Micah

It's good to get to be back with you in the saddle preaching live. I've been excited for this morning and I'm excited for this series. This series, Things You Should Know, I think that's what we're calling it. Yeah, it's right there on the screen next to me. Things You Should Know. I forgot what we named it back in the beginning of December, but I haven't forgotten what it's about. And it's based on this idea that there's things that we should all know as Christians, or that we at least nod along with as Christians, that we pretend that we know, that we may not actually know, right? Like there's a kind of a Christianese and another language that's spoken around churches. And I think sometimes we just kind of nod along with that because we don't want to look or feel dumb. And I know how it goes. I mean, you join a small group for the first time. You haven't really been involved in church in a while or just kind of cursory involvement. And then you show up in a small group and people start talking about stuff. And you might not know what they're talking about, but you don't want to feel dumb or silly or uninformed or make yourself look bad. So you don't say anything. And then you've been there so long that now I have to be one of the people that knows these things too. And so we just kind of nod along when people talk about grace and mercy or throw out Bible words like sanctification, and we just kind of act like we know what they're talking about when sometimes we really don't. And one of the things that I want you to know is that it's okay not to know stuff. It's actually really great to ask questions. One of my favorite things to do is to have my men's Bible study and have people in that study who are not very familiar with the text that we're covering because the questions that they ask are the best, but you have to be brave to ask questions because when you ask a question, you're admitting that I don't know this thing. And there's some stuff in the church that I think we nod along with, that we act like we know, when maybe we don't. And we want to be brave for you this month and ask those questions for you this month. And so this morning, the title of the sermon is simply the Bible. Questions that we might have about the Bible. I'm going to look at three questions that I think everybody has about Scripture that we might not know the answers to, but that I think every Christian should know. And now I'll warn you up front, this is not a normal sermon. This is far more informative. It's informational, this sermon is. The things that I'm going to share with you this morning are things that I wasn't exposed to until I was in Bible college, taking theology classes, or in grad school, in seminary, taking more theology classes. And there's a lot more to it than what we're going to cover this morning, but I wanted to take a morning, one Sunday, and address with you some common questions about the Bible, because again, I think every believer should know the answers to these questions. So I'll say up front, for some of you, you're going to love this. You're going to love it. Your notebook is out. You're ready. You're going to write these things down, and if you're a note taker, there's going to be a lot to write down. So get ready. Get your best possible pen. Some of you might not love this. This might not be your thing. And just to know, just for you to know, when I was praying before the sermon, my final words to God were, Father, make this helpful. And if it's not helpful, make it quick. Okay, so I'm with you. There's a lot of information, but I think you need to know this stuff, and I hope that you'll be interested in it. And actually, I want to know what you learned this morning. If I tell you something that you didn't know before, email me and tell me what you learned and tell me what you enjoyed. If there's other questions that you've always wanted to ask, email me and ask those questions. You can even tell me that I heard my friend ask this, so you don't even have to throw yourself under the bus. But get those questions to me. Get your responses to me. I want us to interact with the things we're talking about in this series. But I said I was going to give you three questions about the Bible that I think we should all be able to answer. And the first one is this. Why is the Bible a big deal? Why is the Bible such a big deal? Why do we make such a fuss about it? And it may seem like I'm going too simple on this, but I think it's an important question. Think about it. Think about where we place the Bible in our lives. I tell you guys all the time that there's no greater habit that anyone in their life could have than to read the Bible every day, than to spend time with God through prayer and in His Word every day. So we make a big deal out of the Bible. We hold the Bible up as the foremost authority in our lives. We believe and we teach at Grace that if you're walking with God, that you won't allow anything into your life until it's filtered through Scripture. That the biggest authority in your life of whether something is right or wrong or good or bad or from God or not is to go to Scripture and see what does it say. The entire church is built around the teachings of the Bible. Wars have been fought over it. People have died to preserve it. So it's worth asking the question, why is the Bible such a big deal? Well, the short answer is this. The Bible is a big deal because it's God's special revelation to us. We make such a fuss out of the Bible. The Bible is a big deal because it is God's special revelation to us. Now, here's what I mean. That word revelation, we're already getting into some technical Christian terms. That's not really a Christian term. That just means something that's revealed. It's the same root word there. It just means to reveal something. And so what we understand about ourselves and what you understand about you, whether you've ever thought about this or not, is that people can only know about you what you choose to reveal to them, right? If you meet somebody at a dinner party, you know you're never going to talk to them again. You can make up a totally false identity. They'll never know. You can tell them that you used to be a professional ball player. They won't know the difference. They'll Google you later. You won't exist, and it's fine. You'll never have that interaction again. But they only know about you what you choose to reveal about yourself. So when you meet someone in passing, it's just a cursory glance. They only know you by the way that you dress, by what you reveal, by how you present yourself to the world. The more someone is around you, the more they see you react and interact and respond, the more they learn about you and what's there. But again, people can only know about you what you choose to reveal to them about yourself, right? Well, the same is true of God. We can only know about God what he chooses to reveal about himself. And with him, it's in particular no more and no less. So with God, if we understand revelation to be what God chooses to reveal to us about himself, that we would get to know God the same way we would get to know anybody in our life, the same way other people would get to know us, then we have to understand that with God, there's two kinds of revelation. There's general revelation and special revelation. The way that I think about those is this. General revelation makes us aware of the presence of God, and special revelation gives us the details of that presence. General revelation is stuff that everybody can see. And Romans 1 actually sums up general revelation like this. This is what Paul says in Romans 1, looking at verse 19. He says, So he says, listen, God wrote himself in nature. Anybody who looks outward at nature, at the trees, at the seasons, at the rhythms of nature, the way the earth rotates around the sun, at how huge the universe is, at how small it can be, at the miracle of birth, at just the essence of life. As you look at nature, it points to a creator God. And as you look inward on what is written in your nature, it points to a creator God. Our moral compass, the fact that every civilization ever has prized bravery and bemoaned cowardice, has said that telling the truth is good and that being deceptive is bad. That moral code was written on our hearts by God. On our hearts, we have a longing for our Creator. So whether we look without or within, when we look at nature, God has written himself in nature. That is his general revelation, making all of us aware of his existence. But his special revelation, where he gives us the details of that existence, that's in the Bible. And here's what's incredible about that. What if we didn't have the Bible? What if we didn't know the details of this God that exists? Then he would just be to us this being that existed distant and cold, who had the authority to punish us, to start our life and to take our life, to manipulate circumstances to make us joyful or to make us miserable. It would be a God that we would hope to try to appease, but we wouldn't really know who he was. It would be a God that would inevitably incur fear and myth. But in God's goodness, he gave us the Bible. And it gives us the details of his existence. It's in his words that we find out, oh goodness, this God that created me loves me. This God that created me actually only created me so that I could spend eternity with him. That's how much he wants to be with me. This God who created me sent his son to die for me. This God who created me is love. He is goodness. He is gracious. He is merciful. This book tells us all we need to know about the God who created us. It is God's special revelation of himself to us. This is why we hold it in such high esteem. Because we believe that in these pages are the very words of God. And that this is, he could have chosen to reveal himself any way he wanted to, but what he chose to do is to reveal himself in the pages of Scripture. And in here we find him and who he is. It's an invitation to know our God better. That's why we make such a big deal out of the Bible. Now, the next question. And this one is important. I hope that some of you guys have asked this. I hope that some of you know some of the answers to this. But I think it's an important question. How did we even get the Bible? How did we get the Bible? How is it that I can go to the store and buy this, and these are the books that God wants in here, and these are the words that God wants in here, and these are the things that were written down however many years ago. How do we even get this? Because I don't know if you know this about the Bible, but the Bible is composed of an Old Testament and a New Testament. It totals 66 books. There's 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament. And you may or may not know, I mean, you probably know that there's been a lot of people who have contributed to writing the Bible, but there's actually over 40 authors that contribute to the Bible. Did you know that the Bible was written over the span of about 1,400 years across three different continents, Africa and Asia and Europe? And that it was written actually in three different languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. And through all of that time, through the span of 1,400 years, through the minds of over 40 authors on three continents and however many different cultures that was, and in three different languages, God inspired this written word. So how did it get to us? It's a fair question. When we talk about how it got to us, we can really talk about it in the Old and the New Testament. The Old Testament is pretty easy. In ancient Israel, there was a ruling body called the Sanhedrin. That was a lot like our Senate. It was made up of different parties. The two most famous parties in the Sanhedrin were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. We've probably heard of those before, at least the Pharisees, I would think. And then there was other little parties that weren't as influential, but were there, the Essenes and the Zealots. You can think of those as like the modern day libertarians. I know that my friend Tom Sartorius will appreciate that very much. But the Sanhedrin was made up of different parties, and those parties ruled Israel. It was a religious rule, not too different from what we see in Muslim countries today. And the Sanhedrin got together somewhere around 250 BC, or maybe a little bit after, and one of the things that they affirmed was that the holy scriptures they had were the Holy Scriptures that would serve as the Old Testament. To them, it was 24 books that they called the Tanakh. To us, it's 39 books that we call the Old Testament, but they're the exact same. They grouped up a bunch of different books that we have separated out together, like Kings and Chronicles was one book, and now it's four. So they would group things together like that, but it's the same. Our 39 books are the same 24 books that they affirmed in 250 BC. And the Sanhedrin looked around and voted and they said, this is it. These are the Holy Scriptures. This is the Tanakh, the law and the prophets. In the New Testament, when we hear Jesus or one of the other writers refer to the law and the prophets, he's referring to the Old Testament, to the Tanakh. And that Old Testament has not been changed since 250 BC when they affirmed it. And the last book was Malachi, and it was written around 400 BC. So it had already existed as one big volume of works for at least 150 years before they ever addressed it. It hasn't changed since 400 BC, and it's not going to change in the future. The Old Testament is done, and that's how we got it. Now, the New Testament is interesting too, because at the time of Christ, there was a lot of writings. There's a lot of people writing a lot of different things. And after Christ left the scene, there was one universal church. We call it the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church was structured. They say that there was a pope in the line of succession of Peter, that there was the next guy who was in charge of the church, and the next guy after that. And then there's bishops all that fan out depending on where the church is based on geography. And every now and again, they would have what was called councils. And all the leaders from all the different churches and parishes, I suppose, and all the different areas would get together in this one city and they would debate theological ideas. And they would decide, this is something that the whole church believes. This is something that we are going to cast aside. An example of this is the Council of Nicaea, where they decided without a doubt that Christ is God. Before that, there was some disagreement in the church. Some people thought that Christ was simply a man, that he was a prophet, like the Islam religion claims that he is. Other people say, no, he is deity. He is God incarnate in the flesh. So they got together, they talked about it, they voted on it, and they decided moving forward, the Christian church believes that Jesus is the Son of God. It's a really pivotal council, and we still affirm that. But what we find is that towards about 393 and 398, there was two councils, the Council of Hippo and the Council of Carthage, where those people got together and they voted on what books were going to be included in the New Testament. This is called the canonization of Scripture, the complete, done, codified work. And they voted on which books would be included. And what's important to point out here is it wasn't like they all brought 60 books to the table and then they slowly whittled it down to these 27. They voted on the 27 books that we commonly accept as Scripture that were commonly accepted then. All they did is agree on what was essentially already agreed upon. If you don't believe me, I actually have a quote this morning. I don't do this a lot, okay? I don't belabor things like this a lot because I think they're boring and no one cares. But I think this morning it's important. I've got a quote for you by a guy named F.F. Bruce. You know he's important because he doesn't use a name. It's just his initials. And in the church world, that means you're super smart and also pretentious. Get over yourself, F.F. But F.F. Bruce said this about the councils, and I think it's great. Read with me here. That's a big, long, fancy way of saying they didn't introduce any new ideas. All they did is put a rubber stamp on, yep, these are the books that we hold as Holy Scripture. And it's the same 27 books that we have today. They affirmed 27 books in the New Testament. We have those same 27 books now. So that's how we got the Old Testament and the New Testament. You may want to know, another question you should ask is, how did they determine which books were allowed in? What was the criteria? Well, for a book to be included in the canon, it had to be apostolic, harmonious, accepted, and inspired. Again, for a book to be included in the New Testament, it had to meet these requirements. It had to be apostolic, had to be harmonious, had to be commonly accepted, and it had to be inspired. And when I say apostolic, what I mean is this. An apostle is someone who has an eyewitness account of Christ. So for a book to be apostolic, it has to be written by someone who has seen Jesus in the flesh, which is a really easy way to say that the canon is closed. Can God appear to somebody and speak to someone and ask them to write something down on his behalf? Sure he could if he wanted to, but he doesn't do that anymore in a way that's going to be included in Scripture. We're not going to add to the Bible because one of the ways to get included in the New Testament is to be someone who's an eyewitness of Christ. And since all those people are dead, we're not accepting any more entries in the Bible. It has to be harmonious, meaning it has to agree with other books that are accepted in Scripture. It can't disagree with the Tanakh. It can't disagree with the teachings in the Old Testament. It can't disagree with the teachings and the quotes of Jesus. The Gospels were the first New Testament books written, so it can't disagree with any of those. It has to be in harmony with the rest of the books included. It's got to be accepted, meaning there's no surprises at these councils. Nobody brought this thing that was written down by somebody else and said, hey, would you consider this? The books that were agreed upon in Hippo and in Carthage were books that everybody was already familiar with, that those guys had taught their congregations out of many, many times. They were commonly accepted books. And then they had to be inspired. And really, the first three things are ways to determine if they felt like it was inspired by God. And this is an important word. We talk about the Bible being inspired. But I don't know how often we talk about what that means. Did God take over the minds of these men and these women and they wrote it down verbatim as the Holy Spirit spoke it to them? Was God basically dictating to them what the Bible was supposed to say? The way that we think about inspiration and how it works, and I hold this with a loose hand because it's hard to be certain how inspiration works. The only people who can explain it to us are people who never wrote the Bible. So it's just guesses. But the fancy word for it, if you're interested in such a thing, is verbal plenary inspiration. And basically what it means is the Holy Spirit guides your thoughts and your ideas and then your personality and your intellect takes over and expresses those things. So the Holy Spirit's gonna present an idea to Paul and he's gonna write it out and it's gonna look a lot different than when James writes something out or when David writes something out or when Solomon writes something out. It's almost like if you were to go to the field next to the church. Now, a lot of you haven't been here in so long that you've forgotten that there's a field over there, but there is. It'd be like going to that field and telling you to take a lap once in an SUV and once in a sports car. The journey is going to be the same. The lap's going to be the same, but the experience in that lap is going to be different based, and that lap is going to be different based on the car that you took. It's going to feel different in the SUV. It's going to get done in a different amount of time. It's going to feel different in the sports car. It's the same way with translation and or with inspiration. God speaks to one person, and the way that that person writes it down is going to be different than the way that this person writes it down. But the path and the impact and the point are the same. So in that way, God breathed Scripture into these authors by directing their thoughts and directing their hearts and their heads to the ideas that he wanted them to write down. So it's not unless a book is inspired, is harmonious, is accepted, and is apostolic do we include it in the New Testament. That's how we got our Bible. And the last question I want to address today is how do we know we can trust it? And this is an important question. How do we know that this book that I hold in my hands is the same book, that these 39 books are the exact same as they were when they got approved by the Sanhedrin in 250 BC? How do I know that when I quote Genesis, it's the same Genesis that Jesus is quoting? How do I know that when I read the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 2,000 years later, that those are the actual words that Jesus spoke? How do I know that the letter that Paul wrote to Romans has been preserved enough over the years so that when I open up Romans 1, 19 through 20 and read to you what Paul said, that it's the same thing the church in the first century was hearing? How do we know that we can trust this book? It's an important question. I would think that there's really three main factors that help us understand how we can trust the Bible. The three biggest reasons we can trust the Bible we hold in our hands are preservation, consistency, and evidence. The three biggest reasons that I know we can trust this are preservation, consistency, and evidence. Here's what I mean. You guys may not know this. I find this fascinating. If you don't find this fascinating, I'm sorry. We're talking about Sabbath next week, and I'm real excited for it. But the preservation of Scripture, to me, is so crucial and interesting and vital that it's worth understanding how it happened. You may remember from reading the New Testament that sometimes there's these two groups of people that are put together, the scribes and the Pharisees. What you may not know is that to be a scribe was actually a full-on religious profession. It was a whole profession to be a scribe. And the whole job of a scribe is not necessarily to write new things, but to simply copy things that existed. The only way to get more copies of the book of Genesis is for someone to sit down and painstakingly copy by hand the book of Genesis, right? Gutenberg hadn't been around yet. We didn't have copiers, so we had to write things down by hand. And the process of doing this was excruciatingly detailed. And again, these are men, it was just men in that day, who have dedicated their entire lives to copying Scripture. And they had very strict rules around how they did it. The foremost rule that I've always appreciated is if they made a single mistake at all, no scratching out and moving on and writing a little note about what you meant, any mistake in the manuscript, you destroyed the whole thing. You burned the whole thing. Now listen, we might think, oh gosh, that sounds tedious at first, but I don't think you understand how tedious. Think about if I asked you, if it was your job in 2021 to hand copy the book of Genesis to perfection. Take the book of Genesis. It's about 50 chapters. I want you to write it out word for word. I want you to look at it in your Bible and I want you to write it down. You have to write it down in such a way that it's going to be legible and easy to read in a hundred years. There can't be anybody a hundred years from now that can't tell if that's a G or a C or an E or an F. It needs to be clear and legible. And if there's a single mistake at all, if you put a comma in the wrong part, if you put the quotations outside the period and they should be inside the period, whatever you do, if there's any mistakes, you have to destroy it and start over. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to nail 43 chapters and in the 44th chapter you write a T instead of an S and you have to destroy the whole thing? That's what they would do. That's how serious they were about this work. Whenever they would approach the word Yahweh, they would stop and get up from their desk and put their pen down and go and wash their hands and pray a prayer and make sure they were ceremonially clean before they would write it down. When they would finish a document to check it, they knew exactly how many words were in the book. If we're using Genesis, they knew exactly how many words were in Genesis. So they'd finish it. It's perfect. It's two years of effort. And then they would start the counting. And they knew how many words had to be in their manuscript and how many words were in the original one. They knew that. And if it was wrong, if the count was off by one word, no matter what, you destroy those years of effort and you start over. They knew the middle word. If there's 50,000 words, they knew the 25,000th word. And they would count to it. And then in the new manuscript, they would count back to it. And if the middle word didn't match up, they would destroy the copy as imperfect. And it seems tedious, and maybe it seems over the top, but here's the thing. It worked. And we get affirmations every so often of just how well it worked. I won't chase this rabbit hole too much because it gets into the weeds, but suffice it to say that in terms of manuscripts, the older ones you can find, the better off you are. The older you can find it, the closer to the original it is, right? If you find some manuscripts that are 1,000 years old, that means that things were written 1,000 years before that. They're a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, right? But if you can find something that's 1,800 years old, so the original was only written 200 years before that, well, now it's a copy of a copy. So the older it is, the more accurate it is. And there have been multiple times in the Christian world where we have translated our Bibles based on the oldest manuscripts that we could find and translated them all out and had them and they've been published and on the shelves for us to pick up and read. And then something will happen, like what happened with the Dead Sea Scrolls, I believe in the 1930s. And they'll find these scrolls that predate the ones that we've already found. They're actually older than the oldest ones that we have. And so then they frantically check, oh my gosh, these ones that we have, are they accurate to the older ones? And what they found out is that within 99.9%, they're accurate. That the newer ones we have are accurate to the old ones that we find every couple of years. Which means that this preservation, over time, it worked. It's accurate. The words that we read here are the very ones that were written by Paul, are the very things that were said by Jesus, are the very words of David that were quoted by Matthew. The words that we read are the ones that are written. This has been proven over and over again. We can also trust the Bible because of its consistency, because of how unified its message is. I've told you already that it was written by over 40 authors over the span of 1,400 years, over three continents, with three languages. And yet, there is not a single irreconcilable difference between any of the books or any of the words. And yet, it is entirely consistent with itself. It was written over that great span of time, yet not a single one of those authors introduced an idea that can't be supported by another author or that goes against what one of the other authors said. How can this be possible unless there is one author overseeing the writing of all of it? How can it be possible that all these men over all these cultures with all these languages and all these years can come together and produce one sound document that has no inconsistencies unless there's been one person orchestrating the writing of it all. And there are people who have dedicated their lives to tearing this book down. There are people who have dedicated their adult lives to finding imperfections in the text, to finding contradictions here that don't exist. There are emperors who have tried to burn it. There are societies who have tried to get rid of it. But the Bible stands the test of time. It's still here. It's still trustworthy. It's still the things that Jesus said back when he said them. And because of its consistency, we know that we can trust it. Finally, there's evidence. I won't get too far in the weeds on this, but do you know that the Bible, hundreds of years before it ever existed, I think Daniel is the one who primarily does this. Do you know the Bible predicts Alexander the Great and the Grecian Empire? And that the Bible predicts the Roman Empire? You know, we find artifacts all the time that show us that the stories in the Bible are true. I've been over to Israel and they take you from Jerusalem down this road through the valley of the shadow of death to get to this little town called Jericho. And if you know your old Bible, your old Bible, your Old Testament well, you'll know that Joshua marched around the walls of Jericho seven times and then the walls fell. And if you go to Jericho today and you look at where they've excavated the wall and you can see the layers of it all the way down to the very bottom, that when you get close to the bottom down there, that there is a layer about this thick of ash and char. I've seen it with my own eyes from the time Jericho was burned to the ground, just like it says in the book of Joshua. In the 60s, a mathematician put this experiment together, and I've always found it to be really interesting. It's not an experiment, it's just an illustration of the prophecies in the Old Testament. If you take all the prophecies in the Old Testament that are about the Messiah, that by his stripes he will be healed, that he will be born of a virgin, that he'll be from both Nazareth and Bethlehem, that he'll be from the line of David. If you take all of the prophecies that are made about Jesus in the Old Testament, that are made about this messianic figure in the Old Testament, and you try to have one life that could possibly fulfill all of those prophecies, that the statistical probability of that, of one person fulfilling all of the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled, is the same as covering the state of Texas a foot deep, it's either a foot deep or three feet deep, in silver dollars. You paint one of those silver dollars red and you just drop it in there with the rest of them. Then you get on a plane, you fly over Texas, you parachute down, you land on the coins, you bend down and you pick up the red one. There's the same chances of you doing that as there is of anyone ever living a life that fulfills all the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled. And yet, he lived it. Jesus bears out the truth of Scripture. We see in Jesus' life enough evidence to know that everything around that is true. So I think, and I've come to a place where I believe we can trust Scripture because we can trust the preservation of it, we can trust the consistency of it, and we can trust the evidence that bears out from it. Now, I'll tell you this, for the extra nerdy ones, I actually have a whole class that I developed that I did a lifetime ago in apologetics, and I have about 12 pages of notes. I only shared with you guys like four pages of notes this morning. If you want more on this stuff, if you want to go more in depth, let me know and I'll email that to you. If you have other questions, let me know and I will respond to those. But it feels appropriate to close out this sermon by offering you a little challenge. We've looked at the Bible. We've asked the questions. How can we trust it? Why is it such a big deal? It's the inspired word of God. It's a special revelation to us. We got it through a trustworthy series of events that have rendered it whole, and now we can trust it because of all the reasons that I just went through. And so it seems appropriate to issue this challenge to you in 2021. You may already be a couple days behind and that's all right, but here's the thing. Here's your challenge. I want to challenge you guys to read more of the Bible this year than you ever have before. That's the challenge. That's the challenge for us at Grace. I'm going to engage in that. I want to challenge you to read more of the Bible this year than you ever have before in a single year. That's going to mean different things for different people. You may be thinking to yourself, well, that's great. I've never read the Bible before. All right, well, then it's a low bar for you. Enjoy your success. I hope that it would continue. Set the bar higher for future years, but take a step. A lot of us are the kind of people who have sat down a bunch of times determined to read the Bible. Let this be the time that it sticks. Find a good pace that you can go at, a good rhythm for yourself. Let the Bible read itself to you. On the Bible app, you can have it read itself to you in your car or on your walk. I'm going to read through the Bible this year. I started last year and then I fell off the wagon. I'm going to make it my goal to read through the Bible this year. I'm just going to listen to the Bible this year in addition to what I'm reading on a regular basis. And it's worth stating that the Bible was actually written to be read aloud. So listening to it is a really good way to consume Scripture. If you're one who reads the Bible regularly, step it up. Let's let 2021 be the year that we read more of the Bible than we ever have. That's my challenge to you. All right, next week I'm going to come back and we're going to talk about this idea of Sabbath. What is it and why is it so important? But for now, I'm going to pray and we're going to close out the service with one more song. Pray with me. Father, we love you. Thank you so much for your word. Thank you that we can trust it. Thank you that we can build our lives on it. Thank you that it will never let us down. Thank you that it has stood the test of time and is trustworthy. Father, if we have any other questions about your word, give us the courage and the tenacity to seek those out. Give us the humility to accept what is true. Give us the clarity to reject what isn't. God, I pray once again that as we go throughout our weeks this week, that we would be people and instruments of peace for you in this country and a time when we need it so badly. God, thank you for your word. Make us students of it. Develop in us a hunger for it. In Jesus' name, amen.

It's good to get to be back with you in the saddle preaching live. I've been excited for this morning and I'm excited for this series. This series, Things You Should Know, I think that's what we're calling it. Yeah, it's right there on the screen next to me. Things You Should Know. I forgot what we named it back in the beginning of December, but I haven't forgotten what it's about. And it's based on this idea that there's things that we should all know as Christians, or that we at least nod along with as Christians, that we pretend that we know, that we may not actually know, right? Like there's a kind of a Christianese and another language that's spoken around churches. And I think sometimes we just kind of nod along with that because we don't want to look or feel dumb. And I know how it goes. I mean, you join a small group for the first time. You haven't really been involved in church in a while or just kind of cursory involvement. And then you show up in a small group and people start talking about stuff. And you might not know what they're talking about, but you don't want to feel dumb or silly or uninformed or make yourself look bad. So you don't say anything. And then you've been there so long that now I have to be one of the people that knows these things too. And so we just kind of nod along when people talk about grace and mercy or throw out Bible words like sanctification, and we just kind of act like we know what they're talking about when sometimes we really don't. And one of the things that I want you to know is that it's okay not to know stuff. It's actually really great to ask questions. One of my favorite things to do is to have my men's Bible study and have people in that study who are not very familiar with the text that we're covering because the questions that they ask are the best, but you have to be brave to ask questions because when you ask a question, you're admitting that I don't know this thing. And there's some stuff in the church that I think we nod along with, that we act like we know, when maybe we don't. And we want to be brave for you this month and ask those questions for you this month. And so this morning, the title of the sermon is simply the Bible. Questions that we might have about the Bible. I'm going to look at three questions that I think everybody has about Scripture that we might not know the answers to, but that I think every Christian should know. And now I'll warn you up front, this is not a normal sermon. This is far more informative. It's informational, this sermon is. The things that I'm going to share with you this morning are things that I wasn't exposed to until I was in Bible college, taking theology classes, or in grad school, in seminary, taking more theology classes. And there's a lot more to it than what we're going to cover this morning, but I wanted to take a morning, one Sunday, and address with you some common questions about the Bible, because again, I think every believer should know the answers to these questions. So I'll say up front, for some of you, you're going to love this. You're going to love it. Your notebook is out. You're ready. You're going to write these things down, and if you're a note taker, there's going to be a lot to write down. So get ready. Get your best possible pen. Some of you might not love this. This might not be your thing. And just to know, just for you to know, when I was praying before the sermon, my final words to God were, Father, make this helpful. And if it's not helpful, make it quick. Okay, so I'm with you. There's a lot of information, but I think you need to know this stuff, and I hope that you'll be interested in it. And actually, I want to know what you learned this morning. If I tell you something that you didn't know before, email me and tell me what you learned and tell me what you enjoyed. If there's other questions that you've always wanted to ask, email me and ask those questions. You can even tell me that I heard my friend ask this, so you don't even have to throw yourself under the bus. But get those questions to me. Get your responses to me. I want us to interact with the things we're talking about in this series. But I said I was going to give you three questions about the Bible that I think we should all be able to answer. And the first one is this. Why is the Bible a big deal? Why is the Bible such a big deal? Why do we make such a fuss about it? And it may seem like I'm going too simple on this, but I think it's an important question. Think about it. Think about where we place the Bible in our lives. I tell you guys all the time that there's no greater habit that anyone in their life could have than to read the Bible every day, than to spend time with God through prayer and in His Word every day. So we make a big deal out of the Bible. We hold the Bible up as the foremost authority in our lives. We believe and we teach at Grace that if you're walking with God, that you won't allow anything into your life until it's filtered through Scripture. That the biggest authority in your life of whether something is right or wrong or good or bad or from God or not is to go to Scripture and see what does it say. The entire church is built around the teachings of the Bible. Wars have been fought over it. People have died to preserve it. So it's worth asking the question, why is the Bible such a big deal? Well, the short answer is this. The Bible is a big deal because it's God's special revelation to us. We make such a fuss out of the Bible. The Bible is a big deal because it is God's special revelation to us. Now, here's what I mean. That word revelation, we're already getting into some technical Christian terms. That's not really a Christian term. That just means something that's revealed. It's the same root word there. It just means to reveal something. And so what we understand about ourselves and what you understand about you, whether you've ever thought about this or not, is that people can only know about you what you choose to reveal to them, right? If you meet somebody at a dinner party, you know you're never going to talk to them again. You can make up a totally false identity. They'll never know. You can tell them that you used to be a professional ball player. They won't know the difference. They'll Google you later. You won't exist, and it's fine. You'll never have that interaction again. But they only know about you what you choose to reveal about yourself. So when you meet someone in passing, it's just a cursory glance. They only know you by the way that you dress, by what you reveal, by how you present yourself to the world. The more someone is around you, the more they see you react and interact and respond, the more they learn about you and what's there. But again, people can only know about you what you choose to reveal to them about yourself, right? Well, the same is true of God. We can only know about God what he chooses to reveal about himself. And with him, it's in particular no more and no less. So with God, if we understand revelation to be what God chooses to reveal to us about himself, that we would get to know God the same way we would get to know anybody in our life, the same way other people would get to know us, then we have to understand that with God, there's two kinds of revelation. There's general revelation and special revelation. The way that I think about those is this. General revelation makes us aware of the presence of God, and special revelation gives us the details of that presence. General revelation is stuff that everybody can see. And Romans 1 actually sums up general revelation like this. This is what Paul says in Romans 1, looking at verse 19. He says, So he says, listen, God wrote himself in nature. Anybody who looks outward at nature, at the trees, at the seasons, at the rhythms of nature, the way the earth rotates around the sun, at how huge the universe is, at how small it can be, at the miracle of birth, at just the essence of life. As you look at nature, it points to a creator God. And as you look inward on what is written in your nature, it points to a creator God. Our moral compass, the fact that every civilization ever has prized bravery and bemoaned cowardice, has said that telling the truth is good and that being deceptive is bad. That moral code was written on our hearts by God. On our hearts, we have a longing for our Creator. So whether we look without or within, when we look at nature, God has written himself in nature. That is his general revelation, making all of us aware of his existence. But his special revelation, where he gives us the details of that existence, that's in the Bible. And here's what's incredible about that. What if we didn't have the Bible? What if we didn't know the details of this God that exists? Then he would just be to us this being that existed distant and cold, who had the authority to punish us, to start our life and to take our life, to manipulate circumstances to make us joyful or to make us miserable. It would be a God that we would hope to try to appease, but we wouldn't really know who he was. It would be a God that would inevitably incur fear and myth. But in God's goodness, he gave us the Bible. And it gives us the details of his existence. It's in his words that we find out, oh goodness, this God that created me loves me. This God that created me actually only created me so that I could spend eternity with him. That's how much he wants to be with me. This God who created me sent his son to die for me. This God who created me is love. He is goodness. He is gracious. He is merciful. This book tells us all we need to know about the God who created us. It is God's special revelation of himself to us. This is why we hold it in such high esteem. Because we believe that in these pages are the very words of God. And that this is, he could have chosen to reveal himself any way he wanted to, but what he chose to do is to reveal himself in the pages of Scripture. And in here we find him and who he is. It's an invitation to know our God better. That's why we make such a big deal out of the Bible. Now, the next question. And this one is important. I hope that some of you guys have asked this. I hope that some of you know some of the answers to this. But I think it's an important question. How did we even get the Bible? How did we get the Bible? How is it that I can go to the store and buy this, and these are the books that God wants in here, and these are the words that God wants in here, and these are the things that were written down however many years ago. How do we even get this? Because I don't know if you know this about the Bible, but the Bible is composed of an Old Testament and a New Testament. It totals 66 books. There's 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament. And you may or may not know, I mean, you probably know that there's been a lot of people who have contributed to writing the Bible, but there's actually over 40 authors that contribute to the Bible. Did you know that the Bible was written over the span of about 1,400 years across three different continents, Africa and Asia and Europe? And that it was written actually in three different languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. And through all of that time, through the span of 1,400 years, through the minds of over 40 authors on three continents and however many different cultures that was, and in three different languages, God inspired this written word. So how did it get to us? It's a fair question. When we talk about how it got to us, we can really talk about it in the Old and the New Testament. The Old Testament is pretty easy. In ancient Israel, there was a ruling body called the Sanhedrin. That was a lot like our Senate. It was made up of different parties. The two most famous parties in the Sanhedrin were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. We've probably heard of those before, at least the Pharisees, I would think. And then there was other little parties that weren't as influential, but were there, the Essenes and the Zealots. You can think of those as like the modern day libertarians. I know that my friend Tom Sartorius will appreciate that very much. But the Sanhedrin was made up of different parties, and those parties ruled Israel. It was a religious rule, not too different from what we see in Muslim countries today. And the Sanhedrin got together somewhere around 250 BC, or maybe a little bit after, and one of the things that they affirmed was that the holy scriptures they had were the Holy Scriptures that would serve as the Old Testament. To them, it was 24 books that they called the Tanakh. To us, it's 39 books that we call the Old Testament, but they're the exact same. They grouped up a bunch of different books that we have separated out together, like Kings and Chronicles was one book, and now it's four. So they would group things together like that, but it's the same. Our 39 books are the same 24 books that they affirmed in 250 BC. And the Sanhedrin looked around and voted and they said, this is it. These are the Holy Scriptures. This is the Tanakh, the law and the prophets. In the New Testament, when we hear Jesus or one of the other writers refer to the law and the prophets, he's referring to the Old Testament, to the Tanakh. And that Old Testament has not been changed since 250 BC when they affirmed it. And the last book was Malachi, and it was written around 400 BC. So it had already existed as one big volume of works for at least 150 years before they ever addressed it. It hasn't changed since 400 BC, and it's not going to change in the future. The Old Testament is done, and that's how we got it. Now, the New Testament is interesting too, because at the time of Christ, there was a lot of writings. There's a lot of people writing a lot of different things. And after Christ left the scene, there was one universal church. We call it the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church was structured. They say that there was a pope in the line of succession of Peter, that there was the next guy who was in charge of the church, and the next guy after that. And then there's bishops all that fan out depending on where the church is based on geography. And every now and again, they would have what was called councils. And all the leaders from all the different churches and parishes, I suppose, and all the different areas would get together in this one city and they would debate theological ideas. And they would decide, this is something that the whole church believes. This is something that we are going to cast aside. An example of this is the Council of Nicaea, where they decided without a doubt that Christ is God. Before that, there was some disagreement in the church. Some people thought that Christ was simply a man, that he was a prophet, like the Islam religion claims that he is. Other people say, no, he is deity. He is God incarnate in the flesh. So they got together, they talked about it, they voted on it, and they decided moving forward, the Christian church believes that Jesus is the Son of God. It's a really pivotal council, and we still affirm that. But what we find is that towards about 393 and 398, there was two councils, the Council of Hippo and the Council of Carthage, where those people got together and they voted on what books were going to be included in the New Testament. This is called the canonization of Scripture, the complete, done, codified work. And they voted on which books would be included. And what's important to point out here is it wasn't like they all brought 60 books to the table and then they slowly whittled it down to these 27. They voted on the 27 books that we commonly accept as Scripture that were commonly accepted then. All they did is agree on what was essentially already agreed upon. If you don't believe me, I actually have a quote this morning. I don't do this a lot, okay? I don't belabor things like this a lot because I think they're boring and no one cares. But I think this morning it's important. I've got a quote for you by a guy named F.F. Bruce. You know he's important because he doesn't use a name. It's just his initials. And in the church world, that means you're super smart and also pretentious. Get over yourself, F.F. But F.F. Bruce said this about the councils, and I think it's great. Read with me here. That's a big, long, fancy way of saying they didn't introduce any new ideas. All they did is put a rubber stamp on, yep, these are the books that we hold as Holy Scripture. And it's the same 27 books that we have today. They affirmed 27 books in the New Testament. We have those same 27 books now. So that's how we got the Old Testament and the New Testament. You may want to know, another question you should ask is, how did they determine which books were allowed in? What was the criteria? Well, for a book to be included in the canon, it had to be apostolic, harmonious, accepted, and inspired. Again, for a book to be included in the New Testament, it had to meet these requirements. It had to be apostolic, had to be harmonious, had to be commonly accepted, and it had to be inspired. And when I say apostolic, what I mean is this. An apostle is someone who has an eyewitness account of Christ. So for a book to be apostolic, it has to be written by someone who has seen Jesus in the flesh, which is a really easy way to say that the canon is closed. Can God appear to somebody and speak to someone and ask them to write something down on his behalf? Sure he could if he wanted to, but he doesn't do that anymore in a way that's going to be included in Scripture. We're not going to add to the Bible because one of the ways to get included in the New Testament is to be someone who's an eyewitness of Christ. And since all those people are dead, we're not accepting any more entries in the Bible. It has to be harmonious, meaning it has to agree with other books that are accepted in Scripture. It can't disagree with the Tanakh. It can't disagree with the teachings in the Old Testament. It can't disagree with the teachings and the quotes of Jesus. The Gospels were the first New Testament books written, so it can't disagree with any of those. It has to be in harmony with the rest of the books included. It's got to be accepted, meaning there's no surprises at these councils. Nobody brought this thing that was written down by somebody else and said, hey, would you consider this? The books that were agreed upon in Hippo and in Carthage were books that everybody was already familiar with, that those guys had taught their congregations out of many, many times. They were commonly accepted books. And then they had to be inspired. And really, the first three things are ways to determine if they felt like it was inspired by God. And this is an important word. We talk about the Bible being inspired. But I don't know how often we talk about what that means. Did God take over the minds of these men and these women and they wrote it down verbatim as the Holy Spirit spoke it to them? Was God basically dictating to them what the Bible was supposed to say? The way that we think about inspiration and how it works, and I hold this with a loose hand because it's hard to be certain how inspiration works. The only people who can explain it to us are people who never wrote the Bible. So it's just guesses. But the fancy word for it, if you're interested in such a thing, is verbal plenary inspiration. And basically what it means is the Holy Spirit guides your thoughts and your ideas and then your personality and your intellect takes over and expresses those things. So the Holy Spirit's gonna present an idea to Paul and he's gonna write it out and it's gonna look a lot different than when James writes something out or when David writes something out or when Solomon writes something out. It's almost like if you were to go to the field next to the church. Now, a lot of you haven't been here in so long that you've forgotten that there's a field over there, but there is. It'd be like going to that field and telling you to take a lap once in an SUV and once in a sports car. The journey is going to be the same. The lap's going to be the same, but the experience in that lap is going to be different based, and that lap is going to be different based on the car that you took. It's going to feel different in the SUV. It's going to get done in a different amount of time. It's going to feel different in the sports car. It's the same way with translation and or with inspiration. God speaks to one person, and the way that that person writes it down is going to be different than the way that this person writes it down. But the path and the impact and the point are the same. So in that way, God breathed Scripture into these authors by directing their thoughts and directing their hearts and their heads to the ideas that he wanted them to write down. So it's not unless a book is inspired, is harmonious, is accepted, and is apostolic do we include it in the New Testament. That's how we got our Bible. And the last question I want to address today is how do we know we can trust it? And this is an important question. How do we know that this book that I hold in my hands is the same book, that these 39 books are the exact same as they were when they got approved by the Sanhedrin in 250 BC? How do I know that when I quote Genesis, it's the same Genesis that Jesus is quoting? How do I know that when I read the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 2,000 years later, that those are the actual words that Jesus spoke? How do I know that the letter that Paul wrote to Romans has been preserved enough over the years so that when I open up Romans 1, 19 through 20 and read to you what Paul said, that it's the same thing the church in the first century was hearing? How do we know that we can trust this book? It's an important question. I would think that there's really three main factors that help us understand how we can trust the Bible. The three biggest reasons we can trust the Bible we hold in our hands are preservation, consistency, and evidence. The three biggest reasons that I know we can trust this are preservation, consistency, and evidence. Here's what I mean. You guys may not know this. I find this fascinating. If you don't find this fascinating, I'm sorry. We're talking about Sabbath next week, and I'm real excited for it. But the preservation of Scripture, to me, is so crucial and interesting and vital that it's worth understanding how it happened. You may remember from reading the New Testament that sometimes there's these two groups of people that are put together, the scribes and the Pharisees. What you may not know is that to be a scribe was actually a full-on religious profession. It was a whole profession to be a scribe. And the whole job of a scribe is not necessarily to write new things, but to simply copy things that existed. The only way to get more copies of the book of Genesis is for someone to sit down and painstakingly copy by hand the book of Genesis, right? Gutenberg hadn't been around yet. We didn't have copiers, so we had to write things down by hand. And the process of doing this was excruciatingly detailed. And again, these are men, it was just men in that day, who have dedicated their entire lives to copying Scripture. And they had very strict rules around how they did it. The foremost rule that I've always appreciated is if they made a single mistake at all, no scratching out and moving on and writing a little note about what you meant, any mistake in the manuscript, you destroyed the whole thing. You burned the whole thing. Now listen, we might think, oh gosh, that sounds tedious at first, but I don't think you understand how tedious. Think about if I asked you, if it was your job in 2021 to hand copy the book of Genesis to perfection. Take the book of Genesis. It's about 50 chapters. I want you to write it out word for word. I want you to look at it in your Bible and I want you to write it down. You have to write it down in such a way that it's going to be legible and easy to read in a hundred years. There can't be anybody a hundred years from now that can't tell if that's a G or a C or an E or an F. It needs to be clear and legible. And if there's a single mistake at all, if you put a comma in the wrong part, if you put the quotations outside the period and they should be inside the period, whatever you do, if there's any mistakes, you have to destroy it and start over. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to nail 43 chapters and in the 44th chapter you write a T instead of an S and you have to destroy the whole thing? That's what they would do. That's how serious they were about this work. Whenever they would approach the word Yahweh, they would stop and get up from their desk and put their pen down and go and wash their hands and pray a prayer and make sure they were ceremonially clean before they would write it down. When they would finish a document to check it, they knew exactly how many words were in the book. If we're using Genesis, they knew exactly how many words were in Genesis. So they'd finish it. It's perfect. It's two years of effort. And then they would start the counting. And they knew how many words had to be in their manuscript and how many words were in the original one. They knew that. And if it was wrong, if the count was off by one word, no matter what, you destroy those years of effort and you start over. They knew the middle word. If there's 50,000 words, they knew the 25,000th word. And they would count to it. And then in the new manuscript, they would count back to it. And if the middle word didn't match up, they would destroy the copy as imperfect. And it seems tedious, and maybe it seems over the top, but here's the thing. It worked. And we get affirmations every so often of just how well it worked. I won't chase this rabbit hole too much because it gets into the weeds, but suffice it to say that in terms of manuscripts, the older ones you can find, the better off you are. The older you can find it, the closer to the original it is, right? If you find some manuscripts that are 1,000 years old, that means that things were written 1,000 years before that. They're a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, right? But if you can find something that's 1,800 years old, so the original was only written 200 years before that, well, now it's a copy of a copy. So the older it is, the more accurate it is. And there have been multiple times in the Christian world where we have translated our Bibles based on the oldest manuscripts that we could find and translated them all out and had them and they've been published and on the shelves for us to pick up and read. And then something will happen, like what happened with the Dead Sea Scrolls, I believe in the 1930s. And they'll find these scrolls that predate the ones that we've already found. They're actually older than the oldest ones that we have. And so then they frantically check, oh my gosh, these ones that we have, are they accurate to the older ones? And what they found out is that within 99.9%, they're accurate. That the newer ones we have are accurate to the old ones that we find every couple of years. Which means that this preservation, over time, it worked. It's accurate. The words that we read here are the very ones that were written by Paul, are the very things that were said by Jesus, are the very words of David that were quoted by Matthew. The words that we read are the ones that are written. This has been proven over and over again. We can also trust the Bible because of its consistency, because of how unified its message is. I've told you already that it was written by over 40 authors over the span of 1,400 years, over three continents, with three languages. And yet, there is not a single irreconcilable difference between any of the books or any of the words. And yet, it is entirely consistent with itself. It was written over that great span of time, yet not a single one of those authors introduced an idea that can't be supported by another author or that goes against what one of the other authors said. How can this be possible unless there is one author overseeing the writing of all of it? How can it be possible that all these men over all these cultures with all these languages and all these years can come together and produce one sound document that has no inconsistencies unless there's been one person orchestrating the writing of it all. And there are people who have dedicated their lives to tearing this book down. There are people who have dedicated their adult lives to finding imperfections in the text, to finding contradictions here that don't exist. There are emperors who have tried to burn it. There are societies who have tried to get rid of it. But the Bible stands the test of time. It's still here. It's still trustworthy. It's still the things that Jesus said back when he said them. And because of its consistency, we know that we can trust it. Finally, there's evidence. I won't get too far in the weeds on this, but do you know that the Bible, hundreds of years before it ever existed, I think Daniel is the one who primarily does this. Do you know the Bible predicts Alexander the Great and the Grecian Empire? And that the Bible predicts the Roman Empire? You know, we find artifacts all the time that show us that the stories in the Bible are true. I've been over to Israel and they take you from Jerusalem down this road through the valley of the shadow of death to get to this little town called Jericho. And if you know your old Bible, your old Bible, your Old Testament well, you'll know that Joshua marched around the walls of Jericho seven times and then the walls fell. And if you go to Jericho today and you look at where they've excavated the wall and you can see the layers of it all the way down to the very bottom, that when you get close to the bottom down there, that there is a layer about this thick of ash and char. I've seen it with my own eyes from the time Jericho was burned to the ground, just like it says in the book of Joshua. In the 60s, a mathematician put this experiment together, and I've always found it to be really interesting. It's not an experiment, it's just an illustration of the prophecies in the Old Testament. If you take all the prophecies in the Old Testament that are about the Messiah, that by his stripes he will be healed, that he will be born of a virgin, that he'll be from both Nazareth and Bethlehem, that he'll be from the line of David. If you take all of the prophecies that are made about Jesus in the Old Testament, that are made about this messianic figure in the Old Testament, and you try to have one life that could possibly fulfill all of those prophecies, that the statistical probability of that, of one person fulfilling all of the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled, is the same as covering the state of Texas a foot deep, it's either a foot deep or three feet deep, in silver dollars. You paint one of those silver dollars red and you just drop it in there with the rest of them. Then you get on a plane, you fly over Texas, you parachute down, you land on the coins, you bend down and you pick up the red one. There's the same chances of you doing that as there is of anyone ever living a life that fulfills all the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled. And yet, he lived it. Jesus bears out the truth of Scripture. We see in Jesus' life enough evidence to know that everything around that is true. So I think, and I've come to a place where I believe we can trust Scripture because we can trust the preservation of it, we can trust the consistency of it, and we can trust the evidence that bears out from it. Now, I'll tell you this, for the extra nerdy ones, I actually have a whole class that I developed that I did a lifetime ago in apologetics, and I have about 12 pages of notes. I only shared with you guys like four pages of notes this morning. If you want more on this stuff, if you want to go more in depth, let me know and I'll email that to you. If you have other questions, let me know and I will respond to those. But it feels appropriate to close out this sermon by offering you a little challenge. We've looked at the Bible. We've asked the questions. How can we trust it? Why is it such a big deal? It's the inspired word of God. It's a special revelation to us. We got it through a trustworthy series of events that have rendered it whole, and now we can trust it because of all the reasons that I just went through. And so it seems appropriate to issue this challenge to you in 2021. You may already be a couple days behind and that's all right, but here's the thing. Here's your challenge. I want to challenge you guys to read more of the Bible this year than you ever have before. That's the challenge. That's the challenge for us at Grace. I'm going to engage in that. I want to challenge you to read more of the Bible this year than you ever have before in a single year. That's going to mean different things for different people. You may be thinking to yourself, well, that's great. I've never read the Bible before. All right, well, then it's a low bar for you. Enjoy your success. I hope that it would continue. Set the bar higher for future years, but take a step. A lot of us are the kind of people who have sat down a bunch of times determined to read the Bible. Let this be the time that it sticks. Find a good pace that you can go at, a good rhythm for yourself. Let the Bible read itself to you. On the Bible app, you can have it read itself to you in your car or on your walk. I'm going to read through the Bible this year. I started last year and then I fell off the wagon. I'm going to make it my goal to read through the Bible this year. I'm just going to listen to the Bible this year in addition to what I'm reading on a regular basis. And it's worth stating that the Bible was actually written to be read aloud. So listening to it is a really good way to consume Scripture. If you're one who reads the Bible regularly, step it up. Let's let 2021 be the year that we read more of the Bible than we ever have. That's my challenge to you. All right, next week I'm going to come back and we're going to talk about this idea of Sabbath. What is it and why is it so important? But for now, I'm going to pray and we're going to close out the service with one more song. Pray with me. Father, we love you. Thank you so much for your word. Thank you that we can trust it. Thank you that we can build our lives on it. Thank you that it will never let us down. Thank you that it has stood the test of time and is trustworthy. Father, if we have any other questions about your word, give us the courage and the tenacity to seek those out. Give us the humility to accept what is true. Give us the clarity to reject what isn't. God, I pray once again that as we go throughout our weeks this week, that we would be people and instruments of peace for you in this country and a time when we need it so badly. God, thank you for your word. Make us students of it. Develop in us a hunger for it. In Jesus' name, amen.

It's good to get to be back with you in the saddle preaching live. I've been excited for this morning and I'm excited for this series. This series, Things You Should Know, I think that's what we're calling it. Yeah, it's right there on the screen next to me. Things You Should Know. I forgot what we named it back in the beginning of December, but I haven't forgotten what it's about. And it's based on this idea that there's things that we should all know as Christians, or that we at least nod along with as Christians, that we pretend that we know, that we may not actually know, right? Like there's a kind of a Christianese and another language that's spoken around churches. And I think sometimes we just kind of nod along with that because we don't want to look or feel dumb. And I know how it goes. I mean, you join a small group for the first time. You haven't really been involved in church in a while or just kind of cursory involvement. And then you show up in a small group and people start talking about stuff. And you might not know what they're talking about, but you don't want to feel dumb or silly or uninformed or make yourself look bad. So you don't say anything. And then you've been there so long that now I have to be one of the people that knows these things too. And so we just kind of nod along when people talk about grace and mercy or throw out Bible words like sanctification, and we just kind of act like we know what they're talking about when sometimes we really don't. And one of the things that I want you to know is that it's okay not to know stuff. It's actually really great to ask questions. One of my favorite things to do is to have my men's Bible study and have people in that study who are not very familiar with the text that we're covering because the questions that they ask are the best, but you have to be brave to ask questions because when you ask a question, you're admitting that I don't know this thing. And there's some stuff in the church that I think we nod along with, that we act like we know, when maybe we don't. And we want to be brave for you this month and ask those questions for you this month. And so this morning, the title of the sermon is simply the Bible. Questions that we might have about the Bible. I'm going to look at three questions that I think everybody has about Scripture that we might not know the answers to, but that I think every Christian should know. And now I'll warn you up front, this is not a normal sermon. This is far more informative. It's informational, this sermon is. The things that I'm going to share with you this morning are things that I wasn't exposed to until I was in Bible college, taking theology classes, or in grad school, in seminary, taking more theology classes. And there's a lot more to it than what we're going to cover this morning, but I wanted to take a morning, one Sunday, and address with you some common questions about the Bible, because again, I think every believer should know the answers to these questions. So I'll say up front, for some of you, you're going to love this. You're going to love it. Your notebook is out. You're ready. You're going to write these things down, and if you're a note taker, there's going to be a lot to write down. So get ready. Get your best possible pen. Some of you might not love this. This might not be your thing. And just to know, just for you to know, when I was praying before the sermon, my final words to God were, Father, make this helpful. And if it's not helpful, make it quick. Okay, so I'm with you. There's a lot of information, but I think you need to know this stuff, and I hope that you'll be interested in it. And actually, I want to know what you learned this morning. If I tell you something that you didn't know before, email me and tell me what you learned and tell me what you enjoyed. If there's other questions that you've always wanted to ask, email me and ask those questions. You can even tell me that I heard my friend ask this, so you don't even have to throw yourself under the bus. But get those questions to me. Get your responses to me. I want us to interact with the things we're talking about in this series. But I said I was going to give you three questions about the Bible that I think we should all be able to answer. And the first one is this. Why is the Bible a big deal? Why is the Bible such a big deal? Why do we make such a fuss about it? And it may seem like I'm going too simple on this, but I think it's an important question. Think about it. Think about where we place the Bible in our lives. I tell you guys all the time that there's no greater habit that anyone in their life could have than to read the Bible every day, than to spend time with God through prayer and in His Word every day. So we make a big deal out of the Bible. We hold the Bible up as the foremost authority in our lives. We believe and we teach at Grace that if you're walking with God, that you won't allow anything into your life until it's filtered through Scripture. That the biggest authority in your life of whether something is right or wrong or good or bad or from God or not is to go to Scripture and see what does it say. The entire church is built around the teachings of the Bible. Wars have been fought over it. People have died to preserve it. So it's worth asking the question, why is the Bible such a big deal? Well, the short answer is this. The Bible is a big deal because it's God's special revelation to us. We make such a fuss out of the Bible. The Bible is a big deal because it is God's special revelation to us. Now, here's what I mean. That word revelation, we're already getting into some technical Christian terms. That's not really a Christian term. That just means something that's revealed. It's the same root word there. It just means to reveal something. And so what we understand about ourselves and what you understand about you, whether you've ever thought about this or not, is that people can only know about you what you choose to reveal to them, right? If you meet somebody at a dinner party, you know you're never going to talk to them again. You can make up a totally false identity. They'll never know. You can tell them that you used to be a professional ball player. They won't know the difference. They'll Google you later. You won't exist, and it's fine. You'll never have that interaction again. But they only know about you what you choose to reveal about yourself. So when you meet someone in passing, it's just a cursory glance. They only know you by the way that you dress, by what you reveal, by how you present yourself to the world. The more someone is around you, the more they see you react and interact and respond, the more they learn about you and what's there. But again, people can only know about you what you choose to reveal to them about yourself, right? Well, the same is true of God. We can only know about God what he chooses to reveal about himself. And with him, it's in particular no more and no less. So with God, if we understand revelation to be what God chooses to reveal to us about himself, that we would get to know God the same way we would get to know anybody in our life, the same way other people would get to know us, then we have to understand that with God, there's two kinds of revelation. There's general revelation and special revelation. The way that I think about those is this. General revelation makes us aware of the presence of God, and special revelation gives us the details of that presence. General revelation is stuff that everybody can see. And Romans 1 actually sums up general revelation like this. This is what Paul says in Romans 1, looking at verse 19. He says, So he says, listen, God wrote himself in nature. Anybody who looks outward at nature, at the trees, at the seasons, at the rhythms of nature, the way the earth rotates around the sun, at how huge the universe is, at how small it can be, at the miracle of birth, at just the essence of life. As you look at nature, it points to a creator God. And as you look inward on what is written in your nature, it points to a creator God. Our moral compass, the fact that every civilization ever has prized bravery and bemoaned cowardice, has said that telling the truth is good and that being deceptive is bad. That moral code was written on our hearts by God. On our hearts, we have a longing for our Creator. So whether we look without or within, when we look at nature, God has written himself in nature. That is his general revelation, making all of us aware of his existence. But his special revelation, where he gives us the details of that existence, that's in the Bible. And here's what's incredible about that. What if we didn't have the Bible? What if we didn't know the details of this God that exists? Then he would just be to us this being that existed distant and cold, who had the authority to punish us, to start our life and to take our life, to manipulate circumstances to make us joyful or to make us miserable. It would be a God that we would hope to try to appease, but we wouldn't really know who he was. It would be a God that would inevitably incur fear and myth. But in God's goodness, he gave us the Bible. And it gives us the details of his existence. It's in his words that we find out, oh goodness, this God that created me loves me. This God that created me actually only created me so that I could spend eternity with him. That's how much he wants to be with me. This God who created me sent his son to die for me. This God who created me is love. He is goodness. He is gracious. He is merciful. This book tells us all we need to know about the God who created us. It is God's special revelation of himself to us. This is why we hold it in such high esteem. Because we believe that in these pages are the very words of God. And that this is, he could have chosen to reveal himself any way he wanted to, but what he chose to do is to reveal himself in the pages of Scripture. And in here we find him and who he is. It's an invitation to know our God better. That's why we make such a big deal out of the Bible. Now, the next question. And this one is important. I hope that some of you guys have asked this. I hope that some of you know some of the answers to this. But I think it's an important question. How did we even get the Bible? How did we get the Bible? How is it that I can go to the store and buy this, and these are the books that God wants in here, and these are the words that God wants in here, and these are the things that were written down however many years ago. How do we even get this? Because I don't know if you know this about the Bible, but the Bible is composed of an Old Testament and a New Testament. It totals 66 books. There's 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament. And you may or may not know, I mean, you probably know that there's been a lot of people who have contributed to writing the Bible, but there's actually over 40 authors that contribute to the Bible. Did you know that the Bible was written over the span of about 1,400 years across three different continents, Africa and Asia and Europe? And that it was written actually in three different languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. And through all of that time, through the span of 1,400 years, through the minds of over 40 authors on three continents and however many different cultures that was, and in three different languages, God inspired this written word. So how did it get to us? It's a fair question. When we talk about how it got to us, we can really talk about it in the Old and the New Testament. The Old Testament is pretty easy. In ancient Israel, there was a ruling body called the Sanhedrin. That was a lot like our Senate. It was made up of different parties. The two most famous parties in the Sanhedrin were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. We've probably heard of those before, at least the Pharisees, I would think. And then there was other little parties that weren't as influential, but were there, the Essenes and the Zealots. You can think of those as like the modern day libertarians. I know that my friend Tom Sartorius will appreciate that very much. But the Sanhedrin was made up of different parties, and those parties ruled Israel. It was a religious rule, not too different from what we see in Muslim countries today. And the Sanhedrin got together somewhere around 250 BC, or maybe a little bit after, and one of the things that they affirmed was that the holy scriptures they had were the Holy Scriptures that would serve as the Old Testament. To them, it was 24 books that they called the Tanakh. To us, it's 39 books that we call the Old Testament, but they're the exact same. They grouped up a bunch of different books that we have separated out together, like Kings and Chronicles was one book, and now it's four. So they would group things together like that, but it's the same. Our 39 books are the same 24 books that they affirmed in 250 BC. And the Sanhedrin looked around and voted and they said, this is it. These are the Holy Scriptures. This is the Tanakh, the law and the prophets. In the New Testament, when we hear Jesus or one of the other writers refer to the law and the prophets, he's referring to the Old Testament, to the Tanakh. And that Old Testament has not been changed since 250 BC when they affirmed it. And the last book was Malachi, and it was written around 400 BC. So it had already existed as one big volume of works for at least 150 years before they ever addressed it. It hasn't changed since 400 BC, and it's not going to change in the future. The Old Testament is done, and that's how we got it. Now, the New Testament is interesting too, because at the time of Christ, there was a lot of writings. There's a lot of people writing a lot of different things. And after Christ left the scene, there was one universal church. We call it the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church was structured. They say that there was a pope in the line of succession of Peter, that there was the next guy who was in charge of the church, and the next guy after that. And then there's bishops all that fan out depending on where the church is based on geography. And every now and again, they would have what was called councils. And all the leaders from all the different churches and parishes, I suppose, and all the different areas would get together in this one city and they would debate theological ideas. And they would decide, this is something that the whole church believes. This is something that we are going to cast aside. An example of this is the Council of Nicaea, where they decided without a doubt that Christ is God. Before that, there was some disagreement in the church. Some people thought that Christ was simply a man, that he was a prophet, like the Islam religion claims that he is. Other people say, no, he is deity. He is God incarnate in the flesh. So they got together, they talked about it, they voted on it, and they decided moving forward, the Christian church believes that Jesus is the Son of God. It's a really pivotal council, and we still affirm that. But what we find is that towards about 393 and 398, there was two councils, the Council of Hippo and the Council of Carthage, where those people got together and they voted on what books were going to be included in the New Testament. This is called the canonization of Scripture, the complete, done, codified work. And they voted on which books would be included. And what's important to point out here is it wasn't like they all brought 60 books to the table and then they slowly whittled it down to these 27. They voted on the 27 books that we commonly accept as Scripture that were commonly accepted then. All they did is agree on what was essentially already agreed upon. If you don't believe me, I actually have a quote this morning. I don't do this a lot, okay? I don't belabor things like this a lot because I think they're boring and no one cares. But I think this morning it's important. I've got a quote for you by a guy named F.F. Bruce. You know he's important because he doesn't use a name. It's just his initials. And in the church world, that means you're super smart and also pretentious. Get over yourself, F.F. But F.F. Bruce said this about the councils, and I think it's great. Read with me here. That's a big, long, fancy way of saying they didn't introduce any new ideas. All they did is put a rubber stamp on, yep, these are the books that we hold as Holy Scripture. And it's the same 27 books that we have today. They affirmed 27 books in the New Testament. We have those same 27 books now. So that's how we got the Old Testament and the New Testament. You may want to know, another question you should ask is, how did they determine which books were allowed in? What was the criteria? Well, for a book to be included in the canon, it had to be apostolic, harmonious, accepted, and inspired. Again, for a book to be included in the New Testament, it had to meet these requirements. It had to be apostolic, had to be harmonious, had to be commonly accepted, and it had to be inspired. And when I say apostolic, what I mean is this. An apostle is someone who has an eyewitness account of Christ. So for a book to be apostolic, it has to be written by someone who has seen Jesus in the flesh, which is a really easy way to say that the canon is closed. Can God appear to somebody and speak to someone and ask them to write something down on his behalf? Sure he could if he wanted to, but he doesn't do that anymore in a way that's going to be included in Scripture. We're not going to add to the Bible because one of the ways to get included in the New Testament is to be someone who's an eyewitness of Christ. And since all those people are dead, we're not accepting any more entries in the Bible. It has to be harmonious, meaning it has to agree with other books that are accepted in Scripture. It can't disagree with the Tanakh. It can't disagree with the teachings in the Old Testament. It can't disagree with the teachings and the quotes of Jesus. The Gospels were the first New Testament books written, so it can't disagree with any of those. It has to be in harmony with the rest of the books included. It's got to be accepted, meaning there's no surprises at these councils. Nobody brought this thing that was written down by somebody else and said, hey, would you consider this? The books that were agreed upon in Hippo and in Carthage were books that everybody was already familiar with, that those guys had taught their congregations out of many, many times. They were commonly accepted books. And then they had to be inspired. And really, the first three things are ways to determine if they felt like it was inspired by God. And this is an important word. We talk about the Bible being inspired. But I don't know how often we talk about what that means. Did God take over the minds of these men and these women and they wrote it down verbatim as the Holy Spirit spoke it to them? Was God basically dictating to them what the Bible was supposed to say? The way that we think about inspiration and how it works, and I hold this with a loose hand because it's hard to be certain how inspiration works. The only people who can explain it to us are people who never wrote the Bible. So it's just guesses. But the fancy word for it, if you're interested in such a thing, is verbal plenary inspiration. And basically what it means is the Holy Spirit guides your thoughts and your ideas and then your personality and your intellect takes over and expresses those things. So the Holy Spirit's gonna present an idea to Paul and he's gonna write it out and it's gonna look a lot different than when James writes something out or when David writes something out or when Solomon writes something out. It's almost like if you were to go to the field next to the church. Now, a lot of you haven't been here in so long that you've forgotten that there's a field over there, but there is. It'd be like going to that field and telling you to take a lap once in an SUV and once in a sports car. The journey is going to be the same. The lap's going to be the same, but the experience in that lap is going to be different based, and that lap is going to be different based on the car that you took. It's going to feel different in the SUV. It's going to get done in a different amount of time. It's going to feel different in the sports car. It's the same way with translation and or with inspiration. God speaks to one person, and the way that that person writes it down is going to be different than the way that this person writes it down. But the path and the impact and the point are the same. So in that way, God breathed Scripture into these authors by directing their thoughts and directing their hearts and their heads to the ideas that he wanted them to write down. So it's not unless a book is inspired, is harmonious, is accepted, and is apostolic do we include it in the New Testament. That's how we got our Bible. And the last question I want to address today is how do we know we can trust it? And this is an important question. How do we know that this book that I hold in my hands is the same book, that these 39 books are the exact same as they were when they got approved by the Sanhedrin in 250 BC? How do I know that when I quote Genesis, it's the same Genesis that Jesus is quoting? How do I know that when I read the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 2,000 years later, that those are the actual words that Jesus spoke? How do I know that the letter that Paul wrote to Romans has been preserved enough over the years so that when I open up Romans 1, 19 through 20 and read to you what Paul said, that it's the same thing the church in the first century was hearing? How do we know that we can trust this book? It's an important question. I would think that there's really three main factors that help us understand how we can trust the Bible. The three biggest reasons we can trust the Bible we hold in our hands are preservation, consistency, and evidence. The three biggest reasons that I know we can trust this are preservation, consistency, and evidence. Here's what I mean. You guys may not know this. I find this fascinating. If you don't find this fascinating, I'm sorry. We're talking about Sabbath next week, and I'm real excited for it. But the preservation of Scripture, to me, is so crucial and interesting and vital that it's worth understanding how it happened. You may remember from reading the New Testament that sometimes there's these two groups of people that are put together, the scribes and the Pharisees. What you may not know is that to be a scribe was actually a full-on religious profession. It was a whole profession to be a scribe. And the whole job of a scribe is not necessarily to write new things, but to simply copy things that existed. The only way to get more copies of the book of Genesis is for someone to sit down and painstakingly copy by hand the book of Genesis, right? Gutenberg hadn't been around yet. We didn't have copiers, so we had to write things down by hand. And the process of doing this was excruciatingly detailed. And again, these are men, it was just men in that day, who have dedicated their entire lives to copying Scripture. And they had very strict rules around how they did it. The foremost rule that I've always appreciated is if they made a single mistake at all, no scratching out and moving on and writing a little note about what you meant, any mistake in the manuscript, you destroyed the whole thing. You burned the whole thing. Now listen, we might think, oh gosh, that sounds tedious at first, but I don't think you understand how tedious. Think about if I asked you, if it was your job in 2021 to hand copy the book of Genesis to perfection. Take the book of Genesis. It's about 50 chapters. I want you to write it out word for word. I want you to look at it in your Bible and I want you to write it down. You have to write it down in such a way that it's going to be legible and easy to read in a hundred years. There can't be anybody a hundred years from now that can't tell if that's a G or a C or an E or an F. It needs to be clear and legible. And if there's a single mistake at all, if you put a comma in the wrong part, if you put the quotations outside the period and they should be inside the period, whatever you do, if there's any mistakes, you have to destroy it and start over. Can you imagine how frustrating it would be to nail 43 chapters and in the 44th chapter you write a T instead of an S and you have to destroy the whole thing? That's what they would do. That's how serious they were about this work. Whenever they would approach the word Yahweh, they would stop and get up from their desk and put their pen down and go and wash their hands and pray a prayer and make sure they were ceremonially clean before they would write it down. When they would finish a document to check it, they knew exactly how many words were in the book. If we're using Genesis, they knew exactly how many words were in Genesis. So they'd finish it. It's perfect. It's two years of effort. And then they would start the counting. And they knew how many words had to be in their manuscript and how many words were in the original one. They knew that. And if it was wrong, if the count was off by one word, no matter what, you destroy those years of effort and you start over. They knew the middle word. If there's 50,000 words, they knew the 25,000th word. And they would count to it. And then in the new manuscript, they would count back to it. And if the middle word didn't match up, they would destroy the copy as imperfect. And it seems tedious, and maybe it seems over the top, but here's the thing. It worked. And we get affirmations every so often of just how well it worked. I won't chase this rabbit hole too much because it gets into the weeds, but suffice it to say that in terms of manuscripts, the older ones you can find, the better off you are. The older you can find it, the closer to the original it is, right? If you find some manuscripts that are 1,000 years old, that means that things were written 1,000 years before that. They're a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, right? But if you can find something that's 1,800 years old, so the original was only written 200 years before that, well, now it's a copy of a copy. So the older it is, the more accurate it is. And there have been multiple times in the Christian world where we have translated our Bibles based on the oldest manuscripts that we could find and translated them all out and had them and they've been published and on the shelves for us to pick up and read. And then something will happen, like what happened with the Dead Sea Scrolls, I believe in the 1930s. And they'll find these scrolls that predate the ones that we've already found. They're actually older than the oldest ones that we have. And so then they frantically check, oh my gosh, these ones that we have, are they accurate to the older ones? And what they found out is that within 99.9%, they're accurate. That the newer ones we have are accurate to the old ones that we find every couple of years. Which means that this preservation, over time, it worked. It's accurate. The words that we read here are the very ones that were written by Paul, are the very things that were said by Jesus, are the very words of David that were quoted by Matthew. The words that we read are the ones that are written. This has been proven over and over again. We can also trust the Bible because of its consistency, because of how unified its message is. I've told you already that it was written by over 40 authors over the span of 1,400 years, over three continents, with three languages. And yet, there is not a single irreconcilable difference between any of the books or any of the words. And yet, it is entirely consistent with itself. It was written over that great span of time, yet not a single one of those authors introduced an idea that can't be supported by another author or that goes against what one of the other authors said. How can this be possible unless there is one author overseeing the writing of all of it? How can it be possible that all these men over all these cultures with all these languages and all these years can come together and produce one sound document that has no inconsistencies unless there's been one person orchestrating the writing of it all. And there are people who have dedicated their lives to tearing this book down. There are people who have dedicated their adult lives to finding imperfections in the text, to finding contradictions here that don't exist. There are emperors who have tried to burn it. There are societies who have tried to get rid of it. But the Bible stands the test of time. It's still here. It's still trustworthy. It's still the things that Jesus said back when he said them. And because of its consistency, we know that we can trust it. Finally, there's evidence. I won't get too far in the weeds on this, but do you know that the Bible, hundreds of years before it ever existed, I think Daniel is the one who primarily does this. Do you know the Bible predicts Alexander the Great and the Grecian Empire? And that the Bible predicts the Roman Empire? You know, we find artifacts all the time that show us that the stories in the Bible are true. I've been over to Israel and they take you from Jerusalem down this road through the valley of the shadow of death to get to this little town called Jericho. And if you know your old Bible, your old Bible, your Old Testament well, you'll know that Joshua marched around the walls of Jericho seven times and then the walls fell. And if you go to Jericho today and you look at where they've excavated the wall and you can see the layers of it all the way down to the very bottom, that when you get close to the bottom down there, that there is a layer about this thick of ash and char. I've seen it with my own eyes from the time Jericho was burned to the ground, just like it says in the book of Joshua. In the 60s, a mathematician put this experiment together, and I've always found it to be really interesting. It's not an experiment, it's just an illustration of the prophecies in the Old Testament. If you take all the prophecies in the Old Testament that are about the Messiah, that by his stripes he will be healed, that he will be born of a virgin, that he'll be from both Nazareth and Bethlehem, that he'll be from the line of David. If you take all of the prophecies that are made about Jesus in the Old Testament, that are made about this messianic figure in the Old Testament, and you try to have one life that could possibly fulfill all of those prophecies, that the statistical probability of that, of one person fulfilling all of the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled, is the same as covering the state of Texas a foot deep, it's either a foot deep or three feet deep, in silver dollars. You paint one of those silver dollars red and you just drop it in there with the rest of them. Then you get on a plane, you fly over Texas, you parachute down, you land on the coins, you bend down and you pick up the red one. There's the same chances of you doing that as there is of anyone ever living a life that fulfills all the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled. And yet, he lived it. Jesus bears out the truth of Scripture. We see in Jesus' life enough evidence to know that everything around that is true. So I think, and I've come to a place where I believe we can trust Scripture because we can trust the preservation of it, we can trust the consistency of it, and we can trust the evidence that bears out from it. Now, I'll tell you this, for the extra nerdy ones, I actually have a whole class that I developed that I did a lifetime ago in apologetics, and I have about 12 pages of notes. I only shared with you guys like four pages of notes this morning. If you want more on this stuff, if you want to go more in depth, let me know and I'll email that to you. If you have other questions, let me know and I will respond to those. But it feels appropriate to close out this sermon by offering you a little challenge. We've looked at the Bible. We've asked the questions. How can we trust it? Why is it such a big deal? It's the inspired word of God. It's a special revelation to us. We got it through a trustworthy series of events that have rendered it whole, and now we can trust it because of all the reasons that I just went through. And so it seems appropriate to issue this challenge to you in 2021. You may already be a couple days behind and that's all right, but here's the thing. Here's your challenge. I want to challenge you guys to read more of the Bible this year than you ever have before. That's the challenge. That's the challenge for us at Grace. I'm going to engage in that. I want to challenge you to read more of the Bible this year than you ever have before in a single year. That's going to mean different things for different people. You may be thinking to yourself, well, that's great. I've never read the Bible before. All right, well, then it's a low bar for you. Enjoy your success. I hope that it would continue. Set the bar higher for future years, but take a step. A lot of us are the kind of people who have sat down a bunch of times determined to read the Bible. Let this be the time that it sticks. Find a good pace that you can go at, a good rhythm for yourself. Let the Bible read itself to you. On the Bible app, you can have it read itself to you in your car or on your walk. I'm going to read through the Bible this year. I started last year and then I fell off the wagon. I'm going to make it my goal to read through the Bible this year. I'm just going to listen to the Bible this year in addition to what I'm reading on a regular basis. And it's worth stating that the Bible was actually written to be read aloud. So listening to it is a really good way to consume Scripture. If you're one who reads the Bible regularly, step it up. Let's let 2021 be the year that we read more of the Bible than we ever have. That's my challenge to you. All right, next week I'm going to come back and we're going to talk about this idea of Sabbath. What is it and why is it so important? But for now, I'm going to pray and we're going to close out the service with one more song. Pray with me. Father, we love you. Thank you so much for your word. Thank you that we can trust it. Thank you that we can build our lives on it. Thank you that it will never let us down. Thank you that it has stood the test of time and is trustworthy. Father, if we have any other questions about your word, give us the courage and the tenacity to seek those out. Give us the humility to accept what is true. Give us the clarity to reject what isn't. God, I pray once again that as we go throughout our weeks this week, that we would be people and instruments of peace for you in this country and a time when we need it so badly. God, thank you for your word. Make us students of it. Develop in us a hunger for it. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. Welcome to Grace. If this is your first time here and you're wondering, do these people wear their pajamas every week? Yeah. Yeah, we do. You should see us in July. It looks crazy. No, we don't. Thanks for participating in Christmas Jammy Sunday. If you did, we said we were going to do a prize or we're going to acknowledge the most festive. And I really think there's only one way to skin this cat this week. Shane, will you do me a favor and stand up? There's about four families wearing those pajamas, which apparently were on sale at Target. So if you are wearing those pajamas today, if you would be so kind as to kind of collect your kids and maybe just hang out in this area after the service, then I'd love to take a group picture of just one big church family that wore the same pajamas today. So if you'll participate in that, that would be really, really great. Next week is our holiday hoot. If you spend any time at all around Grace, you know we like a good hoot nanny. If you don't know what a hoot nanny is, just stick around, you'll find out. Next week is just our church-wide Christmas party immediately following the service. We're just kind of asking everybody, just bring something to share, doesn't really matter what it is, and we'll have some tables set up. You can drop that off, and then after the service, we'll all hang out for just a little bit. We'll provide some stuff to drink, and we'll just have a church-wide Christmas party for as long as anybody wants to, although I know some people are going to be home before the one o'clock kickoff. I get that too. This week we are in part two of our series called Not Alone, where we are looking at the different ways that God reminds us of his presence through the Christmas season. Last week we talked about the silent generations between Malachi and Matthew, the last book of the Old Testament and the first book of the New Testament. And we talked about that Christmas is a reminder that we serve a God who keeps his promises. So when we feel forgotten, when we feel alone, when we feel like we've seen God move for others and he's not moving for me, we, like they, in between the two testaments, cling to Christmas and to the promises of God. This week, I wanted to start us out by just diving right into Scripture. It's an obscure verse from an obscure book of the Bible, Micah. If you think you can find it, you can go ahead and start turning there. I see some people who are ambitious and eager. Good for you for knowing where Micah is in your Bible. The rest of you, get it together, man. This is church. Come on, memorize the books. No, I'm just playing around. Micah is tucked away in the middle of the minor prophets towards the back part of the Old Testament. And we're just going to jump right in and I'm going to the verse, and then we'll talk about it. But it's from an obscure book, from an obscure prophet, kind of tucked away, which makes it really appropriate for this morning. So this is what Micah writes in chapterah is what we call a messianic prophecy. It's a prophecy about Jesus. What Micah is saying is that God has told him, and now he is communicating to the people, and he specifically addresses it to Bethlehem, which is Bethlehem, not ham, just so you know, Southerners, it's Bethlehem, okay? So he addresses it to Bethlehem, and he tells them, from you is going to come what we know of as Jesus. From you is going to come my son. He's going to come a king and sit on the throne. It's this messianic prophecy. And he gives it to Bethlehem specifically because Bethlehem is unknown and insignificant. It says in the prophecy that Bethlehem is too little to be included amongst the tribes of Judah, which means it's really small. I probably should have gone and done the research. What did it take in ancient Hebrew and ancient Israel to become actually a clan within a tribe of Judah or any other tribe. And I just didn't do the research because if I did, the result of the research would have been that Bethlehem was insignificant and small. So I'm just skipping that part and telling you that Bethlehem was insignificant and small. One of you is going to do the research this week and be like, you were way off. I'll have to issue an apology next week. But let's go with that, that Bethlehem was just this small, nondescript, unimportant, insignificant town. And God says in the Old Testament, I'm going to use you in big ways. You're going to be really important. You're going to have a part to play in this grand story of Christmas and my kingdom. And I bring that up and I start our sermon there this morning because really and truly, Christmas has always been about the unseen, hasn't it? Christmas, the story of Christmas, maybe more than any other story, brings to light this thread throughout Scripture of God choosing the unnoticed and the unknown, the unseen and the insignificant. And in Christmas, we see this theme woven throughout the story over and over again. He chooses Bethlehem, a nondescript town from a nondescript place that hasn't even risen to the part of having its own clan within the tribe of Judah. And he says, this is where my son, Jesus, is going to make his grand entrance into the world. He could have chosen Jerusalem. He could have chosen Rome if he wanted to, but he didn't. God chose Bethlehem, this unknown and insignificant town, off to the side, in between, on the way down to the Dead Sea from Jericho. And when you think about the rest of the Christmas story, that's very on brand. Who did God choose to be the mother of his son? Somebody rich? Somebody influential? Somebody that everybody would know and trust? Somebody with a lot of clout from an important family in the nation of Israel? No, he chose Mary, a girl who was probably in her early teen years, who had not yet gotten married, who was from a small, nondescript town called Nazareth. That in the New Testament, when somebody hears that the Savior is from Nazareth, their response is, has anything good ever come out of Nazareth? They talk about it like we talk about Mississippi. Nothing good comes from there. How could that be possible? It's a little nothing quarry. It's a rock quarry town. It's a workaday town. It's in the backwoods. It's in the country. Nobody of any renown comes from there. And yet God chooses Mary to bear his son. Not somebody known. Not somebody influential. Not somebody with status. Somebody with nothing. And then to have his son born, he directs Mary and Joseph to go down to Bethlehem. They tried to stay in Jerusalem. They tried to stay in the important place. There was no room there. So God makes a way for them to end up in Bethlehem in a manger. He doesn't bring him into a noble estate. He brings him into a manger. And I don't know what you think of when you think about a manger, because we hear that in the Christmas story a lot. But I've had the opportunity to go over to Israel and to be in Bethlehem and to see what their mangers are, and they're basically caves. Bethlehem is rocky and hilly, and so on the side of a mountain, there's a little cave. They'll dig that out a little bit. They'll build a couple stables in there, and that's where they would rest. That's where the animals would be. So there's sheep and goats and maybe a donkey back there, and who knows what else, maybe a llama. I don't know. We got a Christmas llama. So a Christmas llama was in there on the sweater over there. Y'all should see it. It's great. It's got a little thing to hold water bottles. And that was the manger, just this little nondescript place where God says, this is where my son is going to come forth. And then God does a birth announcement. He has the angels go and they sing. And it was a little bit different than our birth announcements, right? We do birth announcements and he could have had Mary and Joseph hire a photographer, dress in their business casual wear, and then take off their shoes and get in their bed like they do every day, and then just have the light pouring through and post on Instagram like white people do. That's what we do when we have children. But instead, he had the angels sing. And to whom did they sing? The rich and the wealthy in Jerusalem? No, the poor and the unknown shepherds who meant nothing to anybody. That's where he announced the birth. There were some dignitaries that came, but they came from the east. That's all we know. They came from the east. And they showed up a long while later. Everything about the Christmas story is God choosing the unknown and the unseen to bring about his will. And I happen to think, I don't know if I even believe in the phrase, the spirit of Christmas, and I feel really cheesy saying this to grown adults, but if there is a spirit of Christmas, certainly it is wrapped up in noticing the unnoticed. Certainly it is wrapped up in bringing significance to those who feel insignificant. Certainly it is wrapped up in seeing the unseen. And Jesus lived his life this way. Jesus, the Son of God, born into this obscurity, lived his life noticing the unnoticed. He carried on that tradition and that ethic throughout his life. Think about the disciples that Jesus called. I don't have time to go into the cultural significance of what it was to be a disciple, but I can tell you, and you can take my word for it if you like, that to be a disciple, that was still like being in an Ivy League school. That was to really have accomplished something. Pretty much every little boy hoped to be a disciple. That's what the athletes were back then. They didn't have anything else to aspire to. That's what they aspired to. And so to be a disciple was a big deal. And so those who were in their adolescence, those who were in their late teens, like the disciples may have been when Jesus called them, and not actively following a rabbi, not actively being a disciple. And we need to understand that Jesus didn't have the only disciples in the New Testament. John the Baptist had disciples. Respected rabbis had disciples that they trained for ministry. And so to be going about your business after your education and not be a disciple of a rabbi was for the system to have told you, you're good. There's nothing left for you to pursue here. Learn a trade. We're going to train the more excellent ones. And so for Jesus to go and call his disciples the way that he did tells us that he chose people who had felt rejected. He chose people who had been told you're not gonna be good enough for this. And Jesus goes to Peter and says, yes, you are, follow me. He goes to James and John, yes, you are, follow me. He goes to the tax collector who sold out his people to make money. And he says, Levi, follow me. He goes to different people that are unknown and unnoticed that are cast aside. And he says, follow me. And I think it's really interesting because if I were trying to start a movement in the ancient world or any world, but in a small country like Israel, I would go to the affluent, right? I would go get the sons of the rich people. I would go find the sons of the ones who had the most influence and the most sway in the country. And I would try to, if I were Jesus, win them over to my cause and he saw them when they were unseen. And he noticed them when they were unnoticed, and he gave them significance when they felt insignificant. And then he modeled for them what it was to see the unseen throughout his ministry. We can think of miracle after miracle. He's walking through the pool at Bethesda, and he sees the man who's blind, who has no hope of getting into the pool before the other people do and earning the miracle. That was the myth around that pool at the time. And he goes up to him, and he heals him, and he makes it possible for him to see. I think of the woman who's caught in adultery in the act and drug through the streets to the feet of Jesus. He didn't have to have anything to do with this woman, but he chose to give her dignity. And he chose to give her respect. And he chose to defend her. And he chose to see her for who she was when everybody else just saw her for what she did. I think of Jesus' interaction with the woman at the well that Kyle preached on a few weeks back. This woman who is on her fifth husband, she's not respected in society. She's kind of ashamed of who she is. She goes to the well in the heat of the day so that no one would notice her, precisely to be unnoticed and unseen. And Jesus shows up and he sees her and he gives her living water and he speaks into her. He makes a habit throughout his whole ministry of noticing the unnoticed and seeing the unseen. Zacchaeus, the tax collector, who's rejected by everyone around him, climbs up in a tree just to get a glimpse of this savior. This famous person as he walks by and the crowds are gathered around him. And he looks up and he sees Zacchaeus, the last person anyone there wants to talk to. And he says, hey, I'm gonna come to your house for lunch, all right? I would love to know what Zacchaeus made, short notice for Jesus. At every turn in the life of Christ, you see Jesus living out this Christmas ethic of seeing the unseen, noticing the unnoticed, of giving significance to those who felt insignificant. And then he captures it for us, this ethic and this desire and this command for us to do the same thing towards the end of his life when he's speaking to the disciples in a story, in a parable, or in an example in Matthew chapter 25. We're going to put verse 40 on the screen, but I'm going to start reading in verse 35 when Jesus says this. Then the righteous will answer him saying, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you? And the king will answer them, truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these, my brothers, you did it to me. This is the Christmas ethic. This is what's woven all throughout scripture. This is how Jesus lives his life. And this is what he leaves us with as we are tasked with seeing the unseen and noticing the unnoticed and loving the unlovable. And Jesus himself tells us, whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me. And so as we sit here in the middle of festive Christmas season, I can't help but think what better way to honor the arrival of Jesus than to continue in his example. What better way as individuals, as families, to celebrate Christmas season than to honor the example of Christmas, to honor the example of Christ, and to be intentional about noticing the unnoticed and seeing the unseen, about doing for the least of these. What better way at Christmas than to do for others, right? And I think that when we think about this, when we think about this idea of doing unto others what we would have them do unto us, when we think of this idea of doing for the least of these, and in that way we're actually serving Jesus. And this is a concept that almost everybody in here knows and has heard. And I think that when we think of that concept, doing for the least of these, we tend to think of people who are down and out. We tend to think of people who do not live in our blessing. Who do not live necessarily in our financial status. We tend to think of people who are poor. I think that we tend to think of soup kitchens. Or the homeless. Or maybe that tent community that's right around the corner. And our minds say, what can we do for them? The least of these. I think that's who we think of when we think of the least of these. Or we think we can walk out and we can grab a card off of the angel tree. And these are some people who are in need. And I want them to feel seen and significant. And so we get that. And we participate. And Jen and I, we've participated. And those things are good. And they should be done, and those are the least of these, and we should love them, and we should see them, and the church should be first in line to go love on those people, all the people that come to mind when we think of, quote unquote, the least of these. As a matter of fact, just as an aside, parents in the room still have kids at home. And I have to be careful here because I'm perfectly happy to share with you the things I'm terrible at. I'm perfectly happy to tell you what I'm bad at and to run myself down because we're all bad at something. I don't really have a lot of insecurities around that. Everybody stinks, so get on board. I never want to run down my kids, right? But I think that this issue is so ubiquitous that I'm really not running her down. All I'm doing is saying that Lily is seven. One of the things that we're starting to notice in Lily is this entitlement for Christmas, right? What she wants for Christmas. She starts working on her Christmas list in like May. She'll just tell us what it is. Like it's just gonna arrive. And you with young kids like yours do this too, I'm pretty sure. They all do it. They all go through it. And we start as parents to think like what can we do for the entitlement of our kids? How can we kind of show them so that they can be more grateful? And then we all toy around with that idea, don't we? Like, this is the year. I'm not getting them anything. Then they're going to learn. They need to learn some gratitude. But you don't because you're chicken. You're totally chicken. You're not going to do it and scar them for life. They're going to be in therapy because of it. But I do think that a good way to chisel away at some of the entitlement of our kids is to expose them to the least of these. I remember going down and serving in downtown Atlanta around Christmas season, I believe with my dad, but I know with folks from my church. So just as an aside, those of us with kids still at the house, it's probably not a bad idea to take a field trip this year somewhere and go help in a way that exposes them to another portion of life that they may not see in the circles that they run in. So I do think that when Jesus talks about the least of these, he does mean those people, people who are in different socioeconomic categories than us, people who have less than us, people who need in different ways than we do. But I also believe that the unseen are in and around our lives every day. The unnoticed, the unseen, the people who feel insignificant, I think they're on your row. I think they work in your cluster at the office. I think they're on the Zoom calls and in your neighborhoods. I think those people are everywhere. And I think that we should ask God for eyes to see them and hearts to hurt for them and wills to do for them. I think of my mother-in-law, Terry. Many of you know that part of the story of our family is that now two Christmases ago, December 29th, we lost Jen's dad to cancer. And Jen's dad was highly involved in the church. John and Terry went to church every week. Jen's dad was really, really close with his pastor. The pastor is a good family friend of theirs. And so the church was a big part of John and Terry's life. And because of that, it was really difficult after John passed for Terry to want to go again because it was such a painful, difficult thing. The idea of going to church just made her want to cry because she'd have to do it without John, and she wasn't sure if she would be strong enough to do it. And so a few months go by from essentially January to Easter, and Terry decides, I need to go to church. I need to go to church. Those are my people. I need to go. And so she gets up on Easter, drags herself out of bed, gets herself ready, and she drives there. And she's terrified. She's terrified because she's going to be sitting alone. She can't even bring herself to go to the side of the church that they normally sit on. She goes to the opposite side. And she knows that people are going to see her. She knows she's going to be sitting by herself. And she can already feel the pity in the stairs as she sits down as she's going through this. And she hates all of it. And she's scared of all of it. But she knows she needs to go. So as she's sitting down, a good friend of theirs sees her and says, hey, gives her a hug, tells her he's glad to see her. And he wasn't going to be sitting in that service, but he knew some people who were. And so he introduced this couple over here to Terry, and Terry and this couple had met before. They weren't friends, but they had talked. They were friendly. And they got to talking to Terry. And that couple invited Terry to sit with them at Easter. And as soon as they did, all the tension left Terry. She was good. She was comfortable. She was safe. And she felt seen. And she felt loved. But she was also going to get up from there, and she was going to go home to an empty house with no Easter celebration. And at the end of the service, the couple looked at her, and they said, hey, we're going to go to lunch. Would you like to come with us? And so she went to lunch with this sweet couple, and they talked for hours. And as soon as Terry got done having lunch with this couple, she called her girls. She told them all about this couple that loved her so well, that made her feel seen and made her feel important. I don't know who that couple is, but I know that they rescued Easter for my mother-in-law. I know that they made church a safe place for my mother-in-law. I know that their act of just simple hospitality and inclusion. Let her know God sees you. God loves you. God cares about you. He's going to take care of you. And even you can extrapolate that out to this path theory that you have to walk is difficult, but I'm going to send you little angels along the way. And I can't tell you the difference that it made for her to be seen that day, to be loved that day, and to be noticed that day. And you have those people in your life too. You have people who this year, their life changed tremendously. A diagnosis, a loss, a divorce. And you know that they're facing an uncertain holiday season, or maybe it's certainly going to be very difficult. You have them in your life. You have people in your life who are hurting, who are lonely, who are struggling with mental illness or newfound depression. You have folks in your life who have been praying for something and they don't have it yet. You have people in your life who on their social media feeds, there's less and less pictures of them with their spouse. And you see less and less of them at church. And you can read between those tea leaves. And we know that a phone call would probably be really good. We know that a lunch would probably be really timely. I could make a longer list, but we all have those people. We all have the people in our lives right now who are unseen and unnoticed and hurting. What better way to honor Jesus at Christmas than to make sure those people know that they are seen? Than to make sure those people know that their God loves them, that their God sees them. So why don't we do that? I was talking to Jen about it this week, and she made the point, and I think it's a great one, that we all think it, but it only matters if we actually do it. We all think about the nice things to do, don't we? We see them, we know we should call them, but it only matters if we actually do it. We can't be like me and Kyle. Kyle, our student pastor, we joke around a lot, but neither me nor Kyle really love pranks. We just love the idea of pranks. And so very often, with some degree of regularity, like at least weekly, somebody will do something and the other one of us will be like, dude, I was going to when you left, I was gonna do this to you. I thought to do this. Wouldn't that have been funny? And then we laugh at it. Yes, that would have been funny. Like a couple weeks ago, staff was going to Gonza for lunch because we take about three and a half hour lunch every day. So we're going to Gonza for lunch and we were supposed to leave at a certain time, and I just, to be an idiot, because I'm like this, I just walked out of my office. My door had been shut all day. I hadn't talked to anybody all day. I was writing a sermon, and then I just, I left, and I walked out the door, and as I opened the door, I said, later, losers, and I got in my car, and I drove to Gonsa's, knowing that they would have to drive together, right? So then they all arrive at Gonsa's a few minutes after me, and Kyle comes up to me, sure enough, and he's like, dude, I really thought it would have been funny to convince everybody not to come to lunch with you and just leave you here by yourself. And I was like, I know. I was actually pretty worried that's what you guys were going to do. And then we laughed about it, but we don't actually ever do anything to each other. We just joke about how it would have been, right? We can't do this when it comes to loving people who need it so much. What if that couple, months later, the next time Terry went to church was like, Terry, listen to this. We thought about inviting you to sit with us, but, you know, we just didn't do it. And then we thought, we should invite her to lunch, right? This is her first Sunday back. It's Easter. I don't know if she has any plans. Let's just invite her. But, you know, Terry, we just, we had stuff going on, so we decided not to do it. It doesn't work the same way, does it? We all think the things. We need to do it. I was talking to a dear friend of mine yesterday, who when I think of people who see the unseen and notice the unnoticed, I think of her. And I was talking to her about the sermon. And I made the comment to her, I bet the more you do it, the more you see. And the more you see, the more you want to do. And she said, yeah. And I thought about it more. And it really is true that when we become those agents, God's hands and feet, God's hugs, God's presence, God's attention, God's smiles for the people who need it so desperately. We really do meet Jesus there. We really do find our Savior there in those moments. We really do get a glimpse of what it's like to love like he loves. So that when Jesus says, whatever you do for the least of these, you do it for me, it's not hyperbole. It's just true. And so my simple encouragement for you this week is to go do it. Let me just challenge you to think of one person, one family, one neighbor, one coworker, one person sitting on your row right now who might feel unnoticed or unseen, who might be hurting. And allow God to use you. And maybe you get to be the angel that rescues Christmas for them this year. Maybe God allows you to participate in his good and perfect will in that way. Maybe you'll be the one that other family members that you don't even know will be telling stories about to their friends two and three and five years from now because of a simple act of love this December. And I'll be the first to admit I'm the king of thinking about things I should do. I'm just letting them float off and not do them. So when I say do it, like actually do it, I'm talking to me more than anybody. But what could happen in our little community? What stories could come out? What ways could God be seen if just everybody in this room decides, you know what, when I go to school, when I go to work, when I get home, I'm going to make it a point to ask for eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts to feel. And I'm going to love somebody that needs to be loved. I'm going to notice somebody that needs to be noticed. I'm going to see somebody who doesn't feel seen. What could God do with that in just this room right here? Let's find out. Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. Thank you for always seeing us when we feel unseen. Thank you for always loving us when we feel unlovable. And God, thank you for the opportunity to participate in your word and in your will. I pray that you would give us eyes to see the people around us who need your love. And that you would give us the will and the courage to express that to them. Let us this week, Father, write the email, make the phone call, extend the invitation, buy the gift, reconcile. Give us your heart for the unnoticed and for the unseen so that when we go and love them, we might find you there. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. Welcome to Grace. If this is your first time here and you're wondering, do these people wear their pajamas every week? Yeah. Yeah, we do. You should see us in July. It looks crazy. No, we don't. Thanks for participating in Christmas Jammy Sunday. If you did, we said we were going to do a prize or we're going to acknowledge the most festive. And I really think there's only one way to skin this cat this week. Shane, will you do me a favor and stand up? There's about four families wearing those pajamas, which apparently were on sale at Target. So if you are wearing those pajamas today, if you would be so kind as to kind of collect your kids and maybe just hang out in this area after the service, then I'd love to take a group picture of just one big church family that wore the same pajamas today. So if you'll participate in that, that would be really, really great. Next week is our holiday hoot. If you spend any time at all around Grace, you know we like a good hoot nanny. If you don't know what a hoot nanny is, just stick around, you'll find out. Next week is just our church-wide Christmas party immediately following the service. We're just kind of asking everybody, just bring something to share, doesn't really matter what it is, and we'll have some tables set up. You can drop that off, and then after the service, we'll all hang out for just a little bit. We'll provide some stuff to drink, and we'll just have a church-wide Christmas party for as long as anybody wants to, although I know some people are going to be home before the one o'clock kickoff. I get that too. This week we are in part two of our series called Not Alone, where we are looking at the different ways that God reminds us of his presence through the Christmas season. Last week we talked about the silent generations between Malachi and Matthew, the last book of the Old Testament and the first book of the New Testament. And we talked about that Christmas is a reminder that we serve a God who keeps his promises. So when we feel forgotten, when we feel alone, when we feel like we've seen God move for others and he's not moving for me, we, like they, in between the two testaments, cling to Christmas and to the promises of God. This week, I wanted to start us out by just diving right into Scripture. It's an obscure verse from an obscure book of the Bible, Micah. If you think you can find it, you can go ahead and start turning there. I see some people who are ambitious and eager. Good for you for knowing where Micah is in your Bible. The rest of you, get it together, man. This is church. Come on, memorize the books. No, I'm just playing around. Micah is tucked away in the middle of the minor prophets towards the back part of the Old Testament. And we're just going to jump right in and I'm going to the verse, and then we'll talk about it. But it's from an obscure book, from an obscure prophet, kind of tucked away, which makes it really appropriate for this morning. So this is what Micah writes in chapterah is what we call a messianic prophecy. It's a prophecy about Jesus. What Micah is saying is that God has told him, and now he is communicating to the people, and he specifically addresses it to Bethlehem, which is Bethlehem, not ham, just so you know, Southerners, it's Bethlehem, okay? So he addresses it to Bethlehem, and he tells them, from you is going to come what we know of as Jesus. From you is going to come my son. He's going to come a king and sit on the throne. It's this messianic prophecy. And he gives it to Bethlehem specifically because Bethlehem is unknown and insignificant. It says in the prophecy that Bethlehem is too little to be included amongst the tribes of Judah, which means it's really small. I probably should have gone and done the research. What did it take in ancient Hebrew and ancient Israel to become actually a clan within a tribe of Judah or any other tribe. And I just didn't do the research because if I did, the result of the research would have been that Bethlehem was insignificant and small. So I'm just skipping that part and telling you that Bethlehem was insignificant and small. One of you is going to do the research this week and be like, you were way off. I'll have to issue an apology next week. But let's go with that, that Bethlehem was just this small, nondescript, unimportant, insignificant town. And God says in the Old Testament, I'm going to use you in big ways. You're going to be really important. You're going to have a part to play in this grand story of Christmas and my kingdom. And I bring that up and I start our sermon there this morning because really and truly, Christmas has always been about the unseen, hasn't it? Christmas, the story of Christmas, maybe more than any other story, brings to light this thread throughout Scripture of God choosing the unnoticed and the unknown, the unseen and the insignificant. And in Christmas, we see this theme woven throughout the story over and over again. He chooses Bethlehem, a nondescript town from a nondescript place that hasn't even risen to the part of having its own clan within the tribe of Judah. And he says, this is where my son, Jesus, is going to make his grand entrance into the world. He could have chosen Jerusalem. He could have chosen Rome if he wanted to, but he didn't. God chose Bethlehem, this unknown and insignificant town, off to the side, in between, on the way down to the Dead Sea from Jericho. And when you think about the rest of the Christmas story, that's very on brand. Who did God choose to be the mother of his son? Somebody rich? Somebody influential? Somebody that everybody would know and trust? Somebody with a lot of clout from an important family in the nation of Israel? No, he chose Mary, a girl who was probably in her early teen years, who had not yet gotten married, who was from a small, nondescript town called Nazareth. That in the New Testament, when somebody hears that the Savior is from Nazareth, their response is, has anything good ever come out of Nazareth? They talk about it like we talk about Mississippi. Nothing good comes from there. How could that be possible? It's a little nothing quarry. It's a rock quarry town. It's a workaday town. It's in the backwoods. It's in the country. Nobody of any renown comes from there. And yet God chooses Mary to bear his son. Not somebody known. Not somebody influential. Not somebody with status. Somebody with nothing. And then to have his son born, he directs Mary and Joseph to go down to Bethlehem. They tried to stay in Jerusalem. They tried to stay in the important place. There was no room there. So God makes a way for them to end up in Bethlehem in a manger. He doesn't bring him into a noble estate. He brings him into a manger. And I don't know what you think of when you think about a manger, because we hear that in the Christmas story a lot. But I've had the opportunity to go over to Israel and to be in Bethlehem and to see what their mangers are, and they're basically caves. Bethlehem is rocky and hilly, and so on the side of a mountain, there's a little cave. They'll dig that out a little bit. They'll build a couple stables in there, and that's where they would rest. That's where the animals would be. So there's sheep and goats and maybe a donkey back there, and who knows what else, maybe a llama. I don't know. We got a Christmas llama. So a Christmas llama was in there on the sweater over there. Y'all should see it. It's great. It's got a little thing to hold water bottles. And that was the manger, just this little nondescript place where God says, this is where my son is going to come forth. And then God does a birth announcement. He has the angels go and they sing. And it was a little bit different than our birth announcements, right? We do birth announcements and he could have had Mary and Joseph hire a photographer, dress in their business casual wear, and then take off their shoes and get in their bed like they do every day, and then just have the light pouring through and post on Instagram like white people do. That's what we do when we have children. But instead, he had the angels sing. And to whom did they sing? The rich and the wealthy in Jerusalem? No, the poor and the unknown shepherds who meant nothing to anybody. That's where he announced the birth. There were some dignitaries that came, but they came from the east. That's all we know. They came from the east. And they showed up a long while later. Everything about the Christmas story is God choosing the unknown and the unseen to bring about his will. And I happen to think, I don't know if I even believe in the phrase, the spirit of Christmas, and I feel really cheesy saying this to grown adults, but if there is a spirit of Christmas, certainly it is wrapped up in noticing the unnoticed. Certainly it is wrapped up in bringing significance to those who feel insignificant. Certainly it is wrapped up in seeing the unseen. And Jesus lived his life this way. Jesus, the Son of God, born into this obscurity, lived his life noticing the unnoticed. He carried on that tradition and that ethic throughout his life. Think about the disciples that Jesus called. I don't have time to go into the cultural significance of what it was to be a disciple, but I can tell you, and you can take my word for it if you like, that to be a disciple, that was still like being in an Ivy League school. That was to really have accomplished something. Pretty much every little boy hoped to be a disciple. That's what the athletes were back then. They didn't have anything else to aspire to. That's what they aspired to. And so to be a disciple was a big deal. And so those who were in their adolescence, those who were in their late teens, like the disciples may have been when Jesus called them, and not actively following a rabbi, not actively being a disciple. And we need to understand that Jesus didn't have the only disciples in the New Testament. John the Baptist had disciples. Respected rabbis had disciples that they trained for ministry. And so to be going about your business after your education and not be a disciple of a rabbi was for the system to have told you, you're good. There's nothing left for you to pursue here. Learn a trade. We're going to train the more excellent ones. And so for Jesus to go and call his disciples the way that he did tells us that he chose people who had felt rejected. He chose people who had been told you're not gonna be good enough for this. And Jesus goes to Peter and says, yes, you are, follow me. He goes to James and John, yes, you are, follow me. He goes to the tax collector who sold out his people to make money. And he says, Levi, follow me. He goes to different people that are unknown and unnoticed that are cast aside. And he says, follow me. And I think it's really interesting because if I were trying to start a movement in the ancient world or any world, but in a small country like Israel, I would go to the affluent, right? I would go get the sons of the rich people. I would go find the sons of the ones who had the most influence and the most sway in the country. And I would try to, if I were Jesus, win them over to my cause and he saw them when they were unseen. And he noticed them when they were unnoticed, and he gave them significance when they felt insignificant. And then he modeled for them what it was to see the unseen throughout his ministry. We can think of miracle after miracle. He's walking through the pool at Bethesda, and he sees the man who's blind, who has no hope of getting into the pool before the other people do and earning the miracle. That was the myth around that pool at the time. And he goes up to him, and he heals him, and he makes it possible for him to see. I think of the woman who's caught in adultery in the act and drug through the streets to the feet of Jesus. He didn't have to have anything to do with this woman, but he chose to give her dignity. And he chose to give her respect. And he chose to defend her. And he chose to see her for who she was when everybody else just saw her for what she did. I think of Jesus' interaction with the woman at the well that Kyle preached on a few weeks back. This woman who is on her fifth husband, she's not respected in society. She's kind of ashamed of who she is. She goes to the well in the heat of the day so that no one would notice her, precisely to be unnoticed and unseen. And Jesus shows up and he sees her and he gives her living water and he speaks into her. He makes a habit throughout his whole ministry of noticing the unnoticed and seeing the unseen. Zacchaeus, the tax collector, who's rejected by everyone around him, climbs up in a tree just to get a glimpse of this savior. This famous person as he walks by and the crowds are gathered around him. And he looks up and he sees Zacchaeus, the last person anyone there wants to talk to. And he says, hey, I'm gonna come to your house for lunch, all right? I would love to know what Zacchaeus made, short notice for Jesus. At every turn in the life of Christ, you see Jesus living out this Christmas ethic of seeing the unseen, noticing the unnoticed, of giving significance to those who felt insignificant. And then he captures it for us, this ethic and this desire and this command for us to do the same thing towards the end of his life when he's speaking to the disciples in a story, in a parable, or in an example in Matthew chapter 25. We're going to put verse 40 on the screen, but I'm going to start reading in verse 35 when Jesus says this. Then the righteous will answer him saying, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you? And the king will answer them, truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these, my brothers, you did it to me. This is the Christmas ethic. This is what's woven all throughout scripture. This is how Jesus lives his life. And this is what he leaves us with as we are tasked with seeing the unseen and noticing the unnoticed and loving the unlovable. And Jesus himself tells us, whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me. And so as we sit here in the middle of festive Christmas season, I can't help but think what better way to honor the arrival of Jesus than to continue in his example. What better way as individuals, as families, to celebrate Christmas season than to honor the example of Christmas, to honor the example of Christ, and to be intentional about noticing the unnoticed and seeing the unseen, about doing for the least of these. What better way at Christmas than to do for others, right? And I think that when we think about this, when we think about this idea of doing unto others what we would have them do unto us, when we think of this idea of doing for the least of these, and in that way we're actually serving Jesus. And this is a concept that almost everybody in here knows and has heard. And I think that when we think of that concept, doing for the least of these, we tend to think of people who are down and out. We tend to think of people who do not live in our blessing. Who do not live necessarily in our financial status. We tend to think of people who are poor. I think that we tend to think of soup kitchens. Or the homeless. Or maybe that tent community that's right around the corner. And our minds say, what can we do for them? The least of these. I think that's who we think of when we think of the least of these. Or we think we can walk out and we can grab a card off of the angel tree. And these are some people who are in need. And I want them to feel seen and significant. And so we get that. And we participate. And Jen and I, we've participated. And those things are good. And they should be done, and those are the least of these, and we should love them, and we should see them, and the church should be first in line to go love on those people, all the people that come to mind when we think of, quote unquote, the least of these. As a matter of fact, just as an aside, parents in the room still have kids at home. And I have to be careful here because I'm perfectly happy to share with you the things I'm terrible at. I'm perfectly happy to tell you what I'm bad at and to run myself down because we're all bad at something. I don't really have a lot of insecurities around that. Everybody stinks, so get on board. I never want to run down my kids, right? But I think that this issue is so ubiquitous that I'm really not running her down. All I'm doing is saying that Lily is seven. One of the things that we're starting to notice in Lily is this entitlement for Christmas, right? What she wants for Christmas. She starts working on her Christmas list in like May. She'll just tell us what it is. Like it's just gonna arrive. And you with young kids like yours do this too, I'm pretty sure. They all do it. They all go through it. And we start as parents to think like what can we do for the entitlement of our kids? How can we kind of show them so that they can be more grateful? And then we all toy around with that idea, don't we? Like, this is the year. I'm not getting them anything. Then they're going to learn. They need to learn some gratitude. But you don't because you're chicken. You're totally chicken. You're not going to do it and scar them for life. They're going to be in therapy because of it. But I do think that a good way to chisel away at some of the entitlement of our kids is to expose them to the least of these. I remember going down and serving in downtown Atlanta around Christmas season, I believe with my dad, but I know with folks from my church. So just as an aside, those of us with kids still at the house, it's probably not a bad idea to take a field trip this year somewhere and go help in a way that exposes them to another portion of life that they may not see in the circles that they run in. So I do think that when Jesus talks about the least of these, he does mean those people, people who are in different socioeconomic categories than us, people who have less than us, people who need in different ways than we do. But I also believe that the unseen are in and around our lives every day. The unnoticed, the unseen, the people who feel insignificant, I think they're on your row. I think they work in your cluster at the office. I think they're on the Zoom calls and in your neighborhoods. I think those people are everywhere. And I think that we should ask God for eyes to see them and hearts to hurt for them and wills to do for them. I think of my mother-in-law, Terry. Many of you know that part of the story of our family is that now two Christmases ago, December 29th, we lost Jen's dad to cancer. And Jen's dad was highly involved in the church. John and Terry went to church every week. Jen's dad was really, really close with his pastor. The pastor is a good family friend of theirs. And so the church was a big part of John and Terry's life. And because of that, it was really difficult after John passed for Terry to want to go again because it was such a painful, difficult thing. The idea of going to church just made her want to cry because she'd have to do it without John, and she wasn't sure if she would be strong enough to do it. And so a few months go by from essentially January to Easter, and Terry decides, I need to go to church. I need to go to church. Those are my people. I need to go. And so she gets up on Easter, drags herself out of bed, gets herself ready, and she drives there. And she's terrified. She's terrified because she's going to be sitting alone. She can't even bring herself to go to the side of the church that they normally sit on. She goes to the opposite side. And she knows that people are going to see her. She knows she's going to be sitting by herself. And she can already feel the pity in the stairs as she sits down as she's going through this. And she hates all of it. And she's scared of all of it. But she knows she needs to go. So as she's sitting down, a good friend of theirs sees her and says, hey, gives her a hug, tells her he's glad to see her. And he wasn't going to be sitting in that service, but he knew some people who were. And so he introduced this couple over here to Terry, and Terry and this couple had met before. They weren't friends, but they had talked. They were friendly. And they got to talking to Terry. And that couple invited Terry to sit with them at Easter. And as soon as they did, all the tension left Terry. She was good. She was comfortable. She was safe. And she felt seen. And she felt loved. But she was also going to get up from there, and she was going to go home to an empty house with no Easter celebration. And at the end of the service, the couple looked at her, and they said, hey, we're going to go to lunch. Would you like to come with us? And so she went to lunch with this sweet couple, and they talked for hours. And as soon as Terry got done having lunch with this couple, she called her girls. She told them all about this couple that loved her so well, that made her feel seen and made her feel important. I don't know who that couple is, but I know that they rescued Easter for my mother-in-law. I know that they made church a safe place for my mother-in-law. I know that their act of just simple hospitality and inclusion. Let her know God sees you. God loves you. God cares about you. He's going to take care of you. And even you can extrapolate that out to this path theory that you have to walk is difficult, but I'm going to send you little angels along the way. And I can't tell you the difference that it made for her to be seen that day, to be loved that day, and to be noticed that day. And you have those people in your life too. You have people who this year, their life changed tremendously. A diagnosis, a loss, a divorce. And you know that they're facing an uncertain holiday season, or maybe it's certainly going to be very difficult. You have them in your life. You have people in your life who are hurting, who are lonely, who are struggling with mental illness or newfound depression. You have folks in your life who have been praying for something and they don't have it yet. You have people in your life who on their social media feeds, there's less and less pictures of them with their spouse. And you see less and less of them at church. And you can read between those tea leaves. And we know that a phone call would probably be really good. We know that a lunch would probably be really timely. I could make a longer list, but we all have those people. We all have the people in our lives right now who are unseen and unnoticed and hurting. What better way to honor Jesus at Christmas than to make sure those people know that they are seen? Than to make sure those people know that their God loves them, that their God sees them. So why don't we do that? I was talking to Jen about it this week, and she made the point, and I think it's a great one, that we all think it, but it only matters if we actually do it. We all think about the nice things to do, don't we? We see them, we know we should call them, but it only matters if we actually do it. We can't be like me and Kyle. Kyle, our student pastor, we joke around a lot, but neither me nor Kyle really love pranks. We just love the idea of pranks. And so very often, with some degree of regularity, like at least weekly, somebody will do something and the other one of us will be like, dude, I was going to when you left, I was gonna do this to you. I thought to do this. Wouldn't that have been funny? And then we laugh at it. Yes, that would have been funny. Like a couple weeks ago, staff was going to Gonza for lunch because we take about three and a half hour lunch every day. So we're going to Gonza for lunch and we were supposed to leave at a certain time, and I just, to be an idiot, because I'm like this, I just walked out of my office. My door had been shut all day. I hadn't talked to anybody all day. I was writing a sermon, and then I just, I left, and I walked out the door, and as I opened the door, I said, later, losers, and I got in my car, and I drove to Gonsa's, knowing that they would have to drive together, right? So then they all arrive at Gonsa's a few minutes after me, and Kyle comes up to me, sure enough, and he's like, dude, I really thought it would have been funny to convince everybody not to come to lunch with you and just leave you here by yourself. And I was like, I know. I was actually pretty worried that's what you guys were going to do. And then we laughed about it, but we don't actually ever do anything to each other. We just joke about how it would have been, right? We can't do this when it comes to loving people who need it so much. What if that couple, months later, the next time Terry went to church was like, Terry, listen to this. We thought about inviting you to sit with us, but, you know, we just didn't do it. And then we thought, we should invite her to lunch, right? This is her first Sunday back. It's Easter. I don't know if she has any plans. Let's just invite her. But, you know, Terry, we just, we had stuff going on, so we decided not to do it. It doesn't work the same way, does it? We all think the things. We need to do it. I was talking to a dear friend of mine yesterday, who when I think of people who see the unseen and notice the unnoticed, I think of her. And I was talking to her about the sermon. And I made the comment to her, I bet the more you do it, the more you see. And the more you see, the more you want to do. And she said, yeah. And I thought about it more. And it really is true that when we become those agents, God's hands and feet, God's hugs, God's presence, God's attention, God's smiles for the people who need it so desperately. We really do meet Jesus there. We really do find our Savior there in those moments. We really do get a glimpse of what it's like to love like he loves. So that when Jesus says, whatever you do for the least of these, you do it for me, it's not hyperbole. It's just true. And so my simple encouragement for you this week is to go do it. Let me just challenge you to think of one person, one family, one neighbor, one coworker, one person sitting on your row right now who might feel unnoticed or unseen, who might be hurting. And allow God to use you. And maybe you get to be the angel that rescues Christmas for them this year. Maybe God allows you to participate in his good and perfect will in that way. Maybe you'll be the one that other family members that you don't even know will be telling stories about to their friends two and three and five years from now because of a simple act of love this December. And I'll be the first to admit I'm the king of thinking about things I should do. I'm just letting them float off and not do them. So when I say do it, like actually do it, I'm talking to me more than anybody. But what could happen in our little community? What stories could come out? What ways could God be seen if just everybody in this room decides, you know what, when I go to school, when I go to work, when I get home, I'm going to make it a point to ask for eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts to feel. And I'm going to love somebody that needs to be loved. I'm going to notice somebody that needs to be noticed. I'm going to see somebody who doesn't feel seen. What could God do with that in just this room right here? Let's find out. Let's pray. Father, we love you so much. Thank you for always seeing us when we feel unseen. Thank you for always loving us when we feel unlovable. And God, thank you for the opportunity to participate in your word and in your will. I pray that you would give us eyes to see the people around us who need your love. And that you would give us the will and the courage to express that to them. Let us this week, Father, write the email, make the phone call, extend the invitation, buy the gift, reconcile. Give us your heart for the unnoticed and for the unseen so that when we go and love them, we might find you there. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, Aaron, and the band. Thank you very much. It was good stuff this morning. This is the second part of our series called Powerful Prayers. I think I called it Great Prayers last week. I don't really know what we named the series. I just tell them what I'm going to preach about, and then they make a graphic. So that's how that goes. But this one's called Powerful Prayers, and I am excited to share with you this morning what I believe is probably the most powerful prayer of repentance in the Bible. There's a couple different instances where we see some people in profound repentance and restoration situations, but this is probably the greatest one and the most famous one. This is David's prayer of repentance after his sin with Bathsheba. And I'm not sure what the worst thing is that you've ever done, and I don't want to know what that is. I'm very grateful that we don't have a Catholic model of pastorhood here at this church, and you have to confess things to me. I don't want to know those things. Those are your business. Those are not my business. You and God, you take care of that. I don't need to know. I don't know what the worst thing is you've ever done, but I'm willing to bet it's not as bad as what David did, and I'm willing to bet, unless it is just mind-blowing in its evil and efficacy, that they're not going to write about it so that every generation, henceforth for,000 years learns of it, okay, when they come of age. So this is a pretty unique sin and a pretty profound response to it. And so I think that there is a lot to learn from David's prayer of repentance. And that's kind of what we're doing in this series, is we're just looking at great prayers in the Bible, powerful prayers prayed by saintly people, and we're asking what can we learn from these prayers. So we're not talking about how can I get a better prayer life. We're talking about when I pray, what can I learn from these prayers? And even on this topic of repentance, we're going to be talking about repentance this morning. I preached on repentance in the spring in our Lent series. I'm sure you guys all remember, I mean, almost all of it. It was really good. But I preached on it in the spring, on what it was and on how we do it and on the symbolism of it. And when we walk away from a sin, we walk towards Jesus. And so if this raises some questions for you and you feel like it might be a little incomplete, I want to repent, I don't know how to repent, or I'm not really sure I understand what it is, then I would tell you to go back and listen to that one in the spring, because that's when I kind of talked about the details of repentance. But this week, I want to ask, what can we learn from David's repentance? And if that's what we're asking, then we need to know what he did. Now, a lot of you know what he did. You know this story. You know how David became a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer. Some of us don't know it at all, and some of us know bits and pieces. So just to make sure we're on the same page and that we understand what we're reading when we look at his prayer of repentance in Psalm 51, which is where we're going to be, by the way. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. I wanted to let you know what he did. We find this story in 2 Samuel 11, so you can go there and you can fact check me to make sure I'm not making this stuff up. But it says in the springtime when the kings were off to war, David was in his palace. And there's a lot of insights that we can make into this story, but I don't want to belabor the story this morning. I just want us to understand what's happened. So David's army is off to war, being generaled by Joab, who shows up in this story. And David decides one day that he's going to go out onto his roof. And while he's on his roof, he looks across the way, I would presume, and he sees a woman named Bathsheba bathing. Because in that culture, you bathed on the roof, out of sight from everyone else, but unless you're the king and you have a palace that's higher than everyone else's building, now you can see what you want to see. And so let's be clear about this. David did not go up onto the roof to have a cup of coffee, fire up a cigar, and just take in the sunset, okay? That's not what he was doing. David knew what he was doing. David went up there to see what he could see, and he saw what he wanted to see. Bathsheba was bathing on the roof, and so he tells his guys, whoever his guys are, however the attendants to kings work, he says, I'd like you to bring her to me. So they go get Bathsheba. They bring Bathsheba to his chambers. And he did with her what kings do with pretty girls that they bring to their chambers. And what's interesting, I don't know if it's interesting, but what's important to understand in this moment is that consent was not a thing. I can't say with certainty that what happened between David and Bathsheba was against her consent, but what I can say is that it wouldn't have mattered at all. David was the one making this choice. Bathsheba had no choice. I'm 100% certain she felt powerless in that situation, which only compounds the sin and the predatory nature of what David is doing. And if you're going to tell me that this is the first time David's done this roof bathing, bring her to my chambers trick, I'm going to tell you, you have not watched enough Netflix because that's not how things go. I would be willing to bet this wasn't the first time David had a woman that he found attractive brought to his palace so that he could do with that woman what he wanted to do with that woman. It's not the first time he turned a human into a commodity. So he does what kings do in that situation, and word gets back to him. I don't know. I guess it had to be a couple of weeks later. Bathsheba sent word to David that she was pregnant. And David's like, this is a problem because she's married to a guy named Uriah, the Hittite. Uriah is one of David's mighty men. That's the special forces of the ancient Hebrew army. This is the delta force that's tasked with protecting the king and then also being the forefront, being the tip of the spear in the battles. These were some bad dudes. I think it might be 2 Samuel 17 where the deeds of the mighty men are chronicled, and it's really cool. It's like, I mean, for guys it is. Girls are like, yeah, who cares? But for dudes, it's great. So go read 2 Samuel 17, and it chronicles what the mighty men did, and Uriah is one of those guys. So not only is Bathsheba married, but she's married to a man who lives to serve David, who is one of his best soldiers. And when he finds out she's pregnant, David says, okay, I got to cover this up. So he sends word to Joab on the front lines. He says, send me Uriah back. I need to talk to him. So he sends Uriah back and David says, hey, just wanted to check in with you, see how the war was going. How are you guys doing out there? How's Joab? How's everything going? And he gives him an update and David says, you know what? You're such a great guy, Uriah. You know what I want? Go see your wife. Go see Bathsheba. She's a looker. Just go see her. Spend a night there at your house and then I'll send you back to battle tomorrow. And Uriah refuses. He says, my Lord Joab is sleeping in the field, as are all the men that I fight with. How could I possibly come home and enjoy the warmth of the bed and my wife and be an honorable man? I cannot do it. And so he sleeps on the front step of his house so that all the city knows Uriah didn't go in there that night. So David's little cover-up ain't going to work. I reread the story just to make sure I wasn't misleading you. And something that I hadn't noticed before is when Uriah doesn't do what David needs him to do so that he can cover up his sin, he throws a party the next night. He says, Uriah, stay another day. And then he plies Uriah with wine. And the Bible says clearly gets him drunk and then sends him home to his wife. Maybe this time it'll work. He refuses. He sleeps outside. So the next morning, Uriah wakes up. David hands him a letter. He says, I want you to hand these instructions to Joab the general. They're sealed, so Uriah doesn't look at them. He carries them to Joab, and they're instructions for Joab to put Uriah in the battle where the fighting is the most fierce, and when it gets really intense, have everybody else back away from him so that Uriah is killed. Make sure Uriah dies in battle, is the order. So he does. Joab withdraws the troops. Uriah is killed. Bathsheba is grieving. David, the ever gracious and loving king, brokenhearted for the plight of the widow in his kingdom, does the magnanimous thing and takes her in as his bride and restores her to a proper life. What a good thing for David to do. He is a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer, and he's gotten away with it. Not only has he gotten away with it, but he got away with it, and he found a way to make himself look a little bit better at the end. The very next chapter, 2 Samuel, there's a guy named Nathan, the prophet. And he goes to David, and without belaboring the story, he says, hey, I know what you did. God told me. You need to make this right. And David is brokenhearted. He's crestfallen. Next chapter over, he's on suicide watch. He's brokenhearted at what he did. And what I love about Psalms is Psalms, David didn't write all the Psalms, but he wrote most of them. And it serves us as kind of this private prayer journal of this great king, of this great man, where he writes all the defeats and all the victories and all the laments and all the celebrations and all the times when he's brought low and all the times when he celebrates. And so this moment in his life isn't excluded from his diary. And so we get a peek into his feelings after he's been confronted by Nathan about his sin with Bathsheba and against Uriah the Hittite. And so this is the prayer of repentance that David prays in his worst moment. When his absolute worst moment is brought to life, when his most evil is brought to life, when David has to be confronted with the fact that I didn't even know I could be who I am right now. I didn't know I was capable of this kind of sin, but it just kind of builds and builds and builds until I don't identify myself anymore. And then he's confronted with it. And in that confrontation, he sits down and he prays, and then he writes out his prayer. And I think it's helpful for us to look Against you and you only have I sinned. On one hand, that's not true at all. You sinned against Bathsheba horribly. You sinned horribly against Uriah. You sinned against all the attendants and all the people that you wrapped into your little scheme. You sinned against Joab, who you turned into a murderer on your behalf. You sinned against a lot of people. But at the end of the day, what David is realizing here in this prayer is that, yes, I've sinned against a lot of people, but I have offended no one and sinned against no one more egregiously than I've sinned against God himself, because all of this goes back to him and all of this grieves his heart. So he says, against you and you only have know what hyssop is, it purges. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones that you have broken rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. I love that part of the prayer. Create in me a right heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. David's acknowledging this is broken. My heart is broken. My heart is sinful. I don't know how I became capable of what I did. Create in me a right spirit because mine is wrong. He's falling on his face before God. He's rendering his heart. And it's easy, I think, to jump into the story at this point and say, yeah, yeah, of course he's praying this. He got caught. I don't see him praying this before Nathan went to talk to him. He was perfectly fine living with Bathsheba, letting her be pregnant, planning on raising this son with his multiple other wives and multiple other sons. David's just sorry because he got caught. And we've seen this. We see this in our children. We've done this ourselves. We're not really sorry for the thing that we did. We're sorry that we got caught doing the thing that we did. And then we do all the things we're supposed to do. And it would be very easy to apply that sensibility to David. But what we see in the repentance of David is this sincere brokenness at who he is and what he's done. And we see it, like I alluded to, in the chapters that follow the story in 2 Samuel. He spends the next week on suicide watch. He's literally laying on the ground. He won't go to bed. He will not eat. He will not drink. His friends and his servants are very concerned for him. They try to get him up. They try to get him to stop crying. They try to get him to eat something. They try to get him to lay down on a bed and not the floor. And he refuses. He is broken. He is broken at the reality of his sin and who he is in light of his sin and how he's hurt the heart of his God because of his sin. And in that brokenness, he writes this prayer, and we see the contrition in verses 16 and 17. These are such important verses for understanding the heart of repentance and what God wants from us. For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it. You will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. Listen, a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. See, in the Jewish faith that David was a part of, when you sinned, there were sacrifices that were measured out according to the sin. There was a prescription for what you needed to do. You've sinned this badly, it requires this kind of sacrifice. This was a really bad sense. This is going to be like multiple bulls cut in half, burned, probably some doves, throw in a lamb for good measure. It's like if you grew up Catholic, it's like you got to do this many Hail Marys and Our Fathers and whatever else you're supposed to do as penance for your sin. This is what he's supposed to do. There's a prescription here. And David says, I'm not going to offer you sacrifices. I'm not gonna offer you the Hail Marys. I'm not gonna go through the motions. God, I know that you don't want sacrifices. You know that I'll go kill every bull that I've ever owned. I'll do it right now. But that's not what you want. You don't want me to go through the motions. A broken and contrite heart, oh God, you will not despise. What God is looking for in our repentance is a heart that is broken over what we've done and who we've become. It's interesting to me, and the older I get, and the more perceptive I get of the man that David was, the more the juxtaposition of the two startles me. David's also called a man after God's own heart, by God himself. And it's not for the avoidance of sin. He's a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer. I promise you this is not the first time he's done that. And he was a lifelong adulterer because he had multiple wives for his whole life. And if you read the Bible and be like, how come that was okay back then? It wasn't. David either didn't know or didn't care or some combination of the two. He was a terrible father. Every bit of evidence we have is that he was an absentee father. And yet, God says he's a man after God's own heart, which I can only find encouraging because it tells me I've got a shot. David was a mess. You are a mess. I'm a mess. And yet, David was called a man after God's own heart. How? I think it's because of his repentance, because of his response when he's confronted with his sin, because of how earnestly he returns to the Father and offers him his broken heart. So if we look at this powerful prayer and we ask what we can learn from it about our own repentance, I think the first thing I would point out to you is if we haven't wept over our sin, I'm not sure our hearts are ready to repent. If we haven't been moved to tears, if we haven't been brokenhearted, if our sin and the reality of what we've done and who we've become and who that's turned us into, if that doesn't weight us down so much that we fall on our knees before the Father and beg for his forgiveness, then I'm not sure we're actually ready to repent. Because again, and I said this back in the spring, confession is to agree with God about your sin. Yeah, this thing is wrong. Repentance is to move the opposite direction from your sin. It's to have been moving in this direction towards sin, stop, leave it, and move back towards Jesus. Repentance is moving away from sin and towards the Savior. That's what repentance is. And if we're going to truly repent, our hearts have got to be broken about our sin. I'm not sure what sins that we carry in here this morning. I'm sure I could guess a few. And by guessing a few, I just mean list mine, and then you probably will check some of those boxes too. But I think sometimes we think about repentance as in the big moments, right? Repenting of committing adultery and impregnating a married woman, and then killing her husband to cover it up, and then embroiling everyone else in scandal. I think we think of repentance there, but what about repentance of attitudes that we've carried for years that we've never dealt with? What about repentance of the way we talk to our spouse and how they don't deserve that? What about repentance of these small racist attitudes we carry around and don't address? What about repentance of God needing to teach us the same lesson over and over again? What about selfishness or things in our life that look like greed or materialism? What about that list of things that we've known for a long time we need to stop doing and we're not? Or those lists of things that we've known for a long time we need to start doing and we're not? Repentance isn't just for what we would call big sins. It's probably more helpful for all the little ones that we just carry with us, where good becomes the enemy of great. And what I'm telling you this morning is, I don't think that we can properly repent until we've been actually broken by that sin and who it makes us. And I know that some of you aren't criers, and so the idea of breaking down crying in front of, before the Father at what we've done is probably not realistic. So whatever broken down looks like to you, that's where we need to be if we're going to properly repent. And so it would make sense this morning to invite you into a place of repentance, But what I also know is that some of you are simply not ready for that. Some of us have sins. We know exactly what we are. We know what we're doing. We know who we are. And we know that we're going to go from this place and we're going to do them. And if we're just honest before the Father, what we would say is, I know I don't need to, but I'm going to. I like it in my life. And so that's just how it's gonna be for a little bit. About those things and about everything in between, I think a helpful prayer to move us towards repentance would be, Father, help me to see my sin as you do and so break my heart as yours is broken. I think I would encourage you to pray this prayer. If you know that there is sin in your life, but you've never been broken over it, you feel a little bit bad, maybe that habit doesn't need to be there, but I haven't fallen to my knees over it. I'm not brokenhearted over it. Then I think a very fair and wise prayer is to say, God, I know that this is in my life. Will you break my heart over it? Will you help me see it as you see it so that I hate it like you hate it? Will you help me see how it's hurting me and my family like you see how it's hurting me and my family? So that I would be brought to a place where I'm ready to actually repent? If you're not even ready to pray that, pray this. God, I know there's things in my life that don't need to be there. And you and I both know I'm not getting rid of them anytime soon. Will you please move the needle for me? Will you just move me to a place where I no longer want these things in my life? Will you help me to progressively hate them? Let's just invite God to move us closer to repentance this morning if our hearts aren't moved to be ready for it. But for our hearts to be broken as God's heart is broken, we have to understand, I think, what God sees when we sin. I read somewhere that God's primary emotion towards us when we sin is not anger, it's pity. He hates that we have to do it. It's like a parent watching a child make decisions that are hurting them, and you just have to sit back and watch, and it breaks your heart. And I think what breaks the heart of God when we sin is knowing who you could be and who he created you to be, and knowing that you're allowing that sin to prohibit you from being exactly who God created you to be. Do you understand that when you carry around sin in your life chronically, that you've never even met yourself? Do you understand that? That when God formed you in the womb, he knew exactly who he wanted you to be, and he knew exactly the good work that you were created to walk in. And when you sin, you prohibit yourself from walking in that good work. You prohibit yourself from growing into the person that he created you to be, and so you've never even met yourself. Your spouse is married to some truncated, soul-sick version of you. Your kids are growing up in the home of a half-person who carries around sin. Sin is like a cancer that eats us silently from the inside out and destroys our souls. So when we carry around unrepentant sin, we are a person and a version of ourself that isn't who God created us to be, that isn't who God intended us to be, and no one that we're around gets to experience the fullness of who God is in us because we're soul sick. We're truncated versions of ourselves carrying around sin who have never been able to love our children as God intended us to love them and show them his grace because of our own mess. We're soul sick people who have never been able to love our husband and our wife and give them the spouse that they deserve and let them see God's love through us because we have cancer in our life that we are not addressing. And so it is right and good to learn to hate our sin. I saw this week, someone wrote, we've heard it said that you should love the sinner and hate the sin. He said, I tell you, love everyone and hate your own sin. I think that's a good place to start. So let's ask that God would bring us to that place. And as I dug into this prayer this week to share it with you and the heart of it, I noticed something else come out of David's prayer that I hadn't seen before. I think that when we think of repentance, we think of it exclusively as this thing that brings us low, this thing that humbles us, this thing that brings us to our knees before the Father. Repentance is a low point, and then God builds us up. It's a humbling, and that's it. But we're wrong when we think of it that way, because true repentance doesn't leave us brokenhearted. It restores us to joy. True repentance doesn't leave us brokenhearted. It doesn't leave us down here. It doesn't leave us scraping on the ground. It restores us to joy. It builds us back up. It restores us to our former life. Two times David prays this in a prayer of repentance. He includes this request twice, and I think it's amazing. In verse 8 and verse 12, he says in verse 8, let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones that you have broken rejoice. And then verse 12, restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold with me a willing spirit. In the midst of being brought low, you know what David asked for? Restore me to my former joy. Heal the bones that you've broken, God. And I was sitting chewing on that idea. How does repentance restore us to joy? And I felt like I was gaining on it, but I wasn't quite sure. I felt like I had my head around it, but I wasn't quite sure how to explain it to a room full of people to make it come alive for us. And I was just sitting in my office staring out the window for an hour thinking about this. You would have thought I was a crazy person if you walked by just this blank stare looking out the window. But after thinking through it for a while, I think the best way I can explain it is that the joy of repentance is the all clear after the cancer operation. The joy of repentance is the all clear after the cancer operation. You know, my family has been touched by cancer multiple times in multiple ways. And we all hate that C word. We all hate it. And it's touched all of us. It's scared all of us. It's cost all of us. And if you've been through the journey, you know how scary and uncertain it is. There are three families in the church who recently got that news. Hey, we found a mass. And that begins three weeks of praying and of testing and waiting for doctors to call back and uncertainty and trying to have a strong face, trying to put on a brave face, trying not to think about it every moment of every day, trying to get good sleep while you wait for this news. And sometimes you get the news, and it's like, it's benign, it's nothing, you're good. Oh, great. And then sometimes it's not that good news. And then sometimes we have to go through the whole cancer journey, and there's treatments, and there's chemo, and there's sickness, and there's a whole path that you have to go down. And sometimes, if you're fortunate, if they caught it early, if you got the cancer in the good spot where they can go get it and not the bad spot where they can't, sometimes they'll send you to surgery. And they'll go to that surgery, and they're hoping that they found it all. They know right where it is. They can get it, and they can sew you up, and you have a new lease on life. They're hoping they don't get in there and find more. And so if you're really lucky, after going through years of the cancer journey, the surgeon goes in there. He or she gets it all. And then they tell you afterwards, after you come back from the anesthesia, you're good. We got it. You're cancer free. Have you ever heard those sweet words about someone you love? That's the joy of repentance. You're cancer free, new lease on life.. That thing that was inside of you that was eating you from the inside out, that was destroying your body and destroying your health, that's not a part of your life anymore. Walk fresh, walk new, walk into a newness of life. There's going to be some recovery time. Don't like sprint, but you're good. Go. Experience joy. That's what repentance is. Repentance is handing Jesus the scalpel and saying, here, operate on me. I don't want this in my life anymore. I'm tired of this. I don't need it. Please, would you get rid of it and bring me closer to you? That's what true repentance is. And so the joy of true repentance is finding out that this cancer that we had in our soul that was making us soul sick, that was making us offer a truncated version of ourself to ourselves and those around us, what we find out is that's done, that's gone. You don't have to live with that anymore. Now walk in a newness of life that Jesus bought for you. That's repentance. David got that. That's how he was a man after God's own heart. And that's what I want for you this morning too. Those of you who carried sin in here, which is all of us, I want us to repent. I want us to hand the scalpel over to Jesus and say, would you please just come get it? I want you to be restored to joy of walking in freedom, of knowing there's nothing to hide, there's nothing to be ashamed of. I can skip, like Micah says, like a calf loosed from his stall, because we're free to love. That's what I want for you. And that's what repentance is. So in a second, I'm going to pray. And as I'm praying, Aaron's going to start to just play softly behind me. And when I'm done praying, I'll say amen. The lights will be down. And we're just going to be quiet for a minute. At least a full minute. And that's going to be your opportunity to respond to this. To what true repentance is. If your heart is ready to repent, repent. If it's not, ask God in the most honest prayer you can muster to move the needle. Take me to a place where I see my sin like you do. But I didn't want to talk about something like this without giving you the opportunity to respond to it in the moment. So not in the car, not later on, not tomorrow morning, right now, after I pray, you're going to have a silent minute or two to just bow your head and close your eyes and talk to the Father about whatever you need to talk to Him about. Let's pray. Father, You're good to us. Thank you for, through the cross, making repentance possible. Thank you for who you are and what you've done. Thank you for insisting on recording David's worst moment so that we could see what might be his best moment in Psalm 51 and his repentance. I'm reminded, Father, of the invitation to lay our burdens down at your feet, and so I pray that we would do that today. It's my earnest prayer that some of us would walk out this door this morning feeling a restoration of joy that we haven't felt in years. And God, it's my sincere prayer that if it doesn't happen this morning, that it will happen soon so that everyone who is in this room will get to experience the joy of walking with you and the people who are in the lives around the people in this room will get to meet them as you created them to be, maybe for the first time ever. But God, would you move in our hearts that we would see our sin as you see it and so be moved closer to a sincere repentance. Give us the faith and the courage to hand you the scalpel and to surrender to you removing things from our life. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, Aaron, and the band. Thank you very much. It was good stuff this morning. This is the second part of our series called Powerful Prayers. I think I called it Great Prayers last week. I don't really know what we named the series. I just tell them what I'm going to preach about, and then they make a graphic. So that's how that goes. But this one's called Powerful Prayers, and I am excited to share with you this morning what I believe is probably the most powerful prayer of repentance in the Bible. There's a couple different instances where we see some people in profound repentance and restoration situations, but this is probably the greatest one and the most famous one. This is David's prayer of repentance after his sin with Bathsheba. And I'm not sure what the worst thing is that you've ever done, and I don't want to know what that is. I'm very grateful that we don't have a Catholic model of pastorhood here at this church, and you have to confess things to me. I don't want to know those things. Those are your business. Those are not my business. You and God, you take care of that. I don't need to know. I don't know what the worst thing is you've ever done, but I'm willing to bet it's not as bad as what David did, and I'm willing to bet, unless it is just mind-blowing in its evil and efficacy, that they're not going to write about it so that every generation, henceforth for,000 years learns of it, okay, when they come of age. So this is a pretty unique sin and a pretty profound response to it. And so I think that there is a lot to learn from David's prayer of repentance. And that's kind of what we're doing in this series, is we're just looking at great prayers in the Bible, powerful prayers prayed by saintly people, and we're asking what can we learn from these prayers. So we're not talking about how can I get a better prayer life. We're talking about when I pray, what can I learn from these prayers? And even on this topic of repentance, we're going to be talking about repentance this morning. I preached on repentance in the spring in our Lent series. I'm sure you guys all remember, I mean, almost all of it. It was really good. But I preached on it in the spring, on what it was and on how we do it and on the symbolism of it. And when we walk away from a sin, we walk towards Jesus. And so if this raises some questions for you and you feel like it might be a little incomplete, I want to repent, I don't know how to repent, or I'm not really sure I understand what it is, then I would tell you to go back and listen to that one in the spring, because that's when I kind of talked about the details of repentance. But this week, I want to ask, what can we learn from David's repentance? And if that's what we're asking, then we need to know what he did. Now, a lot of you know what he did. You know this story. You know how David became a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer. Some of us don't know it at all, and some of us know bits and pieces. So just to make sure we're on the same page and that we understand what we're reading when we look at his prayer of repentance in Psalm 51, which is where we're going to be, by the way. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. I wanted to let you know what he did. We find this story in 2 Samuel 11, so you can go there and you can fact check me to make sure I'm not making this stuff up. But it says in the springtime when the kings were off to war, David was in his palace. And there's a lot of insights that we can make into this story, but I don't want to belabor the story this morning. I just want us to understand what's happened. So David's army is off to war, being generaled by Joab, who shows up in this story. And David decides one day that he's going to go out onto his roof. And while he's on his roof, he looks across the way, I would presume, and he sees a woman named Bathsheba bathing. Because in that culture, you bathed on the roof, out of sight from everyone else, but unless you're the king and you have a palace that's higher than everyone else's building, now you can see what you want to see. And so let's be clear about this. David did not go up onto the roof to have a cup of coffee, fire up a cigar, and just take in the sunset, okay? That's not what he was doing. David knew what he was doing. David went up there to see what he could see, and he saw what he wanted to see. Bathsheba was bathing on the roof, and so he tells his guys, whoever his guys are, however the attendants to kings work, he says, I'd like you to bring her to me. So they go get Bathsheba. They bring Bathsheba to his chambers. And he did with her what kings do with pretty girls that they bring to their chambers. And what's interesting, I don't know if it's interesting, but what's important to understand in this moment is that consent was not a thing. I can't say with certainty that what happened between David and Bathsheba was against her consent, but what I can say is that it wouldn't have mattered at all. David was the one making this choice. Bathsheba had no choice. I'm 100% certain she felt powerless in that situation, which only compounds the sin and the predatory nature of what David is doing. And if you're going to tell me that this is the first time David's done this roof bathing, bring her to my chambers trick, I'm going to tell you, you have not watched enough Netflix because that's not how things go. I would be willing to bet this wasn't the first time David had a woman that he found attractive brought to his palace so that he could do with that woman what he wanted to do with that woman. It's not the first time he turned a human into a commodity. So he does what kings do in that situation, and word gets back to him. I don't know. I guess it had to be a couple of weeks later. Bathsheba sent word to David that she was pregnant. And David's like, this is a problem because she's married to a guy named Uriah, the Hittite. Uriah is one of David's mighty men. That's the special forces of the ancient Hebrew army. This is the delta force that's tasked with protecting the king and then also being the forefront, being the tip of the spear in the battles. These were some bad dudes. I think it might be 2 Samuel 17 where the deeds of the mighty men are chronicled, and it's really cool. It's like, I mean, for guys it is. Girls are like, yeah, who cares? But for dudes, it's great. So go read 2 Samuel 17, and it chronicles what the mighty men did, and Uriah is one of those guys. So not only is Bathsheba married, but she's married to a man who lives to serve David, who is one of his best soldiers. And when he finds out she's pregnant, David says, okay, I got to cover this up. So he sends word to Joab on the front lines. He says, send me Uriah back. I need to talk to him. So he sends Uriah back and David says, hey, just wanted to check in with you, see how the war was going. How are you guys doing out there? How's Joab? How's everything going? And he gives him an update and David says, you know what? You're such a great guy, Uriah. You know what I want? Go see your wife. Go see Bathsheba. She's a looker. Just go see her. Spend a night there at your house and then I'll send you back to battle tomorrow. And Uriah refuses. He says, my Lord Joab is sleeping in the field, as are all the men that I fight with. How could I possibly come home and enjoy the warmth of the bed and my wife and be an honorable man? I cannot do it. And so he sleeps on the front step of his house so that all the city knows Uriah didn't go in there that night. So David's little cover-up ain't going to work. I reread the story just to make sure I wasn't misleading you. And something that I hadn't noticed before is when Uriah doesn't do what David needs him to do so that he can cover up his sin, he throws a party the next night. He says, Uriah, stay another day. And then he plies Uriah with wine. And the Bible says clearly gets him drunk and then sends him home to his wife. Maybe this time it'll work. He refuses. He sleeps outside. So the next morning, Uriah wakes up. David hands him a letter. He says, I want you to hand these instructions to Joab the general. They're sealed, so Uriah doesn't look at them. He carries them to Joab, and they're instructions for Joab to put Uriah in the battle where the fighting is the most fierce, and when it gets really intense, have everybody else back away from him so that Uriah is killed. Make sure Uriah dies in battle, is the order. So he does. Joab withdraws the troops. Uriah is killed. Bathsheba is grieving. David, the ever gracious and loving king, brokenhearted for the plight of the widow in his kingdom, does the magnanimous thing and takes her in as his bride and restores her to a proper life. What a good thing for David to do. He is a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer, and he's gotten away with it. Not only has he gotten away with it, but he got away with it, and he found a way to make himself look a little bit better at the end. The very next chapter, 2 Samuel, there's a guy named Nathan, the prophet. And he goes to David, and without belaboring the story, he says, hey, I know what you did. God told me. You need to make this right. And David is brokenhearted. He's crestfallen. Next chapter over, he's on suicide watch. He's brokenhearted at what he did. And what I love about Psalms is Psalms, David didn't write all the Psalms, but he wrote most of them. And it serves us as kind of this private prayer journal of this great king, of this great man, where he writes all the defeats and all the victories and all the laments and all the celebrations and all the times when he's brought low and all the times when he celebrates. And so this moment in his life isn't excluded from his diary. And so we get a peek into his feelings after he's been confronted by Nathan about his sin with Bathsheba and against Uriah the Hittite. And so this is the prayer of repentance that David prays in his worst moment. When his absolute worst moment is brought to life, when his most evil is brought to life, when David has to be confronted with the fact that I didn't even know I could be who I am right now. I didn't know I was capable of this kind of sin, but it just kind of builds and builds and builds until I don't identify myself anymore. And then he's confronted with it. And in that confrontation, he sits down and he prays, and then he writes out his prayer. And I think it's helpful for us to look Against you and you only have I sinned. On one hand, that's not true at all. You sinned against Bathsheba horribly. You sinned horribly against Uriah. You sinned against all the attendants and all the people that you wrapped into your little scheme. You sinned against Joab, who you turned into a murderer on your behalf. You sinned against a lot of people. But at the end of the day, what David is realizing here in this prayer is that, yes, I've sinned against a lot of people, but I have offended no one and sinned against no one more egregiously than I've sinned against God himself, because all of this goes back to him and all of this grieves his heart. So he says, against you and you only have know what hyssop is, it purges. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones that you have broken rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. I love that part of the prayer. Create in me a right heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. David's acknowledging this is broken. My heart is broken. My heart is sinful. I don't know how I became capable of what I did. Create in me a right spirit because mine is wrong. He's falling on his face before God. He's rendering his heart. And it's easy, I think, to jump into the story at this point and say, yeah, yeah, of course he's praying this. He got caught. I don't see him praying this before Nathan went to talk to him. He was perfectly fine living with Bathsheba, letting her be pregnant, planning on raising this son with his multiple other wives and multiple other sons. David's just sorry because he got caught. And we've seen this. We see this in our children. We've done this ourselves. We're not really sorry for the thing that we did. We're sorry that we got caught doing the thing that we did. And then we do all the things we're supposed to do. And it would be very easy to apply that sensibility to David. But what we see in the repentance of David is this sincere brokenness at who he is and what he's done. And we see it, like I alluded to, in the chapters that follow the story in 2 Samuel. He spends the next week on suicide watch. He's literally laying on the ground. He won't go to bed. He will not eat. He will not drink. His friends and his servants are very concerned for him. They try to get him up. They try to get him to stop crying. They try to get him to eat something. They try to get him to lay down on a bed and not the floor. And he refuses. He is broken. He is broken at the reality of his sin and who he is in light of his sin and how he's hurt the heart of his God because of his sin. And in that brokenness, he writes this prayer, and we see the contrition in verses 16 and 17. These are such important verses for understanding the heart of repentance and what God wants from us. For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it. You will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. Listen, a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. See, in the Jewish faith that David was a part of, when you sinned, there were sacrifices that were measured out according to the sin. There was a prescription for what you needed to do. You've sinned this badly, it requires this kind of sacrifice. This was a really bad sense. This is going to be like multiple bulls cut in half, burned, probably some doves, throw in a lamb for good measure. It's like if you grew up Catholic, it's like you got to do this many Hail Marys and Our Fathers and whatever else you're supposed to do as penance for your sin. This is what he's supposed to do. There's a prescription here. And David says, I'm not going to offer you sacrifices. I'm not gonna offer you the Hail Marys. I'm not gonna go through the motions. God, I know that you don't want sacrifices. You know that I'll go kill every bull that I've ever owned. I'll do it right now. But that's not what you want. You don't want me to go through the motions. A broken and contrite heart, oh God, you will not despise. What God is looking for in our repentance is a heart that is broken over what we've done and who we've become. It's interesting to me, and the older I get, and the more perceptive I get of the man that David was, the more the juxtaposition of the two startles me. David's also called a man after God's own heart, by God himself. And it's not for the avoidance of sin. He's a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer. I promise you this is not the first time he's done that. And he was a lifelong adulterer because he had multiple wives for his whole life. And if you read the Bible and be like, how come that was okay back then? It wasn't. David either didn't know or didn't care or some combination of the two. He was a terrible father. Every bit of evidence we have is that he was an absentee father. And yet, God says he's a man after God's own heart, which I can only find encouraging because it tells me I've got a shot. David was a mess. You are a mess. I'm a mess. And yet, David was called a man after God's own heart. How? I think it's because of his repentance, because of his response when he's confronted with his sin, because of how earnestly he returns to the Father and offers him his broken heart. So if we look at this powerful prayer and we ask what we can learn from it about our own repentance, I think the first thing I would point out to you is if we haven't wept over our sin, I'm not sure our hearts are ready to repent. If we haven't been moved to tears, if we haven't been brokenhearted, if our sin and the reality of what we've done and who we've become and who that's turned us into, if that doesn't weight us down so much that we fall on our knees before the Father and beg for his forgiveness, then I'm not sure we're actually ready to repent. Because again, and I said this back in the spring, confession is to agree with God about your sin. Yeah, this thing is wrong. Repentance is to move the opposite direction from your sin. It's to have been moving in this direction towards sin, stop, leave it, and move back towards Jesus. Repentance is moving away from sin and towards the Savior. That's what repentance is. And if we're going to truly repent, our hearts have got to be broken about our sin. I'm not sure what sins that we carry in here this morning. I'm sure I could guess a few. And by guessing a few, I just mean list mine, and then you probably will check some of those boxes too. But I think sometimes we think about repentance as in the big moments, right? Repenting of committing adultery and impregnating a married woman, and then killing her husband to cover it up, and then embroiling everyone else in scandal. I think we think of repentance there, but what about repentance of attitudes that we've carried for years that we've never dealt with? What about repentance of the way we talk to our spouse and how they don't deserve that? What about repentance of these small racist attitudes we carry around and don't address? What about repentance of God needing to teach us the same lesson over and over again? What about selfishness or things in our life that look like greed or materialism? What about that list of things that we've known for a long time we need to stop doing and we're not? Or those lists of things that we've known for a long time we need to start doing and we're not? Repentance isn't just for what we would call big sins. It's probably more helpful for all the little ones that we just carry with us, where good becomes the enemy of great. And what I'm telling you this morning is, I don't think that we can properly repent until we've been actually broken by that sin and who it makes us. And I know that some of you aren't criers, and so the idea of breaking down crying in front of, before the Father at what we've done is probably not realistic. So whatever broken down looks like to you, that's where we need to be if we're going to properly repent. And so it would make sense this morning to invite you into a place of repentance, But what I also know is that some of you are simply not ready for that. Some of us have sins. We know exactly what we are. We know what we're doing. We know who we are. And we know that we're going to go from this place and we're going to do them. And if we're just honest before the Father, what we would say is, I know I don't need to, but I'm going to. I like it in my life. And so that's just how it's gonna be for a little bit. About those things and about everything in between, I think a helpful prayer to move us towards repentance would be, Father, help me to see my sin as you do and so break my heart as yours is broken. I think I would encourage you to pray this prayer. If you know that there is sin in your life, but you've never been broken over it, you feel a little bit bad, maybe that habit doesn't need to be there, but I haven't fallen to my knees over it. I'm not brokenhearted over it. Then I think a very fair and wise prayer is to say, God, I know that this is in my life. Will you break my heart over it? Will you help me see it as you see it so that I hate it like you hate it? Will you help me see how it's hurting me and my family like you see how it's hurting me and my family? So that I would be brought to a place where I'm ready to actually repent? If you're not even ready to pray that, pray this. God, I know there's things in my life that don't need to be there. And you and I both know I'm not getting rid of them anytime soon. Will you please move the needle for me? Will you just move me to a place where I no longer want these things in my life? Will you help me to progressively hate them? Let's just invite God to move us closer to repentance this morning if our hearts aren't moved to be ready for it. But for our hearts to be broken as God's heart is broken, we have to understand, I think, what God sees when we sin. I read somewhere that God's primary emotion towards us when we sin is not anger, it's pity. He hates that we have to do it. It's like a parent watching a child make decisions that are hurting them, and you just have to sit back and watch, and it breaks your heart. And I think what breaks the heart of God when we sin is knowing who you could be and who he created you to be, and knowing that you're allowing that sin to prohibit you from being exactly who God created you to be. Do you understand that when you carry around sin in your life chronically, that you've never even met yourself? Do you understand that? That when God formed you in the womb, he knew exactly who he wanted you to be, and he knew exactly the good work that you were created to walk in. And when you sin, you prohibit yourself from walking in that good work. You prohibit yourself from growing into the person that he created you to be, and so you've never even met yourself. Your spouse is married to some truncated, soul-sick version of you. Your kids are growing up in the home of a half-person who carries around sin. Sin is like a cancer that eats us silently from the inside out and destroys our souls. So when we carry around unrepentant sin, we are a person and a version of ourself that isn't who God created us to be, that isn't who God intended us to be, and no one that we're around gets to experience the fullness of who God is in us because we're soul sick. We're truncated versions of ourselves carrying around sin who have never been able to love our children as God intended us to love them and show them his grace because of our own mess. We're soul sick people who have never been able to love our husband and our wife and give them the spouse that they deserve and let them see God's love through us because we have cancer in our life that we are not addressing. And so it is right and good to learn to hate our sin. I saw this week, someone wrote, we've heard it said that you should love the sinner and hate the sin. He said, I tell you, love everyone and hate your own sin. I think that's a good place to start. So let's ask that God would bring us to that place. And as I dug into this prayer this week to share it with you and the heart of it, I noticed something else come out of David's prayer that I hadn't seen before. I think that when we think of repentance, we think of it exclusively as this thing that brings us low, this thing that humbles us, this thing that brings us to our knees before the Father. Repentance is a low point, and then God builds us up. It's a humbling, and that's it. But we're wrong when we think of it that way, because true repentance doesn't leave us brokenhearted. It restores us to joy. True repentance doesn't leave us brokenhearted. It doesn't leave us down here. It doesn't leave us scraping on the ground. It restores us to joy. It builds us back up. It restores us to our former life. Two times David prays this in a prayer of repentance. He includes this request twice, and I think it's amazing. In verse 8 and verse 12, he says in verse 8, let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones that you have broken rejoice. And then verse 12, restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold with me a willing spirit. In the midst of being brought low, you know what David asked for? Restore me to my former joy. Heal the bones that you've broken, God. And I was sitting chewing on that idea. How does repentance restore us to joy? And I felt like I was gaining on it, but I wasn't quite sure. I felt like I had my head around it, but I wasn't quite sure how to explain it to a room full of people to make it come alive for us. And I was just sitting in my office staring out the window for an hour thinking about this. You would have thought I was a crazy person if you walked by just this blank stare looking out the window. But after thinking through it for a while, I think the best way I can explain it is that the joy of repentance is the all clear after the cancer operation. The joy of repentance is the all clear after the cancer operation. You know, my family has been touched by cancer multiple times in multiple ways. And we all hate that C word. We all hate it. And it's touched all of us. It's scared all of us. It's cost all of us. And if you've been through the journey, you know how scary and uncertain it is. There are three families in the church who recently got that news. Hey, we found a mass. And that begins three weeks of praying and of testing and waiting for doctors to call back and uncertainty and trying to have a strong face, trying to put on a brave face, trying not to think about it every moment of every day, trying to get good sleep while you wait for this news. And sometimes you get the news, and it's like, it's benign, it's nothing, you're good. Oh, great. And then sometimes it's not that good news. And then sometimes we have to go through the whole cancer journey, and there's treatments, and there's chemo, and there's sickness, and there's a whole path that you have to go down. And sometimes, if you're fortunate, if they caught it early, if you got the cancer in the good spot where they can go get it and not the bad spot where they can't, sometimes they'll send you to surgery. And they'll go to that surgery, and they're hoping that they found it all. They know right where it is. They can get it, and they can sew you up, and you have a new lease on life. They're hoping they don't get in there and find more. And so if you're really lucky, after going through years of the cancer journey, the surgeon goes in there. He or she gets it all. And then they tell you afterwards, after you come back from the anesthesia, you're good. We got it. You're cancer free. Have you ever heard those sweet words about someone you love? That's the joy of repentance. You're cancer free, new lease on life.. That thing that was inside of you that was eating you from the inside out, that was destroying your body and destroying your health, that's not a part of your life anymore. Walk fresh, walk new, walk into a newness of life. There's going to be some recovery time. Don't like sprint, but you're good. Go. Experience joy. That's what repentance is. Repentance is handing Jesus the scalpel and saying, here, operate on me. I don't want this in my life anymore. I'm tired of this. I don't need it. Please, would you get rid of it and bring me closer to you? That's what true repentance is. And so the joy of true repentance is finding out that this cancer that we had in our soul that was making us soul sick, that was making us offer a truncated version of ourself to ourselves and those around us, what we find out is that's done, that's gone. You don't have to live with that anymore. Now walk in a newness of life that Jesus bought for you. That's repentance. David got that. That's how he was a man after God's own heart. And that's what I want for you this morning too. Those of you who carried sin in here, which is all of us, I want us to repent. I want us to hand the scalpel over to Jesus and say, would you please just come get it? I want you to be restored to joy of walking in freedom, of knowing there's nothing to hide, there's nothing to be ashamed of. I can skip, like Micah says, like a calf loosed from his stall, because we're free to love. That's what I want for you. And that's what repentance is. So in a second, I'm going to pray. And as I'm praying, Aaron's going to start to just play softly behind me. And when I'm done praying, I'll say amen. The lights will be down. And we're just going to be quiet for a minute. At least a full minute. And that's going to be your opportunity to respond to this. To what true repentance is. If your heart is ready to repent, repent. If it's not, ask God in the most honest prayer you can muster to move the needle. Take me to a place where I see my sin like you do. But I didn't want to talk about something like this without giving you the opportunity to respond to it in the moment. So not in the car, not later on, not tomorrow morning, right now, after I pray, you're going to have a silent minute or two to just bow your head and close your eyes and talk to the Father about whatever you need to talk to Him about. Let's pray. Father, You're good to us. Thank you for, through the cross, making repentance possible. Thank you for who you are and what you've done. Thank you for insisting on recording David's worst moment so that we could see what might be his best moment in Psalm 51 and his repentance. I'm reminded, Father, of the invitation to lay our burdens down at your feet, and so I pray that we would do that today. It's my earnest prayer that some of us would walk out this door this morning feeling a restoration of joy that we haven't felt in years. And God, it's my sincere prayer that if it doesn't happen this morning, that it will happen soon so that everyone who is in this room will get to experience the joy of walking with you and the people who are in the lives around the people in this room will get to meet them as you created them to be, maybe for the first time ever. But God, would you move in our hearts that we would see our sin as you see it and so be moved closer to a sincere repentance. Give us the faith and the courage to hand you the scalpel and to surrender to you removing things from our life. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, Aaron, and the band. Thank you very much. It was good stuff this morning. This is the second part of our series called Powerful Prayers. I think I called it Great Prayers last week. I don't really know what we named the series. I just tell them what I'm going to preach about, and then they make a graphic. So that's how that goes. But this one's called Powerful Prayers, and I am excited to share with you this morning what I believe is probably the most powerful prayer of repentance in the Bible. There's a couple different instances where we see some people in profound repentance and restoration situations, but this is probably the greatest one and the most famous one. This is David's prayer of repentance after his sin with Bathsheba. And I'm not sure what the worst thing is that you've ever done, and I don't want to know what that is. I'm very grateful that we don't have a Catholic model of pastorhood here at this church, and you have to confess things to me. I don't want to know those things. Those are your business. Those are not my business. You and God, you take care of that. I don't need to know. I don't know what the worst thing is you've ever done, but I'm willing to bet it's not as bad as what David did, and I'm willing to bet, unless it is just mind-blowing in its evil and efficacy, that they're not going to write about it so that every generation, henceforth for,000 years learns of it, okay, when they come of age. So this is a pretty unique sin and a pretty profound response to it. And so I think that there is a lot to learn from David's prayer of repentance. And that's kind of what we're doing in this series, is we're just looking at great prayers in the Bible, powerful prayers prayed by saintly people, and we're asking what can we learn from these prayers. So we're not talking about how can I get a better prayer life. We're talking about when I pray, what can I learn from these prayers? And even on this topic of repentance, we're going to be talking about repentance this morning. I preached on repentance in the spring in our Lent series. I'm sure you guys all remember, I mean, almost all of it. It was really good. But I preached on it in the spring, on what it was and on how we do it and on the symbolism of it. And when we walk away from a sin, we walk towards Jesus. And so if this raises some questions for you and you feel like it might be a little incomplete, I want to repent, I don't know how to repent, or I'm not really sure I understand what it is, then I would tell you to go back and listen to that one in the spring, because that's when I kind of talked about the details of repentance. But this week, I want to ask, what can we learn from David's repentance? And if that's what we're asking, then we need to know what he did. Now, a lot of you know what he did. You know this story. You know how David became a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer. Some of us don't know it at all, and some of us know bits and pieces. So just to make sure we're on the same page and that we understand what we're reading when we look at his prayer of repentance in Psalm 51, which is where we're going to be, by the way. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. I wanted to let you know what he did. We find this story in 2 Samuel 11, so you can go there and you can fact check me to make sure I'm not making this stuff up. But it says in the springtime when the kings were off to war, David was in his palace. And there's a lot of insights that we can make into this story, but I don't want to belabor the story this morning. I just want us to understand what's happened. So David's army is off to war, being generaled by Joab, who shows up in this story. And David decides one day that he's going to go out onto his roof. And while he's on his roof, he looks across the way, I would presume, and he sees a woman named Bathsheba bathing. Because in that culture, you bathed on the roof, out of sight from everyone else, but unless you're the king and you have a palace that's higher than everyone else's building, now you can see what you want to see. And so let's be clear about this. David did not go up onto the roof to have a cup of coffee, fire up a cigar, and just take in the sunset, okay? That's not what he was doing. David knew what he was doing. David went up there to see what he could see, and he saw what he wanted to see. Bathsheba was bathing on the roof, and so he tells his guys, whoever his guys are, however the attendants to kings work, he says, I'd like you to bring her to me. So they go get Bathsheba. They bring Bathsheba to his chambers. And he did with her what kings do with pretty girls that they bring to their chambers. And what's interesting, I don't know if it's interesting, but what's important to understand in this moment is that consent was not a thing. I can't say with certainty that what happened between David and Bathsheba was against her consent, but what I can say is that it wouldn't have mattered at all. David was the one making this choice. Bathsheba had no choice. I'm 100% certain she felt powerless in that situation, which only compounds the sin and the predatory nature of what David is doing. And if you're going to tell me that this is the first time David's done this roof bathing, bring her to my chambers trick, I'm going to tell you, you have not watched enough Netflix because that's not how things go. I would be willing to bet this wasn't the first time David had a woman that he found attractive brought to his palace so that he could do with that woman what he wanted to do with that woman. It's not the first time he turned a human into a commodity. So he does what kings do in that situation, and word gets back to him. I don't know. I guess it had to be a couple of weeks later. Bathsheba sent word to David that she was pregnant. And David's like, this is a problem because she's married to a guy named Uriah, the Hittite. Uriah is one of David's mighty men. That's the special forces of the ancient Hebrew army. This is the delta force that's tasked with protecting the king and then also being the forefront, being the tip of the spear in the battles. These were some bad dudes. I think it might be 2 Samuel 17 where the deeds of the mighty men are chronicled, and it's really cool. It's like, I mean, for guys it is. Girls are like, yeah, who cares? But for dudes, it's great. So go read 2 Samuel 17, and it chronicles what the mighty men did, and Uriah is one of those guys. So not only is Bathsheba married, but she's married to a man who lives to serve David, who is one of his best soldiers. And when he finds out she's pregnant, David says, okay, I got to cover this up. So he sends word to Joab on the front lines. He says, send me Uriah back. I need to talk to him. So he sends Uriah back and David says, hey, just wanted to check in with you, see how the war was going. How are you guys doing out there? How's Joab? How's everything going? And he gives him an update and David says, you know what? You're such a great guy, Uriah. You know what I want? Go see your wife. Go see Bathsheba. She's a looker. Just go see her. Spend a night there at your house and then I'll send you back to battle tomorrow. And Uriah refuses. He says, my Lord Joab is sleeping in the field, as are all the men that I fight with. How could I possibly come home and enjoy the warmth of the bed and my wife and be an honorable man? I cannot do it. And so he sleeps on the front step of his house so that all the city knows Uriah didn't go in there that night. So David's little cover-up ain't going to work. I reread the story just to make sure I wasn't misleading you. And something that I hadn't noticed before is when Uriah doesn't do what David needs him to do so that he can cover up his sin, he throws a party the next night. He says, Uriah, stay another day. And then he plies Uriah with wine. And the Bible says clearly gets him drunk and then sends him home to his wife. Maybe this time it'll work. He refuses. He sleeps outside. So the next morning, Uriah wakes up. David hands him a letter. He says, I want you to hand these instructions to Joab the general. They're sealed, so Uriah doesn't look at them. He carries them to Joab, and they're instructions for Joab to put Uriah in the battle where the fighting is the most fierce, and when it gets really intense, have everybody else back away from him so that Uriah is killed. Make sure Uriah dies in battle, is the order. So he does. Joab withdraws the troops. Uriah is killed. Bathsheba is grieving. David, the ever gracious and loving king, brokenhearted for the plight of the widow in his kingdom, does the magnanimous thing and takes her in as his bride and restores her to a proper life. What a good thing for David to do. He is a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer, and he's gotten away with it. Not only has he gotten away with it, but he got away with it, and he found a way to make himself look a little bit better at the end. The very next chapter, 2 Samuel, there's a guy named Nathan, the prophet. And he goes to David, and without belaboring the story, he says, hey, I know what you did. God told me. You need to make this right. And David is brokenhearted. He's crestfallen. Next chapter over, he's on suicide watch. He's brokenhearted at what he did. And what I love about Psalms is Psalms, David didn't write all the Psalms, but he wrote most of them. And it serves us as kind of this private prayer journal of this great king, of this great man, where he writes all the defeats and all the victories and all the laments and all the celebrations and all the times when he's brought low and all the times when he celebrates. And so this moment in his life isn't excluded from his diary. And so we get a peek into his feelings after he's been confronted by Nathan about his sin with Bathsheba and against Uriah the Hittite. And so this is the prayer of repentance that David prays in his worst moment. When his absolute worst moment is brought to life, when his most evil is brought to life, when David has to be confronted with the fact that I didn't even know I could be who I am right now. I didn't know I was capable of this kind of sin, but it just kind of builds and builds and builds until I don't identify myself anymore. And then he's confronted with it. And in that confrontation, he sits down and he prays, and then he writes out his prayer. And I think it's helpful for us to look Against you and you only have I sinned. On one hand, that's not true at all. You sinned against Bathsheba horribly. You sinned horribly against Uriah. You sinned against all the attendants and all the people that you wrapped into your little scheme. You sinned against Joab, who you turned into a murderer on your behalf. You sinned against a lot of people. But at the end of the day, what David is realizing here in this prayer is that, yes, I've sinned against a lot of people, but I have offended no one and sinned against no one more egregiously than I've sinned against God himself, because all of this goes back to him and all of this grieves his heart. So he says, against you and you only have know what hyssop is, it purges. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones that you have broken rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. I love that part of the prayer. Create in me a right heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. David's acknowledging this is broken. My heart is broken. My heart is sinful. I don't know how I became capable of what I did. Create in me a right spirit because mine is wrong. He's falling on his face before God. He's rendering his heart. And it's easy, I think, to jump into the story at this point and say, yeah, yeah, of course he's praying this. He got caught. I don't see him praying this before Nathan went to talk to him. He was perfectly fine living with Bathsheba, letting her be pregnant, planning on raising this son with his multiple other wives and multiple other sons. David's just sorry because he got caught. And we've seen this. We see this in our children. We've done this ourselves. We're not really sorry for the thing that we did. We're sorry that we got caught doing the thing that we did. And then we do all the things we're supposed to do. And it would be very easy to apply that sensibility to David. But what we see in the repentance of David is this sincere brokenness at who he is and what he's done. And we see it, like I alluded to, in the chapters that follow the story in 2 Samuel. He spends the next week on suicide watch. He's literally laying on the ground. He won't go to bed. He will not eat. He will not drink. His friends and his servants are very concerned for him. They try to get him up. They try to get him to stop crying. They try to get him to eat something. They try to get him to lay down on a bed and not the floor. And he refuses. He is broken. He is broken at the reality of his sin and who he is in light of his sin and how he's hurt the heart of his God because of his sin. And in that brokenness, he writes this prayer, and we see the contrition in verses 16 and 17. These are such important verses for understanding the heart of repentance and what God wants from us. For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it. You will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. Listen, a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. See, in the Jewish faith that David was a part of, when you sinned, there were sacrifices that were measured out according to the sin. There was a prescription for what you needed to do. You've sinned this badly, it requires this kind of sacrifice. This was a really bad sense. This is going to be like multiple bulls cut in half, burned, probably some doves, throw in a lamb for good measure. It's like if you grew up Catholic, it's like you got to do this many Hail Marys and Our Fathers and whatever else you're supposed to do as penance for your sin. This is what he's supposed to do. There's a prescription here. And David says, I'm not going to offer you sacrifices. I'm not gonna offer you the Hail Marys. I'm not gonna go through the motions. God, I know that you don't want sacrifices. You know that I'll go kill every bull that I've ever owned. I'll do it right now. But that's not what you want. You don't want me to go through the motions. A broken and contrite heart, oh God, you will not despise. What God is looking for in our repentance is a heart that is broken over what we've done and who we've become. It's interesting to me, and the older I get, and the more perceptive I get of the man that David was, the more the juxtaposition of the two startles me. David's also called a man after God's own heart, by God himself. And it's not for the avoidance of sin. He's a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer. I promise you this is not the first time he's done that. And he was a lifelong adulterer because he had multiple wives for his whole life. And if you read the Bible and be like, how come that was okay back then? It wasn't. David either didn't know or didn't care or some combination of the two. He was a terrible father. Every bit of evidence we have is that he was an absentee father. And yet, God says he's a man after God's own heart, which I can only find encouraging because it tells me I've got a shot. David was a mess. You are a mess. I'm a mess. And yet, David was called a man after God's own heart. How? I think it's because of his repentance, because of his response when he's confronted with his sin, because of how earnestly he returns to the Father and offers him his broken heart. So if we look at this powerful prayer and we ask what we can learn from it about our own repentance, I think the first thing I would point out to you is if we haven't wept over our sin, I'm not sure our hearts are ready to repent. If we haven't been moved to tears, if we haven't been brokenhearted, if our sin and the reality of what we've done and who we've become and who that's turned us into, if that doesn't weight us down so much that we fall on our knees before the Father and beg for his forgiveness, then I'm not sure we're actually ready to repent. Because again, and I said this back in the spring, confession is to agree with God about your sin. Yeah, this thing is wrong. Repentance is to move the opposite direction from your sin. It's to have been moving in this direction towards sin, stop, leave it, and move back towards Jesus. Repentance is moving away from sin and towards the Savior. That's what repentance is. And if we're going to truly repent, our hearts have got to be broken about our sin. I'm not sure what sins that we carry in here this morning. I'm sure I could guess a few. And by guessing a few, I just mean list mine, and then you probably will check some of those boxes too. But I think sometimes we think about repentance as in the big moments, right? Repenting of committing adultery and impregnating a married woman, and then killing her husband to cover it up, and then embroiling everyone else in scandal. I think we think of repentance there, but what about repentance of attitudes that we've carried for years that we've never dealt with? What about repentance of the way we talk to our spouse and how they don't deserve that? What about repentance of these small racist attitudes we carry around and don't address? What about repentance of God needing to teach us the same lesson over and over again? What about selfishness or things in our life that look like greed or materialism? What about that list of things that we've known for a long time we need to stop doing and we're not? Or those lists of things that we've known for a long time we need to start doing and we're not? Repentance isn't just for what we would call big sins. It's probably more helpful for all the little ones that we just carry with us, where good becomes the enemy of great. And what I'm telling you this morning is, I don't think that we can properly repent until we've been actually broken by that sin and who it makes us. And I know that some of you aren't criers, and so the idea of breaking down crying in front of, before the Father at what we've done is probably not realistic. So whatever broken down looks like to you, that's where we need to be if we're going to properly repent. And so it would make sense this morning to invite you into a place of repentance, But what I also know is that some of you are simply not ready for that. Some of us have sins. We know exactly what we are. We know what we're doing. We know who we are. And we know that we're going to go from this place and we're going to do them. And if we're just honest before the Father, what we would say is, I know I don't need to, but I'm going to. I like it in my life. And so that's just how it's gonna be for a little bit. About those things and about everything in between, I think a helpful prayer to move us towards repentance would be, Father, help me to see my sin as you do and so break my heart as yours is broken. I think I would encourage you to pray this prayer. If you know that there is sin in your life, but you've never been broken over it, you feel a little bit bad, maybe that habit doesn't need to be there, but I haven't fallen to my knees over it. I'm not brokenhearted over it. Then I think a very fair and wise prayer is to say, God, I know that this is in my life. Will you break my heart over it? Will you help me see it as you see it so that I hate it like you hate it? Will you help me see how it's hurting me and my family like you see how it's hurting me and my family? So that I would be brought to a place where I'm ready to actually repent? If you're not even ready to pray that, pray this. God, I know there's things in my life that don't need to be there. And you and I both know I'm not getting rid of them anytime soon. Will you please move the needle for me? Will you just move me to a place where I no longer want these things in my life? Will you help me to progressively hate them? Let's just invite God to move us closer to repentance this morning if our hearts aren't moved to be ready for it. But for our hearts to be broken as God's heart is broken, we have to understand, I think, what God sees when we sin. I read somewhere that God's primary emotion towards us when we sin is not anger, it's pity. He hates that we have to do it. It's like a parent watching a child make decisions that are hurting them, and you just have to sit back and watch, and it breaks your heart. And I think what breaks the heart of God when we sin is knowing who you could be and who he created you to be, and knowing that you're allowing that sin to prohibit you from being exactly who God created you to be. Do you understand that when you carry around sin in your life chronically, that you've never even met yourself? Do you understand that? That when God formed you in the womb, he knew exactly who he wanted you to be, and he knew exactly the good work that you were created to walk in. And when you sin, you prohibit yourself from walking in that good work. You prohibit yourself from growing into the person that he created you to be, and so you've never even met yourself. Your spouse is married to some truncated, soul-sick version of you. Your kids are growing up in the home of a half-person who carries around sin. Sin is like a cancer that eats us silently from the inside out and destroys our souls. So when we carry around unrepentant sin, we are a person and a version of ourself that isn't who God created us to be, that isn't who God intended us to be, and no one that we're around gets to experience the fullness of who God is in us because we're soul sick. We're truncated versions of ourselves carrying around sin who have never been able to love our children as God intended us to love them and show them his grace because of our own mess. We're soul sick people who have never been able to love our husband and our wife and give them the spouse that they deserve and let them see God's love through us because we have cancer in our life that we are not addressing. And so it is right and good to learn to hate our sin. I saw this week, someone wrote, we've heard it said that you should love the sinner and hate the sin. He said, I tell you, love everyone and hate your own sin. I think that's a good place to start. So let's ask that God would bring us to that place. And as I dug into this prayer this week to share it with you and the heart of it, I noticed something else come out of David's prayer that I hadn't seen before. I think that when we think of repentance, we think of it exclusively as this thing that brings us low, this thing that humbles us, this thing that brings us to our knees before the Father. Repentance is a low point, and then God builds us up. It's a humbling, and that's it. But we're wrong when we think of it that way, because true repentance doesn't leave us brokenhearted. It restores us to joy. True repentance doesn't leave us brokenhearted. It doesn't leave us down here. It doesn't leave us scraping on the ground. It restores us to joy. It builds us back up. It restores us to our former life. Two times David prays this in a prayer of repentance. He includes this request twice, and I think it's amazing. In verse 8 and verse 12, he says in verse 8, let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones that you have broken rejoice. And then verse 12, restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold with me a willing spirit. In the midst of being brought low, you know what David asked for? Restore me to my former joy. Heal the bones that you've broken, God. And I was sitting chewing on that idea. How does repentance restore us to joy? And I felt like I was gaining on it, but I wasn't quite sure. I felt like I had my head around it, but I wasn't quite sure how to explain it to a room full of people to make it come alive for us. And I was just sitting in my office staring out the window for an hour thinking about this. You would have thought I was a crazy person if you walked by just this blank stare looking out the window. But after thinking through it for a while, I think the best way I can explain it is that the joy of repentance is the all clear after the cancer operation. The joy of repentance is the all clear after the cancer operation. You know, my family has been touched by cancer multiple times in multiple ways. And we all hate that C word. We all hate it. And it's touched all of us. It's scared all of us. It's cost all of us. And if you've been through the journey, you know how scary and uncertain it is. There are three families in the church who recently got that news. Hey, we found a mass. And that begins three weeks of praying and of testing and waiting for doctors to call back and uncertainty and trying to have a strong face, trying to put on a brave face, trying not to think about it every moment of every day, trying to get good sleep while you wait for this news. And sometimes you get the news, and it's like, it's benign, it's nothing, you're good. Oh, great. And then sometimes it's not that good news. And then sometimes we have to go through the whole cancer journey, and there's treatments, and there's chemo, and there's sickness, and there's a whole path that you have to go down. And sometimes, if you're fortunate, if they caught it early, if you got the cancer in the good spot where they can go get it and not the bad spot where they can't, sometimes they'll send you to surgery. And they'll go to that surgery, and they're hoping that they found it all. They know right where it is. They can get it, and they can sew you up, and you have a new lease on life. They're hoping they don't get in there and find more. And so if you're really lucky, after going through years of the cancer journey, the surgeon goes in there. He or she gets it all. And then they tell you afterwards, after you come back from the anesthesia, you're good. We got it. You're cancer free. Have you ever heard those sweet words about someone you love? That's the joy of repentance. You're cancer free, new lease on life.. That thing that was inside of you that was eating you from the inside out, that was destroying your body and destroying your health, that's not a part of your life anymore. Walk fresh, walk new, walk into a newness of life. There's going to be some recovery time. Don't like sprint, but you're good. Go. Experience joy. That's what repentance is. Repentance is handing Jesus the scalpel and saying, here, operate on me. I don't want this in my life anymore. I'm tired of this. I don't need it. Please, would you get rid of it and bring me closer to you? That's what true repentance is. And so the joy of true repentance is finding out that this cancer that we had in our soul that was making us soul sick, that was making us offer a truncated version of ourself to ourselves and those around us, what we find out is that's done, that's gone. You don't have to live with that anymore. Now walk in a newness of life that Jesus bought for you. That's repentance. David got that. That's how he was a man after God's own heart. And that's what I want for you this morning too. Those of you who carried sin in here, which is all of us, I want us to repent. I want us to hand the scalpel over to Jesus and say, would you please just come get it? I want you to be restored to joy of walking in freedom, of knowing there's nothing to hide, there's nothing to be ashamed of. I can skip, like Micah says, like a calf loosed from his stall, because we're free to love. That's what I want for you. And that's what repentance is. So in a second, I'm going to pray. And as I'm praying, Aaron's going to start to just play softly behind me. And when I'm done praying, I'll say amen. The lights will be down. And we're just going to be quiet for a minute. At least a full minute. And that's going to be your opportunity to respond to this. To what true repentance is. If your heart is ready to repent, repent. If it's not, ask God in the most honest prayer you can muster to move the needle. Take me to a place where I see my sin like you do. But I didn't want to talk about something like this without giving you the opportunity to respond to it in the moment. So not in the car, not later on, not tomorrow morning, right now, after I pray, you're going to have a silent minute or two to just bow your head and close your eyes and talk to the Father about whatever you need to talk to Him about. Let's pray. Father, You're good to us. Thank you for, through the cross, making repentance possible. Thank you for who you are and what you've done. Thank you for insisting on recording David's worst moment so that we could see what might be his best moment in Psalm 51 and his repentance. I'm reminded, Father, of the invitation to lay our burdens down at your feet, and so I pray that we would do that today. It's my earnest prayer that some of us would walk out this door this morning feeling a restoration of joy that we haven't felt in years. And God, it's my sincere prayer that if it doesn't happen this morning, that it will happen soon so that everyone who is in this room will get to experience the joy of walking with you and the people who are in the lives around the people in this room will get to meet them as you created them to be, maybe for the first time ever. But God, would you move in our hearts that we would see our sin as you see it and so be moved closer to a sincere repentance. Give us the faith and the courage to hand you the scalpel and to surrender to you removing things from our life. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here, Aaron, and the band. Thank you very much. It was good stuff this morning. This is the second part of our series called Powerful Prayers. I think I called it Great Prayers last week. I don't really know what we named the series. I just tell them what I'm going to preach about, and then they make a graphic. So that's how that goes. But this one's called Powerful Prayers, and I am excited to share with you this morning what I believe is probably the most powerful prayer of repentance in the Bible. There's a couple different instances where we see some people in profound repentance and restoration situations, but this is probably the greatest one and the most famous one. This is David's prayer of repentance after his sin with Bathsheba. And I'm not sure what the worst thing is that you've ever done, and I don't want to know what that is. I'm very grateful that we don't have a Catholic model of pastorhood here at this church, and you have to confess things to me. I don't want to know those things. Those are your business. Those are not my business. You and God, you take care of that. I don't need to know. I don't know what the worst thing is you've ever done, but I'm willing to bet it's not as bad as what David did, and I'm willing to bet, unless it is just mind-blowing in its evil and efficacy, that they're not going to write about it so that every generation, henceforth for,000 years learns of it, okay, when they come of age. So this is a pretty unique sin and a pretty profound response to it. And so I think that there is a lot to learn from David's prayer of repentance. And that's kind of what we're doing in this series, is we're just looking at great prayers in the Bible, powerful prayers prayed by saintly people, and we're asking what can we learn from these prayers. So we're not talking about how can I get a better prayer life. We're talking about when I pray, what can I learn from these prayers? And even on this topic of repentance, we're going to be talking about repentance this morning. I preached on repentance in the spring in our Lent series. I'm sure you guys all remember, I mean, almost all of it. It was really good. But I preached on it in the spring, on what it was and on how we do it and on the symbolism of it. And when we walk away from a sin, we walk towards Jesus. And so if this raises some questions for you and you feel like it might be a little incomplete, I want to repent, I don't know how to repent, or I'm not really sure I understand what it is, then I would tell you to go back and listen to that one in the spring, because that's when I kind of talked about the details of repentance. But this week, I want to ask, what can we learn from David's repentance? And if that's what we're asking, then we need to know what he did. Now, a lot of you know what he did. You know this story. You know how David became a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer. Some of us don't know it at all, and some of us know bits and pieces. So just to make sure we're on the same page and that we understand what we're reading when we look at his prayer of repentance in Psalm 51, which is where we're going to be, by the way. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. I wanted to let you know what he did. We find this story in 2 Samuel 11, so you can go there and you can fact check me to make sure I'm not making this stuff up. But it says in the springtime when the kings were off to war, David was in his palace. And there's a lot of insights that we can make into this story, but I don't want to belabor the story this morning. I just want us to understand what's happened. So David's army is off to war, being generaled by Joab, who shows up in this story. And David decides one day that he's going to go out onto his roof. And while he's on his roof, he looks across the way, I would presume, and he sees a woman named Bathsheba bathing. Because in that culture, you bathed on the roof, out of sight from everyone else, but unless you're the king and you have a palace that's higher than everyone else's building, now you can see what you want to see. And so let's be clear about this. David did not go up onto the roof to have a cup of coffee, fire up a cigar, and just take in the sunset, okay? That's not what he was doing. David knew what he was doing. David went up there to see what he could see, and he saw what he wanted to see. Bathsheba was bathing on the roof, and so he tells his guys, whoever his guys are, however the attendants to kings work, he says, I'd like you to bring her to me. So they go get Bathsheba. They bring Bathsheba to his chambers. And he did with her what kings do with pretty girls that they bring to their chambers. And what's interesting, I don't know if it's interesting, but what's important to understand in this moment is that consent was not a thing. I can't say with certainty that what happened between David and Bathsheba was against her consent, but what I can say is that it wouldn't have mattered at all. David was the one making this choice. Bathsheba had no choice. I'm 100% certain she felt powerless in that situation, which only compounds the sin and the predatory nature of what David is doing. And if you're going to tell me that this is the first time David's done this roof bathing, bring her to my chambers trick, I'm going to tell you, you have not watched enough Netflix because that's not how things go. I would be willing to bet this wasn't the first time David had a woman that he found attractive brought to his palace so that he could do with that woman what he wanted to do with that woman. It's not the first time he turned a human into a commodity. So he does what kings do in that situation, and word gets back to him. I don't know. I guess it had to be a couple of weeks later. Bathsheba sent word to David that she was pregnant. And David's like, this is a problem because she's married to a guy named Uriah, the Hittite. Uriah is one of David's mighty men. That's the special forces of the ancient Hebrew army. This is the delta force that's tasked with protecting the king and then also being the forefront, being the tip of the spear in the battles. These were some bad dudes. I think it might be 2 Samuel 17 where the deeds of the mighty men are chronicled, and it's really cool. It's like, I mean, for guys it is. Girls are like, yeah, who cares? But for dudes, it's great. So go read 2 Samuel 17, and it chronicles what the mighty men did, and Uriah is one of those guys. So not only is Bathsheba married, but she's married to a man who lives to serve David, who is one of his best soldiers. And when he finds out she's pregnant, David says, okay, I got to cover this up. So he sends word to Joab on the front lines. He says, send me Uriah back. I need to talk to him. So he sends Uriah back and David says, hey, just wanted to check in with you, see how the war was going. How are you guys doing out there? How's Joab? How's everything going? And he gives him an update and David says, you know what? You're such a great guy, Uriah. You know what I want? Go see your wife. Go see Bathsheba. She's a looker. Just go see her. Spend a night there at your house and then I'll send you back to battle tomorrow. And Uriah refuses. He says, my Lord Joab is sleeping in the field, as are all the men that I fight with. How could I possibly come home and enjoy the warmth of the bed and my wife and be an honorable man? I cannot do it. And so he sleeps on the front step of his house so that all the city knows Uriah didn't go in there that night. So David's little cover-up ain't going to work. I reread the story just to make sure I wasn't misleading you. And something that I hadn't noticed before is when Uriah doesn't do what David needs him to do so that he can cover up his sin, he throws a party the next night. He says, Uriah, stay another day. And then he plies Uriah with wine. And the Bible says clearly gets him drunk and then sends him home to his wife. Maybe this time it'll work. He refuses. He sleeps outside. So the next morning, Uriah wakes up. David hands him a letter. He says, I want you to hand these instructions to Joab the general. They're sealed, so Uriah doesn't look at them. He carries them to Joab, and they're instructions for Joab to put Uriah in the battle where the fighting is the most fierce, and when it gets really intense, have everybody else back away from him so that Uriah is killed. Make sure Uriah dies in battle, is the order. So he does. Joab withdraws the troops. Uriah is killed. Bathsheba is grieving. David, the ever gracious and loving king, brokenhearted for the plight of the widow in his kingdom, does the magnanimous thing and takes her in as his bride and restores her to a proper life. What a good thing for David to do. He is a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer, and he's gotten away with it. Not only has he gotten away with it, but he got away with it, and he found a way to make himself look a little bit better at the end. The very next chapter, 2 Samuel, there's a guy named Nathan, the prophet. And he goes to David, and without belaboring the story, he says, hey, I know what you did. God told me. You need to make this right. And David is brokenhearted. He's crestfallen. Next chapter over, he's on suicide watch. He's brokenhearted at what he did. And what I love about Psalms is Psalms, David didn't write all the Psalms, but he wrote most of them. And it serves us as kind of this private prayer journal of this great king, of this great man, where he writes all the defeats and all the victories and all the laments and all the celebrations and all the times when he's brought low and all the times when he celebrates. And so this moment in his life isn't excluded from his diary. And so we get a peek into his feelings after he's been confronted by Nathan about his sin with Bathsheba and against Uriah the Hittite. And so this is the prayer of repentance that David prays in his worst moment. When his absolute worst moment is brought to life, when his most evil is brought to life, when David has to be confronted with the fact that I didn't even know I could be who I am right now. I didn't know I was capable of this kind of sin, but it just kind of builds and builds and builds until I don't identify myself anymore. And then he's confronted with it. And in that confrontation, he sits down and he prays, and then he writes out his prayer. And I think it's helpful for us to look Against you and you only have I sinned. On one hand, that's not true at all. You sinned against Bathsheba horribly. You sinned horribly against Uriah. You sinned against all the attendants and all the people that you wrapped into your little scheme. You sinned against Joab, who you turned into a murderer on your behalf. You sinned against a lot of people. But at the end of the day, what David is realizing here in this prayer is that, yes, I've sinned against a lot of people, but I have offended no one and sinned against no one more egregiously than I've sinned against God himself, because all of this goes back to him and all of this grieves his heart. So he says, against you and you only have know what hyssop is, it purges. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones that you have broken rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. I love that part of the prayer. Create in me a right heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. David's acknowledging this is broken. My heart is broken. My heart is sinful. I don't know how I became capable of what I did. Create in me a right spirit because mine is wrong. He's falling on his face before God. He's rendering his heart. And it's easy, I think, to jump into the story at this point and say, yeah, yeah, of course he's praying this. He got caught. I don't see him praying this before Nathan went to talk to him. He was perfectly fine living with Bathsheba, letting her be pregnant, planning on raising this son with his multiple other wives and multiple other sons. David's just sorry because he got caught. And we've seen this. We see this in our children. We've done this ourselves. We're not really sorry for the thing that we did. We're sorry that we got caught doing the thing that we did. And then we do all the things we're supposed to do. And it would be very easy to apply that sensibility to David. But what we see in the repentance of David is this sincere brokenness at who he is and what he's done. And we see it, like I alluded to, in the chapters that follow the story in 2 Samuel. He spends the next week on suicide watch. He's literally laying on the ground. He won't go to bed. He will not eat. He will not drink. His friends and his servants are very concerned for him. They try to get him up. They try to get him to stop crying. They try to get him to eat something. They try to get him to lay down on a bed and not the floor. And he refuses. He is broken. He is broken at the reality of his sin and who he is in light of his sin and how he's hurt the heart of his God because of his sin. And in that brokenness, he writes this prayer, and we see the contrition in verses 16 and 17. These are such important verses for understanding the heart of repentance and what God wants from us. For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it. You will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. Listen, a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. See, in the Jewish faith that David was a part of, when you sinned, there were sacrifices that were measured out according to the sin. There was a prescription for what you needed to do. You've sinned this badly, it requires this kind of sacrifice. This was a really bad sense. This is going to be like multiple bulls cut in half, burned, probably some doves, throw in a lamb for good measure. It's like if you grew up Catholic, it's like you got to do this many Hail Marys and Our Fathers and whatever else you're supposed to do as penance for your sin. This is what he's supposed to do. There's a prescription here. And David says, I'm not going to offer you sacrifices. I'm not gonna offer you the Hail Marys. I'm not gonna go through the motions. God, I know that you don't want sacrifices. You know that I'll go kill every bull that I've ever owned. I'll do it right now. But that's not what you want. You don't want me to go through the motions. A broken and contrite heart, oh God, you will not despise. What God is looking for in our repentance is a heart that is broken over what we've done and who we've become. It's interesting to me, and the older I get, and the more perceptive I get of the man that David was, the more the juxtaposition of the two startles me. David's also called a man after God's own heart, by God himself. And it's not for the avoidance of sin. He's a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer. I promise you this is not the first time he's done that. And he was a lifelong adulterer because he had multiple wives for his whole life. And if you read the Bible and be like, how come that was okay back then? It wasn't. David either didn't know or didn't care or some combination of the two. He was a terrible father. Every bit of evidence we have is that he was an absentee father. And yet, God says he's a man after God's own heart, which I can only find encouraging because it tells me I've got a shot. David was a mess. You are a mess. I'm a mess. And yet, David was called a man after God's own heart. How? I think it's because of his repentance, because of his response when he's confronted with his sin, because of how earnestly he returns to the Father and offers him his broken heart. So if we look at this powerful prayer and we ask what we can learn from it about our own repentance, I think the first thing I would point out to you is if we haven't wept over our sin, I'm not sure our hearts are ready to repent. If we haven't been moved to tears, if we haven't been brokenhearted, if our sin and the reality of what we've done and who we've become and who that's turned us into, if that doesn't weight us down so much that we fall on our knees before the Father and beg for his forgiveness, then I'm not sure we're actually ready to repent. Because again, and I said this back in the spring, confession is to agree with God about your sin. Yeah, this thing is wrong. Repentance is to move the opposite direction from your sin. It's to have been moving in this direction towards sin, stop, leave it, and move back towards Jesus. Repentance is moving away from sin and towards the Savior. That's what repentance is. And if we're going to truly repent, our hearts have got to be broken about our sin. I'm not sure what sins that we carry in here this morning. I'm sure I could guess a few. And by guessing a few, I just mean list mine, and then you probably will check some of those boxes too. But I think sometimes we think about repentance as in the big moments, right? Repenting of committing adultery and impregnating a married woman, and then killing her husband to cover it up, and then embroiling everyone else in scandal. I think we think of repentance there, but what about repentance of attitudes that we've carried for years that we've never dealt with? What about repentance of the way we talk to our spouse and how they don't deserve that? What about repentance of these small racist attitudes we carry around and don't address? What about repentance of God needing to teach us the same lesson over and over again? What about selfishness or things in our life that look like greed or materialism? What about that list of things that we've known for a long time we need to stop doing and we're not? Or those lists of things that we've known for a long time we need to start doing and we're not? Repentance isn't just for what we would call big sins. It's probably more helpful for all the little ones that we just carry with us, where good becomes the enemy of great. And what I'm telling you this morning is, I don't think that we can properly repent until we've been actually broken by that sin and who it makes us. And I know that some of you aren't criers, and so the idea of breaking down crying in front of, before the Father at what we've done is probably not realistic. So whatever broken down looks like to you, that's where we need to be if we're going to properly repent. And so it would make sense this morning to invite you into a place of repentance, But what I also know is that some of you are simply not ready for that. Some of us have sins. We know exactly what we are. We know what we're doing. We know who we are. And we know that we're going to go from this place and we're going to do them. And if we're just honest before the Father, what we would say is, I know I don't need to, but I'm going to. I like it in my life. And so that's just how it's gonna be for a little bit. About those things and about everything in between, I think a helpful prayer to move us towards repentance would be, Father, help me to see my sin as you do and so break my heart as yours is broken. I think I would encourage you to pray this prayer. If you know that there is sin in your life, but you've never been broken over it, you feel a little bit bad, maybe that habit doesn't need to be there, but I haven't fallen to my knees over it. I'm not brokenhearted over it. Then I think a very fair and wise prayer is to say, God, I know that this is in my life. Will you break my heart over it? Will you help me see it as you see it so that I hate it like you hate it? Will you help me see how it's hurting me and my family like you see how it's hurting me and my family? So that I would be brought to a place where I'm ready to actually repent? If you're not even ready to pray that, pray this. God, I know there's things in my life that don't need to be there. And you and I both know I'm not getting rid of them anytime soon. Will you please move the needle for me? Will you just move me to a place where I no longer want these things in my life? Will you help me to progressively hate them? Let's just invite God to move us closer to repentance this morning if our hearts aren't moved to be ready for it. But for our hearts to be broken as God's heart is broken, we have to understand, I think, what God sees when we sin. I read somewhere that God's primary emotion towards us when we sin is not anger, it's pity. He hates that we have to do it. It's like a parent watching a child make decisions that are hurting them, and you just have to sit back and watch, and it breaks your heart. And I think what breaks the heart of God when we sin is knowing who you could be and who he created you to be, and knowing that you're allowing that sin to prohibit you from being exactly who God created you to be. Do you understand that when you carry around sin in your life chronically, that you've never even met yourself? Do you understand that? That when God formed you in the womb, he knew exactly who he wanted you to be, and he knew exactly the good work that you were created to walk in. And when you sin, you prohibit yourself from walking in that good work. You prohibit yourself from growing into the person that he created you to be, and so you've never even met yourself. Your spouse is married to some truncated, soul-sick version of you. Your kids are growing up in the home of a half-person who carries around sin. Sin is like a cancer that eats us silently from the inside out and destroys our souls. So when we carry around unrepentant sin, we are a person and a version of ourself that isn't who God created us to be, that isn't who God intended us to be, and no one that we're around gets to experience the fullness of who God is in us because we're soul sick. We're truncated versions of ourselves carrying around sin who have never been able to love our children as God intended us to love them and show them his grace because of our own mess. We're soul sick people who have never been able to love our husband and our wife and give them the spouse that they deserve and let them see God's love through us because we have cancer in our life that we are not addressing. And so it is right and good to learn to hate our sin. I saw this week, someone wrote, we've heard it said that you should love the sinner and hate the sin. He said, I tell you, love everyone and hate your own sin. I think that's a good place to start. So let's ask that God would bring us to that place. And as I dug into this prayer this week to share it with you and the heart of it, I noticed something else come out of David's prayer that I hadn't seen before. I think that when we think of repentance, we think of it exclusively as this thing that brings us low, this thing that humbles us, this thing that brings us to our knees before the Father. Repentance is a low point, and then God builds us up. It's a humbling, and that's it. But we're wrong when we think of it that way, because true repentance doesn't leave us brokenhearted. It restores us to joy. True repentance doesn't leave us brokenhearted. It doesn't leave us down here. It doesn't leave us scraping on the ground. It restores us to joy. It builds us back up. It restores us to our former life. Two times David prays this in a prayer of repentance. He includes this request twice, and I think it's amazing. In verse 8 and verse 12, he says in verse 8, let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones that you have broken rejoice. And then verse 12, restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold with me a willing spirit. In the midst of being brought low, you know what David asked for? Restore me to my former joy. Heal the bones that you've broken, God. And I was sitting chewing on that idea. How does repentance restore us to joy? And I felt like I was gaining on it, but I wasn't quite sure. I felt like I had my head around it, but I wasn't quite sure how to explain it to a room full of people to make it come alive for us. And I was just sitting in my office staring out the window for an hour thinking about this. You would have thought I was a crazy person if you walked by just this blank stare looking out the window. But after thinking through it for a while, I think the best way I can explain it is that the joy of repentance is the all clear after the cancer operation. The joy of repentance is the all clear after the cancer operation. You know, my family has been touched by cancer multiple times in multiple ways. And we all hate that C word. We all hate it. And it's touched all of us. It's scared all of us. It's cost all of us. And if you've been through the journey, you know how scary and uncertain it is. There are three families in the church who recently got that news. Hey, we found a mass. And that begins three weeks of praying and of testing and waiting for doctors to call back and uncertainty and trying to have a strong face, trying to put on a brave face, trying not to think about it every moment of every day, trying to get good sleep while you wait for this news. And sometimes you get the news, and it's like, it's benign, it's nothing, you're good. Oh, great. And then sometimes it's not that good news. And then sometimes we have to go through the whole cancer journey, and there's treatments, and there's chemo, and there's sickness, and there's a whole path that you have to go down. And sometimes, if you're fortunate, if they caught it early, if you got the cancer in the good spot where they can go get it and not the bad spot where they can't, sometimes they'll send you to surgery. And they'll go to that surgery, and they're hoping that they found it all. They know right where it is. They can get it, and they can sew you up, and you have a new lease on life. They're hoping they don't get in there and find more. And so if you're really lucky, after going through years of the cancer journey, the surgeon goes in there. He or she gets it all. And then they tell you afterwards, after you come back from the anesthesia, you're good. We got it. You're cancer free. Have you ever heard those sweet words about someone you love? That's the joy of repentance. You're cancer free, new lease on life.. That thing that was inside of you that was eating you from the inside out, that was destroying your body and destroying your health, that's not a part of your life anymore. Walk fresh, walk new, walk into a newness of life. There's going to be some recovery time. Don't like sprint, but you're good. Go. Experience joy. That's what repentance is. Repentance is handing Jesus the scalpel and saying, here, operate on me. I don't want this in my life anymore. I'm tired of this. I don't need it. Please, would you get rid of it and bring me closer to you? That's what true repentance is. And so the joy of true repentance is finding out that this cancer that we had in our soul that was making us soul sick, that was making us offer a truncated version of ourself to ourselves and those around us, what we find out is that's done, that's gone. You don't have to live with that anymore. Now walk in a newness of life that Jesus bought for you. That's repentance. David got that. That's how he was a man after God's own heart. And that's what I want for you this morning too. Those of you who carried sin in here, which is all of us, I want us to repent. I want us to hand the scalpel over to Jesus and say, would you please just come get it? I want you to be restored to joy of walking in freedom, of knowing there's nothing to hide, there's nothing to be ashamed of. I can skip, like Micah says, like a calf loosed from his stall, because we're free to love. That's what I want for you. And that's what repentance is. So in a second, I'm going to pray. And as I'm praying, Aaron's going to start to just play softly behind me. And when I'm done praying, I'll say amen. The lights will be down. And we're just going to be quiet for a minute. At least a full minute. And that's going to be your opportunity to respond to this. To what true repentance is. If your heart is ready to repent, repent. If it's not, ask God in the most honest prayer you can muster to move the needle. Take me to a place where I see my sin like you do. But I didn't want to talk about something like this without giving you the opportunity to respond to it in the moment. So not in the car, not later on, not tomorrow morning, right now, after I pray, you're going to have a silent minute or two to just bow your head and close your eyes and talk to the Father about whatever you need to talk to Him about. Let's pray. Father, You're good to us. Thank you for, through the cross, making repentance possible. Thank you for who you are and what you've done. Thank you for insisting on recording David's worst moment so that we could see what might be his best moment in Psalm 51 and his repentance. I'm reminded, Father, of the invitation to lay our burdens down at your feet, and so I pray that we would do that today. It's my earnest prayer that some of us would walk out this door this morning feeling a restoration of joy that we haven't felt in years. And God, it's my sincere prayer that if it doesn't happen this morning, that it will happen soon so that everyone who is in this room will get to experience the joy of walking with you and the people who are in the lives around the people in this room will get to meet them as you created them to be, maybe for the first time ever. But God, would you move in our hearts that we would see our sin as you see it and so be moved closer to a sincere repentance. Give us the faith and the courage to hand you the scalpel and to surrender to you removing things from our life. In Jesus' name, amen.

This is our summer series called One Hit Wonders. And I have an explanation for what the series is and why we're doing it. But really, the most honest, transparent thing to say is this is really just a vehicle so that we can stop and highlight some of the passages that we don't pay attention to as much sometimes. That's really what it is. To pull these passages out of the Bible that maybe in a normal sermon series we wouldn't normally hit. This morning we're going to be in the book of Micah, which if you have never looked for the book of Micah in your Bible before, now is probably a good time to start, okay, because it's a hard one to find. So you're going to need a few minutes before I get there. So if you have a Bible, open to Micah chapter 6. If you don't know where it is, I was trying to think of helpful ways to tell you that, and there are none, okay? It's just like most of the way through the Old Testament, probably use your table of contents if you need to, and good luck. But we wanted to, for the next six or seven weeks, take some time to highlight some of the passages that we just don't get to talk about in church as often. And so this morning, like I said, we're going to be in Micah chapter 6. As we approach Micah chapter 6, I wanted to tell you about a friend of mine. This is a friend of mine who grew up in North Georgia. I'm just going to grab a name out of the air. We'll call him Alan. Alan grew up in North Georgia. In his late teens, early 20s, I'm unsure of the exact timing, small town, he's driving around one night and doing something he shouldn't do, speeding or whatever. I forget the details of the story. But the fuzz gets after him, right? The law catches him and the blue lights come on. And here they come after Alan. And Alan thinks, maybe I can outrun these guys. Maybe I can duck away and not get in trouble because my parents are going to be mad. I think the story goes, pulls into a driveway and thinks he's hiding out. The officer pulls up behind him. He knows good and well who it is. The officer knows good and well who's driving this car because, again, it's a small town in North Georgia. He gets out of the car and he pulls his pants up likey police officers did, you know. And he looks at him and he says, son, you done boogered up. Which I just love that phrase. That's just such a good southern phrase. Son, you done boogered up. And you know it. Like you know you're in trouble. You messed up. You know you messed up. And now you know that there's going to be consequences. And I bring that up because I think we've all felt like that. Oh, man, I done boogered up. I think that we know people who have messed up. We have people that we probably could have said that to in our lives. And I think the tendency there, when we mess up real bad, is to try to figure out what can we do to make it right. I think of a husband who's messed up in some significant way. He's just been drifting away from the family for a while. He did one big dumb thing. He's not paying attention to the kids. He's a grump whenever he comes home. He's selfish in the way that he spends his time. Something, some way that a husband can mess up and we're all capable of messing up. Wives are not. Wives are great and we just need to try to get on board with them. But husbands mess up and when we mess up, I've been in so many conversations with guys after they've messed up and they think to themselves, what can I do to make it right? What can I do? I've boogered up. What can I do so that my wife knows I love her? Should I give her a day at the spa? Like a girl's trip? This is really bad. Do I buy her a new car? Like a hundred roses spread throughout the house? Like is this what I do? Do I buy her jewelry, like something big and nice? Like, what's the grand gesture that I can do that when she is the recipient of it, she will go, oh, he loves me. Everything's good. You're forgiven. That's what we're looking for, right, is that grand gesture. But here's the thing. Here's the thing about marriage when we really mess it up. And when the husband comes to me and he says, what can I do? What can I buy her? What can I give her? What big extravagant thing can I do for her? I always say like, dude, she doesn't want a day at the spa. She wants you to do the dishes. She doesn't want a hundred roses. She wants you to cut the grass without complaining about it. She doesn't want a big grand gesture. She wants you to get up with the kids when you don't have to. She wants you to offer to do bedtime and bath time. She wants you to clean the kitchen. She wants you to do these small, consistent behaviors that spring from a sincere love. And you know what she wants? She wants you to be a good husband, man. You don't get to act however you want for a month and then spend a bunch of money at the end of the month and be like, see, we're good. Grand gestures are never in a real relationship. In a relationship where we genuinely love one another, where the other person matters to us, grand gestures are almost never the thing that communicates the love that we feel for them. And the truth of marriage and the truth of relationships is that when we mess up, what we really need to do to make it right is just small, consistent, simple behaviors over time that flow out of a sincere love. Show them. Don't tell them that you love them. Don't tell them. Don't make some big promise, some big commitment. I promise I'm going to get up every day and I'm going to do this and I'm going to come home and I'm going to do this. Don't do that stuff. Just start doing it, right? And I'll just throw in this little tip. I don't like to give tips for my marriage because I don't like to set myself up like I'm some sort of good husband here, But this one I think I've learned. If you'll be consistent with these little things over time and do the dishes and get up with the kids and show on a daily basis that you love her, the pressure's kind of off for the big grand gestures. You don't have to do those as much. Now, if you can do both of them, I would imagine that's really firing on all cylinders. I have not experienced that. I try to invest in the little things, you know. But the grand gestures aren't really needed as much. And you know what's interesting to me is that that's how we as people work. Just give me the consistent things. Just show me that you actually love me. Just be a good husband. Just be a good friend. Just be a good wife. Just be a good son or a daughter. That's what we need. And what's interesting to me is that God is no different. If we think about our relationship with God, to be a Christian for any amount of time is to come to the conclusion that we've done boogered up. We've messed it up. I've disappointed God. I ought to know better by now, and I'm still doing this. I didn't even know I was capable of becoming this version of myself, and now look at me, I feel shameful. To be a believer is to come to a conclusion at some point or another that we have let God down, that we have messed up. And I've talked with people. I've felt these emotions. What can I do to show God that I love him? I get on my knees, I'll pray, I'll commit. I used to work at a summer camp, man. And the summer camp, I got to the point just callously and skeptically. At the end of the week, we would do a campfire, right? And there's a campfire and we sing songs and we've been pumping these kids, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus all week. And it's good. And the things that happen at camp are wonderful are wonderful and life changing and I trace a significant event in my spiritual formation back to the first time I went to a particular camp. So I think that they're incredibly effective in the lives, in our spiritual lives. But these campfire moments where these kids come forward and they make these big grand promises. I'm going to go home and I'm going to break up with my boyfriend and I'm never going to talk to them again. I'm going to make a bunch of new friends and I'm never going to do this. You're just kind of sitting there as a counselor and you go, I made that promise. You're going to fail. You're not going to do that. But it's our tendency to want to try to find these promises to make to God, to make this big grand gesture. God, what do you want from me? What can I give you? What do you ask of me? I want to show you that I love you. And this is actually the same place that the ancient Hebrew people found themselves. When we get to the book of Micah, I'm not going to give you all the background to the book of Micah for the sake of time and your interest level. But what I will say is that God's people, the Hebrew people, the Israelites, were far from him. They had been wandering from him. They had thrown off his rules. They had thrown off his reign and his sovereignty, and they had begun to live by their own rules. And because of that, they were suffering in their sin. And by the end of Micah chapter 6, these prophets would try to shake them and get their attention. And by the end of Micah, they had gotten, Micah had successfully gotten their attention and they were ready to repent. They're ready to come back to God. And so they go to God and they say, what do you want from us? We've messed up. We've done, boogered up. What do you want from us? And that's kind of, that's the questions that we see in verses six and seven. So I want to read those to you first. We be right with God. They realize they've messed up. They want to fix it. God, what do you want from us? What can we do? Can I offer you oil of a thousand rivers? Do you want a hundred calves that are a year old? Do you want my firstborn, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? Now they're getting into hyperbole. Whatever you want, God, I'll give you. Whatever grand gesture, whatever I need to do, whatever promise. You want all my money? You want me to stroke a check for everything in my bank account? I'll do it, God. Just tell me that you love me and that we're good. This is the place of desperation that they've reached. And it's a place, again, as believers, that I believe that we are familiar with. God, I've messed up. I've become someone that I didn't know I could become. What should I do now? How do I make this up to you? What do you want from me? Whatever you want, I will do. And I love God's response in verse 8. You know how you can make it right with me? You know what you need to do so that we can be good? I'll tell you. Verse 8, he has told you, oh man, what is good and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God. I'll read it again because it's worth it. He has told you, oh man, what is good and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God. I love this passage because it distills down so much the complication of scripture. You know what God wants from you? You know what he wants you to do? He wants you to seek justice. He wants you to love kindness. He wants you to walk humbly with him. Really, at the end of the day, God wants what we want when someone has messed up with us. He wants us to just simply show him that we actually mean it, that we actually love him. He doesn't look for a big grand gesture. God asks for simple behaviors born out of sincere love. And if I had the notes to do over again, I would put the word consistent in there. So if you're a note taker, put that in there for me so I feel better about things. God asks for simple, consistent behaviors that are born out of a sincere love. If we want our wives to forgive us and to know that we mean it, be better husbands. You want God to forgive you and know that you mean it, be better children. He doesn't need the oil from a thousand rivers. He's got all the oil he could want. He doesn't need your bank account. He's got a big one. He doesn't need your time and your energy and your talent. He created everybody, and he can use a donkey to speak to people. He does not need me. You want to show God that you love him. You want to know what God wants from you. It's simple, consistent behaviors born out of a sincere love. And I really love the simplicity of this truth. I love how resonant this is and what it does for us in our thinking about our spiritual life because I think it's entirely possible for someone to be new to the faith and be intimidated by it. This is a thick book. It's a complicated book. It's hard to know everything in here. I would bet if you're a student of the Word, if you listen to sermons regularly, I very much hope that you regularly encounter things that you did not know before, that you had not heard before. I think it's part of the Christian experience for there to be a spiritual question that we can't answer because we don't know the Bible well enough, or to learn something about Scripture and see it be incongruent with another part of Scripture and not know how to harmonize those things. And so I think that Scripture itself can be intimidating. I think that the idea of living a Christian life can be intimidating. The idea of being spiritually healthy can be intimidating and it can be big and it can be confusing. And sometimes it's hard to know where to begin. And for those of us that feel like that, kind of mystified by the whole Christian life and all the learning from us that it requires, this verse is incredibly helpful because it takes everything that we're trying to piece together and distills it down into the simplest form. Listen, just seek justice and love mercy and walk humbly with God. Just do those things and the rest of it will help make sense. Seniors, as you go into your own lives and you make your own decisions for what you want your faith to be and how you want to live that out. You will have any number of messages coming from the world about what it should look like and how it should be shaped and what you should believe and what you should think is right and who you should affirm and who you should do all these things for. Listen, if your faith seeks justice and loves mercy and walks humbly with God, you're on the right track. For the rest of us confused about our faith sometimes, intimidated by what it means to be a Christian and not really sure, is this a sin? Is that a sin? Is this right? Is that wrong? How do I do this? What do I do there? Do this first. Seek justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God. I think the opposite is true too, the way that this simplifies things. Some of us have been walking with God for a long time. Some of us know the Bible very well. And some of us have the tendency and the mindset to kind of get entrenched in the details, to get mired in the details and in the dogma and how it all pieces together in a good systematic theology. And we like to deep dive into books and parse out individual words and sentences and tenses and understand what does this mean in context and this and how does it relate to this. And we can fire off all those things and do those studies. And listen to me, those studies are valuable. They're good. They're profitable. They're beneficial. They build us up. They're helpful. It's good to understand the Bible on a granular level like that. But if that's the only place that we live, is on that granular level, if that's the only place we go and we get mired in the details, sometimes we forget about the themes of the Bible and the whole purpose of the Bible. And this verse kind of helps to pull us up out of that and help us give a 30,000 foot view of the Bible and go, I need to seek justice. I need to love mercy. I need to walk humbly with my God. And it helps to pull us down. If our heads are in the clouds and we're confused, it helps to bring us down and center us. So this verse is a wonderful, settling verse. We love it so much that we have it displayed in our home to remind us consistently that these are the things that we need to champion in our house. Because they're so vital, because Micah in this book, in his message to the Israelites and then in turn to us, highlights these things as vital practices, seeking justice and loving kindness and walking humbly with God. I believe it's worth our time to think about this morning what it means to actually do those things. What does it mean to seek justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with God? And so as I thought about justice, and some translations, mine says that you should do justice. Other translations say that you should seek justice. And so as I thought about it, I thought of this idea. I don't think that what he's telling us to do is to seek justice for ourselves. I don't think that we should do justice for ourselves. I don't think that we're to seek out our own justice. And justice is someone getting what they deserve. Whether it be a warranted punishment for a sin committed or whether it be a right wrong. Someone's been treated unfairly and we're trying to right that wrong. And I think more often than not, the type of justice that we're supposed to seek for other people is not punitive justice. We shouldn't be trying to punish them, but we should be trying to restore people who have been mistreated. And this idea of seeking justice, again, is not for us. I don't think the message of seeking justice for yourself is really congruent with the gospel message. Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, to go the extra mile, that we're to reciprocate evil with kindness. So I don't think it's really congruent in the gospel message that we should in 2021 be running around concerned about our own justice. I think the heart of God is that we would seek justice for others. And so here's the thing about justice. And this is for me, okay? This is something I thought of this week. So try it on with skepticism. This is not gospel truth. I didn't get this from some smart pastor or theologian. I made it up, okay? So you try that on for whatever it's worth. If it fits in your life, good. If not, it doesn't hurt my feelings. But here's what I think about justice, particularly as we seek it for other people. Justice always flows downhill. If we're going to seek justice for others, we can really only seek it for those that don't have the voice or influence or power that we do. We don't seek justice for people who have a greater voice or influence than us. If Jeff Bezos is wrongfully imprisoned, he doesn't need your help. He doesn't collectively need our help. He's good. We can't get him any resources or voice or influence or power that he doesn't have access to. He's fine. But we have a girl here named Jen Taylor who's involved in a ministry called Refugee Hope. There's a whole community of refugees that live behind the Falls Village Shopping Center over there on Falls in the News. And on July 11th, we're going to actually have a whole Sunday dedicated to highlighting our ministry partners, and we're going to get to talk to her, and I'm really excited about that. But those people who live in those apartments, they don't have the voice and the influence that Grace does. If we want to seek justice, we seek it for people like them. A really easy application of this, because you might think, I don't have voice. I don't have influence. How do I seek justice for other people? An easy way to do this is when a kid's getting bullied. Right? We're on the cul-de-sac or we're at the park or we just happen to notice and we see some older kids picking on a younger kid. Nothing riles me up more than watching a kid get bullied. I used to be a teacher and there was a kid getting bullied in my class and I sent him to the office to get something I didn't need and I laid into the girls that were making fun of him and they cried and I felt better. Maybe someone needed to seek justice on me after that moment. But we can insert ourselves there. That kid's not getting treated fairly. I want to let them know that that's not okay to do. This community of people isn't getting what they deserve. I want to be an advocate to get them what they deserve. I have a friend who started a ministry. He became aware of a trailer park community that was 85% Mexican immigrant. And the children were English speakers and the parents were not. And it was really hard for them to make their way in society. And so they got involved simply by bringing a turkey for Thanksgiving one year. And that developed into a multi-state ministry called Path Project, where they go and they partner with these people and they get adults in there to teach the adults English as a second language. They teach them to go into the schools and be advocates for their children so that they can seek justice on their own behalf. And that's what godly justice looks like, is using our voice to bring about fairness for someone who doesn't have the voice or the influence that we do. That's seeking justice. And I say that because if we're growing in our walks with God, if our hearts are beginning to beat more like his, then we will be people who regularly seek justice for those who don't have the voice that we do. And I think it's important for us to point that out in church because I grew up in church. I grew up in church in the South. I know what institutional religion looks like. And I have watched over and over again people in the church choose to use their voice to try to convince victims that they're not victims instead of trying to help the victims that are being hurt. If we're growing in our heart with God, we will be far more interested in helping victims than we are in trying to convince them and others that they're not actually victims. And if they'll just suck it up, if they'll just take ownership, if they'll just do what I did, then they'll be okay. That's not what the heart of God says. And I don't want to be a part of a church that is more interested in trying to convince others that they're not actually suffering than they are in actually doing something about the suffering. So we need to be a church that seeks justice, that leverages our voice and influence to help people who don't have the voice and influence that we do. As we seek justice, we're also told to love kindness. And I don't have any great insight to you on what kindness is. You're grown-ups. I think you'd get it. If you don't know what kindness is, just go talk to my wife. She's really nice. She'll tell you. We know what it is to be kind. But what I wanted to think about as we think about this idea of kindness is that kindness is most helpful, it is most effective where it is least warranted. Kindness is most effective where it is least warranted, right? We know this. It's really easy to be nice to someone who's nice to you. Again, my wife, Jen, she just drips kindness. And I have watched people in my life who I know are not kind people, and they are just butter in her hands. They just respond with kindness to her because that's how she acts towards everyone. It's really easy to be kind to someone when they're kind to you. But what about being kind to people that we don't have anything to gain from? Right? We've heard this before. You can tell someone's character by how they treat somebody they have nothing to gain from. What about when I don't need anything from you? I don't need you to like me. I don't need your money. I don't need your support. I don't need you to play my kid in the game. I don't need you to give my kid a good grade. I don't need this sale to go through. I don't need anything you have to offer me. There is nothing. You are literally bankrupt in my economy. You have nothing that I need. And yet we'd be kind to that person anyways. What about when someone is unkind to us and we feel like they don't deserve our kindness? Isn't that when kindness is most effective? When someone's been unkind to you, when everyone around you is telling you, yeah, you can be a jerk back to them, you need to put them in their place, and we choose to respond with measured kindness anyways, isn't that a more effective kindness? And when we are kind in these incredibly effective ways, I'll tell you, it makes an impact. When I was six or seven years old, I went with my church at the time, Grace Fellowship Church, to my first overnight summer camp, Word of Life Camp down in Florida. And I was newer to the church and young, and most of the kids on the trip were a little bit older than me. And so I was pretty intimidated by the whole deal, right? And so it's the classic scary moment of getting breakfast on the first morning and looking at the cafeteria and going, I don't have any friends here. I don't know what I'm going to do. You know, that terrifying moment of where in the world am I going to sit and how's this going to go? And so I just find a seat, sit down in the middle of the table somewhere. And I'll never forget the pastor's wife, a woman named Jody Hoffman. She comes and she sits down across from me. Which, as soon as she did that, I felt more important. I felt valued. I felt seen. I felt like this breakfast was going to be okay. Because here's the pastor's wife sitting down with me. And I remember at the time, even at six or seven years old, having the wherewithal to acknowledge this as kindness. She's not sitting here because she wants to. She's sitting here because she knows I'm alone and I'm scared and she wants to be kind to me. And now she's going to make conversation with me even though she doesn't know how to do that. And listen, that in and of itself is a remarkable act of kindness. I'm the pastor. I love your children. I want my hugs when they get here, and I want my high fives when they get here. I don't want to have breakfast with them. I don't want to do that. She sat down and she had breakfast with me. Not only that, I was so nervous about this breakfast and not messing it up, that somehow or another when I reached for something, I knocked over my milk. I knocked over my milk directly into her tray of French toast. I felt terrible. I'm scrambling. I'm apologizing. I'm near teary-eyed. I'm so, so sorry. I'll get you some more French toast. And she calms me down. She puts her hand on the table. She says, Nathan, it's okay. Calm down. It's all right. It's all right. I said, no, I'm so sorry to ruin your breakfast. And she said, I actually, I like milk on my French toast. And I'm like, you do? Yeah. Sometimes at the house I do this when there's no one else around. I like to, I like eating my French toast like this. Really? She goes, yeah, look. She takes a bite of it. That woman sat there and ate milky French toast for a whole breakfast so some dumb six-year-old wouldn't feel bad about himself. That's remarkable kindness. It's remarkable kindness. And listen, I promise you this. Here's what I promise. She doesn't remember that. I haven't talked to Jodi in years, but if I could talk to her this morning and say, do you remember the time at Word of Life that I dumped milk on your French toast and you ate it anyways? I promise you she had no recollection of that. That was probably the third milky French toast she ate that week, okay? She's just that kind of person. She's that kind of nice. It meant nothing to her than just being kind in the moment. But here we are 35 years later and I remember it and it stands out as this mark of kindness that someone treated me with. That kindness when it's least warranted is most effective. Maybe there's someone at your work who's not being kind to you. Maybe your boss is running your rag and maybe there's a co-worker who's not treating you with the respect that you deserve. Maybe you're kind of getting run over there and it's getting frustrated and you want to stand up for yourself, but you keep being kind because of your witness and because that's how you're wired. And let me tell you something, even if that person isn't responding to your kindness the way you wish they would, the people around you see it and they're going to tell your story for years. We have an opportunity to be kind to people that we get nothing from. They're going to remember that for years. My father-in-law, you know I like to brag on him. He lived in a community where they had a joint landscaping service. People who would come around and cut the grass. It was part of their HOA. It was part of the deal. He doesn't have to pay them anything. He doesn't owe them anything. He can't get any more or less service out of them without going through this big contract or whatever. He's got nothing to gain from being nice to these guys, yet every time they came, he would have a cooler full of drinks and fruit to refresh them on the summer days. They knew when they got to his house. You don't think they remember that house? Do they remember the people who worked there? When we have opportunities to show unwarranted kindness, it is incredibly effective. And lastly, God tells us that we should walk humbly with him. We're to walk humbly with our God. And so I was thinking through, how do I explain this humility? How do we walk humbly with our God? And the only conclusion that I could reach is that the deeper you go, the more humble you become. The deeper you go with God, the more you walk with him, the more you know him, the more your heart beats like his, the more humble of a person you become in your faith. I actually think of it like this. A few years ago, reading a book, I came across like this, a bell curve. And the idea of the bell curve was the ignorance of expertise, and I thought it absolutely applied to what we're doing. So we created this for you today to kind of take a look at. I think that this is how we get to humility. I think at the beginning of our Christian walk, we have this ignorance of beginning, right? We're just starting off. We don't know the whole Bible. All I know is that I'm a sinner in need of God and Jesus' sacrifice, and I'm putting my faith in that, and I'm going to kind of trust the people around me to show me the way. I love these people. I love the church people who are in the ignorance of beginning. There's no pretension. They're willing to ask any question. These are the people that always ask the good questions in Bible study. I love having these people in Bible study. Those people in the middle, arrogance and familiarity, they're bummers in Bible study. I don't want them anywhere near my Bible study. They know all the answers. They know everything. They're really, really smart. They can answer all your questions for you. But the ones at the beginning, man, they got the great questions. And they're not arrogant at all because they don't think they know any more than anybody else. Then what happens is we start to learn a little something. Start to piece some things together. We come to church often enough. We've got our Bible kind of scratched up and marked up. And then eventually we get to this arrogance of familiarity where we know enough to start being able to answer questions. People are coming to us asking us questions. What does the Bible say about this? What do you think about this? We start to teach it to others. And we start to be pretty confident in this theological system that we've built up, that this is going to have all the answers for life, and I've got the answer if you'll just come to me and ask me. This is where I lived in my 20s and most of my 30s. I hope that I'm on the other side of that now. I hope I'm not an arrogant jerk about my spirituality. Maybe I am, and this is exhibit A, but I hope not. And I think people get stuck there. People get stuck there because they quit learning and growing because Christianity for them is an intellectual exercise of how much of this can I understand and how much of this can I explain to other people and how many answers can I know and am I going to be the one in my circle of friends that people come to for advice? This becomes a place where Christians get stuck. We get caught up with theology and knowing the Bible and this intellectual knowledge never becomes a heart knowledge that we actually live out. And let me tell you something, that place, the arrogance, familiarity, that's a dangerous place. I'm very tempted to go off on denominations and things going on in our church and in our culture. The American church right now precisely because of this, because of people and leadership who have never moved past the arrogance of familiarity. It really gets us in trouble. But I just happen to believe that the more you know of God, the deeper you go, the more about his character that you learn, the more sincerely and honestly you read the Bible and let it rip you open and respond to that, the more humbly we approach God and spiritual things that we eventually arrive at this place of the humility of expertise. And the humility of expertise, we know how much we don't know. So we're not arrogant about the peace that we do. And the humility of expertise, we remember who we were when we had the arrogance of familiarity. We remember how we were teaching other people that you ought not do these things. How we were raising our kids telling them you shouldn't be like this. You shouldn't have that attitude. You shouldn't do this thing. Knowing good and darn well that we did those things. And the arrogance of familiarity to get to the expertise of humility. We know that we've walked through a season where we were the biggest hypocrites around. We're coming to church acting like we've got everything together. We're teaching a Bible study, telling everybody this is what the Bible means, this is what we have to do. And we know good and well that we're not living it out in our own private life. We know good and well that we've become a person that we can't identify anymore. That we've slipped so far into sin that we didn't even know we were capable of that. And yet, in our arrogance and in our hypocrisy, God continued to bless us. He continued to use us. He continued to forgive us. He continued to restore us. He continued to be there every time we cried out for him and said, God, this is the last time I'm going to need you. I'm not going to do this again. And he loved you and he rushed in recklessly with his grace, even though he knew you weren't going to keep that promise either. We've received that love enough times that we've moved into this place of humility because we know who we were and we know who God forgave. And how could we possibly judge other people? How could we possibly think that we're more than somebody else or that we're better than somebody else or that we know more than them because we've seen God forgive us? We know what we walked through. How could we not want to offer that forgiveness and understanding and empathy to others? Really and truly, I don't think we ever get to the humility of expertise if we don't begin to practice seeking justice and loving kindness. I think the way that we get stuck there is just to be satisfied with knowing the things that we know and never learning anything else. Knowing the things that we know and not feeling encumbered with expressing the other sides of ourselves. I have watched people over the years get their heads full of Bible knowledge and it turned them into more of a jerk. Because now I'm right and I don't need you. It's incredibly sad to me when that happens. And I would say to you this, if practicing your faith doesn't cause you to trend towards Micah 6.8, then you need to rethink how your faith is practiced. If as you grow, as you go to church, as you go to small group, as you learn more about the Bible, as you grow in your faith, if it does not trend towards seeking justice and loving to show kindness and walking in humility with God because you know who you are and where you've come from and you want to offer that same love to other people, if it doesn't trend in that direction, you need a new faith, man. This is a hard one for me, okay? It's a hard one for me. I don't know if you guys have pieced this together yet. I do not love kindness. That does not come naturally from me, okay? Any kindness I show is a direct result of the Spirit's hard and arduous work in my heart. But if our faith doesn't grow us and move us into a place where we want to seek justice for others, where we want to leverage our voice for those that have a smaller one, where we love showing kindness more than we love reciprocity, then we need a new faith. And if over time as we grow with God, we don't walk humbly with him because we know who we are and what we've been forgiven of and we want to offer that to others, if we don't walk in that, then we're not growing how we should and we should change how our faith is practiced. You know, right now, as we come out of COVID and things start to feel normal again, right? There's a lot of talk in church world about what does churches look like? And what everybody knows, what every pastor in America knows is essentially we've got to rebuild the church. Okay. February of 2020, for those of you who are around, was like one of the all-time highs of grace. We had record attendance for years prior to going back to years prior to that record attendance. People, you guys were enthusiastic. We had people coming out of our ears. It was super fun. We finished up a building campaign. I don't even know if you guys know that we're still doing that. We're still in the middle of a building campaign. It ends February coming up. I'm going to highlight it in the fall as we kind of make the push for the home stretch, but it's entirely possible for you to have been coming to this church for like a year and this be news to you. It's just kind of been quietly going in the background with faithful folks and it's been amazing. But we're in the middle of doing that. We were really, really humming. And then COVID hit. And within a couple months, I realized very quickly, oh, we're not going to see February numbers again for a while. Might not ever. And that's all right, too. But we're going to have to rebuild this church. We have to rebuild volunteer teams. All of our volunteer teams need new people. All of them. All of them. Most importantly, children and AV. Greg and Laura Taylor, I think we have to pay them to keep them on retainer now. They volunteer so much. We need volunteers across the board. We're going to have to rebuild the church. And as we look to rebuild the church, you know, I pay attention to pastor things, to conferences. I watch videos of guys teaching about growth strategy and yada, yada, yada. And there's all these strategies out there. There's all these things. You develop a goal, and then the goal gives you a vision, and then the vision gives you a strategy. Your strategy gives you tactics, and the tactics give you results. Gross. Gross. Get it away from me. I don't like any of that garbage. Because here's what I think. You give me a church that lives this out. You give me a church that seeks justice and loves showing kindness and walks humbly with God, you can keep your tactics. You're never going to hear me get up here and be like, if you'll just invite one person, and that person invites two people. I hate that stuff. Share your faith. Talk to your friends. Seek justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with your God. If we have a church full of people who do that, we're going to need a bigger building. And listen to me, I mean this with absolute authenticity. More than I've ever meant it. I don't give a rip about growing this church. I don't care about being in charge of a church that's growing and has more people coming. That's not the point at all. The point is to care for the people that God sends us, to be good stewards of the souls that walk through that door that call grace home. And we're not going to be good stewards of them if we've got some stupid strategy to get their butt in the seat and then nothing to take care of their soul after that. I don't care. But if we'll seek justice and we'll love kindness and walk humbly with our God, we'll be ready to care for the people that he sends us. That's what matters to me. If we'll live out this verse, God's going to do cool things with grace because you've been faithful to him. What can happen in this church if we embody that verse? What can happen in your life if you embody that verse? What kind of stories will people be telling from you 35 years from now if you'll simply do these things? What kind of richness and joy and peace can you experience if we'll simply follow God's advice and distill our faith down to these simple practices? I want us to be people who seek justice, understanding that it flows downhill, and use our voice not to convince people they aren't victims, but to help them in their pain. I want us to love kindness so much that we show it when it's least warranted. And I want us to be people who have the grace and honesty to walk humbly with God and empathetically with others. And if we do that, I think God's going to do amazing things in our lives and the life of our church. Let's pray. Father, you are overwhelmingly good to us. You love us recklessly and unconditionally. You forgive us again and again and again. You restore us in the middle of our arrogance. You seek us in the midst of our ignorance. God, I pray that you would draw us into the humility that comes from walking with you, From praying to you. From talking to you. God, I pray for these seniors as they leave their homes and they go to become the people that you designed them and created them to be. Would they be people who whatever else happens to them would seek justice and love, mercy, and walk humbly with you as they learn and try on and exercise their new faiths? Father, for the rest of us, would we be a church, really and truly God, who just does those things? Would we be a church who just seeks you out and then seeks to show your love to other people? Would we be a church that's just characterized by simple, consistent behaviors that spring out of a sincere love for you? We just ask that you would give us a deeper love. Even as we finish and sing here this morning, enlarging our hearts to you and what you're doing in our lives. It's in your son's name we ask all of these things. Amen.