I stand on. I'm reminded of my spiritual inheritance. And that's what I want us to focus on today. In some ways, nobody in here stands to inherit, I don't think, stands to inherit tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and be incredibly wealthy in our financial inheritances. If you are, good for you. But how often do we think about our spiritual health and our spiritual wealth and the kind of spiritual legacy that we've been left and the shoulders that we stand on and the shoes that we walk in? In some ways, I don't, in earthly standards, I'll probably get some sort of inheritance, but it's not going to be anything that's, I'm not buying a yacht with it. But in a much more important way, I am the recipient of a deep and rich spiritual inheritance. In a much more important way, I am the recipient of generational wealth. And it shows up for me in different times and in different places. One of the things that makes me think about it is I have a Tuesday morning men's group. And we'll have anywhere from 10 to sometimes 20 guys in there. And all we do is read through the Bible. We just pick a book of the Bible, we talk about it. It's a very simple format. And guys who are older than me will ask questions. What about this? What does this mean? What are we talking about here? And I learned the answer to those questions in first grade. That's my generational wealth. It's not their ignorance. It's their lack of exposure because maybe they didn't grow up with the generational spiritual wealth that I did. But each of us this morning has an opportunity to think about what we're going to pass on to the generations that follow. And it's a much more valuable inheritance than anything financial that you could leave them. In my son's room, we have this frame. My son is named John. He's named after Jen's dad, John Vinson. John Vinson got to celebrate with us the fact that we were pregnant and that it was a boy and that we were going to name it after him. But John has never met John. He passed before John was born. But I have absolute certainty that if we raise up John the way that we're supposed to, that one day he will come to know Jesus. And in doing so, he will have the opportunity to meet his namesake one day. They will meet. But we keep that in his room because of the name that he inherits. His middle name is Robert. That's my dad's middle name. John's name is John Robert Rector. To remind us and to remind him of the spiritual shoulders on which he sits. And Jen is the happy, grateful recipient of the legacy of John and Terry. Her parents grew up going to church. Terry grew up in Memphis going to church with an old Southern Baptist pastor, Adrian Rogers, who she still loves. John grew up with the son of Porter and Bernice. Porter fought in World War II. We've got his footlocker in my workbench in the garage. He loved Jesus. And he showed John what it was to be a godly man. And Bernice showed his sister Mary what it was to be a godly woman. And they passed that on to their children. And Jen grew up in a home, going to church every Sunday. Mom and dad serving in the church. Jesus spoken about in the home. Christianity prioritized. Quiet times happening. Being poured into. Her mom showing her how to be a godly woman. Her dad showing her what to expect from her husband. That guy is not as good when it comes to the spiritual wealth that we've inherited and some of you are too some of you are too some of you were blessed and grew up in homes that modeled faith to you some of you your dad or your mom is the most godly person you know. If not that, they at least, they prioritized church, they brought you to church, they were human and they made mistakes, but they made those right, and they always pointed you towards Christ. And in doing that, when you had kids, you knew, I always want to point them towards Christ. And you exist in this kind of, in this flow, as a general wealth cascades down through the generations, you just exist as a rung on the ladder, and that's great. And to those of you who are like us, Jen and I, who are spiritually wealthy because of the generational wealth that you've inherited, you have a deep and sacred responsibility to pass that on. To not squander it. To not mess it up. To pursue Jesus. To model to your children what it is to make him the center of your home. And to send them out into the world as better, more capable believers than you. Best case scenario, your kids know more scripture than you do. Best case scenario, they're better than you. Best case scenario, they're better dads and better moms and better spouses than you are. That's what we want for our children. So if you are the proud and grateful recipient of generational spiritual wealth, if you have Bibles you could stack together to remind you of the shoulders that you stand on, then you have a sacred responsibility to pass that on to your children and to their children and not squander it. Now some of you do not have spiritual wealth. Some of you were not born into a spiritually wealthy family. And you have an amazing opportunity. Some of you are what I consider spiritual orphans. You didn't have a mom or a dad teaching you about faith. You came to faith as a child, but there was no one there to help you, the church people, but no one that you lived with. Or you came to faith in adulthood. And now you're just trying to figure this thing out. You have a profound opportunity. If that's you, you have a profound opportunity. That opportunity is to draw a line in the sand and say, my family and my name has not built up any spiritual wealth. I did not have a spiritual inheritance, and my dad didn't, and his dad didn't, and his dad didn't. That's not a part of our family tree. I did not get to inherit that. I was born spiritually impoverished. Well, you have the opportunity to draw the line in the sand and say, but that will not be the case for my children. That will not be what they inherit. And you can change what it means to inherit your name. You can change what it means for your grandkid to be named after you. You can change what your name means. If you make the decision now to draw a line in the sand and not allow the generational trends that led to your poverty impoverish those who would come after you. And if you can tell I'm emotional about this, it's because that's what my parents did. My mom got bused to church when she was eight. It was the 60s and they did weird stuff like that. Some guy just showed up and said, hey little girl, you want to get on this bus? And she was like, yep, I do. And then she went. And she got saved. It was great. Best case scenario, you get on the bus with a stranger. You go to church and meet Jesus. She came to faith. She brought, she was what God used to bring her parents to faith. So this Pawpaw's Bible that I have, it wasn't him teaching her. It was her showing him. My dad? My dad basically grew up without a dad. His grandfather was the closest thing he had to a dad. He had a stepdad. He had a dad that ran away and he had a stepdad that didn't care about him. He found faith pretty much on his own. He was loved on by his grandfather, but that's distant. And so he made that decision. I did not, I was born spiritually impoverished, but my children will not be. And he drew that line in the sand, and mom drew that line in the sand. And in their faithfulness, changed what it means for me to be a rector. Changed what it is for Lily to be born into our family. If you are not generationally wealthy spiritually, you have a remarkable opportunity with your life to change what your name means. And I don't think there's anything that we could do that's more important than that. There is nothing that my parents can ever do for me that will make me more grateful for them than allowing me to be born into a family that was spiritually wealthy. Then impart their spiritual wealth on me. There's nothing they could ever give me that I'll be more grateful for than my spiritual inheritance from them. And we have the opportunity to us greatly the kind of legacy we leave behind. We should hope and pray, not to aggrandize it too much, but we should hope and pray that we live the kind of lives that one day my grandkid is going to sit in their office and my Bible is going to be somewhere in a stack of Bibles reminding them that I existed and I pointed them towards Christ. It should be important to us to want to leave that legacy. And so as I thought about this, and I thought about this comparison between a material inheritance and a spiritual inheritance, I thought about the material inheritance and what that currency is. We deal in material inheritance with dollars. That's the currency that we're trying to leave behind if that matters to us. And so I thought, what is the currency of a spiritual inheritance? What are we spending? What are we allocating? What are we saving up? What are we investing in our lives if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance? I think the currency of a spiritual inheritance is love. I think the currency of a spiritual inheritance is love. If we want our kids to be spiritually wealthy, then we spend our love on them and our love on God and our love on one another and we invest that love into the things of God and into our children every chance we get. And to put a finer point on it, this love is often manifested through time and presence. If we say, how do I invest my love in my children? How do I invest my love in God in my children? How does that work? I think that love is most often manifested through time and presence. And I mean time and presence in three different ways. I mean time with God and in God's presence. I mean time doing God's work and in the presence of people doing God's work and being served by God's work. And I mean time and presence with our children. Time and presence in all three of those ways. I won't hit this hard this week because I just mentioned it last week. But if you want to leave your child a spiritual inheritance, if you want them to be spiritually wealthy with what they receive from you, if you want to change what it means to receive your name or simply honor the wonderful name that you've inherited, if you want to do that, very first step, be a person of devotion. Wake up every day, spend time in God's presence, spend time in prayer. Be a person who reads your Bible every day. And parents, I'm telling you, let your children see you do it. I've mentioned before, I can remember in middle school and high school coming down the stairs and walking past the chair where my mom would sit in the morning and her Bible would be out. And this was the 90s. So it was, I don't know if you guys remember, the Bibles were thicker and they had these cases that went around them, these knit cases for old ladies with handles and you could keep pens and stuff and reading glasses in there. And her case was open, and there's usually a cup of coffee with some lipstick on it. And so every day, mom got on, she put her face on, she got up, put on her face, and then she came downstairs and she spent time in God's word and time in prayer. That's how you build legacy. You become a person of devotion. You become a person that your people see spending time with, that your children see spending time with God. You make church a priority. You go every week. I saw a good friend back there, and he's got his grandson with him. Grandson was trying to decide, am I going to go to class or am I going to have to go suffer through Nate? I hope he made the right choice. But when you grow up with grandparents that take you to church every time you're at their house, that's a legacy. And this isn't just for parents with young kids. You folks with grandkids, you're still leaving a legacy to your children. You're still influencing them. I'm 43 years old. I lead a church. I don't need nothing from nobody. I need my mom and my dad. I still need my parents. And as long as your parents are around, you do too. I was on the phone with Mike Harris this morning. His mom passed away last night. And she was in her 90s. He's still crying. There's just something about a mama and a daddy. I don't care how old you are and how old your kids are. They need you. You can still continue to build that legacy by being a person who loves them. And we love through our time and through our presence first with God. Then we love through our time and presence in God's work and what the people around us see us do. Growing up, I can remember mom was the Awana mama. We had this program called Awanas and she was in charge of it. She ran it. Dad was on the deacon board. And what it taught me is church is important. What it taught me is this matters to us. We prioritize this. And so you mamas that do all the work and show up and do all the things and bring your kids to decorate for Summer Extreme, and they're all running around while you're putting up under the sea foam stuff and making my drum kit messy for nine months. When you're doing that, your kids see you doing it. They're going to remember that. They remember prioritizing church. They're going to see you volunteering places. They're going to know what's important to you with your time and with your checkbook. They're going to notice those things. So if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance, we love through our time and presence in doing God's work. They learn from that. And we're never done doing that work. And then we show them that love through time and presence with them. And this one, I'm really preaching to myself, too. Because it's so easy when they're young to turn on a screen, to tell them to go play, to pacify them. It's a bad habit at my house. Whenever John talks all the time, he's three and a half, he's talking always. And so eventually, I start tuning him out, and he'll say say something and I go, uh-huh. And he'll be like, yeah. Then the dragon threw the marshmallow at the bear and boy, the pig was upset. And I'll go, uh-huh. And then he'll get mad and he goes, dad, why do you say uh-huh? Shoot. Okay. I got to come up with another response that seems like I'm engaged. It's difficult, and I'm not the best at it. But we love our children through time and through presence. Showing up for them. Being there for them. Allowing the extended bedtime because this might be the time when they talk. Just simply being in the room with them, finding different activities that we can do together. And that doesn't change as we get older. As we get older and our kids morph and our relationships change with them and they move out and they do their own thing, they still need time and presence with their parents. It just looks different. Your grandchildren need time and presence from you. That's how we invest in them. And so I think if we want to leave a spiritual inheritance, we live a life of love with time and presence with God, with God's work, and with our people, with our children that we love. And those requirements never stop. And as I thought about this idea of leaving a spiritual inheritance for our children, it occurred to me that selfishness is the enemy of inheritance. Selfishness really is the enemy of inheritance. Let's say, if we think about it financially, what you have to do if you have a goal to leave an inheritance behind, and you may not, and that's okay, I'm not pressing that on you, although Proverbs does, so you should think about it. If that's your goal to leave a financial inheritance behind, then what you have to do is make decisions in your working years, in your 20s and your 30s and your 40s. I'm making this amount of money, but I'm going to take this part and I'm going to set it over here and I'm going to let it grow. And I'm not going to use that for me. I'm going to use that for them. That's not for me. That's for my children. That's not for me. That's for the things that that's for the people who come after me. So I'm not going to spend it all on myself every time I get a paycheck. We have to choose to be unselfish and set some of our resources aside. We have to allocate them for others. We can't spend it all on ourselves. Likewise, if we get older and we do receive an inheritance, we do have wealth. Our granddad did pick himself up by his bootstraps and he left something for us. And now we've got this. Selfishness is the enemy of that inheritance because you could choose at that season of your life to squander it. You could buy the yacht. You could get rid of all, you could drain it dry and leave nothing for your children because you acted completely selfishly. In the same way, selfishness is the enemy of a spiritual inheritance. The reason we're not people of devotion, like we know we should be sometimes, is because we're selfish. We want to sleep more. We want to linger longer on our phone. We want to get to work sooner. There's other things we prioritize over spending time in God's word, and so we're selfish and we don't do it. There's other things we prioritize. We're selfish with our time, just like we're given a limited amount of money in our paychecks every month, and we have to decide how we want to allocate those resources. We're given a limited amount of time each day, each week, each year. And we have to decide how we want to allocate that resource. And if we're selfish with our time, and we only do what we want to do or what we have to do, and we do not intentionally take that time and allocate it for others and for the things of God, then we are selfish with our resource and we don't leave behind an inheritance. Our selfishness is the enemy of our inheritance. And it reminds me of this principle that Jesus teaches in Matthew chapter 6. Where he says. If you're leaving a spiritual inheritance, if your children are spiritually wealthy, that's a treasure in heaven. And Moth and Rust did not destroy that. If we live our lives selfishly, if we decide, if we're the generation tasked with drawing a line in the sand and saying, it's going to mean something different to have my name. I'm changing that for the generations that come after. Let me tell you something. That's hard. That's challenging. It's discouraging. And you're going to want to quit. And you're going to want to bail. And you're going to want to say, I'll leave it up to them. I figured it out. They can figure it out. But ultimately, that's selfish. And that's building up for yourself treasures on earth. My ardent prayer for the families of grace is that your children would be spiritual billionaires. That your children would be spiritually wealthy. I genuinely don't care what you leave them financially. I am going to invest all the years God gives me at Grace into partnering with you, parents and grandparents, to make sure that the generations that come after you are spiritually wealthy, to make sure that your children get a name that they honor and are proud of. I want to do everything I can so that one day your kid names their child after you because they understand that the name that you've given them is the most valuable thing you could ever do for them. That's my prayer for you. So as I wrap up, we have this simple question. What kind of inheritance do you want to leave? What do you want to leave behind for your kids? With the years remaining and the time remaining with them, what kind of inheritance do you want them to receive? How spiritually wealthy can you make them? What kind of name can you hand to them? Every week of this series, every week of this series, we're going to finish the sermon with a prayer. We're going to finish the, not the sermon, but the service with a prayer. Last week, Mikey closed us out and read a prayer, a summary of the prayer of Colossians. This week, there is a prayer that we are going to pray over our families, but it's not, we're not going to speak it. Jordan and Aaron are going to come up and Jordan is going to sing this prayer over us. And when you think about what prayer should we pray for our families, you don't have to think very hard because there's a passage in Numbers that tells us exactly what we should pray. God tells Moses and Moses tells Aaron, the high priest, his brother, go and tell the families to pray this over there, over one another. This is the prayer that we should pray for our families. So Jordan and Aaron are going to come up as I read this verse. And I want you to think about what kind of legacy you want to leave. Here's the prayer that's going to be sung over us from Numbers chapter 6. The Lord said to Moses, tell Aaron and his sons this is how you are to bless the Israelites. Say to them, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face towards you and give you peace. Jordan is going to sing that over us as a prayer. As you are prayed over, as you sit, rather than feeling an impetus to stand and sing along, what I would much rather you do is take a quiet minute here at the end of the service as you are prayed over and consider what kind of legacy you want to leave. Consider what kind of spiritual wealth you want to hand to your children. Consider what you want it to mean to inherit your name. And if you are someone who has to draw a line in the sand and change what your name means, pray so hard that you would do that. And if you trust me enough to tell me that, that that's what you're doing, I promise I will write you down and pray for you every day. Let's let them pray over us and let's pray while they're praying and then we'll go have a good week.