Nehemiah

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody, particularly the UNC fans this morning. If you don't know this about me, I'm wearing neutral colors, but that's really what we're wearing today. This is just to keep you guys from getting mad at me. I would like to personally thank Alan Hill, Kyle's future father-in-law, for inviting me to their UNC tailgate yesterday, where I was able to bring what is apparently my son, who is a good luck charm, and we won, which was great. And you'll have to forgive my exuberance. Georgia Tech doesn't get a lot to cheer for. This is essentially my national championship, okay? This is the one time in a calendar year I've been able to be proud to be a Georgia Tech Yellow Jacket. As a matter of fact, I think the last time was when we beat UNC last year in Atlanta. So I'm high on the hog right now. All right, thank you for indulging me that. I'm sorry, I'll settle down. But we are in the fifth part of our series called Powerful Prayers, where we're looking at prayers that we find in Scripture and just examining them, seeing what we can learn from them, from the heart that's revealed in them. And I thought that we would be remiss if we didn't ask the question for ourselves as we look at powerful prayers, how can we become more powerful prayers? How can we become more powerful and more consistent in our prayers, right? How can we be people of prayer? I know that for many of us, you share my experience. To be a Christian for a while is to hear things like, man, you should probably pray more. And instantly you go, yeah, I should. It's a thing that we know. So how do we go from knowing that we should pray more, that it should define us more, that we should be what's called people of prayer, people who are defined by a rich and vibrant prayer life? How do we go from knowing that to actually doing it, to actually experiencing it? How do we become more powerful prayers? And to answer this question, I think we can look at an example tucked away in an Old Testament story. We're going to be in the book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah is tough to find. If you don't know where it is, just use your table of contents. But turn there with me if you want to. We're going to be in chapters 1 and 2. Now, Nehemiah is one of my favorite stories in the Bible. I know that doesn't carry any weight with you guys because all the stories that I talk about are my favorite stories in the Bible. I get that. But I love the story of Nehemiah because it's such a great picture of how we are supposed to build God's church here as Grace Raleigh, but how God intends to build his church in Raleigh, how God intends to build his church in America, how God intends to build his church internationally. I think what we find in Nehemiah is examples and lessons for how God intends to build his church that have applications all over how we think of church. But I don't get to talk about that this morning. I just get to say it and hope that it sparks enough interest in you to go read it and figure it out for yourself. What I do get to focus on is the prayer life of Nehemiah. So I want to look at this instance, this little snapshot of his life at the beginning of his story. We encounter him when he is the cupbearer for King Artaxerxes. Now, Nehemiah is a Jewish man who was carried over after the Babylonians conquered Israel or Judea, and they carried the best and the brightest over to Babylon to be slaves. And clearly, Nehemiah was a sharp man. He was a trustworthy man because he made it up the ladder to where he is the cupbearer for the most powerful king in the world. This is the man, Artaxerxes, that called himself the king of kings. He was the king of Persia and Babylon and Egypt all at the same time. So we're going to call it the Babylonian empire, but it's really, it's even larger than that. And here Nehemiah finds himself as the cup bearer to King Artaxerxes. And one day Nehemiah gets word that his hometown Jerusalem has been just laid waste, that the walls are torn down, they're broken down, and the city has been destroyed. And this is a big deal in the ancient world for a city not to have walls, because when a city doesn't have walls, it has no defense. Anybody around it that wants to come in and take from the city whatever they want, just with enough swords can come in and take what they want. They have no defense. They lay vulnerable to the entire countryside, to the entire surrounding countries. This city is vulnerable to whatever they want to come and do to it. And so Nehemiah goes into this phase of fasting and mourning and sadness and prayer because he's distraught over his hometown, Jerusalem. And you've got to remember, too, it's not just finding out that your hometown has been ransacked. That hometown, I'm not going to get into it too much this morning, but that hometown represents promises from God that the Jewish people clung to all the way back to Abraham, all the way back to Genesis chapter 12. And so it's not just that the hometown lays in rubble, it's that he's feeling that his promises from God need to be restored. And so in his spirit, he's wrestling with all this and trying to figure out what to do. And so when he heard this news, this is Nehemiah's response. In chapter 1, O Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keeps his commandment. And then in verse six, I just go on. Let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for the people of Israel, your servants. And so he goes on and on praying, but he essentially prays that Israel would be restored. God, hear my prayer. Hear the prayer of your servants in Israel. Restore Jerusalem to its former glory. Let the walls be rebuilt. And in the interim, you know that Nehemiah, it's implied all throughout the passage, is wondering, what can I do? How can I help? God, what would you have me do to fix this problem? I'm a thousand miles away, the cupbearer for a king. How could I possibly help repair the walls of Jerusalem? But I guess at some point or another, he gets an idea. And we see him admit to this idea in Nehemiah chapter 2, when he's in the throne room of Artaxerxes. And Artaxerxes notices that he's sad. And this is not a good thing because when you serve the ancient kings, you needed to be glad to be in their presence. You needed to be happy, okay? You had to fake it until you made it. You did not want to be bummed out and depressed and bring in your bad mood into their presence. But Artaxerxes cares about Nehemiah, and he notices that he's downtrodden. He notices that he's been bummed out the last little while, and so he asks him about it. And this is the interchange between the two of them in Nehemiah 2, verses 2 through 5. Yeah, why should not my face be sad when the city, the place of my father's graves lies in ruins and its gates have been destroyed by fire? Then the king said to me, what are you requesting? So I prayed to the God of heaven and I said to the king, if it pleases the king and if your servant has found favor in your sight, then you send me to Judah, to the city of my father's graves, that I might rebuild it. So he's in the presence of the king. And he's clearly depressed. And the king says, Nehemiah, what's been going on, man? You're sad. You're sulking. You're not sick. So your heart is sick. What's going on? And he was afraid, but he admitted to it. The city of my fathers and my grandfathers has been torn to rubble. And then Artaxerxes says, what are you asking? What are you requesting? And then I love that phrase that he stopped, he paused. Nehemiah paused in the middle of what was going on and he offered a prayer to the God in heaven. And he asked for a blessing from God before he asked for the blessing from Artaxerxes. God, I'm about to ask this really bold thing. God, this request could potentially cost me some jail time or my life if he decides he's in a bad mood. So I need you to bless this for me real quick and just confirm for me that this is actually the idea that you placed in my mind before I submitted to the king. So he stops and he prays. He says, God, bless this. And then he turns to Artaxerxes and he tells him what he wants to do. And Artaxerxes is moved by Nehemiah, cares for his servant, and releases him to do that. Not only does he release him to do that, but he hands him a letter. It's a letter of free passage through each province between Babylon and Jerusalem. And it's a letter that once he gets to Jerusalem, that he can get all of the lumber and all of the stone that he needs to complete the wall and he can bill it to Artaxerxes himself. So it went pretty well for Nehemiah. But the reason I'm focusing on the story when we ask the question, how do we become more powerful prayers, is because Nehemiah models the importance of scheduled and spontaneous prayers. In Nehemiah, we find the model of a life of a person who is a person of prayer. He models both scheduled and spontaneous prayers. He models scheduled prayers. When he heard about the destruction of Jerusalem, he went into a time of mourning and fasting. He picked the time when he was gonna sit down and more likely kneel before the Father. And just as an aside, in your prayers, if you're able, I don't know if some of us are not, if you're able to kneel when you pray, it really changes your mindset as you pray. I would encourage you as a regular practice to be someone who kneels when you can. But Nehemiah was likely kneeling to pray. He set this time aside and he poured his heart out to God. He prayed everything that was on his heart. And so he models for us scheduled prayers. The greatest model for us of scheduled prayers in the Bible that I see is Daniel. Daniel set aside three times a day to pray. And we've preached about him before. But that's the first place where I would push you a little bit. In your own prayer life, whatever your regularity is, however much you pray, however often it is, if it's not very often at all or if it's very, very regularly, I would encourage you to follow the model and the example of Nehemiah and of Daniel and schedule your times to pray. And we all know this is true. You've heard this before. People have told you this. You've heard this in seminars. You hear this in corporate world. We hear it in church world. Someone, one of your friends has told it to you over lunch as if they've unearthed some sort of wisdom that's never occurred to you before when they tell you, if you don't schedule it, it won't happen, right? We know that. We know that to be true. This is America. We schedule things. We're very busy. We're the busiest. We have not, Europe has figured it out. We have not figured it out. We're a bunch of dum-dums. We just, I mean, every block of time that we have is scheduled out. And so what we know is if we don't schedule it, it's not going to happen. How many of you, don't raise your hand, but how many of you have left church or left a small group or read a book, something that emphasized prayer and thought to yourself, I'm gonna pray more. But you didn't pick a time to do it. You didn't commit to a set schedule of it. And then you didn't pray more. I think it's probably happened to all of us. It might sound unspiritual to schedule your prayer, but I'm telling you it's one of the most spiritual things you can do. I would recommend starting with prayer in the morning. I've said it since I started here. I'll say it until you guys get rid of me. But the single most important habit anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. You've got to schedule your time in prayer and you've got to figure out what works for you. There was a season of my life where I set my alarm a little bit early and I thought the first thing I'm going to do during the day to begin my day is pray. And my alarm would go off and I would swing my legs out of the bed and I would kneel on the bed and I would pray and then I would wake up and there would be drool in my beard. And I would think, this seems to be an unsuccessful practice. I need to schedule this a little bit better. So I learned for myself that I need to get up. I need to have coffee. I need to read God's word. And then let God's word push me into prayer. So that's been my pattern and habit. And then after I pray, just if this helps anybody, I have a book that I'm reading that's spiritually encouraging. So my practice and my devotionals is to wake up, get a cup of coffee, perk up, be somewhere with a little bit of light, but not too much light. I mean, come on, you don't want to ruin it. And then read God's word, let God's word carry me into prayer. And then I read whatever spiritually encouraging book I'm reading until a child makes a noise and ruins my peace, right? That's what I do. But we've got to have these times that we schedule. That used to be what I do. I do that on the weekends now as much as I can. But now what I do is I just get up and I get after it and I get Lily to school and I get into the office and I'm usually here first because Lily has to be at school earlier than everybody else has to get up. And that's when I have my time of prayer. But you need to pick a time for prayer that works for you. You need to schedule it. There was a season of my life where I set an alarm that went off every day at three o'clock and I would pause at three o'clock and I would pray. I'm not that spiritual anymore. I don't do that. I missed pray, but I do know that if you don't schedule it, it won't happen. So maybe the first baby step for you in being a person of prayer is to schedule a time of prayer. And I'll just tell you this too, practically as your pastor, if you're sitting there right now and you're like, yeah, I'm gonna do that. Tomorrow morning, I'm gonna get up, I'm gonna do a couple things, I'm gonna pray. Tomorrow when I have the space, when I park, I'm gonna get to the office five minutes early and I'm gonna pray. Whatever it is, however it is, you figure out how you can begin to be a person of prayer and you intend to pray tomorrow or later today. I'll just tell you, the first time you pray, you're gonna really mean it. You're gonna last about two and a half minutes and you're gonna be done and you'll be like, God, I'm sorry, I ran out of things to pray. And you're going to feel like a terrible Christian. That's because you are. I'm just messing around. You're going to feel like a terrible Christian, but you're not a terrible Christian. You just haven't developed the pattern and the habit of prayer. So just let two and a half minutes be two and a half minutes. And the next day, pray for three minutes. And the next day, pray for three minutes. Just pray. Just talk to God. Pour out what's on your heart to him. Schedule a time to prayer and then pray about whatever it is you're supposed to pray about. And I tell you, if you do that day after day, you'll start praying longer. If you do that day after day, you'll learn the art of listening prayer, of just sitting in stillness in the presence of God and trying to hear him and be encouraged by him and receive love from him. But you don't just start on day one praying these 45-minute prayers that are 15 minutes of silence and other stuff. So just take the baby step, start the prayers, and start to make your way to being a person of prayer. Now the other thing Nehemiah does is he models for us spontaneous prayers. Just these single shot prayers as he goes throughout his life. He's just going throughout his life. He's just going throughout his day. He doesn't stop in mid-conversation with King Artaxerxes and say, hang on King, and kneel down and pour out this elaborate prayer. No, he just says, God, bless me. Like, let's see what he says. So I prayed to the God of heaven. That's it. So God, bless this conversation as I'm about to have this conversation. Bless the thing I'm about to do. He just stops, he pauses, gives a momentary mental, God, I need you, and then he steps into what he needs to step into. And this is the pattern of prayer that we need to follow. These spontaneous prayers as we go into and out of different situations to just stop and say, God, I'm inviting you into this situation. God, I'm not enough for this situation. God, I need you in this situation. God, I need you in this conversation. I need you to calm me down right now because I'm about to lose my mind. Whatever it is, he models for us this time of scheduled prayer and this time of spontaneous prayer. And as I read the story, I began to wonder about us. And really, I began to wonder about me. Because I'll confess to you, I don't pray enough spontaneous prayers. I don't stop enough times throughout my day and go, God, just be with me as I go into this lunch meeting. I mean, I was thinking about it, and I don't pray before staff meetings. We have a staff meeting every Tuesday. And this last staff meeting, we got in there and we went to plan the semester. To plan next semester, the series from January all the way to Mother's Day. And we prayed as a group in there. And I prayed earlier in the day. But going into that meeting, I didn't stop and pray, God, just bless this time, just be with me as I lead us through this. What's the matter with me? Why doesn't that trigger my prayers? Why aren't we triggered to prayer more? And it just made me wonder what actually triggers our prayers. What is it in your life that makes you stop and go, yeah, I'm gonna pray real quick? Whether we, like, one of the things that triggers my prayer sometimes is when I go inside my kid's bedroom and I look at my sleeping children. If you're a parent and that doesn't trigger the occasional prayer, you're broken on the inside. It's even worse than not liking dogs. You're totally dead on the inside. And I'll go in and I'll see Lily lying there and I'll kind of just be overwhelmed and I'll kneel and I'll pray. And sometimes things will happen, I'll get nervous, I'll get worried and I'll stop and I'll pray. But the things that trigger me in my life, there's very few of them. There's not enough. And it made me realize that I go through my life feeling pretty adequate to the things that God would ask me to do. And I think that when we don't pray a lot of spontaneous prayers, God be with me here, that's a pretty good sign that we're too prideful. We think too highly of ourselves. Or we think too little of God, one or the other. But I wonder what kinds of things trigger you to prayer. Because the reality is, the model that we see in Nehemiah, and the model that we see throughout the powerful prayers in Scripture, is that powerful prayers pray about everything all the time. Powerful prayers pray about everything all the time. People who are powerful in their prayer life, people who are people of prayer, are in constant prayer. It's not just the scheduled prayer where they wake up and they get on their knees and they pray, or the midday prayer, or the end of the day prayer. It's this constant communication with God. They pray about everything all the time. And that has to be true because it's the only explanation for Paul's little pithy throwaway instruction in 1 Thessalonians, I believe chapter 5, where he's wrapping up the book. He's writing a letter to the church in Thessalonica in the New Testament, and he's wrapping up the book. He's giving them five chapters worth of encouragement, and then he tells them, he gives them kind of a list of things like, hey, just to review, do these things. And one of the things that he just throws in there is if we're just supposed to receive it and do it all the time is he says, pray without ceasing. And whenever you read it, it's like, what are you, how man? Like I'm not a monk. I have things to do. I have a life. I have stuff I have to get accomplished. And even monks, they like make beer and honey and stuff. Like they got things. I don't know what happens in monasteries. Everybody has stuff to do. How do we pray without ceasing? It's got to be that we maintain this daily communication with God. I heard a story years ago that illustrates this point very well. And it's a totally made-up story. Somebody made it up. When they told us the story. They told us they made it up. This is not real. This is more of a parable. Okay. So there's a guy who is renowned in his church for the way that he prays. He is a person of prayer. He prays about everything all the time. He has this incredibly vibrant prayer life. And some other dudes in the church wanted to learn from this guy. They wanted to hear him pray. And so they got together and they figured that the best time to hear him pray is going to be his nighttime prayer. When he kneels beside his bed and he's praying before the end of the day and he's talking to God and he kind of downloads this whole day, this is going to be the best time to hear this guy's prayer. And so while that guy's out doing whatever he's doing, probably feeding the homeless or something, they go to his house, and they hide in his closet. Now this guy, this hypothetical non-existent person, is a single man without a wife, so it's not weird that they're in there, okay? They're not going to see anything they shouldn't see. So they're hiding in his closet, and dude comes in the bedroom, and he does his nighttime routine, and they're kind of sitting there waiting, and this is when he's going to kneel by his bed, right? So they're kind of waiting there, leaning in, and he doesn't kneel by his bed. He just gets into his bed, and they're like, oh, oh, he's going to go prostrate. He's going to go face down on the bed. This guy means it, but he doesn't do that. He just kind of gets in, and he rolls over on his side, and he reaches over, and he turns out the lamp, and he says, good night, Father. And he closes his eyes, and that's it. Because that man had been in prayer all day. That man woke up. He said, good morning, God. This is the day that you have made. Let me rejoice and be glad in it. It's yours. Let me be who you need me to be today. And then at one point or another, I'm sure that man had a time of scheduled prayer where he sat down and he prayed about all the things. And then as he went through his day, he kept God as an active participant in his day so that at the end of the day, when it was time to say goodnight, the only thing left to do was to say goodnight because he had been talking to God all day. This is the model of prayer that we are supposed to pursue. And I know that that might feel far off for some of us. I heard that story before and I've heard pray without ceasing and this attitude of prayer and I've sat you are, and I've thought, gosh, forget it. I barely can remember to pray every day. I don't pray for some of my meals. Like, I don't know if I can ever do that. And it might feel pretty impossible to be someone who wakes up talking to God, who goes throughout your day talking to God, and ends your day talking to God. But I don't love you if I don't put that in front of you as the standard. If I tell you that something short of that is actually what God wants for you, that praying without ceasing, that being people of prayer, that being people who have conversations with God throughout the day, every day, if I tell you that that's only for some Christians, that that's only for some churchgoers, that's only for some of God's children, then I'm lying to you and I don't love you. And so even though that goal may feel very far off, how dare me sell you short of what you should be and of what God wants you to be and of what he implores you to be through model after model and verse after verse in his word. We are to be people of prayer who exist in communication with God. And if you're not there yet and it feels very far off, that's okay. There's grace for that. But we cannot accept less than that. We must be people who pursue God in prayer. And there's so many reasons why, but I think one of the big ones is that when we pray, we confess. Do you know that every time you go to God in prayer, you are making an implicit confession with the simple act of praying. When I see Lily sleeping in her bedroom and I'm overwhelmed and I stop and I pray, I'm confessing in that prayer. God, I'm not big enough for this. God, I'm not adequate to raise this girl without scars that are going to send her into counseling later. I don't have the character to do it, God. I don't have the wisdom to do it, God. God, I can't see around corners, but you can, so I'm just asking you to be with her. God, I know that you created her as your workmanship to walk in those good works, but I don't know what those good works are, God, but you do. So would you please help me raise her in such a way that moves her towards what you intended her to be because I know that I'm inadequate for this. When we pray for our children, we confess that we are inadequate to make them who God wants them to be. And so we need God's help. When we go into a meeting, and before that meeting, maybe it's a difficult conversation. Maybe you're having lunch with a friend and they're going to ask you about a thing, or you have to ask them about a thing, and it's not going to be easy. As we go into that and we say, God, just please be with me as I go to meet with so-and-so. We confess. We confess that we don't have the wisdom for that conversation and that God does. We confess that God loves that person more than we do. We confess that God is going to be present there and that his spirit is needed to give me the words I need to say and to soften the ears and the heart of the person who has to hear them. We confess that God is needed there. Listen, when we're going into a business meeting in sterile, corporate, sometimes vulgar corporate America, when we go into those meetings, and before we go into those meetings, we pray. And we say, God, help me remember that I'm your agent here. Help me remember that they're your children too, that I'm about to meet with your sons and daughters, and that there's something bigger going on than just the decisions that we make or the deal that we close or the pitch that we agree upon. Help me remember, God, that there is something divine happening in that room when I get in there and that I need to be sensitive to it. Help me be sensitive to what everybody else in the room is experiencing. When we pray before we walk into a business meeting, we confess that there's something bigger than business happening in that room. So we stop and we pray. When I pray before a staff meeting, I confess that there's something more important than the day-to-day decisions that are going on in that room. I stop and I pray and I confess. When we schedule time and we pray about everything, it's a confession that we are inadequate for all of those things. And these confessions are important to make those confessions through prayer. It humbles us. It attunes us. It focuses us when we make these confessions. Every Sunday I pray before I come up. And one of the things that I pray is, God, thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to do this. And it confesses, right? It's a helpful thing for me to thank God for the opportunity to do it, to ask that my words would be a reflection of his words and would be helpful for his people. It's helpful for me to do that because it reminds me. God made me for this good work. He made me to teach and run my mouth. I didn't get good at it. I don't know if you think I'm good at it now. I don't really, I don't care if you do. But God gave me a gift to teach. But every time I thank him for the opportunity to express that gift, I acknowledge that it is a gift. I acknowledge and confess. He can take it from me whenever he wants. He can give someone else this stage whenever he wants. It is only by his grace and by his protection that I'm up here this week. And I hope Lord will and I'll be here next week. That's all up to God. And so when I confess that and I acknowledge it and then I get done and someone says, oh, that was good. Oh, that was helpful. I get to celebrate with them that God has worked in their life and that has been helpful, not that I did good because I've already confessed to God that this is his. When we pray, we confess. And by making those regular confessions in our lives, we put ourselves in a posture of humility before God and before others. We see other people as God's children or people who need to be turned on to God's love. Not projects or things that are in the way or simple coworkers or simple friends, but we see God's children. When we pray, we confess our own inadequacies, our need and reliance for God's wisdom rather than our own. I said earlier, I think I'm not triggered to pray enough because I think too highly of myself. I think that I'm too capable for things. I'd be willing to bet we all think that. I want us to be a church of powerful prayers. I want us to follow the model of Nehemiah, to have times that we schedule to pray, And maybe that can be your step of obedience this morning, is to schedule times of prayer. If you're a person who already does that, then maybe your step of obedience can be, God, help me open my eyes to the times that I need to pray. Help me see the times when I'm not doing it. Maybe we can create more triggers. Every time I'm going to make a phone call, every time I'm going to be in a meeting, every time I have a presentation, every time this happens, I will pray. Every time I drive home, I need to pray, God, give me grace for my children from 5.30 p.m. until 7 p.m. Let me be the dad that I need to be to them and not the one I feel like being. We need to set up things in our life where we need that remind us to pray. And I think that we need to acknowledge as we pray that we confess and think through what are the things that we are confessing with this prayer and let that confession humble us before God and for others. With that being said, let's pray together. Father, we love you. We trust you. We're grateful for you. We are thankful that even when we don't know what to pray, that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words, and that even as an added help, your son sits at your right hand interceding for us on behalf of our prayers. God, make us a church filled with people of prayer. And in those prayers, may we confess our insufficiency in light of your all-sufficiency, your greater love for the objects of our prayers that we love so much. May we confess, Father, you as a source of all our wisdom, of all our peace, of all our strength. And may our bowed heads and bent knees acknowledge your sovereignty over this world and your lordship over us. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody, particularly the UNC fans this morning. If you don't know this about me, I'm wearing neutral colors, but that's really what we're wearing today. This is just to keep you guys from getting mad at me. I would like to personally thank Alan Hill, Kyle's future father-in-law, for inviting me to their UNC tailgate yesterday, where I was able to bring what is apparently my son, who is a good luck charm, and we won, which was great. And you'll have to forgive my exuberance. Georgia Tech doesn't get a lot to cheer for. This is essentially my national championship, okay? This is the one time in a calendar year I've been able to be proud to be a Georgia Tech Yellow Jacket. As a matter of fact, I think the last time was when we beat UNC last year in Atlanta. So I'm high on the hog right now. All right, thank you for indulging me that. I'm sorry, I'll settle down. But we are in the fifth part of our series called Powerful Prayers, where we're looking at prayers that we find in Scripture and just examining them, seeing what we can learn from them, from the heart that's revealed in them. And I thought that we would be remiss if we didn't ask the question for ourselves as we look at powerful prayers, how can we become more powerful prayers? How can we become more powerful and more consistent in our prayers, right? How can we be people of prayer? I know that for many of us, you share my experience. To be a Christian for a while is to hear things like, man, you should probably pray more. And instantly you go, yeah, I should. It's a thing that we know. So how do we go from knowing that we should pray more, that it should define us more, that we should be what's called people of prayer, people who are defined by a rich and vibrant prayer life? How do we go from knowing that to actually doing it, to actually experiencing it? How do we become more powerful prayers? And to answer this question, I think we can look at an example tucked away in an Old Testament story. We're going to be in the book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah is tough to find. If you don't know where it is, just use your table of contents. But turn there with me if you want to. We're going to be in chapters 1 and 2. Now, Nehemiah is one of my favorite stories in the Bible. I know that doesn't carry any weight with you guys because all the stories that I talk about are my favorite stories in the Bible. I get that. But I love the story of Nehemiah because it's such a great picture of how we are supposed to build God's church here as Grace Raleigh, but how God intends to build his church in Raleigh, how God intends to build his church in America, how God intends to build his church internationally. I think what we find in Nehemiah is examples and lessons for how God intends to build his church that have applications all over how we think of church. But I don't get to talk about that this morning. I just get to say it and hope that it sparks enough interest in you to go read it and figure it out for yourself. What I do get to focus on is the prayer life of Nehemiah. So I want to look at this instance, this little snapshot of his life at the beginning of his story. We encounter him when he is the cupbearer for King Artaxerxes. Now, Nehemiah is a Jewish man who was carried over after the Babylonians conquered Israel or Judea, and they carried the best and the brightest over to Babylon to be slaves. And clearly, Nehemiah was a sharp man. He was a trustworthy man because he made it up the ladder to where he is the cupbearer for the most powerful king in the world. This is the man, Artaxerxes, that called himself the king of kings. He was the king of Persia and Babylon and Egypt all at the same time. So we're going to call it the Babylonian empire, but it's really, it's even larger than that. And here Nehemiah finds himself as the cup bearer to King Artaxerxes. And one day Nehemiah gets word that his hometown Jerusalem has been just laid waste, that the walls are torn down, they're broken down, and the city has been destroyed. And this is a big deal in the ancient world for a city not to have walls, because when a city doesn't have walls, it has no defense. Anybody around it that wants to come in and take from the city whatever they want, just with enough swords can come in and take what they want. They have no defense. They lay vulnerable to the entire countryside, to the entire surrounding countries. This city is vulnerable to whatever they want to come and do to it. And so Nehemiah goes into this phase of fasting and mourning and sadness and prayer because he's distraught over his hometown, Jerusalem. And you've got to remember, too, it's not just finding out that your hometown has been ransacked. That hometown, I'm not going to get into it too much this morning, but that hometown represents promises from God that the Jewish people clung to all the way back to Abraham, all the way back to Genesis chapter 12. And so it's not just that the hometown lays in rubble, it's that he's feeling that his promises from God need to be restored. And so in his spirit, he's wrestling with all this and trying to figure out what to do. And so when he heard this news, this is Nehemiah's response. In chapter 1, O Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keeps his commandment. And then in verse six, I just go on. Let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for the people of Israel, your servants. And so he goes on and on praying, but he essentially prays that Israel would be restored. God, hear my prayer. Hear the prayer of your servants in Israel. Restore Jerusalem to its former glory. Let the walls be rebuilt. And in the interim, you know that Nehemiah, it's implied all throughout the passage, is wondering, what can I do? How can I help? God, what would you have me do to fix this problem? I'm a thousand miles away, the cupbearer for a king. How could I possibly help repair the walls of Jerusalem? But I guess at some point or another, he gets an idea. And we see him admit to this idea in Nehemiah chapter 2, when he's in the throne room of Artaxerxes. And Artaxerxes notices that he's sad. And this is not a good thing because when you serve the ancient kings, you needed to be glad to be in their presence. You needed to be happy, okay? You had to fake it until you made it. You did not want to be bummed out and depressed and bring in your bad mood into their presence. But Artaxerxes cares about Nehemiah, and he notices that he's downtrodden. He notices that he's been bummed out the last little while, and so he asks him about it. And this is the interchange between the two of them in Nehemiah 2, verses 2 through 5. Yeah, why should not my face be sad when the city, the place of my father's graves lies in ruins and its gates have been destroyed by fire? Then the king said to me, what are you requesting? So I prayed to the God of heaven and I said to the king, if it pleases the king and if your servant has found favor in your sight, then you send me to Judah, to the city of my father's graves, that I might rebuild it. So he's in the presence of the king. And he's clearly depressed. And the king says, Nehemiah, what's been going on, man? You're sad. You're sulking. You're not sick. So your heart is sick. What's going on? And he was afraid, but he admitted to it. The city of my fathers and my grandfathers has been torn to rubble. And then Artaxerxes says, what are you asking? What are you requesting? And then I love that phrase that he stopped, he paused. Nehemiah paused in the middle of what was going on and he offered a prayer to the God in heaven. And he asked for a blessing from God before he asked for the blessing from Artaxerxes. God, I'm about to ask this really bold thing. God, this request could potentially cost me some jail time or my life if he decides he's in a bad mood. So I need you to bless this for me real quick and just confirm for me that this is actually the idea that you placed in my mind before I submitted to the king. So he stops and he prays. He says, God, bless this. And then he turns to Artaxerxes and he tells him what he wants to do. And Artaxerxes is moved by Nehemiah, cares for his servant, and releases him to do that. Not only does he release him to do that, but he hands him a letter. It's a letter of free passage through each province between Babylon and Jerusalem. And it's a letter that once he gets to Jerusalem, that he can get all of the lumber and all of the stone that he needs to complete the wall and he can bill it to Artaxerxes himself. So it went pretty well for Nehemiah. But the reason I'm focusing on the story when we ask the question, how do we become more powerful prayers, is because Nehemiah models the importance of scheduled and spontaneous prayers. In Nehemiah, we find the model of a life of a person who is a person of prayer. He models both scheduled and spontaneous prayers. He models scheduled prayers. When he heard about the destruction of Jerusalem, he went into a time of mourning and fasting. He picked the time when he was gonna sit down and more likely kneel before the Father. And just as an aside, in your prayers, if you're able, I don't know if some of us are not, if you're able to kneel when you pray, it really changes your mindset as you pray. I would encourage you as a regular practice to be someone who kneels when you can. But Nehemiah was likely kneeling to pray. He set this time aside and he poured his heart out to God. He prayed everything that was on his heart. And so he models for us scheduled prayers. The greatest model for us of scheduled prayers in the Bible that I see is Daniel. Daniel set aside three times a day to pray. And we've preached about him before. But that's the first place where I would push you a little bit. In your own prayer life, whatever your regularity is, however much you pray, however often it is, if it's not very often at all or if it's very, very regularly, I would encourage you to follow the model and the example of Nehemiah and of Daniel and schedule your times to pray. And we all know this is true. You've heard this before. People have told you this. You've heard this in seminars. You hear this in corporate world. We hear it in church world. Someone, one of your friends has told it to you over lunch as if they've unearthed some sort of wisdom that's never occurred to you before when they tell you, if you don't schedule it, it won't happen, right? We know that. We know that to be true. This is America. We schedule things. We're very busy. We're the busiest. We have not, Europe has figured it out. We have not figured it out. We're a bunch of dum-dums. We just, I mean, every block of time that we have is scheduled out. And so what we know is if we don't schedule it, it's not going to happen. How many of you, don't raise your hand, but how many of you have left church or left a small group or read a book, something that emphasized prayer and thought to yourself, I'm gonna pray more. But you didn't pick a time to do it. You didn't commit to a set schedule of it. And then you didn't pray more. I think it's probably happened to all of us. It might sound unspiritual to schedule your prayer, but I'm telling you it's one of the most spiritual things you can do. I would recommend starting with prayer in the morning. I've said it since I started here. I'll say it until you guys get rid of me. But the single most important habit anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. You've got to schedule your time in prayer and you've got to figure out what works for you. There was a season of my life where I set my alarm a little bit early and I thought the first thing I'm going to do during the day to begin my day is pray. And my alarm would go off and I would swing my legs out of the bed and I would kneel on the bed and I would pray and then I would wake up and there would be drool in my beard. And I would think, this seems to be an unsuccessful practice. I need to schedule this a little bit better. So I learned for myself that I need to get up. I need to have coffee. I need to read God's word. And then let God's word push me into prayer. So that's been my pattern and habit. And then after I pray, just if this helps anybody, I have a book that I'm reading that's spiritually encouraging. So my practice and my devotionals is to wake up, get a cup of coffee, perk up, be somewhere with a little bit of light, but not too much light. I mean, come on, you don't want to ruin it. And then read God's word, let God's word carry me into prayer. And then I read whatever spiritually encouraging book I'm reading until a child makes a noise and ruins my peace, right? That's what I do. But we've got to have these times that we schedule. That used to be what I do. I do that on the weekends now as much as I can. But now what I do is I just get up and I get after it and I get Lily to school and I get into the office and I'm usually here first because Lily has to be at school earlier than everybody else has to get up. And that's when I have my time of prayer. But you need to pick a time for prayer that works for you. You need to schedule it. There was a season of my life where I set an alarm that went off every day at three o'clock and I would pause at three o'clock and I would pray. I'm not that spiritual anymore. I don't do that. I missed pray, but I do know that if you don't schedule it, it won't happen. So maybe the first baby step for you in being a person of prayer is to schedule a time of prayer. And I'll just tell you this too, practically as your pastor, if you're sitting there right now and you're like, yeah, I'm gonna do that. Tomorrow morning, I'm gonna get up, I'm gonna do a couple things, I'm gonna pray. Tomorrow when I have the space, when I park, I'm gonna get to the office five minutes early and I'm gonna pray. Whatever it is, however it is, you figure out how you can begin to be a person of prayer and you intend to pray tomorrow or later today. I'll just tell you, the first time you pray, you're gonna really mean it. You're gonna last about two and a half minutes and you're gonna be done and you'll be like, God, I'm sorry, I ran out of things to pray. And you're going to feel like a terrible Christian. That's because you are. I'm just messing around. You're going to feel like a terrible Christian, but you're not a terrible Christian. You just haven't developed the pattern and the habit of prayer. So just let two and a half minutes be two and a half minutes. And the next day, pray for three minutes. And the next day, pray for three minutes. Just pray. Just talk to God. Pour out what's on your heart to him. Schedule a time to prayer and then pray about whatever it is you're supposed to pray about. And I tell you, if you do that day after day, you'll start praying longer. If you do that day after day, you'll learn the art of listening prayer, of just sitting in stillness in the presence of God and trying to hear him and be encouraged by him and receive love from him. But you don't just start on day one praying these 45-minute prayers that are 15 minutes of silence and other stuff. So just take the baby step, start the prayers, and start to make your way to being a person of prayer. Now the other thing Nehemiah does is he models for us spontaneous prayers. Just these single shot prayers as he goes throughout his life. He's just going throughout his life. He's just going throughout his day. He doesn't stop in mid-conversation with King Artaxerxes and say, hang on King, and kneel down and pour out this elaborate prayer. No, he just says, God, bless me. Like, let's see what he says. So I prayed to the God of heaven. That's it. So God, bless this conversation as I'm about to have this conversation. Bless the thing I'm about to do. He just stops, he pauses, gives a momentary mental, God, I need you, and then he steps into what he needs to step into. And this is the pattern of prayer that we need to follow. These spontaneous prayers as we go into and out of different situations to just stop and say, God, I'm inviting you into this situation. God, I'm not enough for this situation. God, I need you in this situation. God, I need you in this conversation. I need you to calm me down right now because I'm about to lose my mind. Whatever it is, he models for us this time of scheduled prayer and this time of spontaneous prayer. And as I read the story, I began to wonder about us. And really, I began to wonder about me. Because I'll confess to you, I don't pray enough spontaneous prayers. I don't stop enough times throughout my day and go, God, just be with me as I go into this lunch meeting. I mean, I was thinking about it, and I don't pray before staff meetings. We have a staff meeting every Tuesday. And this last staff meeting, we got in there and we went to plan the semester. To plan next semester, the series from January all the way to Mother's Day. And we prayed as a group in there. And I prayed earlier in the day. But going into that meeting, I didn't stop and pray, God, just bless this time, just be with me as I lead us through this. What's the matter with me? Why doesn't that trigger my prayers? Why aren't we triggered to prayer more? And it just made me wonder what actually triggers our prayers. What is it in your life that makes you stop and go, yeah, I'm gonna pray real quick? Whether we, like, one of the things that triggers my prayer sometimes is when I go inside my kid's bedroom and I look at my sleeping children. If you're a parent and that doesn't trigger the occasional prayer, you're broken on the inside. It's even worse than not liking dogs. You're totally dead on the inside. And I'll go in and I'll see Lily lying there and I'll kind of just be overwhelmed and I'll kneel and I'll pray. And sometimes things will happen, I'll get nervous, I'll get worried and I'll stop and I'll pray. But the things that trigger me in my life, there's very few of them. There's not enough. And it made me realize that I go through my life feeling pretty adequate to the things that God would ask me to do. And I think that when we don't pray a lot of spontaneous prayers, God be with me here, that's a pretty good sign that we're too prideful. We think too highly of ourselves. Or we think too little of God, one or the other. But I wonder what kinds of things trigger you to prayer. Because the reality is, the model that we see in Nehemiah, and the model that we see throughout the powerful prayers in Scripture, is that powerful prayers pray about everything all the time. Powerful prayers pray about everything all the time. People who are powerful in their prayer life, people who are people of prayer, are in constant prayer. It's not just the scheduled prayer where they wake up and they get on their knees and they pray, or the midday prayer, or the end of the day prayer. It's this constant communication with God. They pray about everything all the time. And that has to be true because it's the only explanation for Paul's little pithy throwaway instruction in 1 Thessalonians, I believe chapter 5, where he's wrapping up the book. He's writing a letter to the church in Thessalonica in the New Testament, and he's wrapping up the book. He's giving them five chapters worth of encouragement, and then he tells them, he gives them kind of a list of things like, hey, just to review, do these things. And one of the things that he just throws in there is if we're just supposed to receive it and do it all the time is he says, pray without ceasing. And whenever you read it, it's like, what are you, how man? Like I'm not a monk. I have things to do. I have a life. I have stuff I have to get accomplished. And even monks, they like make beer and honey and stuff. Like they got things. I don't know what happens in monasteries. Everybody has stuff to do. How do we pray without ceasing? It's got to be that we maintain this daily communication with God. I heard a story years ago that illustrates this point very well. And it's a totally made-up story. Somebody made it up. When they told us the story. They told us they made it up. This is not real. This is more of a parable. Okay. So there's a guy who is renowned in his church for the way that he prays. He is a person of prayer. He prays about everything all the time. He has this incredibly vibrant prayer life. And some other dudes in the church wanted to learn from this guy. They wanted to hear him pray. And so they got together and they figured that the best time to hear him pray is going to be his nighttime prayer. When he kneels beside his bed and he's praying before the end of the day and he's talking to God and he kind of downloads this whole day, this is going to be the best time to hear this guy's prayer. And so while that guy's out doing whatever he's doing, probably feeding the homeless or something, they go to his house, and they hide in his closet. Now this guy, this hypothetical non-existent person, is a single man without a wife, so it's not weird that they're in there, okay? They're not going to see anything they shouldn't see. So they're hiding in his closet, and dude comes in the bedroom, and he does his nighttime routine, and they're kind of sitting there waiting, and this is when he's going to kneel by his bed, right? So they're kind of waiting there, leaning in, and he doesn't kneel by his bed. He just gets into his bed, and they're like, oh, oh, he's going to go prostrate. He's going to go face down on the bed. This guy means it, but he doesn't do that. He just kind of gets in, and he rolls over on his side, and he reaches over, and he turns out the lamp, and he says, good night, Father. And he closes his eyes, and that's it. Because that man had been in prayer all day. That man woke up. He said, good morning, God. This is the day that you have made. Let me rejoice and be glad in it. It's yours. Let me be who you need me to be today. And then at one point or another, I'm sure that man had a time of scheduled prayer where he sat down and he prayed about all the things. And then as he went through his day, he kept God as an active participant in his day so that at the end of the day, when it was time to say goodnight, the only thing left to do was to say goodnight because he had been talking to God all day. This is the model of prayer that we are supposed to pursue. And I know that that might feel far off for some of us. I heard that story before and I've heard pray without ceasing and this attitude of prayer and I've sat you are, and I've thought, gosh, forget it. I barely can remember to pray every day. I don't pray for some of my meals. Like, I don't know if I can ever do that. And it might feel pretty impossible to be someone who wakes up talking to God, who goes throughout your day talking to God, and ends your day talking to God. But I don't love you if I don't put that in front of you as the standard. If I tell you that something short of that is actually what God wants for you, that praying without ceasing, that being people of prayer, that being people who have conversations with God throughout the day, every day, if I tell you that that's only for some Christians, that that's only for some churchgoers, that's only for some of God's children, then I'm lying to you and I don't love you. And so even though that goal may feel very far off, how dare me sell you short of what you should be and of what God wants you to be and of what he implores you to be through model after model and verse after verse in his word. We are to be people of prayer who exist in communication with God. And if you're not there yet and it feels very far off, that's okay. There's grace for that. But we cannot accept less than that. We must be people who pursue God in prayer. And there's so many reasons why, but I think one of the big ones is that when we pray, we confess. Do you know that every time you go to God in prayer, you are making an implicit confession with the simple act of praying. When I see Lily sleeping in her bedroom and I'm overwhelmed and I stop and I pray, I'm confessing in that prayer. God, I'm not big enough for this. God, I'm not adequate to raise this girl without scars that are going to send her into counseling later. I don't have the character to do it, God. I don't have the wisdom to do it, God. God, I can't see around corners, but you can, so I'm just asking you to be with her. God, I know that you created her as your workmanship to walk in those good works, but I don't know what those good works are, God, but you do. So would you please help me raise her in such a way that moves her towards what you intended her to be because I know that I'm inadequate for this. When we pray for our children, we confess that we are inadequate to make them who God wants them to be. And so we need God's help. When we go into a meeting, and before that meeting, maybe it's a difficult conversation. Maybe you're having lunch with a friend and they're going to ask you about a thing, or you have to ask them about a thing, and it's not going to be easy. As we go into that and we say, God, just please be with me as I go to meet with so-and-so. We confess. We confess that we don't have the wisdom for that conversation and that God does. We confess that God loves that person more than we do. We confess that God is going to be present there and that his spirit is needed to give me the words I need to say and to soften the ears and the heart of the person who has to hear them. We confess that God is needed there. Listen, when we're going into a business meeting in sterile, corporate, sometimes vulgar corporate America, when we go into those meetings, and before we go into those meetings, we pray. And we say, God, help me remember that I'm your agent here. Help me remember that they're your children too, that I'm about to meet with your sons and daughters, and that there's something bigger going on than just the decisions that we make or the deal that we close or the pitch that we agree upon. Help me remember, God, that there is something divine happening in that room when I get in there and that I need to be sensitive to it. Help me be sensitive to what everybody else in the room is experiencing. When we pray before we walk into a business meeting, we confess that there's something bigger than business happening in that room. So we stop and we pray. When I pray before a staff meeting, I confess that there's something more important than the day-to-day decisions that are going on in that room. I stop and I pray and I confess. When we schedule time and we pray about everything, it's a confession that we are inadequate for all of those things. And these confessions are important to make those confessions through prayer. It humbles us. It attunes us. It focuses us when we make these confessions. Every Sunday I pray before I come up. And one of the things that I pray is, God, thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to do this. And it confesses, right? It's a helpful thing for me to thank God for the opportunity to do it, to ask that my words would be a reflection of his words and would be helpful for his people. It's helpful for me to do that because it reminds me. God made me for this good work. He made me to teach and run my mouth. I didn't get good at it. I don't know if you think I'm good at it now. I don't really, I don't care if you do. But God gave me a gift to teach. But every time I thank him for the opportunity to express that gift, I acknowledge that it is a gift. I acknowledge and confess. He can take it from me whenever he wants. He can give someone else this stage whenever he wants. It is only by his grace and by his protection that I'm up here this week. And I hope Lord will and I'll be here next week. That's all up to God. And so when I confess that and I acknowledge it and then I get done and someone says, oh, that was good. Oh, that was helpful. I get to celebrate with them that God has worked in their life and that has been helpful, not that I did good because I've already confessed to God that this is his. When we pray, we confess. And by making those regular confessions in our lives, we put ourselves in a posture of humility before God and before others. We see other people as God's children or people who need to be turned on to God's love. Not projects or things that are in the way or simple coworkers or simple friends, but we see God's children. When we pray, we confess our own inadequacies, our need and reliance for God's wisdom rather than our own. I said earlier, I think I'm not triggered to pray enough because I think too highly of myself. I think that I'm too capable for things. I'd be willing to bet we all think that. I want us to be a church of powerful prayers. I want us to follow the model of Nehemiah, to have times that we schedule to pray, And maybe that can be your step of obedience this morning, is to schedule times of prayer. If you're a person who already does that, then maybe your step of obedience can be, God, help me open my eyes to the times that I need to pray. Help me see the times when I'm not doing it. Maybe we can create more triggers. Every time I'm going to make a phone call, every time I'm going to be in a meeting, every time I have a presentation, every time this happens, I will pray. Every time I drive home, I need to pray, God, give me grace for my children from 5.30 p.m. until 7 p.m. Let me be the dad that I need to be to them and not the one I feel like being. We need to set up things in our life where we need that remind us to pray. And I think that we need to acknowledge as we pray that we confess and think through what are the things that we are confessing with this prayer and let that confession humble us before God and for others. With that being said, let's pray together. Father, we love you. We trust you. We're grateful for you. We are thankful that even when we don't know what to pray, that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words, and that even as an added help, your son sits at your right hand interceding for us on behalf of our prayers. God, make us a church filled with people of prayer. And in those prayers, may we confess our insufficiency in light of your all-sufficiency, your greater love for the objects of our prayers that we love so much. May we confess, Father, you as a source of all our wisdom, of all our peace, of all our strength. And may our bowed heads and bent knees acknowledge your sovereignty over this world and your lordship over us. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody, particularly the UNC fans this morning. If you don't know this about me, I'm wearing neutral colors, but that's really what we're wearing today. This is just to keep you guys from getting mad at me. I would like to personally thank Alan Hill, Kyle's future father-in-law, for inviting me to their UNC tailgate yesterday, where I was able to bring what is apparently my son, who is a good luck charm, and we won, which was great. And you'll have to forgive my exuberance. Georgia Tech doesn't get a lot to cheer for. This is essentially my national championship, okay? This is the one time in a calendar year I've been able to be proud to be a Georgia Tech Yellow Jacket. As a matter of fact, I think the last time was when we beat UNC last year in Atlanta. So I'm high on the hog right now. All right, thank you for indulging me that. I'm sorry, I'll settle down. But we are in the fifth part of our series called Powerful Prayers, where we're looking at prayers that we find in Scripture and just examining them, seeing what we can learn from them, from the heart that's revealed in them. And I thought that we would be remiss if we didn't ask the question for ourselves as we look at powerful prayers, how can we become more powerful prayers? How can we become more powerful and more consistent in our prayers, right? How can we be people of prayer? I know that for many of us, you share my experience. To be a Christian for a while is to hear things like, man, you should probably pray more. And instantly you go, yeah, I should. It's a thing that we know. So how do we go from knowing that we should pray more, that it should define us more, that we should be what's called people of prayer, people who are defined by a rich and vibrant prayer life? How do we go from knowing that to actually doing it, to actually experiencing it? How do we become more powerful prayers? And to answer this question, I think we can look at an example tucked away in an Old Testament story. We're going to be in the book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah is tough to find. If you don't know where it is, just use your table of contents. But turn there with me if you want to. We're going to be in chapters 1 and 2. Now, Nehemiah is one of my favorite stories in the Bible. I know that doesn't carry any weight with you guys because all the stories that I talk about are my favorite stories in the Bible. I get that. But I love the story of Nehemiah because it's such a great picture of how we are supposed to build God's church here as Grace Raleigh, but how God intends to build his church in Raleigh, how God intends to build his church in America, how God intends to build his church internationally. I think what we find in Nehemiah is examples and lessons for how God intends to build his church that have applications all over how we think of church. But I don't get to talk about that this morning. I just get to say it and hope that it sparks enough interest in you to go read it and figure it out for yourself. What I do get to focus on is the prayer life of Nehemiah. So I want to look at this instance, this little snapshot of his life at the beginning of his story. We encounter him when he is the cupbearer for King Artaxerxes. Now, Nehemiah is a Jewish man who was carried over after the Babylonians conquered Israel or Judea, and they carried the best and the brightest over to Babylon to be slaves. And clearly, Nehemiah was a sharp man. He was a trustworthy man because he made it up the ladder to where he is the cupbearer for the most powerful king in the world. This is the man, Artaxerxes, that called himself the king of kings. He was the king of Persia and Babylon and Egypt all at the same time. So we're going to call it the Babylonian empire, but it's really, it's even larger than that. And here Nehemiah finds himself as the cup bearer to King Artaxerxes. And one day Nehemiah gets word that his hometown Jerusalem has been just laid waste, that the walls are torn down, they're broken down, and the city has been destroyed. And this is a big deal in the ancient world for a city not to have walls, because when a city doesn't have walls, it has no defense. Anybody around it that wants to come in and take from the city whatever they want, just with enough swords can come in and take what they want. They have no defense. They lay vulnerable to the entire countryside, to the entire surrounding countries. This city is vulnerable to whatever they want to come and do to it. And so Nehemiah goes into this phase of fasting and mourning and sadness and prayer because he's distraught over his hometown, Jerusalem. And you've got to remember, too, it's not just finding out that your hometown has been ransacked. That hometown, I'm not going to get into it too much this morning, but that hometown represents promises from God that the Jewish people clung to all the way back to Abraham, all the way back to Genesis chapter 12. And so it's not just that the hometown lays in rubble, it's that he's feeling that his promises from God need to be restored. And so in his spirit, he's wrestling with all this and trying to figure out what to do. And so when he heard this news, this is Nehemiah's response. In chapter 1, O Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keeps his commandment. And then in verse six, I just go on. Let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for the people of Israel, your servants. And so he goes on and on praying, but he essentially prays that Israel would be restored. God, hear my prayer. Hear the prayer of your servants in Israel. Restore Jerusalem to its former glory. Let the walls be rebuilt. And in the interim, you know that Nehemiah, it's implied all throughout the passage, is wondering, what can I do? How can I help? God, what would you have me do to fix this problem? I'm a thousand miles away, the cupbearer for a king. How could I possibly help repair the walls of Jerusalem? But I guess at some point or another, he gets an idea. And we see him admit to this idea in Nehemiah chapter 2, when he's in the throne room of Artaxerxes. And Artaxerxes notices that he's sad. And this is not a good thing because when you serve the ancient kings, you needed to be glad to be in their presence. You needed to be happy, okay? You had to fake it until you made it. You did not want to be bummed out and depressed and bring in your bad mood into their presence. But Artaxerxes cares about Nehemiah, and he notices that he's downtrodden. He notices that he's been bummed out the last little while, and so he asks him about it. And this is the interchange between the two of them in Nehemiah 2, verses 2 through 5. Yeah, why should not my face be sad when the city, the place of my father's graves lies in ruins and its gates have been destroyed by fire? Then the king said to me, what are you requesting? So I prayed to the God of heaven and I said to the king, if it pleases the king and if your servant has found favor in your sight, then you send me to Judah, to the city of my father's graves, that I might rebuild it. So he's in the presence of the king. And he's clearly depressed. And the king says, Nehemiah, what's been going on, man? You're sad. You're sulking. You're not sick. So your heart is sick. What's going on? And he was afraid, but he admitted to it. The city of my fathers and my grandfathers has been torn to rubble. And then Artaxerxes says, what are you asking? What are you requesting? And then I love that phrase that he stopped, he paused. Nehemiah paused in the middle of what was going on and he offered a prayer to the God in heaven. And he asked for a blessing from God before he asked for the blessing from Artaxerxes. God, I'm about to ask this really bold thing. God, this request could potentially cost me some jail time or my life if he decides he's in a bad mood. So I need you to bless this for me real quick and just confirm for me that this is actually the idea that you placed in my mind before I submitted to the king. So he stops and he prays. He says, God, bless this. And then he turns to Artaxerxes and he tells him what he wants to do. And Artaxerxes is moved by Nehemiah, cares for his servant, and releases him to do that. Not only does he release him to do that, but he hands him a letter. It's a letter of free passage through each province between Babylon and Jerusalem. And it's a letter that once he gets to Jerusalem, that he can get all of the lumber and all of the stone that he needs to complete the wall and he can bill it to Artaxerxes himself. So it went pretty well for Nehemiah. But the reason I'm focusing on the story when we ask the question, how do we become more powerful prayers, is because Nehemiah models the importance of scheduled and spontaneous prayers. In Nehemiah, we find the model of a life of a person who is a person of prayer. He models both scheduled and spontaneous prayers. He models scheduled prayers. When he heard about the destruction of Jerusalem, he went into a time of mourning and fasting. He picked the time when he was gonna sit down and more likely kneel before the Father. And just as an aside, in your prayers, if you're able, I don't know if some of us are not, if you're able to kneel when you pray, it really changes your mindset as you pray. I would encourage you as a regular practice to be someone who kneels when you can. But Nehemiah was likely kneeling to pray. He set this time aside and he poured his heart out to God. He prayed everything that was on his heart. And so he models for us scheduled prayers. The greatest model for us of scheduled prayers in the Bible that I see is Daniel. Daniel set aside three times a day to pray. And we've preached about him before. But that's the first place where I would push you a little bit. In your own prayer life, whatever your regularity is, however much you pray, however often it is, if it's not very often at all or if it's very, very regularly, I would encourage you to follow the model and the example of Nehemiah and of Daniel and schedule your times to pray. And we all know this is true. You've heard this before. People have told you this. You've heard this in seminars. You hear this in corporate world. We hear it in church world. Someone, one of your friends has told it to you over lunch as if they've unearthed some sort of wisdom that's never occurred to you before when they tell you, if you don't schedule it, it won't happen, right? We know that. We know that to be true. This is America. We schedule things. We're very busy. We're the busiest. We have not, Europe has figured it out. We have not figured it out. We're a bunch of dum-dums. We just, I mean, every block of time that we have is scheduled out. And so what we know is if we don't schedule it, it's not going to happen. How many of you, don't raise your hand, but how many of you have left church or left a small group or read a book, something that emphasized prayer and thought to yourself, I'm gonna pray more. But you didn't pick a time to do it. You didn't commit to a set schedule of it. And then you didn't pray more. I think it's probably happened to all of us. It might sound unspiritual to schedule your prayer, but I'm telling you it's one of the most spiritual things you can do. I would recommend starting with prayer in the morning. I've said it since I started here. I'll say it until you guys get rid of me. But the single most important habit anyone can develop in their life is to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. You've got to schedule your time in prayer and you've got to figure out what works for you. There was a season of my life where I set my alarm a little bit early and I thought the first thing I'm going to do during the day to begin my day is pray. And my alarm would go off and I would swing my legs out of the bed and I would kneel on the bed and I would pray and then I would wake up and there would be drool in my beard. And I would think, this seems to be an unsuccessful practice. I need to schedule this a little bit better. So I learned for myself that I need to get up. I need to have coffee. I need to read God's word. And then let God's word push me into prayer. So that's been my pattern and habit. And then after I pray, just if this helps anybody, I have a book that I'm reading that's spiritually encouraging. So my practice and my devotionals is to wake up, get a cup of coffee, perk up, be somewhere with a little bit of light, but not too much light. I mean, come on, you don't want to ruin it. And then read God's word, let God's word carry me into prayer. And then I read whatever spiritually encouraging book I'm reading until a child makes a noise and ruins my peace, right? That's what I do. But we've got to have these times that we schedule. That used to be what I do. I do that on the weekends now as much as I can. But now what I do is I just get up and I get after it and I get Lily to school and I get into the office and I'm usually here first because Lily has to be at school earlier than everybody else has to get up. And that's when I have my time of prayer. But you need to pick a time for prayer that works for you. You need to schedule it. There was a season of my life where I set an alarm that went off every day at three o'clock and I would pause at three o'clock and I would pray. I'm not that spiritual anymore. I don't do that. I missed pray, but I do know that if you don't schedule it, it won't happen. So maybe the first baby step for you in being a person of prayer is to schedule a time of prayer. And I'll just tell you this too, practically as your pastor, if you're sitting there right now and you're like, yeah, I'm gonna do that. Tomorrow morning, I'm gonna get up, I'm gonna do a couple things, I'm gonna pray. Tomorrow when I have the space, when I park, I'm gonna get to the office five minutes early and I'm gonna pray. Whatever it is, however it is, you figure out how you can begin to be a person of prayer and you intend to pray tomorrow or later today. I'll just tell you, the first time you pray, you're gonna really mean it. You're gonna last about two and a half minutes and you're gonna be done and you'll be like, God, I'm sorry, I ran out of things to pray. And you're going to feel like a terrible Christian. That's because you are. I'm just messing around. You're going to feel like a terrible Christian, but you're not a terrible Christian. You just haven't developed the pattern and the habit of prayer. So just let two and a half minutes be two and a half minutes. And the next day, pray for three minutes. And the next day, pray for three minutes. Just pray. Just talk to God. Pour out what's on your heart to him. Schedule a time to prayer and then pray about whatever it is you're supposed to pray about. And I tell you, if you do that day after day, you'll start praying longer. If you do that day after day, you'll learn the art of listening prayer, of just sitting in stillness in the presence of God and trying to hear him and be encouraged by him and receive love from him. But you don't just start on day one praying these 45-minute prayers that are 15 minutes of silence and other stuff. So just take the baby step, start the prayers, and start to make your way to being a person of prayer. Now the other thing Nehemiah does is he models for us spontaneous prayers. Just these single shot prayers as he goes throughout his life. He's just going throughout his life. He's just going throughout his day. He doesn't stop in mid-conversation with King Artaxerxes and say, hang on King, and kneel down and pour out this elaborate prayer. No, he just says, God, bless me. Like, let's see what he says. So I prayed to the God of heaven. That's it. So God, bless this conversation as I'm about to have this conversation. Bless the thing I'm about to do. He just stops, he pauses, gives a momentary mental, God, I need you, and then he steps into what he needs to step into. And this is the pattern of prayer that we need to follow. These spontaneous prayers as we go into and out of different situations to just stop and say, God, I'm inviting you into this situation. God, I'm not enough for this situation. God, I need you in this situation. God, I need you in this conversation. I need you to calm me down right now because I'm about to lose my mind. Whatever it is, he models for us this time of scheduled prayer and this time of spontaneous prayer. And as I read the story, I began to wonder about us. And really, I began to wonder about me. Because I'll confess to you, I don't pray enough spontaneous prayers. I don't stop enough times throughout my day and go, God, just be with me as I go into this lunch meeting. I mean, I was thinking about it, and I don't pray before staff meetings. We have a staff meeting every Tuesday. And this last staff meeting, we got in there and we went to plan the semester. To plan next semester, the series from January all the way to Mother's Day. And we prayed as a group in there. And I prayed earlier in the day. But going into that meeting, I didn't stop and pray, God, just bless this time, just be with me as I lead us through this. What's the matter with me? Why doesn't that trigger my prayers? Why aren't we triggered to prayer more? And it just made me wonder what actually triggers our prayers. What is it in your life that makes you stop and go, yeah, I'm gonna pray real quick? Whether we, like, one of the things that triggers my prayer sometimes is when I go inside my kid's bedroom and I look at my sleeping children. If you're a parent and that doesn't trigger the occasional prayer, you're broken on the inside. It's even worse than not liking dogs. You're totally dead on the inside. And I'll go in and I'll see Lily lying there and I'll kind of just be overwhelmed and I'll kneel and I'll pray. And sometimes things will happen, I'll get nervous, I'll get worried and I'll stop and I'll pray. But the things that trigger me in my life, there's very few of them. There's not enough. And it made me realize that I go through my life feeling pretty adequate to the things that God would ask me to do. And I think that when we don't pray a lot of spontaneous prayers, God be with me here, that's a pretty good sign that we're too prideful. We think too highly of ourselves. Or we think too little of God, one or the other. But I wonder what kinds of things trigger you to prayer. Because the reality is, the model that we see in Nehemiah, and the model that we see throughout the powerful prayers in Scripture, is that powerful prayers pray about everything all the time. Powerful prayers pray about everything all the time. People who are powerful in their prayer life, people who are people of prayer, are in constant prayer. It's not just the scheduled prayer where they wake up and they get on their knees and they pray, or the midday prayer, or the end of the day prayer. It's this constant communication with God. They pray about everything all the time. And that has to be true because it's the only explanation for Paul's little pithy throwaway instruction in 1 Thessalonians, I believe chapter 5, where he's wrapping up the book. He's writing a letter to the church in Thessalonica in the New Testament, and he's wrapping up the book. He's giving them five chapters worth of encouragement, and then he tells them, he gives them kind of a list of things like, hey, just to review, do these things. And one of the things that he just throws in there is if we're just supposed to receive it and do it all the time is he says, pray without ceasing. And whenever you read it, it's like, what are you, how man? Like I'm not a monk. I have things to do. I have a life. I have stuff I have to get accomplished. And even monks, they like make beer and honey and stuff. Like they got things. I don't know what happens in monasteries. Everybody has stuff to do. How do we pray without ceasing? It's got to be that we maintain this daily communication with God. I heard a story years ago that illustrates this point very well. And it's a totally made-up story. Somebody made it up. When they told us the story. They told us they made it up. This is not real. This is more of a parable. Okay. So there's a guy who is renowned in his church for the way that he prays. He is a person of prayer. He prays about everything all the time. He has this incredibly vibrant prayer life. And some other dudes in the church wanted to learn from this guy. They wanted to hear him pray. And so they got together and they figured that the best time to hear him pray is going to be his nighttime prayer. When he kneels beside his bed and he's praying before the end of the day and he's talking to God and he kind of downloads this whole day, this is going to be the best time to hear this guy's prayer. And so while that guy's out doing whatever he's doing, probably feeding the homeless or something, they go to his house, and they hide in his closet. Now this guy, this hypothetical non-existent person, is a single man without a wife, so it's not weird that they're in there, okay? They're not going to see anything they shouldn't see. So they're hiding in his closet, and dude comes in the bedroom, and he does his nighttime routine, and they're kind of sitting there waiting, and this is when he's going to kneel by his bed, right? So they're kind of waiting there, leaning in, and he doesn't kneel by his bed. He just gets into his bed, and they're like, oh, oh, he's going to go prostrate. He's going to go face down on the bed. This guy means it, but he doesn't do that. He just kind of gets in, and he rolls over on his side, and he reaches over, and he turns out the lamp, and he says, good night, Father. And he closes his eyes, and that's it. Because that man had been in prayer all day. That man woke up. He said, good morning, God. This is the day that you have made. Let me rejoice and be glad in it. It's yours. Let me be who you need me to be today. And then at one point or another, I'm sure that man had a time of scheduled prayer where he sat down and he prayed about all the things. And then as he went through his day, he kept God as an active participant in his day so that at the end of the day, when it was time to say goodnight, the only thing left to do was to say goodnight because he had been talking to God all day. This is the model of prayer that we are supposed to pursue. And I know that that might feel far off for some of us. I heard that story before and I've heard pray without ceasing and this attitude of prayer and I've sat you are, and I've thought, gosh, forget it. I barely can remember to pray every day. I don't pray for some of my meals. Like, I don't know if I can ever do that. And it might feel pretty impossible to be someone who wakes up talking to God, who goes throughout your day talking to God, and ends your day talking to God. But I don't love you if I don't put that in front of you as the standard. If I tell you that something short of that is actually what God wants for you, that praying without ceasing, that being people of prayer, that being people who have conversations with God throughout the day, every day, if I tell you that that's only for some Christians, that that's only for some churchgoers, that's only for some of God's children, then I'm lying to you and I don't love you. And so even though that goal may feel very far off, how dare me sell you short of what you should be and of what God wants you to be and of what he implores you to be through model after model and verse after verse in his word. We are to be people of prayer who exist in communication with God. And if you're not there yet and it feels very far off, that's okay. There's grace for that. But we cannot accept less than that. We must be people who pursue God in prayer. And there's so many reasons why, but I think one of the big ones is that when we pray, we confess. Do you know that every time you go to God in prayer, you are making an implicit confession with the simple act of praying. When I see Lily sleeping in her bedroom and I'm overwhelmed and I stop and I pray, I'm confessing in that prayer. God, I'm not big enough for this. God, I'm not adequate to raise this girl without scars that are going to send her into counseling later. I don't have the character to do it, God. I don't have the wisdom to do it, God. God, I can't see around corners, but you can, so I'm just asking you to be with her. God, I know that you created her as your workmanship to walk in those good works, but I don't know what those good works are, God, but you do. So would you please help me raise her in such a way that moves her towards what you intended her to be because I know that I'm inadequate for this. When we pray for our children, we confess that we are inadequate to make them who God wants them to be. And so we need God's help. When we go into a meeting, and before that meeting, maybe it's a difficult conversation. Maybe you're having lunch with a friend and they're going to ask you about a thing, or you have to ask them about a thing, and it's not going to be easy. As we go into that and we say, God, just please be with me as I go to meet with so-and-so. We confess. We confess that we don't have the wisdom for that conversation and that God does. We confess that God loves that person more than we do. We confess that God is going to be present there and that his spirit is needed to give me the words I need to say and to soften the ears and the heart of the person who has to hear them. We confess that God is needed there. Listen, when we're going into a business meeting in sterile, corporate, sometimes vulgar corporate America, when we go into those meetings, and before we go into those meetings, we pray. And we say, God, help me remember that I'm your agent here. Help me remember that they're your children too, that I'm about to meet with your sons and daughters, and that there's something bigger going on than just the decisions that we make or the deal that we close or the pitch that we agree upon. Help me remember, God, that there is something divine happening in that room when I get in there and that I need to be sensitive to it. Help me be sensitive to what everybody else in the room is experiencing. When we pray before we walk into a business meeting, we confess that there's something bigger than business happening in that room. So we stop and we pray. When I pray before a staff meeting, I confess that there's something more important than the day-to-day decisions that are going on in that room. I stop and I pray and I confess. When we schedule time and we pray about everything, it's a confession that we are inadequate for all of those things. And these confessions are important to make those confessions through prayer. It humbles us. It attunes us. It focuses us when we make these confessions. Every Sunday I pray before I come up. And one of the things that I pray is, God, thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to do this. And it confesses, right? It's a helpful thing for me to thank God for the opportunity to do it, to ask that my words would be a reflection of his words and would be helpful for his people. It's helpful for me to do that because it reminds me. God made me for this good work. He made me to teach and run my mouth. I didn't get good at it. I don't know if you think I'm good at it now. I don't really, I don't care if you do. But God gave me a gift to teach. But every time I thank him for the opportunity to express that gift, I acknowledge that it is a gift. I acknowledge and confess. He can take it from me whenever he wants. He can give someone else this stage whenever he wants. It is only by his grace and by his protection that I'm up here this week. And I hope Lord will and I'll be here next week. That's all up to God. And so when I confess that and I acknowledge it and then I get done and someone says, oh, that was good. Oh, that was helpful. I get to celebrate with them that God has worked in their life and that has been helpful, not that I did good because I've already confessed to God that this is his. When we pray, we confess. And by making those regular confessions in our lives, we put ourselves in a posture of humility before God and before others. We see other people as God's children or people who need to be turned on to God's love. Not projects or things that are in the way or simple coworkers or simple friends, but we see God's children. When we pray, we confess our own inadequacies, our need and reliance for God's wisdom rather than our own. I said earlier, I think I'm not triggered to pray enough because I think too highly of myself. I think that I'm too capable for things. I'd be willing to bet we all think that. I want us to be a church of powerful prayers. I want us to follow the model of Nehemiah, to have times that we schedule to pray, And maybe that can be your step of obedience this morning, is to schedule times of prayer. If you're a person who already does that, then maybe your step of obedience can be, God, help me open my eyes to the times that I need to pray. Help me see the times when I'm not doing it. Maybe we can create more triggers. Every time I'm going to make a phone call, every time I'm going to be in a meeting, every time I have a presentation, every time this happens, I will pray. Every time I drive home, I need to pray, God, give me grace for my children from 5.30 p.m. until 7 p.m. Let me be the dad that I need to be to them and not the one I feel like being. We need to set up things in our life where we need that remind us to pray. And I think that we need to acknowledge as we pray that we confess and think through what are the things that we are confessing with this prayer and let that confession humble us before God and for others. With that being said, let's pray together. Father, we love you. We trust you. We're grateful for you. We are thankful that even when we don't know what to pray, that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words, and that even as an added help, your son sits at your right hand interceding for us on behalf of our prayers. God, make us a church filled with people of prayer. And in those prayers, may we confess our insufficiency in light of your all-sufficiency, your greater love for the objects of our prayers that we love so much. May we confess, Father, you as a source of all our wisdom, of all our peace, of all our strength. And may our bowed heads and bent knees acknowledge your sovereignty over this world and your lordship over us. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. I appreciate you being here on this October Sunday. This is the first Sunday where I'm really seeing a lot of sweaters and flannels, and it's just making me so, so very happy that it's cool weather finally. Nothing in my life requires the temperature to ever be above 70 degrees. So I'm very happy to be in the fall. We are wrapping up our series, as Kyle mentioned earlier, this Sunday called Transformed, where we're talking about God transforming us in different ways. This morning, we're going to be focused on transforming our love from conditional to unconditional love. How do we move from conditional love to being able to offer unconditional love, which is a lot more challenging than we might think at first. And in a way, the next series that we're doing is called The Songs We Sing, and it's one I told you about last week. I'm very excited about it because it's one that we've wanted to do for about two and a half years, I think. I've had it in the kitty. I've wanted to do it. We weren't sure the right time to deploy it, and we felt like this fall was the right time. This is what we want to do. And so it's really going to be a six-week series focused on worship. We're going to look at individual worship songs and where they come from in Scripture, imbue them with not more meaning, but the meaning that they had from the author that wrote them and see them in Scripture so that they can mean more to us and really move through a theology of worship learning why we do it. So I'm very excited for that series, and I hope it will be a very meaningful one in the life of Grace. This Sunday is almost like kind of part one of that. It's a transition between transformed and between the songs we sing because we just sang this song, Reckless Love, the reckless love of God. And that's where we're going to rest today. As we approach the idea, I wanted to share with you an idea about love that I encountered years ago, two, three years ago, and it stuck with me, and it's really, it's kind of transformed the way I think about love, and it definitely helps me as I counsel with couples who are going to get married as I do premarital counseling and all of those things, and you'll see why in a minute. But this idea that was presented to me about love is the concept that we all love with boundaries. We all offer our love with some boundaries around it. I'm going to love this person or this thing, but I'm going to love them within some parameters that I've set up. And if this person or thing ventures outside those parameters, I will no longer love you. I'm going to love this puppy until it goes to the bathroom on my bed. Then that is outside the parameters of love. I no longer love this puppy. That scarred me for my whole life, right? Maybe I wouldn't assume that all of you love me. I think some of you do. Maybe you feel kind thoughts towards me. I would hope that none of you exist in open hostility towards me, but maybe you have some affection for me as your pastor. But if I got up here next week and I told you how to vote next year, some of you would be like, that is outside my bounds of love. I no longer feel those feelings of affection towards you, right? There's plenty of things I could get up here and say that would be outside your boundaries of affection for me. There's things that could come up about stuff in the shadows that you would go, well, that's outside, that behavior is outside the bounds of love that I would have for a pastor, so I'm out. You see, we all love with boundaries. We all love with parameters. And this is just kind of as an aside, something that I always say to the couples that I'm doing premarital counseling with. It's important in our marriages to love with broad borders, big expansive boundaries, because the truth of marriage is people don't stay the same. When you get married, you're not just committing to loving that person that you're married, but you're committed to loving the version of them that unfolds 10 years down the road. When we walk the aisle, it fundamentally changes who we are as a person. When we have children, it fundamentally changes who we are as a person. When we get into our careers, when we start to learn ourselves a little bit more, new hobbies open up and those changes, new desires and passions open up and we evolve as people, or at least we should, and those changes. So even this notion in marriage of looking at your spouse and going, you're not who I married. Yeah, no kidding. This shouldn't be unless you married a real dud. So we love with broad borders and allow the person in our marriage to become whoever they need to become, whoever God designed them to be. And that's the love that we should offer to other people is borders that are broad and wide and generous and gracious where we allow God to work in the lives of these people and we don't set tight parameters of our love around the objects of our love. But you can also make an argument that we love with boundaries because these boundaries protect us. We love with these boundaries because life has taught us to love with boundaries. Because those boundaries protect us from hurt. When love goes unreciprocated, when you care a great deal for someone, and at no point in this for the rest of the day am I talking about a romantic love. I just want to be clear. I'm talking about phileo love, the brotherly love, an affectionate love. If we offer our love and affection to somebody over and over and over again and it goes unreciprocated, then eventually it's going to hurt too much to offer that love and we're going to stop. If we offer someone our love and trust and they betray us and they show us that they're not worthy of our love, enough times eventually it's going to hurt so much to offer it to them that we are going to stop. So we naturally develop these borders around the love that we offer to other people and to other things because after those things have hurt us enough or disappointed us enough, we withdraw our love because it hurts too much to extend it. I have a friend that I've had since high school. Really good buddy of mine. And it's probably four or five years ago now, it kind of came to light that his wife was an addict. She was addicted to pills. And it was profoundly impacting their marriage, obviously. And he, for years, had tried to love her in spite of, and eventually had to let other people in on the struggle that they carried together. And it led to her doing things that were not legal to acquire the things that she felt like she needed. And she became more and more distant from my friend. They together had three kids. She had a daughter from a previous relationship but was so close to my friend that she called him dad. So they ostensibly had four kids together and she was completely absent. And I watched him love her faithfully through that. I watched him think the best of her and hope the best of her. Continue to try to rehabilitate and rejuvenate her. And then the time came when she eventually broke down and she needed to go to rehab and rehab lasted several months for her. And I watched him hold together the pieces of his life, try to raise four kids that ran the gamut in age from elementary school to high school. I watched him try to hold everything together. He's an accountant. He had a really good job and his bosses knew what he was going through, but they had to pull him aside and be like, dude, we're not getting any productivity out of you. You can't do your job well right now. We need you to do better. And they worked with him and they worked with him and he felt the pressure and he felt bad. During the season of life, he and I would talk on the phone two and three times a week. And you could just see him spinning out of control and falling apart at the seams. And eventually his bosses came to him at work and they were like, we hate to do this, but you need to look for another job. Because if you stay here, we're going to have to fire you and we don't want to do that. His life was hard. And then in the middle of this, as she's gotten out of rehab and has started to go to different meetings throughout the week. What I felt was inevitable, unearthed as true, she was unfaithful to him as well with somebody in the rehab group. And even in the face of that reality, my friend continued to love her, continued to hope for her and for them and for their best future. And it was hard to watch. And I began to just gently tell him, it may be time to move away. It may be time to move on for your sake and for the sake of the kids. The language I didn't have was, she's ventured outside of any boundaries that should be required of you. And it may be time to admit that she's never coming back in. And he still couldn't do it, wouldn't do it. Still determined to love her. And one day we were on the phone and he said, man, it feels like I'm just throwing myself against a brick wall. And I get up and I dust myself off and I don't know what to do. And I said, dude, not to make it about me, but he decided it was time to make that decision. And so they separated and eventually divorced. And if you fast forward now, now he's living in the Brady Bunch. He married a lady. I think she has three kids. They have seven kids in this house. And it's nuts, but he's happy and she loves him well. And the whole experience actually brought him back to God. But there are times in life when those boundaries are necessary because they protect us. We offer very little boundless love. I can really only think of two situations where we approach offering limitless love to someone or something. The first is to our children. Most parents have incredibly generous borders around the love for their children, and this is a good model for how God loves us. The other place where we seem to have boundless borders around our love is in our sports fandom. We just, NC State fans, you know this. You know this well. Every year, every year, maybe they'll be good. Maybe they won't disappoint me. Maybe they'll take a step forward. And then they just slam into the brick wall of mediocrity. And what do you do? You get yourself up. You dust yourself off. The next year is going to be different. And here's what's awful. Here's what you do is you impart that on your children masochistically. These people that you love boundlessly, now you parade them to the game with you so it becomes a part of their soul. And now they're Wolfpack fans too. Great. They get to endure a life of pain. And I know this masochism well because Lily's a Georgia Tech fan. And I know that we had a big victory last night. Whoop-dee-doo. Guess what? We're still bad at football, and we're going to be bad at football for decades. We offer very little boundless love in our life. And because we are used to offering our love with boundaries, and we are used to receiving love with boundaries, we understand that when someone shows us affection and love and care, that there's some parameter, there's a fence that we need to stay inside of. We get that concept. Because we give and receive love with boundaries, we assume that God has boundaries too. We assume that there must be some parameters around the love that God offers to me because every other experience of love in my life carries those parameters and I know that I need to stay within them or offer within them, and so God must love me in that same way. And the thing that happens that I've seen being a Christian for as far back as I can remember is that when you're in, when you're in the church, when you've been a long-time Christian, you hear about the boundless and the reckless love of God, and you're like, yes, amen. That's absolutely true. To the sinner out there who's disappointing God with every word, thought, and action that they have, who's so far from God, they come to know him, and they get the good news, the good news of the gospel. Hey, God loves you boundlessly. He loves you recklessly. He loves you with no parameters at all. Just be swept up into that love and ushered into heaven. We love that message. That's a good message. That's the Christian message. That's the miracle of the gospel. The problem is that once we receive that love and feel that love, we move into the process of sanctification, becoming more like Christ in character, and we start to disappoint God, and we start to let him down down and we start to return to some of the sins that we employed previously and we slide into and out of fervency, into and out of spiritual attendedness, into and out of faithful pursuit of him. There are times when we run our race well. There are times when we take a breather and we walk and there are times when we just sit down and consider whether or not we want to continue the race at all. And we assume, Christians, that we have ventured outside the parameters of God's love. And the love that he once had for me, he still has, but not as much because I've tainted it. Because I should know better. Because I know what I'm going to go do. I know what I'm planning to go do. I know that if you put me in this situation with this group of people, what I am capable of doing. I know my private heart conditions. I know my prejudices and my biases, and I am not going to be letting those go anytime soon. So God must be disappointed in me. I think that's how most Christians go through their life. To put it more pointedly, if you were God, would you still love you? If you were God in heaven, would you still love you? Let's make you God and me you. And you offered for me the thing that you valued the most in all of your existence, your only son. You sent him and you watched him die for my sake. And I saw that gift and I saw your love and I saw your sacrifice and I saw his suffering, the same suffering that you watched and I I said, thanks for that. And I put it in my back pocket. And then for the rest of my days, I lived as if that weren't true. I lived outside of gratitude for it. I did whatever I wanted. You said, I'm doing this for you. Let me be the Lord of my life and I'll give you the best life possible. And I said, I'm going to accept your eternal life. I'm going to put that in my back pocket, save it for a rainy day. And I I'm actually gonna choose my version of a good life because I think I know what it is better than yours. Yours seems lame and boring. Mine is super awesome and fun. So I'm gonna do what I wanna do. And every now and again, I'm gonna lean towards Jesus. I'm gonna make it look to everyone around me like I've got my act together and I'm doing the right things and I read my Bible and I pray and I make wise choices. But you and I both know that I'm really not living under your lordship at all. But at the end of my life, when it comes time, I'm gonna pull out that card and be like, so I get in, right? Would you still love me? If that was my attitude towards your gift? There's a reason that most of us feel like God is disappointed in us. There's a reason why when I ask a question like, if God still loves you, if you were God, would you still love you? And it's because we've been programmed to assume that God's love works the same way ours does. That there's parameters, there's borders, that there's a limit. But thank God that this human God, this God that loves like a person, is not the God at all that's described in Scripture. Thank God that the God in Scripture is described as offering a love that is utterly impossible for us and unknown to us outside of knowing him. And I'm going to read some scriptures and go through and show you this never-ending reckless love of God from scripture. But as I do that, the temptation, I believe, for us Christians in the room is to say, I know that. Yeah, I know God loves me no matter what. I get it. He loves me no matter what. He loves me recklessly. He loves me to the end of the earth. He removes my sins as far as the east is from the west. Some of you can probably guess the verses that I'm going to use. I know God loves me. Yeah. Listen. You know God loves you here. But when's the last time you felt God's love here? We know intellectually he loves us. Do we walk filled with the love of God through our days and offering that freely and graciously to others? Do we live out that verse from his goodness? We have all received grace upon grace. The initial grace is God's And from his fullness, we receive that and we spill it out onto others. Do you walk through your days knowing here, deep in your soul, that God loves you and it's the only love that you ever need and you can stop chasing it in other places because he is all sufficient for you? Do you walk in a heart knowledge of God's relentless love of you? I don't. I know I don't. Because every now and again I do. And when I do, those days are different. When I walk with a soul knowledge that I am loved by the creator God, that he finds no fault in me because of his son, I'm a better husband, I'll tell you that. I'm a more patient father. I'm a more gracious friend. I'm a more diligent pastor. I'm a much more patient driver. Do you go through your days with some sort of mental assent that yes, there's a God and he loves me? Or do you go through your days feeling it beat in your chest and in your soul that God loves you deeply and there's nothing you can ever do to change that? So as I go through these verses, don't be the pious Christian that gives intellectual assent to what I'm going to say, but let God's love rest on your soul this morning. That you might know and accept and walk in the fact that you are loved deeply by your creator. This is what he says in Jeremiah 31.3. I've just got a list of passages here that I want you to hear this morning. The Lord appeared to him from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love. Therefore, I have continued my faithfulness to you. Now he's speaking here in Jeremiah to God's people, to the Israelites, but we know that if we are Christians, if we profess a faith in Christ, then we are God's people too. And so this verse, and God's love applies to us, he loves us in an everlasting way. And so he remains faithful to us. Nehemiah says, back in the desert when you freed us from slavery and we were wandering around for those 40 years, we trampled on you. We rejected you. You gave us manna every day and we didn't care. You gave us laws and we didn't want them. You gave us provision and we didn't care for it. We wanted to actually go back to Egypt and worship their gods. We stubbed our, I don't know the right phrase. We snubbed our nose at you. Is that a thing? We refused your help. And by all rights, you should have rejected us. But you didn't. Because you're slow to anger and you're abounding in steadfast love and mercy. And he did not forsake them. And then John writes at the end of his life, 1 John chapter 4. Your notes have 9 through 11, but the first three words are from verse 8. God is love. In this, the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation of our sins. I mentioned the sacrifice of Christ earlier. That is the picture of love. That is love literally becoming flesh and suffering for us, with us, to bring us with him into eternal not suffering. And he leads off this section, John does, by saying God is love. He is the personification of love. You cannot think of pure love and be thinking not of God. Any person who's ever existed without a knowledge of God, who refuses to acknowledge the existence of God, when they think of love, when they feel love, they are thinking of God, they are feeling God, even if they don't realize it because God is love. He is found in that emotion. He is found in that desire and in that affection. God claims to be love itself. And if that's true, then I would like for you to allow me the license to reword Paul's famous poem on love in 1 Corinthians chapter 13. If we replace the word love, love is patient, love is kind, doesn't envy, does not boast. If we replace that with God, because God is love, then it reads like this and resonates with me. God is patient. God is kind. He does not envy. He does not boast. He is not proud. He does not dishonor others. God is not self-seeking. He is not easily angered. He keeps no record of wrongs. God does not delight in trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. God never fails. That's the love that your God offers to you. He loves you with an everlasting love. And because of that, he is steadfast in his faithfulness to you, even when you are unfaithful to him. He always persists. He always hopes in you. He never fails you. He keeps no record of your wrongs. We sing that song right before the sermon, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. And it's funny to me, when that song first came out, there was debate in theological circles because theological circles like to have stupid debates to justify their existence. And there was a school of thought that the recklessness there was that shouldn't be in a worship song. We shouldn't attribute that to God. That's a negative thing. That means he's foolhardy. It's some sort of error that he's making in loving us. And I always thought that was absurd. God's love is reckless because he loves with no regard for himself. God's love for you is reckless because he's the only entity in eternity that can love with a boundless love with no parameters to protect himself. God will slam against the wall of your apathy over and over and over again for your entire life and get himself up and dust himself off and heal himself up and chase after you again. And eventually, I'm just going to tell you, he's going to Kool-Aid man through that brick wall of yours. He's going to get you. But in the meantime, he's going to keep coming. And our sin and our obstinance and our apathy can keep holding him at bay, but he's not going to stop following you. He's not going to stop pursuing you. He's not going to stop chasing you. You're not going to hurt him enough that he has to withdraw and retract and say, I just can't do it. It hurts too much to continue to love her. He's just going to keep coming because that's the love of God. I've gotten into this habit recently that I would honestly highly recommend for my Bible readers. When it's time for my reading time in the morning, I've started trying to figure out what's the thing I'm feeling or thinking about the most right now. And then I read the book of the Bible that I feel like most aligns with that. If the book's short enough, I just read the whole thing. And so this morning, knowing that I was preaching about this, I sat down to read Hosea. Some of my scholars in the room know that that's what the whole book of Hosea is about. An overview of the book of Hosea is there's a prophet, I bet you can guess his name, and he is told by God to go marry a lady of the night named Gomer, which could there be a more tempting name for a lady of the night than Gomer? God says, I want you to go marry her. I want you to make her an honest woman. Go pay the bride price, and I want you to marry her. And your marriage to her is to be a picture, is to be a picture of my marriage to Israel that has gone and been unfaithful to me and cheated on me with other gods and with other priorities and yet I'm still choosing them. So you're gonna go marry her as a picture for how I love you. They got married, They had three kids. After they had three kids, she left and she went back to her old ways. Because I think when you're in a lifestyle like that or others like that, that it's difficult to always fully depart from them. She went back to her old ways. And God said, Hosea, go pay her bride price and marry her again. And he did it. And then she left him again and he went and got her again. And the whole book is a picture of God's love for Israel, God's love for you and me. So I sat down to reread it this morning and I didn't even get through, I didn't even get it past the second chapter because in the second chapter we see, or it might be in the first chapter where she has the kids, yeah, it's the first chapter. Because in the second chapter, we see, or it might be in the first chapter where she has the kids. Yeah, it's the first chapter. She has the kids and God, whenever she gets pregnant, God tells Hosea what to name the child. And I don't remember the actual names. One is just real. I don't remember the rest. But the first name of the first child meant not my people. And he said, you're going to name your child not my people because Israel, not Judah, Israel has betrayed me. Israel has talked and acted and walked and thought as if they don't want to be my children, as if they don't care to be my people, so now they no longer will be my people. So you will name your first child as assigned to Israel, not my people. You will name your second child as assigned to Israel, not my God, because in word and thought and action, they have betrayed me as their God. They no longer want me as their God, so I'm going to grant them their wish. You name your second child, not my God. The third child, I want you to name no mercy, because through their words and through the thoughts and through their deeds, they do not want my mercy anymore. So name the child no mercy, for I will not show them mercy. And as you read it, you think, this makes sense. I know this love. I understand this judgment. I get this reciprocity. I offered myself to you. I made you my people. You acted as if you didn't want to be my people. Eventually, you're not. I made myself your God. You acted like you wanted other gods to worship Baal or whatever else. So eventually, I'm not your God. I offered you mercy. You said, no thanks, we don't need your mercy. Fine, I'm not going to offer you my mercy. And then you read chapter 2. Chapter 2 is this long poem. And in it, he details the unfaithfulness of his bride, Israel. And then all the things that he was doing behind the scenes to provide for her, care for her, love for her, that she didn't realize. And then ultimately, she still spat on him and who he was. But even after that, chapter two ends with this verse. It just sat me down right there in my seat. It just blew me back. Even after that, after Israel does nothing, they have not apologized. They have not looked at the example of Hosea and been like, oh no, what do we do? They are not repentant. They are not sorry. They have not come back to God at all. And in the midst of that, God says this, and I will have mercy on no mercy. And I will say to not my people, you are my people. And he shall say, you are my God. Even after not repenting, even after continuing to stomp on the love of God, continuing to betray it in word and in thought and in action, and reject it in word and thought and action, God says to those people, I am your God, you are my people, and I will show you mercy. And he says that to us. His love is overwhelming and never-ending and reckless. And he pursues you. And I don't want you to know it. I want you to feel it. Because here's what happens when you feel it and you walk as if you're loved by God. God's reckless love creates a protective sanctuary from which we are able to offer boundless love as well. How do we transform, transition from offering conditional love to unconditional love? By walking in the deep heart knowledge of the boundless love that Creator God has for us. When you can walk with it here, you can offer it everywhere. Reject me as many times as you like, brother. Creator God loves me. I don't need yours anyways. Say whatever you want to say about me. Betray my trust as many times as you need to before I wear you down and before you accept this love too because God loves me. I don't really need yours. I'm loving you for you. If we want to be transformed from offering human conditional love with boundaries to offering divine, holy, Jesus-enabled and Holy Spirit-inspired love to others, then what we must do is walk in a deep knowledge of the reckless love that God offers to us. I hope you'll go from this place and do that. Let's pray. God, every time I pray, personally or corporately, I pray that I or we love you. And we do. You know that we do. We're just not good at it. So God, would you make us better? And God, would the only effort that we make towards loving you and others more, would the only effort that we make towards that be? To attempt to live in a knowledge that we are loved recklessly and endlessly by you. Would that reality transform our lives, our hearts, how we love, how we live? God, we thank you for your son, the personification of your love, the embodiment of your love, and how he was poured out for us. God, I pray that we would leave this room more certain that you love us, feeling more deeply what your love means than we did when we came in here today. Help us receive and offer your reckless love, Lord. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. I appreciate you being here on this October Sunday. This is the first Sunday where I'm really seeing a lot of sweaters and flannels, and it's just making me so, so very happy that it's cool weather finally. Nothing in my life requires the temperature to ever be above 70 degrees. So I'm very happy to be in the fall. We are wrapping up our series, as Kyle mentioned earlier, this Sunday called Transformed, where we're talking about God transforming us in different ways. This morning, we're going to be focused on transforming our love from conditional to unconditional love. How do we move from conditional love to being able to offer unconditional love, which is a lot more challenging than we might think at first. And in a way, the next series that we're doing is called The Songs We Sing, and it's one I told you about last week. I'm very excited about it because it's one that we've wanted to do for about two and a half years, I think. I've had it in the kitty. I've wanted to do it. We weren't sure the right time to deploy it, and we felt like this fall was the right time. This is what we want to do. And so it's really going to be a six-week series focused on worship. We're going to look at individual worship songs and where they come from in Scripture, imbue them with not more meaning, but the meaning that they had from the author that wrote them and see them in Scripture so that they can mean more to us and really move through a theology of worship learning why we do it. So I'm very excited for that series, and I hope it will be a very meaningful one in the life of Grace. This Sunday is almost like kind of part one of that. It's a transition between transformed and between the songs we sing because we just sang this song, Reckless Love, the reckless love of God. And that's where we're going to rest today. As we approach the idea, I wanted to share with you an idea about love that I encountered years ago, two, three years ago, and it stuck with me, and it's really, it's kind of transformed the way I think about love, and it definitely helps me as I counsel with couples who are going to get married as I do premarital counseling and all of those things, and you'll see why in a minute. But this idea that was presented to me about love is the concept that we all love with boundaries. We all offer our love with some boundaries around it. I'm going to love this person or this thing, but I'm going to love them within some parameters that I've set up. And if this person or thing ventures outside those parameters, I will no longer love you. I'm going to love this puppy until it goes to the bathroom on my bed. Then that is outside the parameters of love. I no longer love this puppy. That scarred me for my whole life, right? Maybe I wouldn't assume that all of you love me. I think some of you do. Maybe you feel kind thoughts towards me. I would hope that none of you exist in open hostility towards me, but maybe you have some affection for me as your pastor. But if I got up here next week and I told you how to vote next year, some of you would be like, that is outside my bounds of love. I no longer feel those feelings of affection towards you, right? There's plenty of things I could get up here and say that would be outside your boundaries of affection for me. There's things that could come up about stuff in the shadows that you would go, well, that's outside, that behavior is outside the bounds of love that I would have for a pastor, so I'm out. You see, we all love with boundaries. We all love with parameters. And this is just kind of as an aside, something that I always say to the couples that I'm doing premarital counseling with. It's important in our marriages to love with broad borders, big expansive boundaries, because the truth of marriage is people don't stay the same. When you get married, you're not just committing to loving that person that you're married, but you're committed to loving the version of them that unfolds 10 years down the road. When we walk the aisle, it fundamentally changes who we are as a person. When we have children, it fundamentally changes who we are as a person. When we get into our careers, when we start to learn ourselves a little bit more, new hobbies open up and those changes, new desires and passions open up and we evolve as people, or at least we should, and those changes. So even this notion in marriage of looking at your spouse and going, you're not who I married. Yeah, no kidding. This shouldn't be unless you married a real dud. So we love with broad borders and allow the person in our marriage to become whoever they need to become, whoever God designed them to be. And that's the love that we should offer to other people is borders that are broad and wide and generous and gracious where we allow God to work in the lives of these people and we don't set tight parameters of our love around the objects of our love. But you can also make an argument that we love with boundaries because these boundaries protect us. We love with these boundaries because life has taught us to love with boundaries. Because those boundaries protect us from hurt. When love goes unreciprocated, when you care a great deal for someone, and at no point in this for the rest of the day am I talking about a romantic love. I just want to be clear. I'm talking about phileo love, the brotherly love, an affectionate love. If we offer our love and affection to somebody over and over and over again and it goes unreciprocated, then eventually it's going to hurt too much to offer that love and we're going to stop. If we offer someone our love and trust and they betray us and they show us that they're not worthy of our love, enough times eventually it's going to hurt so much to offer it to them that we are going to stop. So we naturally develop these borders around the love that we offer to other people and to other things because after those things have hurt us enough or disappointed us enough, we withdraw our love because it hurts too much to extend it. I have a friend that I've had since high school. Really good buddy of mine. And it's probably four or five years ago now, it kind of came to light that his wife was an addict. She was addicted to pills. And it was profoundly impacting their marriage, obviously. And he, for years, had tried to love her in spite of, and eventually had to let other people in on the struggle that they carried together. And it led to her doing things that were not legal to acquire the things that she felt like she needed. And she became more and more distant from my friend. They together had three kids. She had a daughter from a previous relationship but was so close to my friend that she called him dad. So they ostensibly had four kids together and she was completely absent. And I watched him love her faithfully through that. I watched him think the best of her and hope the best of her. Continue to try to rehabilitate and rejuvenate her. And then the time came when she eventually broke down and she needed to go to rehab and rehab lasted several months for her. And I watched him hold together the pieces of his life, try to raise four kids that ran the gamut in age from elementary school to high school. I watched him try to hold everything together. He's an accountant. He had a really good job and his bosses knew what he was going through, but they had to pull him aside and be like, dude, we're not getting any productivity out of you. You can't do your job well right now. We need you to do better. And they worked with him and they worked with him and he felt the pressure and he felt bad. During the season of life, he and I would talk on the phone two and three times a week. And you could just see him spinning out of control and falling apart at the seams. And eventually his bosses came to him at work and they were like, we hate to do this, but you need to look for another job. Because if you stay here, we're going to have to fire you and we don't want to do that. His life was hard. And then in the middle of this, as she's gotten out of rehab and has started to go to different meetings throughout the week. What I felt was inevitable, unearthed as true, she was unfaithful to him as well with somebody in the rehab group. And even in the face of that reality, my friend continued to love her, continued to hope for her and for them and for their best future. And it was hard to watch. And I began to just gently tell him, it may be time to move away. It may be time to move on for your sake and for the sake of the kids. The language I didn't have was, she's ventured outside of any boundaries that should be required of you. And it may be time to admit that she's never coming back in. And he still couldn't do it, wouldn't do it. Still determined to love her. And one day we were on the phone and he said, man, it feels like I'm just throwing myself against a brick wall. And I get up and I dust myself off and I don't know what to do. And I said, dude, not to make it about me, but he decided it was time to make that decision. And so they separated and eventually divorced. And if you fast forward now, now he's living in the Brady Bunch. He married a lady. I think she has three kids. They have seven kids in this house. And it's nuts, but he's happy and she loves him well. And the whole experience actually brought him back to God. But there are times in life when those boundaries are necessary because they protect us. We offer very little boundless love. I can really only think of two situations where we approach offering limitless love to someone or something. The first is to our children. Most parents have incredibly generous borders around the love for their children, and this is a good model for how God loves us. The other place where we seem to have boundless borders around our love is in our sports fandom. We just, NC State fans, you know this. You know this well. Every year, every year, maybe they'll be good. Maybe they won't disappoint me. Maybe they'll take a step forward. And then they just slam into the brick wall of mediocrity. And what do you do? You get yourself up. You dust yourself off. The next year is going to be different. And here's what's awful. Here's what you do is you impart that on your children masochistically. These people that you love boundlessly, now you parade them to the game with you so it becomes a part of their soul. And now they're Wolfpack fans too. Great. They get to endure a life of pain. And I know this masochism well because Lily's a Georgia Tech fan. And I know that we had a big victory last night. Whoop-dee-doo. Guess what? We're still bad at football, and we're going to be bad at football for decades. We offer very little boundless love in our life. And because we are used to offering our love with boundaries, and we are used to receiving love with boundaries, we understand that when someone shows us affection and love and care, that there's some parameter, there's a fence that we need to stay inside of. We get that concept. Because we give and receive love with boundaries, we assume that God has boundaries too. We assume that there must be some parameters around the love that God offers to me because every other experience of love in my life carries those parameters and I know that I need to stay within them or offer within them, and so God must love me in that same way. And the thing that happens that I've seen being a Christian for as far back as I can remember is that when you're in, when you're in the church, when you've been a long-time Christian, you hear about the boundless and the reckless love of God, and you're like, yes, amen. That's absolutely true. To the sinner out there who's disappointing God with every word, thought, and action that they have, who's so far from God, they come to know him, and they get the good news, the good news of the gospel. Hey, God loves you boundlessly. He loves you recklessly. He loves you with no parameters at all. Just be swept up into that love and ushered into heaven. We love that message. That's a good message. That's the Christian message. That's the miracle of the gospel. The problem is that once we receive that love and feel that love, we move into the process of sanctification, becoming more like Christ in character, and we start to disappoint God, and we start to let him down down and we start to return to some of the sins that we employed previously and we slide into and out of fervency, into and out of spiritual attendedness, into and out of faithful pursuit of him. There are times when we run our race well. There are times when we take a breather and we walk and there are times when we just sit down and consider whether or not we want to continue the race at all. And we assume, Christians, that we have ventured outside the parameters of God's love. And the love that he once had for me, he still has, but not as much because I've tainted it. Because I should know better. Because I know what I'm going to go do. I know what I'm planning to go do. I know that if you put me in this situation with this group of people, what I am capable of doing. I know my private heart conditions. I know my prejudices and my biases, and I am not going to be letting those go anytime soon. So God must be disappointed in me. I think that's how most Christians go through their life. To put it more pointedly, if you were God, would you still love you? If you were God in heaven, would you still love you? Let's make you God and me you. And you offered for me the thing that you valued the most in all of your existence, your only son. You sent him and you watched him die for my sake. And I saw that gift and I saw your love and I saw your sacrifice and I saw his suffering, the same suffering that you watched and I I said, thanks for that. And I put it in my back pocket. And then for the rest of my days, I lived as if that weren't true. I lived outside of gratitude for it. I did whatever I wanted. You said, I'm doing this for you. Let me be the Lord of my life and I'll give you the best life possible. And I said, I'm going to accept your eternal life. I'm going to put that in my back pocket, save it for a rainy day. And I I'm actually gonna choose my version of a good life because I think I know what it is better than yours. Yours seems lame and boring. Mine is super awesome and fun. So I'm gonna do what I wanna do. And every now and again, I'm gonna lean towards Jesus. I'm gonna make it look to everyone around me like I've got my act together and I'm doing the right things and I read my Bible and I pray and I make wise choices. But you and I both know that I'm really not living under your lordship at all. But at the end of my life, when it comes time, I'm gonna pull out that card and be like, so I get in, right? Would you still love me? If that was my attitude towards your gift? There's a reason that most of us feel like God is disappointed in us. There's a reason why when I ask a question like, if God still loves you, if you were God, would you still love you? And it's because we've been programmed to assume that God's love works the same way ours does. That there's parameters, there's borders, that there's a limit. But thank God that this human God, this God that loves like a person, is not the God at all that's described in Scripture. Thank God that the God in Scripture is described as offering a love that is utterly impossible for us and unknown to us outside of knowing him. And I'm going to read some scriptures and go through and show you this never-ending reckless love of God from scripture. But as I do that, the temptation, I believe, for us Christians in the room is to say, I know that. Yeah, I know God loves me no matter what. I get it. He loves me no matter what. He loves me recklessly. He loves me to the end of the earth. He removes my sins as far as the east is from the west. Some of you can probably guess the verses that I'm going to use. I know God loves me. Yeah. Listen. You know God loves you here. But when's the last time you felt God's love here? We know intellectually he loves us. Do we walk filled with the love of God through our days and offering that freely and graciously to others? Do we live out that verse from his goodness? We have all received grace upon grace. The initial grace is God's And from his fullness, we receive that and we spill it out onto others. Do you walk through your days knowing here, deep in your soul, that God loves you and it's the only love that you ever need and you can stop chasing it in other places because he is all sufficient for you? Do you walk in a heart knowledge of God's relentless love of you? I don't. I know I don't. Because every now and again I do. And when I do, those days are different. When I walk with a soul knowledge that I am loved by the creator God, that he finds no fault in me because of his son, I'm a better husband, I'll tell you that. I'm a more patient father. I'm a more gracious friend. I'm a more diligent pastor. I'm a much more patient driver. Do you go through your days with some sort of mental assent that yes, there's a God and he loves me? Or do you go through your days feeling it beat in your chest and in your soul that God loves you deeply and there's nothing you can ever do to change that? So as I go through these verses, don't be the pious Christian that gives intellectual assent to what I'm going to say, but let God's love rest on your soul this morning. That you might know and accept and walk in the fact that you are loved deeply by your creator. This is what he says in Jeremiah 31.3. I've just got a list of passages here that I want you to hear this morning. The Lord appeared to him from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love. Therefore, I have continued my faithfulness to you. Now he's speaking here in Jeremiah to God's people, to the Israelites, but we know that if we are Christians, if we profess a faith in Christ, then we are God's people too. And so this verse, and God's love applies to us, he loves us in an everlasting way. And so he remains faithful to us. Nehemiah says, back in the desert when you freed us from slavery and we were wandering around for those 40 years, we trampled on you. We rejected you. You gave us manna every day and we didn't care. You gave us laws and we didn't want them. You gave us provision and we didn't care for it. We wanted to actually go back to Egypt and worship their gods. We stubbed our, I don't know the right phrase. We snubbed our nose at you. Is that a thing? We refused your help. And by all rights, you should have rejected us. But you didn't. Because you're slow to anger and you're abounding in steadfast love and mercy. And he did not forsake them. And then John writes at the end of his life, 1 John chapter 4. Your notes have 9 through 11, but the first three words are from verse 8. God is love. In this, the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation of our sins. I mentioned the sacrifice of Christ earlier. That is the picture of love. That is love literally becoming flesh and suffering for us, with us, to bring us with him into eternal not suffering. And he leads off this section, John does, by saying God is love. He is the personification of love. You cannot think of pure love and be thinking not of God. Any person who's ever existed without a knowledge of God, who refuses to acknowledge the existence of God, when they think of love, when they feel love, they are thinking of God, they are feeling God, even if they don't realize it because God is love. He is found in that emotion. He is found in that desire and in that affection. God claims to be love itself. And if that's true, then I would like for you to allow me the license to reword Paul's famous poem on love in 1 Corinthians chapter 13. If we replace the word love, love is patient, love is kind, doesn't envy, does not boast. If we replace that with God, because God is love, then it reads like this and resonates with me. God is patient. God is kind. He does not envy. He does not boast. He is not proud. He does not dishonor others. God is not self-seeking. He is not easily angered. He keeps no record of wrongs. God does not delight in trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. God never fails. That's the love that your God offers to you. He loves you with an everlasting love. And because of that, he is steadfast in his faithfulness to you, even when you are unfaithful to him. He always persists. He always hopes in you. He never fails you. He keeps no record of your wrongs. We sing that song right before the sermon, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. And it's funny to me, when that song first came out, there was debate in theological circles because theological circles like to have stupid debates to justify their existence. And there was a school of thought that the recklessness there was that shouldn't be in a worship song. We shouldn't attribute that to God. That's a negative thing. That means he's foolhardy. It's some sort of error that he's making in loving us. And I always thought that was absurd. God's love is reckless because he loves with no regard for himself. God's love for you is reckless because he's the only entity in eternity that can love with a boundless love with no parameters to protect himself. God will slam against the wall of your apathy over and over and over again for your entire life and get himself up and dust himself off and heal himself up and chase after you again. And eventually, I'm just going to tell you, he's going to Kool-Aid man through that brick wall of yours. He's going to get you. But in the meantime, he's going to keep coming. And our sin and our obstinance and our apathy can keep holding him at bay, but he's not going to stop following you. He's not going to stop pursuing you. He's not going to stop chasing you. You're not going to hurt him enough that he has to withdraw and retract and say, I just can't do it. It hurts too much to continue to love her. He's just going to keep coming because that's the love of God. I've gotten into this habit recently that I would honestly highly recommend for my Bible readers. When it's time for my reading time in the morning, I've started trying to figure out what's the thing I'm feeling or thinking about the most right now. And then I read the book of the Bible that I feel like most aligns with that. If the book's short enough, I just read the whole thing. And so this morning, knowing that I was preaching about this, I sat down to read Hosea. Some of my scholars in the room know that that's what the whole book of Hosea is about. An overview of the book of Hosea is there's a prophet, I bet you can guess his name, and he is told by God to go marry a lady of the night named Gomer, which could there be a more tempting name for a lady of the night than Gomer? God says, I want you to go marry her. I want you to make her an honest woman. Go pay the bride price, and I want you to marry her. And your marriage to her is to be a picture, is to be a picture of my marriage to Israel that has gone and been unfaithful to me and cheated on me with other gods and with other priorities and yet I'm still choosing them. So you're gonna go marry her as a picture for how I love you. They got married, They had three kids. After they had three kids, she left and she went back to her old ways. Because I think when you're in a lifestyle like that or others like that, that it's difficult to always fully depart from them. She went back to her old ways. And God said, Hosea, go pay her bride price and marry her again. And he did it. And then she left him again and he went and got her again. And the whole book is a picture of God's love for Israel, God's love for you and me. So I sat down to reread it this morning and I didn't even get through, I didn't even get it past the second chapter because in the second chapter we see, or it might be in the first chapter where she has the kids, yeah, it's the first chapter. Because in the second chapter, we see, or it might be in the first chapter where she has the kids. Yeah, it's the first chapter. She has the kids and God, whenever she gets pregnant, God tells Hosea what to name the child. And I don't remember the actual names. One is just real. I don't remember the rest. But the first name of the first child meant not my people. And he said, you're going to name your child not my people because Israel, not Judah, Israel has betrayed me. Israel has talked and acted and walked and thought as if they don't want to be my children, as if they don't care to be my people, so now they no longer will be my people. So you will name your first child as assigned to Israel, not my people. You will name your second child as assigned to Israel, not my God, because in word and thought and action, they have betrayed me as their God. They no longer want me as their God, so I'm going to grant them their wish. You name your second child, not my God. The third child, I want you to name no mercy, because through their words and through the thoughts and through their deeds, they do not want my mercy anymore. So name the child no mercy, for I will not show them mercy. And as you read it, you think, this makes sense. I know this love. I understand this judgment. I get this reciprocity. I offered myself to you. I made you my people. You acted as if you didn't want to be my people. Eventually, you're not. I made myself your God. You acted like you wanted other gods to worship Baal or whatever else. So eventually, I'm not your God. I offered you mercy. You said, no thanks, we don't need your mercy. Fine, I'm not going to offer you my mercy. And then you read chapter 2. Chapter 2 is this long poem. And in it, he details the unfaithfulness of his bride, Israel. And then all the things that he was doing behind the scenes to provide for her, care for her, love for her, that she didn't realize. And then ultimately, she still spat on him and who he was. But even after that, chapter two ends with this verse. It just sat me down right there in my seat. It just blew me back. Even after that, after Israel does nothing, they have not apologized. They have not looked at the example of Hosea and been like, oh no, what do we do? They are not repentant. They are not sorry. They have not come back to God at all. And in the midst of that, God says this, and I will have mercy on no mercy. And I will say to not my people, you are my people. And he shall say, you are my God. Even after not repenting, even after continuing to stomp on the love of God, continuing to betray it in word and in thought and in action, and reject it in word and thought and action, God says to those people, I am your God, you are my people, and I will show you mercy. And he says that to us. His love is overwhelming and never-ending and reckless. And he pursues you. And I don't want you to know it. I want you to feel it. Because here's what happens when you feel it and you walk as if you're loved by God. God's reckless love creates a protective sanctuary from which we are able to offer boundless love as well. How do we transform, transition from offering conditional love to unconditional love? By walking in the deep heart knowledge of the boundless love that Creator God has for us. When you can walk with it here, you can offer it everywhere. Reject me as many times as you like, brother. Creator God loves me. I don't need yours anyways. Say whatever you want to say about me. Betray my trust as many times as you need to before I wear you down and before you accept this love too because God loves me. I don't really need yours. I'm loving you for you. If we want to be transformed from offering human conditional love with boundaries to offering divine, holy, Jesus-enabled and Holy Spirit-inspired love to others, then what we must do is walk in a deep knowledge of the reckless love that God offers to us. I hope you'll go from this place and do that. Let's pray. God, every time I pray, personally or corporately, I pray that I or we love you. And we do. You know that we do. We're just not good at it. So God, would you make us better? And God, would the only effort that we make towards loving you and others more, would the only effort that we make towards that be? To attempt to live in a knowledge that we are loved recklessly and endlessly by you. Would that reality transform our lives, our hearts, how we love, how we live? God, we thank you for your son, the personification of your love, the embodiment of your love, and how he was poured out for us. God, I pray that we would leave this room more certain that you love us, feeling more deeply what your love means than we did when we came in here today. Help us receive and offer your reckless love, Lord. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. I appreciate you being here on this October Sunday. This is the first Sunday where I'm really seeing a lot of sweaters and flannels, and it's just making me so, so very happy that it's cool weather finally. Nothing in my life requires the temperature to ever be above 70 degrees. So I'm very happy to be in the fall. We are wrapping up our series, as Kyle mentioned earlier, this Sunday called Transformed, where we're talking about God transforming us in different ways. This morning, we're going to be focused on transforming our love from conditional to unconditional love. How do we move from conditional love to being able to offer unconditional love, which is a lot more challenging than we might think at first. And in a way, the next series that we're doing is called The Songs We Sing, and it's one I told you about last week. I'm very excited about it because it's one that we've wanted to do for about two and a half years, I think. I've had it in the kitty. I've wanted to do it. We weren't sure the right time to deploy it, and we felt like this fall was the right time. This is what we want to do. And so it's really going to be a six-week series focused on worship. We're going to look at individual worship songs and where they come from in Scripture, imbue them with not more meaning, but the meaning that they had from the author that wrote them and see them in Scripture so that they can mean more to us and really move through a theology of worship learning why we do it. So I'm very excited for that series, and I hope it will be a very meaningful one in the life of Grace. This Sunday is almost like kind of part one of that. It's a transition between transformed and between the songs we sing because we just sang this song, Reckless Love, the reckless love of God. And that's where we're going to rest today. As we approach the idea, I wanted to share with you an idea about love that I encountered years ago, two, three years ago, and it stuck with me, and it's really, it's kind of transformed the way I think about love, and it definitely helps me as I counsel with couples who are going to get married as I do premarital counseling and all of those things, and you'll see why in a minute. But this idea that was presented to me about love is the concept that we all love with boundaries. We all offer our love with some boundaries around it. I'm going to love this person or this thing, but I'm going to love them within some parameters that I've set up. And if this person or thing ventures outside those parameters, I will no longer love you. I'm going to love this puppy until it goes to the bathroom on my bed. Then that is outside the parameters of love. I no longer love this puppy. That scarred me for my whole life, right? Maybe I wouldn't assume that all of you love me. I think some of you do. Maybe you feel kind thoughts towards me. I would hope that none of you exist in open hostility towards me, but maybe you have some affection for me as your pastor. But if I got up here next week and I told you how to vote next year, some of you would be like, that is outside my bounds of love. I no longer feel those feelings of affection towards you, right? There's plenty of things I could get up here and say that would be outside your boundaries of affection for me. There's things that could come up about stuff in the shadows that you would go, well, that's outside, that behavior is outside the bounds of love that I would have for a pastor, so I'm out. You see, we all love with boundaries. We all love with parameters. And this is just kind of as an aside, something that I always say to the couples that I'm doing premarital counseling with. It's important in our marriages to love with broad borders, big expansive boundaries, because the truth of marriage is people don't stay the same. When you get married, you're not just committing to loving that person that you're married, but you're committed to loving the version of them that unfolds 10 years down the road. When we walk the aisle, it fundamentally changes who we are as a person. When we have children, it fundamentally changes who we are as a person. When we get into our careers, when we start to learn ourselves a little bit more, new hobbies open up and those changes, new desires and passions open up and we evolve as people, or at least we should, and those changes. So even this notion in marriage of looking at your spouse and going, you're not who I married. Yeah, no kidding. This shouldn't be unless you married a real dud. So we love with broad borders and allow the person in our marriage to become whoever they need to become, whoever God designed them to be. And that's the love that we should offer to other people is borders that are broad and wide and generous and gracious where we allow God to work in the lives of these people and we don't set tight parameters of our love around the objects of our love. But you can also make an argument that we love with boundaries because these boundaries protect us. We love with these boundaries because life has taught us to love with boundaries. Because those boundaries protect us from hurt. When love goes unreciprocated, when you care a great deal for someone, and at no point in this for the rest of the day am I talking about a romantic love. I just want to be clear. I'm talking about phileo love, the brotherly love, an affectionate love. If we offer our love and affection to somebody over and over and over again and it goes unreciprocated, then eventually it's going to hurt too much to offer that love and we're going to stop. If we offer someone our love and trust and they betray us and they show us that they're not worthy of our love, enough times eventually it's going to hurt so much to offer it to them that we are going to stop. So we naturally develop these borders around the love that we offer to other people and to other things because after those things have hurt us enough or disappointed us enough, we withdraw our love because it hurts too much to extend it. I have a friend that I've had since high school. Really good buddy of mine. And it's probably four or five years ago now, it kind of came to light that his wife was an addict. She was addicted to pills. And it was profoundly impacting their marriage, obviously. And he, for years, had tried to love her in spite of, and eventually had to let other people in on the struggle that they carried together. And it led to her doing things that were not legal to acquire the things that she felt like she needed. And she became more and more distant from my friend. They together had three kids. She had a daughter from a previous relationship but was so close to my friend that she called him dad. So they ostensibly had four kids together and she was completely absent. And I watched him love her faithfully through that. I watched him think the best of her and hope the best of her. Continue to try to rehabilitate and rejuvenate her. And then the time came when she eventually broke down and she needed to go to rehab and rehab lasted several months for her. And I watched him hold together the pieces of his life, try to raise four kids that ran the gamut in age from elementary school to high school. I watched him try to hold everything together. He's an accountant. He had a really good job and his bosses knew what he was going through, but they had to pull him aside and be like, dude, we're not getting any productivity out of you. You can't do your job well right now. We need you to do better. And they worked with him and they worked with him and he felt the pressure and he felt bad. During the season of life, he and I would talk on the phone two and three times a week. And you could just see him spinning out of control and falling apart at the seams. And eventually his bosses came to him at work and they were like, we hate to do this, but you need to look for another job. Because if you stay here, we're going to have to fire you and we don't want to do that. His life was hard. And then in the middle of this, as she's gotten out of rehab and has started to go to different meetings throughout the week. What I felt was inevitable, unearthed as true, she was unfaithful to him as well with somebody in the rehab group. And even in the face of that reality, my friend continued to love her, continued to hope for her and for them and for their best future. And it was hard to watch. And I began to just gently tell him, it may be time to move away. It may be time to move on for your sake and for the sake of the kids. The language I didn't have was, she's ventured outside of any boundaries that should be required of you. And it may be time to admit that she's never coming back in. And he still couldn't do it, wouldn't do it. Still determined to love her. And one day we were on the phone and he said, man, it feels like I'm just throwing myself against a brick wall. And I get up and I dust myself off and I don't know what to do. And I said, dude, not to make it about me, but he decided it was time to make that decision. And so they separated and eventually divorced. And if you fast forward now, now he's living in the Brady Bunch. He married a lady. I think she has three kids. They have seven kids in this house. And it's nuts, but he's happy and she loves him well. And the whole experience actually brought him back to God. But there are times in life when those boundaries are necessary because they protect us. We offer very little boundless love. I can really only think of two situations where we approach offering limitless love to someone or something. The first is to our children. Most parents have incredibly generous borders around the love for their children, and this is a good model for how God loves us. The other place where we seem to have boundless borders around our love is in our sports fandom. We just, NC State fans, you know this. You know this well. Every year, every year, maybe they'll be good. Maybe they won't disappoint me. Maybe they'll take a step forward. And then they just slam into the brick wall of mediocrity. And what do you do? You get yourself up. You dust yourself off. The next year is going to be different. And here's what's awful. Here's what you do is you impart that on your children masochistically. These people that you love boundlessly, now you parade them to the game with you so it becomes a part of their soul. And now they're Wolfpack fans too. Great. They get to endure a life of pain. And I know this masochism well because Lily's a Georgia Tech fan. And I know that we had a big victory last night. Whoop-dee-doo. Guess what? We're still bad at football, and we're going to be bad at football for decades. We offer very little boundless love in our life. And because we are used to offering our love with boundaries, and we are used to receiving love with boundaries, we understand that when someone shows us affection and love and care, that there's some parameter, there's a fence that we need to stay inside of. We get that concept. Because we give and receive love with boundaries, we assume that God has boundaries too. We assume that there must be some parameters around the love that God offers to me because every other experience of love in my life carries those parameters and I know that I need to stay within them or offer within them, and so God must love me in that same way. And the thing that happens that I've seen being a Christian for as far back as I can remember is that when you're in, when you're in the church, when you've been a long-time Christian, you hear about the boundless and the reckless love of God, and you're like, yes, amen. That's absolutely true. To the sinner out there who's disappointing God with every word, thought, and action that they have, who's so far from God, they come to know him, and they get the good news, the good news of the gospel. Hey, God loves you boundlessly. He loves you recklessly. He loves you with no parameters at all. Just be swept up into that love and ushered into heaven. We love that message. That's a good message. That's the Christian message. That's the miracle of the gospel. The problem is that once we receive that love and feel that love, we move into the process of sanctification, becoming more like Christ in character, and we start to disappoint God, and we start to let him down down and we start to return to some of the sins that we employed previously and we slide into and out of fervency, into and out of spiritual attendedness, into and out of faithful pursuit of him. There are times when we run our race well. There are times when we take a breather and we walk and there are times when we just sit down and consider whether or not we want to continue the race at all. And we assume, Christians, that we have ventured outside the parameters of God's love. And the love that he once had for me, he still has, but not as much because I've tainted it. Because I should know better. Because I know what I'm going to go do. I know what I'm planning to go do. I know that if you put me in this situation with this group of people, what I am capable of doing. I know my private heart conditions. I know my prejudices and my biases, and I am not going to be letting those go anytime soon. So God must be disappointed in me. I think that's how most Christians go through their life. To put it more pointedly, if you were God, would you still love you? If you were God in heaven, would you still love you? Let's make you God and me you. And you offered for me the thing that you valued the most in all of your existence, your only son. You sent him and you watched him die for my sake. And I saw that gift and I saw your love and I saw your sacrifice and I saw his suffering, the same suffering that you watched and I I said, thanks for that. And I put it in my back pocket. And then for the rest of my days, I lived as if that weren't true. I lived outside of gratitude for it. I did whatever I wanted. You said, I'm doing this for you. Let me be the Lord of my life and I'll give you the best life possible. And I said, I'm going to accept your eternal life. I'm going to put that in my back pocket, save it for a rainy day. And I I'm actually gonna choose my version of a good life because I think I know what it is better than yours. Yours seems lame and boring. Mine is super awesome and fun. So I'm gonna do what I wanna do. And every now and again, I'm gonna lean towards Jesus. I'm gonna make it look to everyone around me like I've got my act together and I'm doing the right things and I read my Bible and I pray and I make wise choices. But you and I both know that I'm really not living under your lordship at all. But at the end of my life, when it comes time, I'm gonna pull out that card and be like, so I get in, right? Would you still love me? If that was my attitude towards your gift? There's a reason that most of us feel like God is disappointed in us. There's a reason why when I ask a question like, if God still loves you, if you were God, would you still love you? And it's because we've been programmed to assume that God's love works the same way ours does. That there's parameters, there's borders, that there's a limit. But thank God that this human God, this God that loves like a person, is not the God at all that's described in Scripture. Thank God that the God in Scripture is described as offering a love that is utterly impossible for us and unknown to us outside of knowing him. And I'm going to read some scriptures and go through and show you this never-ending reckless love of God from scripture. But as I do that, the temptation, I believe, for us Christians in the room is to say, I know that. Yeah, I know God loves me no matter what. I get it. He loves me no matter what. He loves me recklessly. He loves me to the end of the earth. He removes my sins as far as the east is from the west. Some of you can probably guess the verses that I'm going to use. I know God loves me. Yeah. Listen. You know God loves you here. But when's the last time you felt God's love here? We know intellectually he loves us. Do we walk filled with the love of God through our days and offering that freely and graciously to others? Do we live out that verse from his goodness? We have all received grace upon grace. The initial grace is God's And from his fullness, we receive that and we spill it out onto others. Do you walk through your days knowing here, deep in your soul, that God loves you and it's the only love that you ever need and you can stop chasing it in other places because he is all sufficient for you? Do you walk in a heart knowledge of God's relentless love of you? I don't. I know I don't. Because every now and again I do. And when I do, those days are different. When I walk with a soul knowledge that I am loved by the creator God, that he finds no fault in me because of his son, I'm a better husband, I'll tell you that. I'm a more patient father. I'm a more gracious friend. I'm a more diligent pastor. I'm a much more patient driver. Do you go through your days with some sort of mental assent that yes, there's a God and he loves me? Or do you go through your days feeling it beat in your chest and in your soul that God loves you deeply and there's nothing you can ever do to change that? So as I go through these verses, don't be the pious Christian that gives intellectual assent to what I'm going to say, but let God's love rest on your soul this morning. That you might know and accept and walk in the fact that you are loved deeply by your creator. This is what he says in Jeremiah 31.3. I've just got a list of passages here that I want you to hear this morning. The Lord appeared to him from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love. Therefore, I have continued my faithfulness to you. Now he's speaking here in Jeremiah to God's people, to the Israelites, but we know that if we are Christians, if we profess a faith in Christ, then we are God's people too. And so this verse, and God's love applies to us, he loves us in an everlasting way. And so he remains faithful to us. Nehemiah says, back in the desert when you freed us from slavery and we were wandering around for those 40 years, we trampled on you. We rejected you. You gave us manna every day and we didn't care. You gave us laws and we didn't want them. You gave us provision and we didn't care for it. We wanted to actually go back to Egypt and worship their gods. We stubbed our, I don't know the right phrase. We snubbed our nose at you. Is that a thing? We refused your help. And by all rights, you should have rejected us. But you didn't. Because you're slow to anger and you're abounding in steadfast love and mercy. And he did not forsake them. And then John writes at the end of his life, 1 John chapter 4. Your notes have 9 through 11, but the first three words are from verse 8. God is love. In this, the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation of our sins. I mentioned the sacrifice of Christ earlier. That is the picture of love. That is love literally becoming flesh and suffering for us, with us, to bring us with him into eternal not suffering. And he leads off this section, John does, by saying God is love. He is the personification of love. You cannot think of pure love and be thinking not of God. Any person who's ever existed without a knowledge of God, who refuses to acknowledge the existence of God, when they think of love, when they feel love, they are thinking of God, they are feeling God, even if they don't realize it because God is love. He is found in that emotion. He is found in that desire and in that affection. God claims to be love itself. And if that's true, then I would like for you to allow me the license to reword Paul's famous poem on love in 1 Corinthians chapter 13. If we replace the word love, love is patient, love is kind, doesn't envy, does not boast. If we replace that with God, because God is love, then it reads like this and resonates with me. God is patient. God is kind. He does not envy. He does not boast. He is not proud. He does not dishonor others. God is not self-seeking. He is not easily angered. He keeps no record of wrongs. God does not delight in trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. God never fails. That's the love that your God offers to you. He loves you with an everlasting love. And because of that, he is steadfast in his faithfulness to you, even when you are unfaithful to him. He always persists. He always hopes in you. He never fails you. He keeps no record of your wrongs. We sing that song right before the sermon, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. And it's funny to me, when that song first came out, there was debate in theological circles because theological circles like to have stupid debates to justify their existence. And there was a school of thought that the recklessness there was that shouldn't be in a worship song. We shouldn't attribute that to God. That's a negative thing. That means he's foolhardy. It's some sort of error that he's making in loving us. And I always thought that was absurd. God's love is reckless because he loves with no regard for himself. God's love for you is reckless because he's the only entity in eternity that can love with a boundless love with no parameters to protect himself. God will slam against the wall of your apathy over and over and over again for your entire life and get himself up and dust himself off and heal himself up and chase after you again. And eventually, I'm just going to tell you, he's going to Kool-Aid man through that brick wall of yours. He's going to get you. But in the meantime, he's going to keep coming. And our sin and our obstinance and our apathy can keep holding him at bay, but he's not going to stop following you. He's not going to stop pursuing you. He's not going to stop chasing you. You're not going to hurt him enough that he has to withdraw and retract and say, I just can't do it. It hurts too much to continue to love her. He's just going to keep coming because that's the love of God. I've gotten into this habit recently that I would honestly highly recommend for my Bible readers. When it's time for my reading time in the morning, I've started trying to figure out what's the thing I'm feeling or thinking about the most right now. And then I read the book of the Bible that I feel like most aligns with that. If the book's short enough, I just read the whole thing. And so this morning, knowing that I was preaching about this, I sat down to read Hosea. Some of my scholars in the room know that that's what the whole book of Hosea is about. An overview of the book of Hosea is there's a prophet, I bet you can guess his name, and he is told by God to go marry a lady of the night named Gomer, which could there be a more tempting name for a lady of the night than Gomer? God says, I want you to go marry her. I want you to make her an honest woman. Go pay the bride price, and I want you to marry her. And your marriage to her is to be a picture, is to be a picture of my marriage to Israel that has gone and been unfaithful to me and cheated on me with other gods and with other priorities and yet I'm still choosing them. So you're gonna go marry her as a picture for how I love you. They got married, They had three kids. After they had three kids, she left and she went back to her old ways. Because I think when you're in a lifestyle like that or others like that, that it's difficult to always fully depart from them. She went back to her old ways. And God said, Hosea, go pay her bride price and marry her again. And he did it. And then she left him again and he went and got her again. And the whole book is a picture of God's love for Israel, God's love for you and me. So I sat down to reread it this morning and I didn't even get through, I didn't even get it past the second chapter because in the second chapter we see, or it might be in the first chapter where she has the kids, yeah, it's the first chapter. Because in the second chapter, we see, or it might be in the first chapter where she has the kids. Yeah, it's the first chapter. She has the kids and God, whenever she gets pregnant, God tells Hosea what to name the child. And I don't remember the actual names. One is just real. I don't remember the rest. But the first name of the first child meant not my people. And he said, you're going to name your child not my people because Israel, not Judah, Israel has betrayed me. Israel has talked and acted and walked and thought as if they don't want to be my children, as if they don't care to be my people, so now they no longer will be my people. So you will name your first child as assigned to Israel, not my people. You will name your second child as assigned to Israel, not my God, because in word and thought and action, they have betrayed me as their God. They no longer want me as their God, so I'm going to grant them their wish. You name your second child, not my God. The third child, I want you to name no mercy, because through their words and through the thoughts and through their deeds, they do not want my mercy anymore. So name the child no mercy, for I will not show them mercy. And as you read it, you think, this makes sense. I know this love. I understand this judgment. I get this reciprocity. I offered myself to you. I made you my people. You acted as if you didn't want to be my people. Eventually, you're not. I made myself your God. You acted like you wanted other gods to worship Baal or whatever else. So eventually, I'm not your God. I offered you mercy. You said, no thanks, we don't need your mercy. Fine, I'm not going to offer you my mercy. And then you read chapter 2. Chapter 2 is this long poem. And in it, he details the unfaithfulness of his bride, Israel. And then all the things that he was doing behind the scenes to provide for her, care for her, love for her, that she didn't realize. And then ultimately, she still spat on him and who he was. But even after that, chapter two ends with this verse. It just sat me down right there in my seat. It just blew me back. Even after that, after Israel does nothing, they have not apologized. They have not looked at the example of Hosea and been like, oh no, what do we do? They are not repentant. They are not sorry. They have not come back to God at all. And in the midst of that, God says this, and I will have mercy on no mercy. And I will say to not my people, you are my people. And he shall say, you are my God. Even after not repenting, even after continuing to stomp on the love of God, continuing to betray it in word and in thought and in action, and reject it in word and thought and action, God says to those people, I am your God, you are my people, and I will show you mercy. And he says that to us. His love is overwhelming and never-ending and reckless. And he pursues you. And I don't want you to know it. I want you to feel it. Because here's what happens when you feel it and you walk as if you're loved by God. God's reckless love creates a protective sanctuary from which we are able to offer boundless love as well. How do we transform, transition from offering conditional love to unconditional love? By walking in the deep heart knowledge of the boundless love that Creator God has for us. When you can walk with it here, you can offer it everywhere. Reject me as many times as you like, brother. Creator God loves me. I don't need yours anyways. Say whatever you want to say about me. Betray my trust as many times as you need to before I wear you down and before you accept this love too because God loves me. I don't really need yours. I'm loving you for you. If we want to be transformed from offering human conditional love with boundaries to offering divine, holy, Jesus-enabled and Holy Spirit-inspired love to others, then what we must do is walk in a deep knowledge of the reckless love that God offers to us. I hope you'll go from this place and do that. Let's pray. God, every time I pray, personally or corporately, I pray that I or we love you. And we do. You know that we do. We're just not good at it. So God, would you make us better? And God, would the only effort that we make towards loving you and others more, would the only effort that we make towards that be? To attempt to live in a knowledge that we are loved recklessly and endlessly by you. Would that reality transform our lives, our hearts, how we love, how we live? God, we thank you for your son, the personification of your love, the embodiment of your love, and how he was poured out for us. God, I pray that we would leave this room more certain that you love us, feeling more deeply what your love means than we did when we came in here today. Help us receive and offer your reckless love, Lord. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. I appreciate you being here on this October Sunday. This is the first Sunday where I'm really seeing a lot of sweaters and flannels, and it's just making me so, so very happy that it's cool weather finally. Nothing in my life requires the temperature to ever be above 70 degrees. So I'm very happy to be in the fall. We are wrapping up our series, as Kyle mentioned earlier, this Sunday called Transformed, where we're talking about God transforming us in different ways. This morning, we're going to be focused on transforming our love from conditional to unconditional love. How do we move from conditional love to being able to offer unconditional love, which is a lot more challenging than we might think at first. And in a way, the next series that we're doing is called The Songs We Sing, and it's one I told you about last week. I'm very excited about it because it's one that we've wanted to do for about two and a half years, I think. I've had it in the kitty. I've wanted to do it. We weren't sure the right time to deploy it, and we felt like this fall was the right time. This is what we want to do. And so it's really going to be a six-week series focused on worship. We're going to look at individual worship songs and where they come from in Scripture, imbue them with not more meaning, but the meaning that they had from the author that wrote them and see them in Scripture so that they can mean more to us and really move through a theology of worship learning why we do it. So I'm very excited for that series, and I hope it will be a very meaningful one in the life of Grace. This Sunday is almost like kind of part one of that. It's a transition between transformed and between the songs we sing because we just sang this song, Reckless Love, the reckless love of God. And that's where we're going to rest today. As we approach the idea, I wanted to share with you an idea about love that I encountered years ago, two, three years ago, and it stuck with me, and it's really, it's kind of transformed the way I think about love, and it definitely helps me as I counsel with couples who are going to get married as I do premarital counseling and all of those things, and you'll see why in a minute. But this idea that was presented to me about love is the concept that we all love with boundaries. We all offer our love with some boundaries around it. I'm going to love this person or this thing, but I'm going to love them within some parameters that I've set up. And if this person or thing ventures outside those parameters, I will no longer love you. I'm going to love this puppy until it goes to the bathroom on my bed. Then that is outside the parameters of love. I no longer love this puppy. That scarred me for my whole life, right? Maybe I wouldn't assume that all of you love me. I think some of you do. Maybe you feel kind thoughts towards me. I would hope that none of you exist in open hostility towards me, but maybe you have some affection for me as your pastor. But if I got up here next week and I told you how to vote next year, some of you would be like, that is outside my bounds of love. I no longer feel those feelings of affection towards you, right? There's plenty of things I could get up here and say that would be outside your boundaries of affection for me. There's things that could come up about stuff in the shadows that you would go, well, that's outside, that behavior is outside the bounds of love that I would have for a pastor, so I'm out. You see, we all love with boundaries. We all love with parameters. And this is just kind of as an aside, something that I always say to the couples that I'm doing premarital counseling with. It's important in our marriages to love with broad borders, big expansive boundaries, because the truth of marriage is people don't stay the same. When you get married, you're not just committing to loving that person that you're married, but you're committed to loving the version of them that unfolds 10 years down the road. When we walk the aisle, it fundamentally changes who we are as a person. When we have children, it fundamentally changes who we are as a person. When we get into our careers, when we start to learn ourselves a little bit more, new hobbies open up and those changes, new desires and passions open up and we evolve as people, or at least we should, and those changes. So even this notion in marriage of looking at your spouse and going, you're not who I married. Yeah, no kidding. This shouldn't be unless you married a real dud. So we love with broad borders and allow the person in our marriage to become whoever they need to become, whoever God designed them to be. And that's the love that we should offer to other people is borders that are broad and wide and generous and gracious where we allow God to work in the lives of these people and we don't set tight parameters of our love around the objects of our love. But you can also make an argument that we love with boundaries because these boundaries protect us. We love with these boundaries because life has taught us to love with boundaries. Because those boundaries protect us from hurt. When love goes unreciprocated, when you care a great deal for someone, and at no point in this for the rest of the day am I talking about a romantic love. I just want to be clear. I'm talking about phileo love, the brotherly love, an affectionate love. If we offer our love and affection to somebody over and over and over again and it goes unreciprocated, then eventually it's going to hurt too much to offer that love and we're going to stop. If we offer someone our love and trust and they betray us and they show us that they're not worthy of our love, enough times eventually it's going to hurt so much to offer it to them that we are going to stop. So we naturally develop these borders around the love that we offer to other people and to other things because after those things have hurt us enough or disappointed us enough, we withdraw our love because it hurts too much to extend it. I have a friend that I've had since high school. Really good buddy of mine. And it's probably four or five years ago now, it kind of came to light that his wife was an addict. She was addicted to pills. And it was profoundly impacting their marriage, obviously. And he, for years, had tried to love her in spite of, and eventually had to let other people in on the struggle that they carried together. And it led to her doing things that were not legal to acquire the things that she felt like she needed. And she became more and more distant from my friend. They together had three kids. She had a daughter from a previous relationship but was so close to my friend that she called him dad. So they ostensibly had four kids together and she was completely absent. And I watched him love her faithfully through that. I watched him think the best of her and hope the best of her. Continue to try to rehabilitate and rejuvenate her. And then the time came when she eventually broke down and she needed to go to rehab and rehab lasted several months for her. And I watched him hold together the pieces of his life, try to raise four kids that ran the gamut in age from elementary school to high school. I watched him try to hold everything together. He's an accountant. He had a really good job and his bosses knew what he was going through, but they had to pull him aside and be like, dude, we're not getting any productivity out of you. You can't do your job well right now. We need you to do better. And they worked with him and they worked with him and he felt the pressure and he felt bad. During the season of life, he and I would talk on the phone two and three times a week. And you could just see him spinning out of control and falling apart at the seams. And eventually his bosses came to him at work and they were like, we hate to do this, but you need to look for another job. Because if you stay here, we're going to have to fire you and we don't want to do that. His life was hard. And then in the middle of this, as she's gotten out of rehab and has started to go to different meetings throughout the week. What I felt was inevitable, unearthed as true, she was unfaithful to him as well with somebody in the rehab group. And even in the face of that reality, my friend continued to love her, continued to hope for her and for them and for their best future. And it was hard to watch. And I began to just gently tell him, it may be time to move away. It may be time to move on for your sake and for the sake of the kids. The language I didn't have was, she's ventured outside of any boundaries that should be required of you. And it may be time to admit that she's never coming back in. And he still couldn't do it, wouldn't do it. Still determined to love her. And one day we were on the phone and he said, man, it feels like I'm just throwing myself against a brick wall. And I get up and I dust myself off and I don't know what to do. And I said, dude, not to make it about me, but he decided it was time to make that decision. And so they separated and eventually divorced. And if you fast forward now, now he's living in the Brady Bunch. He married a lady. I think she has three kids. They have seven kids in this house. And it's nuts, but he's happy and she loves him well. And the whole experience actually brought him back to God. But there are times in life when those boundaries are necessary because they protect us. We offer very little boundless love. I can really only think of two situations where we approach offering limitless love to someone or something. The first is to our children. Most parents have incredibly generous borders around the love for their children, and this is a good model for how God loves us. The other place where we seem to have boundless borders around our love is in our sports fandom. We just, NC State fans, you know this. You know this well. Every year, every year, maybe they'll be good. Maybe they won't disappoint me. Maybe they'll take a step forward. And then they just slam into the brick wall of mediocrity. And what do you do? You get yourself up. You dust yourself off. The next year is going to be different. And here's what's awful. Here's what you do is you impart that on your children masochistically. These people that you love boundlessly, now you parade them to the game with you so it becomes a part of their soul. And now they're Wolfpack fans too. Great. They get to endure a life of pain. And I know this masochism well because Lily's a Georgia Tech fan. And I know that we had a big victory last night. Whoop-dee-doo. Guess what? We're still bad at football, and we're going to be bad at football for decades. We offer very little boundless love in our life. And because we are used to offering our love with boundaries, and we are used to receiving love with boundaries, we understand that when someone shows us affection and love and care, that there's some parameter, there's a fence that we need to stay inside of. We get that concept. Because we give and receive love with boundaries, we assume that God has boundaries too. We assume that there must be some parameters around the love that God offers to me because every other experience of love in my life carries those parameters and I know that I need to stay within them or offer within them, and so God must love me in that same way. And the thing that happens that I've seen being a Christian for as far back as I can remember is that when you're in, when you're in the church, when you've been a long-time Christian, you hear about the boundless and the reckless love of God, and you're like, yes, amen. That's absolutely true. To the sinner out there who's disappointing God with every word, thought, and action that they have, who's so far from God, they come to know him, and they get the good news, the good news of the gospel. Hey, God loves you boundlessly. He loves you recklessly. He loves you with no parameters at all. Just be swept up into that love and ushered into heaven. We love that message. That's a good message. That's the Christian message. That's the miracle of the gospel. The problem is that once we receive that love and feel that love, we move into the process of sanctification, becoming more like Christ in character, and we start to disappoint God, and we start to let him down down and we start to return to some of the sins that we employed previously and we slide into and out of fervency, into and out of spiritual attendedness, into and out of faithful pursuit of him. There are times when we run our race well. There are times when we take a breather and we walk and there are times when we just sit down and consider whether or not we want to continue the race at all. And we assume, Christians, that we have ventured outside the parameters of God's love. And the love that he once had for me, he still has, but not as much because I've tainted it. Because I should know better. Because I know what I'm going to go do. I know what I'm planning to go do. I know that if you put me in this situation with this group of people, what I am capable of doing. I know my private heart conditions. I know my prejudices and my biases, and I am not going to be letting those go anytime soon. So God must be disappointed in me. I think that's how most Christians go through their life. To put it more pointedly, if you were God, would you still love you? If you were God in heaven, would you still love you? Let's make you God and me you. And you offered for me the thing that you valued the most in all of your existence, your only son. You sent him and you watched him die for my sake. And I saw that gift and I saw your love and I saw your sacrifice and I saw his suffering, the same suffering that you watched and I I said, thanks for that. And I put it in my back pocket. And then for the rest of my days, I lived as if that weren't true. I lived outside of gratitude for it. I did whatever I wanted. You said, I'm doing this for you. Let me be the Lord of my life and I'll give you the best life possible. And I said, I'm going to accept your eternal life. I'm going to put that in my back pocket, save it for a rainy day. And I I'm actually gonna choose my version of a good life because I think I know what it is better than yours. Yours seems lame and boring. Mine is super awesome and fun. So I'm gonna do what I wanna do. And every now and again, I'm gonna lean towards Jesus. I'm gonna make it look to everyone around me like I've got my act together and I'm doing the right things and I read my Bible and I pray and I make wise choices. But you and I both know that I'm really not living under your lordship at all. But at the end of my life, when it comes time, I'm gonna pull out that card and be like, so I get in, right? Would you still love me? If that was my attitude towards your gift? There's a reason that most of us feel like God is disappointed in us. There's a reason why when I ask a question like, if God still loves you, if you were God, would you still love you? And it's because we've been programmed to assume that God's love works the same way ours does. That there's parameters, there's borders, that there's a limit. But thank God that this human God, this God that loves like a person, is not the God at all that's described in Scripture. Thank God that the God in Scripture is described as offering a love that is utterly impossible for us and unknown to us outside of knowing him. And I'm going to read some scriptures and go through and show you this never-ending reckless love of God from scripture. But as I do that, the temptation, I believe, for us Christians in the room is to say, I know that. Yeah, I know God loves me no matter what. I get it. He loves me no matter what. He loves me recklessly. He loves me to the end of the earth. He removes my sins as far as the east is from the west. Some of you can probably guess the verses that I'm going to use. I know God loves me. Yeah. Listen. You know God loves you here. But when's the last time you felt God's love here? We know intellectually he loves us. Do we walk filled with the love of God through our days and offering that freely and graciously to others? Do we live out that verse from his goodness? We have all received grace upon grace. The initial grace is God's And from his fullness, we receive that and we spill it out onto others. Do you walk through your days knowing here, deep in your soul, that God loves you and it's the only love that you ever need and you can stop chasing it in other places because he is all sufficient for you? Do you walk in a heart knowledge of God's relentless love of you? I don't. I know I don't. Because every now and again I do. And when I do, those days are different. When I walk with a soul knowledge that I am loved by the creator God, that he finds no fault in me because of his son, I'm a better husband, I'll tell you that. I'm a more patient father. I'm a more gracious friend. I'm a more diligent pastor. I'm a much more patient driver. Do you go through your days with some sort of mental assent that yes, there's a God and he loves me? Or do you go through your days feeling it beat in your chest and in your soul that God loves you deeply and there's nothing you can ever do to change that? So as I go through these verses, don't be the pious Christian that gives intellectual assent to what I'm going to say, but let God's love rest on your soul this morning. That you might know and accept and walk in the fact that you are loved deeply by your creator. This is what he says in Jeremiah 31.3. I've just got a list of passages here that I want you to hear this morning. The Lord appeared to him from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love. Therefore, I have continued my faithfulness to you. Now he's speaking here in Jeremiah to God's people, to the Israelites, but we know that if we are Christians, if we profess a faith in Christ, then we are God's people too. And so this verse, and God's love applies to us, he loves us in an everlasting way. And so he remains faithful to us. Nehemiah says, back in the desert when you freed us from slavery and we were wandering around for those 40 years, we trampled on you. We rejected you. You gave us manna every day and we didn't care. You gave us laws and we didn't want them. You gave us provision and we didn't care for it. We wanted to actually go back to Egypt and worship their gods. We stubbed our, I don't know the right phrase. We snubbed our nose at you. Is that a thing? We refused your help. And by all rights, you should have rejected us. But you didn't. Because you're slow to anger and you're abounding in steadfast love and mercy. And he did not forsake them. And then John writes at the end of his life, 1 John chapter 4. Your notes have 9 through 11, but the first three words are from verse 8. God is love. In this, the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation of our sins. I mentioned the sacrifice of Christ earlier. That is the picture of love. That is love literally becoming flesh and suffering for us, with us, to bring us with him into eternal not suffering. And he leads off this section, John does, by saying God is love. He is the personification of love. You cannot think of pure love and be thinking not of God. Any person who's ever existed without a knowledge of God, who refuses to acknowledge the existence of God, when they think of love, when they feel love, they are thinking of God, they are feeling God, even if they don't realize it because God is love. He is found in that emotion. He is found in that desire and in that affection. God claims to be love itself. And if that's true, then I would like for you to allow me the license to reword Paul's famous poem on love in 1 Corinthians chapter 13. If we replace the word love, love is patient, love is kind, doesn't envy, does not boast. If we replace that with God, because God is love, then it reads like this and resonates with me. God is patient. God is kind. He does not envy. He does not boast. He is not proud. He does not dishonor others. God is not self-seeking. He is not easily angered. He keeps no record of wrongs. God does not delight in trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. God never fails. That's the love that your God offers to you. He loves you with an everlasting love. And because of that, he is steadfast in his faithfulness to you, even when you are unfaithful to him. He always persists. He always hopes in you. He never fails you. He keeps no record of your wrongs. We sing that song right before the sermon, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. And it's funny to me, when that song first came out, there was debate in theological circles because theological circles like to have stupid debates to justify their existence. And there was a school of thought that the recklessness there was that shouldn't be in a worship song. We shouldn't attribute that to God. That's a negative thing. That means he's foolhardy. It's some sort of error that he's making in loving us. And I always thought that was absurd. God's love is reckless because he loves with no regard for himself. God's love for you is reckless because he's the only entity in eternity that can love with a boundless love with no parameters to protect himself. God will slam against the wall of your apathy over and over and over again for your entire life and get himself up and dust himself off and heal himself up and chase after you again. And eventually, I'm just going to tell you, he's going to Kool-Aid man through that brick wall of yours. He's going to get you. But in the meantime, he's going to keep coming. And our sin and our obstinance and our apathy can keep holding him at bay, but he's not going to stop following you. He's not going to stop pursuing you. He's not going to stop chasing you. You're not going to hurt him enough that he has to withdraw and retract and say, I just can't do it. It hurts too much to continue to love her. He's just going to keep coming because that's the love of God. I've gotten into this habit recently that I would honestly highly recommend for my Bible readers. When it's time for my reading time in the morning, I've started trying to figure out what's the thing I'm feeling or thinking about the most right now. And then I read the book of the Bible that I feel like most aligns with that. If the book's short enough, I just read the whole thing. And so this morning, knowing that I was preaching about this, I sat down to read Hosea. Some of my scholars in the room know that that's what the whole book of Hosea is about. An overview of the book of Hosea is there's a prophet, I bet you can guess his name, and he is told by God to go marry a lady of the night named Gomer, which could there be a more tempting name for a lady of the night than Gomer? God says, I want you to go marry her. I want you to make her an honest woman. Go pay the bride price, and I want you to marry her. And your marriage to her is to be a picture, is to be a picture of my marriage to Israel that has gone and been unfaithful to me and cheated on me with other gods and with other priorities and yet I'm still choosing them. So you're gonna go marry her as a picture for how I love you. They got married, They had three kids. After they had three kids, she left and she went back to her old ways. Because I think when you're in a lifestyle like that or others like that, that it's difficult to always fully depart from them. She went back to her old ways. And God said, Hosea, go pay her bride price and marry her again. And he did it. And then she left him again and he went and got her again. And the whole book is a picture of God's love for Israel, God's love for you and me. So I sat down to reread it this morning and I didn't even get through, I didn't even get it past the second chapter because in the second chapter we see, or it might be in the first chapter where she has the kids, yeah, it's the first chapter. Because in the second chapter, we see, or it might be in the first chapter where she has the kids. Yeah, it's the first chapter. She has the kids and God, whenever she gets pregnant, God tells Hosea what to name the child. And I don't remember the actual names. One is just real. I don't remember the rest. But the first name of the first child meant not my people. And he said, you're going to name your child not my people because Israel, not Judah, Israel has betrayed me. Israel has talked and acted and walked and thought as if they don't want to be my children, as if they don't care to be my people, so now they no longer will be my people. So you will name your first child as assigned to Israel, not my people. You will name your second child as assigned to Israel, not my God, because in word and thought and action, they have betrayed me as their God. They no longer want me as their God, so I'm going to grant them their wish. You name your second child, not my God. The third child, I want you to name no mercy, because through their words and through the thoughts and through their deeds, they do not want my mercy anymore. So name the child no mercy, for I will not show them mercy. And as you read it, you think, this makes sense. I know this love. I understand this judgment. I get this reciprocity. I offered myself to you. I made you my people. You acted as if you didn't want to be my people. Eventually, you're not. I made myself your God. You acted like you wanted other gods to worship Baal or whatever else. So eventually, I'm not your God. I offered you mercy. You said, no thanks, we don't need your mercy. Fine, I'm not going to offer you my mercy. And then you read chapter 2. Chapter 2 is this long poem. And in it, he details the unfaithfulness of his bride, Israel. And then all the things that he was doing behind the scenes to provide for her, care for her, love for her, that she didn't realize. And then ultimately, she still spat on him and who he was. But even after that, chapter two ends with this verse. It just sat me down right there in my seat. It just blew me back. Even after that, after Israel does nothing, they have not apologized. They have not looked at the example of Hosea and been like, oh no, what do we do? They are not repentant. They are not sorry. They have not come back to God at all. And in the midst of that, God says this, and I will have mercy on no mercy. And I will say to not my people, you are my people. And he shall say, you are my God. Even after not repenting, even after continuing to stomp on the love of God, continuing to betray it in word and in thought and in action, and reject it in word and thought and action, God says to those people, I am your God, you are my people, and I will show you mercy. And he says that to us. His love is overwhelming and never-ending and reckless. And he pursues you. And I don't want you to know it. I want you to feel it. Because here's what happens when you feel it and you walk as if you're loved by God. God's reckless love creates a protective sanctuary from which we are able to offer boundless love as well. How do we transform, transition from offering conditional love to unconditional love? By walking in the deep heart knowledge of the boundless love that Creator God has for us. When you can walk with it here, you can offer it everywhere. Reject me as many times as you like, brother. Creator God loves me. I don't need yours anyways. Say whatever you want to say about me. Betray my trust as many times as you need to before I wear you down and before you accept this love too because God loves me. I don't really need yours. I'm loving you for you. If we want to be transformed from offering human conditional love with boundaries to offering divine, holy, Jesus-enabled and Holy Spirit-inspired love to others, then what we must do is walk in a deep knowledge of the reckless love that God offers to us. I hope you'll go from this place and do that. Let's pray. God, every time I pray, personally or corporately, I pray that I or we love you. And we do. You know that we do. We're just not good at it. So God, would you make us better? And God, would the only effort that we make towards loving you and others more, would the only effort that we make towards that be? To attempt to live in a knowledge that we are loved recklessly and endlessly by you. Would that reality transform our lives, our hearts, how we love, how we live? God, we thank you for your son, the personification of your love, the embodiment of your love, and how he was poured out for us. God, I pray that we would leave this room more certain that you love us, feeling more deeply what your love means than we did when we came in here today. Help us receive and offer your reckless love, Lord. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I'd love to do that in the lobby after the service. I appreciate you being here on this October Sunday. This is the first Sunday where I'm really seeing a lot of sweaters and flannels, and it's just making me so, so very happy that it's cool weather finally. Nothing in my life requires the temperature to ever be above 70 degrees. So I'm very happy to be in the fall. We are wrapping up our series, as Kyle mentioned earlier, this Sunday called Transformed, where we're talking about God transforming us in different ways. This morning, we're going to be focused on transforming our love from conditional to unconditional love. How do we move from conditional love to being able to offer unconditional love, which is a lot more challenging than we might think at first. And in a way, the next series that we're doing is called The Songs We Sing, and it's one I told you about last week. I'm very excited about it because it's one that we've wanted to do for about two and a half years, I think. I've had it in the kitty. I've wanted to do it. We weren't sure the right time to deploy it, and we felt like this fall was the right time. This is what we want to do. And so it's really going to be a six-week series focused on worship. We're going to look at individual worship songs and where they come from in Scripture, imbue them with not more meaning, but the meaning that they had from the author that wrote them and see them in Scripture so that they can mean more to us and really move through a theology of worship learning why we do it. So I'm very excited for that series, and I hope it will be a very meaningful one in the life of Grace. This Sunday is almost like kind of part one of that. It's a transition between transformed and between the songs we sing because we just sang this song, Reckless Love, the reckless love of God. And that's where we're going to rest today. As we approach the idea, I wanted to share with you an idea about love that I encountered years ago, two, three years ago, and it stuck with me, and it's really, it's kind of transformed the way I think about love, and it definitely helps me as I counsel with couples who are going to get married as I do premarital counseling and all of those things, and you'll see why in a minute. But this idea that was presented to me about love is the concept that we all love with boundaries. We all offer our love with some boundaries around it. I'm going to love this person or this thing, but I'm going to love them within some parameters that I've set up. And if this person or thing ventures outside those parameters, I will no longer love you. I'm going to love this puppy until it goes to the bathroom on my bed. Then that is outside the parameters of love. I no longer love this puppy. That scarred me for my whole life, right? Maybe I wouldn't assume that all of you love me. I think some of you do. Maybe you feel kind thoughts towards me. I would hope that none of you exist in open hostility towards me, but maybe you have some affection for me as your pastor. But if I got up here next week and I told you how to vote next year, some of you would be like, that is outside my bounds of love. I no longer feel those feelings of affection towards you, right? There's plenty of things I could get up here and say that would be outside your boundaries of affection for me. There's things that could come up about stuff in the shadows that you would go, well, that's outside, that behavior is outside the bounds of love that I would have for a pastor, so I'm out. You see, we all love with boundaries. We all love with parameters. And this is just kind of as an aside, something that I always say to the couples that I'm doing premarital counseling with. It's important in our marriages to love with broad borders, big expansive boundaries, because the truth of marriage is people don't stay the same. When you get married, you're not just committing to loving that person that you're married, but you're committed to loving the version of them that unfolds 10 years down the road. When we walk the aisle, it fundamentally changes who we are as a person. When we have children, it fundamentally changes who we are as a person. When we get into our careers, when we start to learn ourselves a little bit more, new hobbies open up and those changes, new desires and passions open up and we evolve as people, or at least we should, and those changes. So even this notion in marriage of looking at your spouse and going, you're not who I married. Yeah, no kidding. This shouldn't be unless you married a real dud. So we love with broad borders and allow the person in our marriage to become whoever they need to become, whoever God designed them to be. And that's the love that we should offer to other people is borders that are broad and wide and generous and gracious where we allow God to work in the lives of these people and we don't set tight parameters of our love around the objects of our love. But you can also make an argument that we love with boundaries because these boundaries protect us. We love with these boundaries because life has taught us to love with boundaries. Because those boundaries protect us from hurt. When love goes unreciprocated, when you care a great deal for someone, and at no point in this for the rest of the day am I talking about a romantic love. I just want to be clear. I'm talking about phileo love, the brotherly love, an affectionate love. If we offer our love and affection to somebody over and over and over again and it goes unreciprocated, then eventually it's going to hurt too much to offer that love and we're going to stop. If we offer someone our love and trust and they betray us and they show us that they're not worthy of our love, enough times eventually it's going to hurt so much to offer it to them that we are going to stop. So we naturally develop these borders around the love that we offer to other people and to other things because after those things have hurt us enough or disappointed us enough, we withdraw our love because it hurts too much to extend it. I have a friend that I've had since high school. Really good buddy of mine. And it's probably four or five years ago now, it kind of came to light that his wife was an addict. She was addicted to pills. And it was profoundly impacting their marriage, obviously. And he, for years, had tried to love her in spite of, and eventually had to let other people in on the struggle that they carried together. And it led to her doing things that were not legal to acquire the things that she felt like she needed. And she became more and more distant from my friend. They together had three kids. She had a daughter from a previous relationship but was so close to my friend that she called him dad. So they ostensibly had four kids together and she was completely absent. And I watched him love her faithfully through that. I watched him think the best of her and hope the best of her. Continue to try to rehabilitate and rejuvenate her. And then the time came when she eventually broke down and she needed to go to rehab and rehab lasted several months for her. And I watched him hold together the pieces of his life, try to raise four kids that ran the gamut in age from elementary school to high school. I watched him try to hold everything together. He's an accountant. He had a really good job and his bosses knew what he was going through, but they had to pull him aside and be like, dude, we're not getting any productivity out of you. You can't do your job well right now. We need you to do better. And they worked with him and they worked with him and he felt the pressure and he felt bad. During the season of life, he and I would talk on the phone two and three times a week. And you could just see him spinning out of control and falling apart at the seams. And eventually his bosses came to him at work and they were like, we hate to do this, but you need to look for another job. Because if you stay here, we're going to have to fire you and we don't want to do that. His life was hard. And then in the middle of this, as she's gotten out of rehab and has started to go to different meetings throughout the week. What I felt was inevitable, unearthed as true, she was unfaithful to him as well with somebody in the rehab group. And even in the face of that reality, my friend continued to love her, continued to hope for her and for them and for their best future. And it was hard to watch. And I began to just gently tell him, it may be time to move away. It may be time to move on for your sake and for the sake of the kids. The language I didn't have was, she's ventured outside of any boundaries that should be required of you. And it may be time to admit that she's never coming back in. And he still couldn't do it, wouldn't do it. Still determined to love her. And one day we were on the phone and he said, man, it feels like I'm just throwing myself against a brick wall. And I get up and I dust myself off and I don't know what to do. And I said, dude, not to make it about me, but he decided it was time to make that decision. And so they separated and eventually divorced. And if you fast forward now, now he's living in the Brady Bunch. He married a lady. I think she has three kids. They have seven kids in this house. And it's nuts, but he's happy and she loves him well. And the whole experience actually brought him back to God. But there are times in life when those boundaries are necessary because they protect us. We offer very little boundless love. I can really only think of two situations where we approach offering limitless love to someone or something. The first is to our children. Most parents have incredibly generous borders around the love for their children, and this is a good model for how God loves us. The other place where we seem to have boundless borders around our love is in our sports fandom. We just, NC State fans, you know this. You know this well. Every year, every year, maybe they'll be good. Maybe they won't disappoint me. Maybe they'll take a step forward. And then they just slam into the brick wall of mediocrity. And what do you do? You get yourself up. You dust yourself off. The next year is going to be different. And here's what's awful. Here's what you do is you impart that on your children masochistically. These people that you love boundlessly, now you parade them to the game with you so it becomes a part of their soul. And now they're Wolfpack fans too. Great. They get to endure a life of pain. And I know this masochism well because Lily's a Georgia Tech fan. And I know that we had a big victory last night. Whoop-dee-doo. Guess what? We're still bad at football, and we're going to be bad at football for decades. We offer very little boundless love in our life. And because we are used to offering our love with boundaries, and we are used to receiving love with boundaries, we understand that when someone shows us affection and love and care, that there's some parameter, there's a fence that we need to stay inside of. We get that concept. Because we give and receive love with boundaries, we assume that God has boundaries too. We assume that there must be some parameters around the love that God offers to me because every other experience of love in my life carries those parameters and I know that I need to stay within them or offer within them, and so God must love me in that same way. And the thing that happens that I've seen being a Christian for as far back as I can remember is that when you're in, when you're in the church, when you've been a long-time Christian, you hear about the boundless and the reckless love of God, and you're like, yes, amen. That's absolutely true. To the sinner out there who's disappointing God with every word, thought, and action that they have, who's so far from God, they come to know him, and they get the good news, the good news of the gospel. Hey, God loves you boundlessly. He loves you recklessly. He loves you with no parameters at all. Just be swept up into that love and ushered into heaven. We love that message. That's a good message. That's the Christian message. That's the miracle of the gospel. The problem is that once we receive that love and feel that love, we move into the process of sanctification, becoming more like Christ in character, and we start to disappoint God, and we start to let him down down and we start to return to some of the sins that we employed previously and we slide into and out of fervency, into and out of spiritual attendedness, into and out of faithful pursuit of him. There are times when we run our race well. There are times when we take a breather and we walk and there are times when we just sit down and consider whether or not we want to continue the race at all. And we assume, Christians, that we have ventured outside the parameters of God's love. And the love that he once had for me, he still has, but not as much because I've tainted it. Because I should know better. Because I know what I'm going to go do. I know what I'm planning to go do. I know that if you put me in this situation with this group of people, what I am capable of doing. I know my private heart conditions. I know my prejudices and my biases, and I am not going to be letting those go anytime soon. So God must be disappointed in me. I think that's how most Christians go through their life. To put it more pointedly, if you were God, would you still love you? If you were God in heaven, would you still love you? Let's make you God and me you. And you offered for me the thing that you valued the most in all of your existence, your only son. You sent him and you watched him die for my sake. And I saw that gift and I saw your love and I saw your sacrifice and I saw his suffering, the same suffering that you watched and I I said, thanks for that. And I put it in my back pocket. And then for the rest of my days, I lived as if that weren't true. I lived outside of gratitude for it. I did whatever I wanted. You said, I'm doing this for you. Let me be the Lord of my life and I'll give you the best life possible. And I said, I'm going to accept your eternal life. I'm going to put that in my back pocket, save it for a rainy day. And I I'm actually gonna choose my version of a good life because I think I know what it is better than yours. Yours seems lame and boring. Mine is super awesome and fun. So I'm gonna do what I wanna do. And every now and again, I'm gonna lean towards Jesus. I'm gonna make it look to everyone around me like I've got my act together and I'm doing the right things and I read my Bible and I pray and I make wise choices. But you and I both know that I'm really not living under your lordship at all. But at the end of my life, when it comes time, I'm gonna pull out that card and be like, so I get in, right? Would you still love me? If that was my attitude towards your gift? There's a reason that most of us feel like God is disappointed in us. There's a reason why when I ask a question like, if God still loves you, if you were God, would you still love you? And it's because we've been programmed to assume that God's love works the same way ours does. That there's parameters, there's borders, that there's a limit. But thank God that this human God, this God that loves like a person, is not the God at all that's described in Scripture. Thank God that the God in Scripture is described as offering a love that is utterly impossible for us and unknown to us outside of knowing him. And I'm going to read some scriptures and go through and show you this never-ending reckless love of God from scripture. But as I do that, the temptation, I believe, for us Christians in the room is to say, I know that. Yeah, I know God loves me no matter what. I get it. He loves me no matter what. He loves me recklessly. He loves me to the end of the earth. He removes my sins as far as the east is from the west. Some of you can probably guess the verses that I'm going to use. I know God loves me. Yeah. Listen. You know God loves you here. But when's the last time you felt God's love here? We know intellectually he loves us. Do we walk filled with the love of God through our days and offering that freely and graciously to others? Do we live out that verse from his goodness? We have all received grace upon grace. The initial grace is God's And from his fullness, we receive that and we spill it out onto others. Do you walk through your days knowing here, deep in your soul, that God loves you and it's the only love that you ever need and you can stop chasing it in other places because he is all sufficient for you? Do you walk in a heart knowledge of God's relentless love of you? I don't. I know I don't. Because every now and again I do. And when I do, those days are different. When I walk with a soul knowledge that I am loved by the creator God, that he finds no fault in me because of his son, I'm a better husband, I'll tell you that. I'm a more patient father. I'm a more gracious friend. I'm a more diligent pastor. I'm a much more patient driver. Do you go through your days with some sort of mental assent that yes, there's a God and he loves me? Or do you go through your days feeling it beat in your chest and in your soul that God loves you deeply and there's nothing you can ever do to change that? So as I go through these verses, don't be the pious Christian that gives intellectual assent to what I'm going to say, but let God's love rest on your soul this morning. That you might know and accept and walk in the fact that you are loved deeply by your creator. This is what he says in Jeremiah 31.3. I've just got a list of passages here that I want you to hear this morning. The Lord appeared to him from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love. Therefore, I have continued my faithfulness to you. Now he's speaking here in Jeremiah to God's people, to the Israelites, but we know that if we are Christians, if we profess a faith in Christ, then we are God's people too. And so this verse, and God's love applies to us, he loves us in an everlasting way. And so he remains faithful to us. Nehemiah says, back in the desert when you freed us from slavery and we were wandering around for those 40 years, we trampled on you. We rejected you. You gave us manna every day and we didn't care. You gave us laws and we didn't want them. You gave us provision and we didn't care for it. We wanted to actually go back to Egypt and worship their gods. We stubbed our, I don't know the right phrase. We snubbed our nose at you. Is that a thing? We refused your help. And by all rights, you should have rejected us. But you didn't. Because you're slow to anger and you're abounding in steadfast love and mercy. And he did not forsake them. And then John writes at the end of his life, 1 John chapter 4. Your notes have 9 through 11, but the first three words are from verse 8. God is love. In this, the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation of our sins. I mentioned the sacrifice of Christ earlier. That is the picture of love. That is love literally becoming flesh and suffering for us, with us, to bring us with him into eternal not suffering. And he leads off this section, John does, by saying God is love. He is the personification of love. You cannot think of pure love and be thinking not of God. Any person who's ever existed without a knowledge of God, who refuses to acknowledge the existence of God, when they think of love, when they feel love, they are thinking of God, they are feeling God, even if they don't realize it because God is love. He is found in that emotion. He is found in that desire and in that affection. God claims to be love itself. And if that's true, then I would like for you to allow me the license to reword Paul's famous poem on love in 1 Corinthians chapter 13. If we replace the word love, love is patient, love is kind, doesn't envy, does not boast. If we replace that with God, because God is love, then it reads like this and resonates with me. God is patient. God is kind. He does not envy. He does not boast. He is not proud. He does not dishonor others. God is not self-seeking. He is not easily angered. He keeps no record of wrongs. God does not delight in trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. God never fails. That's the love that your God offers to you. He loves you with an everlasting love. And because of that, he is steadfast in his faithfulness to you, even when you are unfaithful to him. He always persists. He always hopes in you. He never fails you. He keeps no record of your wrongs. We sing that song right before the sermon, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God. And it's funny to me, when that song first came out, there was debate in theological circles because theological circles like to have stupid debates to justify their existence. And there was a school of thought that the recklessness there was that shouldn't be in a worship song. We shouldn't attribute that to God. That's a negative thing. That means he's foolhardy. It's some sort of error that he's making in loving us. And I always thought that was absurd. God's love is reckless because he loves with no regard for himself. God's love for you is reckless because he's the only entity in eternity that can love with a boundless love with no parameters to protect himself. God will slam against the wall of your apathy over and over and over again for your entire life and get himself up and dust himself off and heal himself up and chase after you again. And eventually, I'm just going to tell you, he's going to Kool-Aid man through that brick wall of yours. He's going to get you. But in the meantime, he's going to keep coming. And our sin and our obstinance and our apathy can keep holding him at bay, but he's not going to stop following you. He's not going to stop pursuing you. He's not going to stop chasing you. You're not going to hurt him enough that he has to withdraw and retract and say, I just can't do it. It hurts too much to continue to love her. He's just going to keep coming because that's the love of God. I've gotten into this habit recently that I would honestly highly recommend for my Bible readers. When it's time for my reading time in the morning, I've started trying to figure out what's the thing I'm feeling or thinking about the most right now. And then I read the book of the Bible that I feel like most aligns with that. If the book's short enough, I just read the whole thing. And so this morning, knowing that I was preaching about this, I sat down to read Hosea. Some of my scholars in the room know that that's what the whole book of Hosea is about. An overview of the book of Hosea is there's a prophet, I bet you can guess his name, and he is told by God to go marry a lady of the night named Gomer, which could there be a more tempting name for a lady of the night than Gomer? God says, I want you to go marry her. I want you to make her an honest woman. Go pay the bride price, and I want you to marry her. And your marriage to her is to be a picture, is to be a picture of my marriage to Israel that has gone and been unfaithful to me and cheated on me with other gods and with other priorities and yet I'm still choosing them. So you're gonna go marry her as a picture for how I love you. They got married, They had three kids. After they had three kids, she left and she went back to her old ways. Because I think when you're in a lifestyle like that or others like that, that it's difficult to always fully depart from them. She went back to her old ways. And God said, Hosea, go pay her bride price and marry her again. And he did it. And then she left him again and he went and got her again. And the whole book is a picture of God's love for Israel, God's love for you and me. So I sat down to reread it this morning and I didn't even get through, I didn't even get it past the second chapter because in the second chapter we see, or it might be in the first chapter where she has the kids, yeah, it's the first chapter. Because in the second chapter, we see, or it might be in the first chapter where she has the kids. Yeah, it's the first chapter. She has the kids and God, whenever she gets pregnant, God tells Hosea what to name the child. And I don't remember the actual names. One is just real. I don't remember the rest. But the first name of the first child meant not my people. And he said, you're going to name your child not my people because Israel, not Judah, Israel has betrayed me. Israel has talked and acted and walked and thought as if they don't want to be my children, as if they don't care to be my people, so now they no longer will be my people. So you will name your first child as assigned to Israel, not my people. You will name your second child as assigned to Israel, not my God, because in word and thought and action, they have betrayed me as their God. They no longer want me as their God, so I'm going to grant them their wish. You name your second child, not my God. The third child, I want you to name no mercy, because through their words and through the thoughts and through their deeds, they do not want my mercy anymore. So name the child no mercy, for I will not show them mercy. And as you read it, you think, this makes sense. I know this love. I understand this judgment. I get this reciprocity. I offered myself to you. I made you my people. You acted as if you didn't want to be my people. Eventually, you're not. I made myself your God. You acted like you wanted other gods to worship Baal or whatever else. So eventually, I'm not your God. I offered you mercy. You said, no thanks, we don't need your mercy. Fine, I'm not going to offer you my mercy. And then you read chapter 2. Chapter 2 is this long poem. And in it, he details the unfaithfulness of his bride, Israel. And then all the things that he was doing behind the scenes to provide for her, care for her, love for her, that she didn't realize. And then ultimately, she still spat on him and who he was. But even after that, chapter two ends with this verse. It just sat me down right there in my seat. It just blew me back. Even after that, after Israel does nothing, they have not apologized. They have not looked at the example of Hosea and been like, oh no, what do we do? They are not repentant. They are not sorry. They have not come back to God at all. And in the midst of that, God says this, and I will have mercy on no mercy. And I will say to not my people, you are my people. And he shall say, you are my God. Even after not repenting, even after continuing to stomp on the love of God, continuing to betray it in word and in thought and in action, and reject it in word and thought and action, God says to those people, I am your God, you are my people, and I will show you mercy. And he says that to us. His love is overwhelming and never-ending and reckless. And he pursues you. And I don't want you to know it. I want you to feel it. Because here's what happens when you feel it and you walk as if you're loved by God. God's reckless love creates a protective sanctuary from which we are able to offer boundless love as well. How do we transform, transition from offering conditional love to unconditional love? By walking in the deep heart knowledge of the boundless love that Creator God has for us. When you can walk with it here, you can offer it everywhere. Reject me as many times as you like, brother. Creator God loves me. I don't need yours anyways. Say whatever you want to say about me. Betray my trust as many times as you need to before I wear you down and before you accept this love too because God loves me. I don't really need yours. I'm loving you for you. If we want to be transformed from offering human conditional love with boundaries to offering divine, holy, Jesus-enabled and Holy Spirit-inspired love to others, then what we must do is walk in a deep knowledge of the reckless love that God offers to us. I hope you'll go from this place and do that. Let's pray. God, every time I pray, personally or corporately, I pray that I or we love you. And we do. You know that we do. We're just not good at it. So God, would you make us better? And God, would the only effort that we make towards loving you and others more, would the only effort that we make towards that be? To attempt to live in a knowledge that we are loved recklessly and endlessly by you. Would that reality transform our lives, our hearts, how we love, how we live? God, we thank you for your son, the personification of your love, the embodiment of your love, and how he was poured out for us. God, I pray that we would leave this room more certain that you love us, feeling more deeply what your love means than we did when we came in here today. Help us receive and offer your reckless love, Lord. In Jesus' name, amen.