Numbers 11

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. Before I launch into the sermon, I did want to say this on Hootenanny Sunday. A couple of weeks ago, it was in the middle of the week, and we were going into the first full Sunday in September when we were going to go back to two services as a church. And, you know, Jen and I were having a conversation, Jen's my wife, and I said, hey, you know, this Sunday we go back to two services because for the summer we were at one. It was our summer schedule and everybody was at church together. And she goes, yeah, I know, two services. Are you excited? And I said, not really. I don't really want to go to two services. And she goes, yeah, I'm not either. She goes, why don't you want to go to two services? And I said, well, I just really like everybody being together. I like everybody going to church together, having service together. I like being able to see everybody all at the same time. Like, it's one big family, and I really kind of like that. But, you know, it's full. So we either decide to keep it all to ourselves, or we open up to two services, and we invite other people into what God's doing here and what we think is special. And so that's what we've done. And so we're all in this together. But I point that out because in a few minutes, we're going to leave from here. We're going to go outside and celebrate and have our hootenanny, have a big party. And hopefully everyone is together in one place and we get to be a big family of faith after this. So even though we have two services, we want to try to continue to intentionally put things in our calendar and in the life of the church where we can all come together as one and get to see everybody that we love and care about, and then other people who we don't love or care about. This morning, we're getting into the third part of our series called Feasts. In the Old Testament, the book of Leviticus chapter 26, God gives us six festivals that, or gives the Hebrew people six festivals that he wants them to observe for the rest of their history. What's going on is they've been led out of slavery. They're living in the desert around Egypt. They are trying to figure out life. They're starting a society and a culture. And God says, as you do this, here's some laws. Here's some ways that you can relate to me. Here's where I want you to go. Here's your leader, Moses. Here's all this provision. But I also want you to celebrate these things, these six things throughout the year. Sometimes it's a week. Sometimes it's a day, but these are the six holidays or festivals that I want you to have. And what we've said since week one is a holiday is important and vital because what it does for us is amidst the craziness of life, the stress of life, the distractions of life, all the things that we get caught up in and give our days to, what a holiday does is it stops and slows us down and focuses us in on something that we say is important. So I think it's really interesting and worthwhile to go, well, what are the six things that God wanted his people to slow down and focus on for a day or for a period of time? So this week we arrive at a festival that has a lot of names. It can be the Feast of Tabernacles, the Feast of Tents, the Feast of Booths. The Hebrew name for it is Sukkot. So any of those will do. We'll call it the Feast of Tents, but it does have a lot of names. And what they would do, it was the most festive holiday of the year for the Hebrew people. This was the big, this was the big, fun, joy-filled one. This is the one that makes me think of Christmas because it was just, it was just about celebrating. And so what they would do for this holiday, the reason it was called the Feast of Tents is that they would all, every family in Israel would set up a tent at their house that they would live in. So it would be in the front yard or on the porch. If they were urban, it would be up on the roof and they would live in this tent as much as the weather would permit. They would sleep and have meals out there if they could. And they decorated them with different kinds of fruits that meant different things and different kinds of branches that meant different things. And I read that they were very brightly colored and it was very festive. It kind of reminded me of our Christmas season, right? Where decorations go up around the neighborhood. And I would be even willing to bet that there was a sort of like competition culture with the different tents. Like, oh, Phil's got the big lights this year. Like you do with Christmas, like he's pulled out the inflatable, like Santa, we got to step up our game over here. We look like a bunch of chumps. So I bet that the different tents for the different families looked pretty good and that they made little additions and that it was a big family thing. So it was a festive holiday. It was a festive time of year in Israel. And it was always positioned at the end of harvest season. The crops in Israel, the big ones were olives and grapes, and those are harvested in the fall. And so they've been praying to their God. They've been praying to God that he'll bring about a fruit and bring about a good harvest, that the fields would be okay, that everything would go well, that they'd be injury-free, they'd be able to reap their harvest and whatever it was. And a lot of effort had gone into this, and now the Lord had provided. There was provision there. And so they wanted to stop and celebrate and acknowledge that provision. How often do we pray for something, implore God for something, ask Him for something, and then get it, and then just move on with our lives without ever stopping to acknowledge that He's the one that gave it to us. And so that's what they were doing, is they're pausing after harvest season and saying, God, you are good. You have provided for us yet again. And they did that by living in these tents for a week as a tip of the hat, as an acknowledgement to their ancestors who had to live in the tents in the desert. It's a reference back to the time when they had escaped out of Egypt. They were slaves in Egypt. Moses led them away. And then for 40 years, between three and 500,000 of Abraham's descendants, the Hebrew people, lived in the desert. And so they were a nomadic people. They had a tent and they would set it up. Their family would stay there. In the center of the camp was the tabernacle, which was God's big tent that was the forefather of the shadow of the temple. It would become the temple later. It was the model of the temple in the middle of their camp. And then there was God's big tent, and then they would set up theirs all around it. And then when God decided it was time to move, everybody would pack up stuff and move until God told them to set down camp again. Then they'd set down camp again and they'd live in this tent. And they did that for 40 years. And so celebrating this feast is an acknowledgement of what their ancestors did in the desert. It reminded them where they came from. It reminded them of God's provision in the desert. And then it celebrated God's provision in the harvest. That was the point of the festival. And it's a good thing to acknowledge it ties together very well because this time spent in the desert was really some of the most visible time of provision in all of history from the Lord. God provided for his people in incredible ways. I've already mentioned to you that there was between three and five,000 people in the desert, right? So they leave Egypt. They don't have discernible skills. They don't know how to grow stuff yet on their own in their own fields. They're out in the desert. They can't do it there. There's not enough grass to feed all of their flocks. There's a real logistics issue going on. How are we going to feed all these people? How are we going to make sure they have enough to drink? How are we going to keep their flocks alive? And so what God does to provide for his people is every day when they would walk out, there was a substance on the ground that was a lot like bread that they called manna. And you guys know this. A lot of you guys know this. A lot of you guys know that the word manna literally means, what is it? What's that? But every day they would walk out and on the desert floor waiting for them was their provision for the day, was their manna. It's the food and the sustenance that they needed for both them and their flocks. It was the way that God provided for them in the desert. It's this remarkable provision. And God in his grace, even when they complained about it and said, we'd really like something different. Are there more options on the menu up there, God? He said, okay, for a little while, we'll give you some quail. And so they had quail. I mean, how great would that be to wake up every day, walk outside, grab the food for the day, not have to go grocery shopping, run to Harris Teeter, wherever it is you go, not have to worry about buying it. Just walk outside and grab it and walk inside, and there you go, and you're done. And then maybe you could be like, well, God, tomorrow, I'd like a couple more. It's a big day. We've got some people coming over. Like, whatever it is, but you could go outside and you could get it. And then, because they're in the desert and they don't know where to go, God guides them. We're told that by day, God was a pillar of cloud and that by night, he was a pillar of fire. And he was telling his people, walk towards me, follow me, and I'll take you where you need to go. It's the world's very first GPS system. I don't know if you realize that. And then he would also provide for them water. They're bound to get thirsty. And one time Moses strikes a rock and water comes out of the rock and gives everybody there something to drink. God provided for his people at that time in remarkable ways. And you would think, based on all the daily provision happening in the desert, you would think that these people were particularly grateful people. You would think that they would be characterized by gratitude. You would think that they would marvel every day at the fact that God has provided for us yet again. Every day I walk outside, every day my food is there. Where are we going to go today? I don't know. Well, there's the cloud. Let's walk that way. It seems a little bit like retiring and moving into an all-inclusive resort. Like you just wake up every day and there's the food that you need and we're going to look at the clouds today. Like that's what you're going to do. It sounds like a pretty great gig. You would think that they would be people who are incredibly grateful for God. When they are thirsty and they cry out, hit that rock and here comes water. When they don't understand how to relate to their God, well, let me take your leader up on a mountain and give him some laws, and I'm going to give you some parameters around this so you don't have to figure it out on your own. Let me give you a way that you can make yourself right with me, a sacrificial system. Let me provide that for you. You would think the generation that saw what happened at the Red outmanned for. It was like, you know, App State and UNC yesterday, and like the underdog would win all the time. They watched this provision throughout their entire life, so you would think that they would be characterized by a gratitude. But really what we see when we read the Old Testament, when we read the first five books of the Bible, when we learn about the people in the desert, is amidst all this provision, everything that God was doing for them daily, these remarkable things, He healed them of bites of snakes just in an instant. Rather than being characterized by gratitude, they were characterized by grumbling. What we see is in the desert, God's people were characterized by grumbling rather than gratitude. They were characterized by complaining. We see it in Exodus 16 and Numbers 11 and Numbers 14, all throughout the Old Testament where we read about the life of the people in the desert. They complained and they grumbled. The reason God gave them quail that one time is because they complained that they were tired of manna. They were tired of the taste of their free food that they didn't have to work for. At one point, do you know that they actually had the gall to go to Moses, God's representative, and say, we were better off as slaves in Egypt. Why have you brought us out here? Are you kidding me? What a bunch of spoiled brats. In the face of God's provision, we wish that we were still slaves. This is the worst. Another time when Moses was off talking to God going, what are we going to do with these people? They all got together and took all the jewelry that they stole from the Egyptians so that they could have some wealth, which God told them to do anyways, and then melted it down, fashioned it together into a calf, thinking maybe this golden calf can provide for us better than our God does. They're characterized by grumbling, and it blows me away in the midst of all this provision, of all these regular daily miracles by God, that they would still complain. And what I realized about them, the reason that this was happening is because they were so focused on what they wanted God to do that they forgot what he had done. The people in the desert, those folks, they were so focused on what they wanted God to do. We need better food. We need a place to live. I'm tired of living in this tent. The desert is getting old. I'd love to set up a shop of some sort. This is miserable. God, we are better off as slaves. They were so focused on what they wanted God to do, on what they were waiting for, on what they were praying for, on what they were anticipating and hoping for, that in the midst of that looking forward, they forgot to acknowledge what God was doing right in front of them. And when I think about that, I realize that maybe they were spoiled brats, but that I'm the same way. We get so locked in on what we want in the future that we forget what God has provided in the present. I think about the last three and a half years that I had at the previous church that I was at outside of Atlanta. And I was talking with Jen about this time, and we look back on it now, and we wouldn't have admitted it at the time, but now as I look back, I realize that we just really weren't happy. I mean, we were happy with each other, I assume. I don't know if she was unhappy with me or not. She's never told me. But we just weren't happy in life. There's a lot of things we wanted that we didn't have. It was a hard season. I think most pointedly, we really wanted a family. We wanted a child. And for whatever reason, we just weren't having kids at the time. We just couldn't get pregnant. It was just a struggle for us. And it was especially hard when all of our friends at church, everybody around us started having kids. Everybody our age started having kids. And then that got really hard because all we could think about is this thing that we want. And then to make it even worse, it wasn't just the people who are our age, but we both, I was a student pastor for a long time. She's taught school. And some of the kids that we used to know and lead and pour into, now they're growing up and they're having families. And we're just going, God, are you kidding me? It's like they're having kids on accident. We can't have one on purpose. It was a hard season. Not only that, but Jen was a school teacher at a private school, and I was a youth pastor, so I don't think that affluent is a word that I would choose to describe us at the time. But we had friends, we had peers, and they all had more lucrative jobs than I did. And they started buying houses that were bigger than ours and going on vacations that were better than us. They'd go to Ireland, we'd go to Gatlinburg, you know? And then some of them built houses all in the same community and we're friends with everybody and we want to go and be a part of that. We wish we could live out there. That's not the life that God's chosen for us, and it kind of made us unhappy, and sometimes we drive out there in our station wagon like Cousin Eddie, like, hey, guys, what are you doing over here? Can we eat your food and drink your things? It was tough. Jen had a job that she liked, a teacher, and she moved to a part-time job. That was fine. She wasn't necessarily unhappy there, but she wasn't fulfilled in that job like she was. But she did that to prepare for us to have a kid that never came or that wasn't coming at the time. I was really unhappy in my job. I was unhappy with my role at the church. I wanted to do more. I couldn't understand why I was so limited in what I was able to do there. And I was chomping at the bit with God, like, give me more, give me more opportunity. And I would even pray, like, can I do something else? Can I look somewhere else? And I just felt like he would go, no, why don't you just chill out for a second, be quiet, hang in there. And when I think about that time, I realize that we weren't super happy with life. We wanted a lot of things that we didn't have. And we couldn't understand a lot of the situations that we were in. And if you were to really ask us, we probably would have said something to the effect of, you know, we don't really deserve to be walking through all of these things. At least I would have. Jen wouldn't have. She's a better person than me. But now as I look back on that time, as we look back on that time, I'm embarrassed about my attitude during that season. Because what I saw as God not providing, he was preparing. When I look back on that season and I asked Jen, and we talked about this this week, I said, when you think about that season, what are you now grateful for? What were we missing there? What did we not acknowledge during that season when we were grumbling? What were we ungrateful for? And the first thing out of her mouth was the first thing that I thought. She said, you know, that season to me is marked by a real sweet time of friendship. And it was. During that season of our life, God provided us with some really good friends. They're our sweatpants friends, you know? The ones that you don't have to dress up for. The ones that you can like leave stuff on the counter. You don't have to clean up. They can just come over. They were those kinds of friends. In fact, I remember one of the things we used to do all the time. Once a month, we would get in the car, we would drive an hour and a half, and we would go to this place that had all-you-can-eat crab legs, and we would eat an unhealthy amount of crab legs. I ate so many crab legs, I got tired of the juice jippering onto my jeans that I used to eat in wristbands, you know? And like, these are the friends that you can do this with. I would text them at like nine o'clock or 9.30 at night when we were really, you know, going at it hard, 9.30 at night. And I would text them like, hey, fro-yo? Just one word to eight people. Fro-yo with a question mark. And I don't know if the frozen yogurt wave hit Raleigh as hard as it hit Gwinnett County, where I was from outside of Atlanta, but you would go to these places and there would be all of these different flavors of frozen yogurt. And then there would be this bar and you could get all the flavors you want. You put it in your own cup and then you put all the toppings on it that you want. And then at the end, it was beautiful. They didn't have like a price. You just weighed it, right? You just put it on the scale and they charge you per ounce. And what I realized very quickly is there's a cap on how much they'll charge you. So once you hit the cap, man, just go nuts. Just get it all on there. And it's frozen yogurt, so it's good for you. You don't have to feel bad about it. So I would text them at like 9 or 9.30 at night, hey, fro-yo? And within 15 or 20 minutes, eight of us are sitting out in a parking lot, talking, laughing, sharing stories, catching up, sitting in the back of a truck, sitting in chairs. Guys are talking over here, girls are talking over there. And I just think, as I think about that time now, it's like, man, what sweet time of community that was. What freedom we had that we weren't grateful for then. And they're our vacation friends now. God formed some good, what we believe to be lifelong friendships during that season. We waited for Lily. Which to us, our hearts are full with her. She's our three-year-old daughter. We love her. What I saw as a lack of God's provision and opportunity at Greystone at the time was really a provision of Him preparing me and preparing us for what was next. Sometimes I got the tasks that other people didn't want. I was kind of the catch-all on staff, like, oh, we got to go visit so-and-so, we got to go do this wedding, we got to go do this thing, and all of that fell to me. And I can remember at times resenting it because it felt like I was just kind of a catch-all. Now, guess what I am at Grace? All that stuff. God was preparing me. He was giving me an opportunity to find my voice because one day I was going to have to do this every week. He knew that. He was preparing Jen in different ways. I missed all that at the time because all I did every day is wake up thinking about what I wanted and how I was going to bring it about and wake up thinking about praying for it and asking God for it and then being unsatisfied when I didn't have it. And I missed everything that he was providing all along the way. And I think that this is why we have the Feast of Tents. It's God's way of encouraging us, of making us stop and focus on what He has provided, on helping us to remember what He has done for us. I think that you guys are probably not dissimilar to me in that way. I would be willing to bet that just about everybody in this room has already thought about something that they want in the future today. I bet we've already thought about something that we don't have now that we want, something that we're asking God for that we hope he provides. I would be willing to bet, I almost asked you guys to raise your hands just to out everybody. I wonder how many couples in here, how many married couples within the last month, one of you has looked at the other one and said, you think it's time for a new kitchen? There's some hands. You think it's time for a new kitchen? Should we sell? Buy a new house? We'll redo the bathroom. I need heated floors. My toesies are cold. How many of us in the last couple of weeks have hoped for a new job? For a new opportunity? Instead of unhappy in this relationship, I hope that it gets fixed. How many of us have had our thought life and our prayer life dominated by something that someone we love is going through? Whether it's a struggle or an illness or a diagnosis. How much of our energy goes towards things that we want to be different in the future? How much of us are so focused, or how many of us are so focused on something that's happening with our kids and just hoping that we can get on the other side of this with them? What is life going to look like on the other side of this thing? What's life going to look like in a month, a year from now? What would life look like if I could have a better job that gave me purpose? What would life look like if we could get out of this financial situation? And I think all of us, as we came in today, as we arrived at church, all of us have things in our life with which we are unsatisfied, and we are very likely appealing to God to fix those things and change those things and bring those things about. And listen, that's not bad. We're told that we have not because we ask not. We're told that we should bring our cares to God. We are told that we should go to him in prayer. It's not bad to hope for good things, and it's not bad to appeal to God for good things. But when that's all we ever do is want the next thing, then we perpetually forget to focus on the thing that we have. When all we want is future provision, then we forget today's provision. And when we do that, this isn't my idea. I got this from some guy in a TED Talk. When we do that, when we are constantly focused on what's next, then we fundamentally eliminate happiness in our life. We fundamentally eliminate joy because we never give ourselves a chance to enjoy what's happening in our life right now because we're always wanting the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. And I think that that's why God installed the Feast of Tenths in the calendar of His people because the Feast of Tenths invites us into a day where we don't think about what we want and we choose gratitude for what we have. The Feast of Tenths invites us into a day where just for a day, just for a couple of hours, we stop thinking about the things that we want. We stop thinking about the things that we're hoping for. We stop thinking about the things that maybe have been dominating our thought life or our prayer life for months or weeks or years, and we just stop and we say, for today, I'm not going to focus on what I want. I'm going to be grateful for what I have. And I want to invite us into that celebration today. I want to invite you into that celebration today. It's a very human, normal, fine thing to want different things in the future. It's a very human and all right thing to not be happy with the way that something might be right now and to ask that God might change that, to be concerned about very serious things. But if that's all we ever do, then we miss out on all the provision that God has given us right now. So today I want to invite you into that, just for today. Can you commit to not thinking about something that I want tomorrow? I'm not going to think about that. I'm not going to think about what I hope breaks my way. I'm not even for today, God's heard my prayers. He knows what's on my heart. For today, I'm not even going to pray for that thing. I'm just going to think about what he's given me today. And if I were to ask you, what would you tell me? If I were to ask you, what do you have to celebrate today? As a matter of fact, I don't know if you've given me homework authority in your life. I don't know if I have that. But if you have, if I can give you homework, I would make this the assignment. At some point today, have this conversation with somebody. Talk with somebody else who heard this sermon and say, what do you have to celebrate today? What has God provided for you? What has our good, good Father who knows how to give good and perfect gifts, what has He given you today? If I could ask you, what would you tell me? Do you have people in your life who love you? Do you have someone that you know loves you, who's rooting for you? Who wants the best for you? What a blessing that is. Are you in a sweet season of friendships with people? Do you have sweet memories of someone? When you think about who they are, what they said, you could smile right now. Do you have somebody in your life that if you called them, they would actually answer? And if you said, hey, I need, that it wouldn't matter what followed after that because they would do it for you. Do you have those people in your life? Do you have memories of a good family? Do you have a loved one? Do you have moms and dads that you can call up right now? If you don't, do you have fond memories of them? Do you have a job that you enjoy, and if you don't love it, it at least gives you the opportunity to live towards another purpose? It at least pays your bills? Do you have a job that you're grateful for? Do you have a house that you like, even if the kitchen stinks? Do you have a car that gets you where you need to go? Do you have plans today? People that you're going to see? Games that you're going to watch? Relaxing that needs to happen? Do you have those things? And God's provided so much for us in so many ways. And I'm convinced that like the people in the desert, we continually focus so much on what we want that we forget to be grateful for what we have. And this, I think, is the simple wisdom of David in Psalm 118. Many of you guys know this psalm. You might not know that you know it, but Psalm 118, 24, you say, if you grew up in church, you probably sang it. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. I think that's the wisdom. We have today. This is our reality. Right now, today, we have the things we hope for in the future. Some of them will happen. Some of them won't. But right now, we have today. And what are we grateful for today? Today is the day the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it. And as I looked into the passage, what I realized is Psalm 118 has a lot of verses. This is the day the Lord has made all rejoicing and glad in it. That's verse 24. The 23 verses preceding that verse are David listing out all the things that God had done for him. You've handed me victory when I did not think I could have it. You've provided for me people to love. You came through in this way and in this way and in this way. And all of the provisions of God in the past lead him to this conclusion that this is also a day that you have made, and I'll rejoice in you. And then he caps it off. He doesn't stop there with verse 24. It ends in verse 29 when it says, Oh, give thanks to if we'll stop and slow down and be grateful for what we do have, that it will engender in us, rather than grumbling, it will engender in us this gratitude that will compel us to a love and appreciation of God. Not only is today the day that He's made, but let us rejoice and be glad for the love of God endures forever. If today is good and he's the author of it, then he's the author of tomorrow too. And I know that when I get there, I can praise him for the provision that he's made in my life. And so the feast of tents is joyful because it's a day where we stop, we refuse to think about what we want, and we focus on what we have. And as we go out in a minute and we celebrate together, the hootenanny, the party for grace, it's appropriate that we stop and acknowledge all that God has done here at Grace. Because I think a lot about the future of Grace. I think a lot about where God wants to take us and what we might do. We've got some plans coming up that I think people are going to be excited about, but that's all down the road. I know our elders think about it. I know our staff and our partners think about what's the future of grace, where are we going, and what's that going to look like. But on the hootenanny, on this party, we stop and we slow down for a festival that's positioned at the end of the harvest season, and we say, God, we are so grateful for what you've done here. And so for me, I don't just celebrate what God has done in my life, but I want to invite you as church partners and church family to celebrate what God is doing in this place. Because I don't know if you thought about it, but it's pretty remarkable. When I got here two and a half years ago, we were in debt. We didn't have any money. And we owed this church down the street. I was looking at everything that we owed and trying to figure out how can I wiggle out of this. And I looked at this church down the street, World Overcomers, right next door. And we owed them $17,000 because of an agreement that we made about some space. And I emailed them. I didn't have any pride or dignity. I was too young for that. So I emailed them. I said, hey, listen, we owe you $17,000. We cannot pay it. If we try to pay it now, like, we will not exist as a church. Can we please defer this to the end of the year? Or maybe you'll just say, like, don't worry about it. And they said, we love God. We love His church. We believe in the sameness of purpose. And if it will help you, don't pay it. Don't worry about it. It's remarkable. $17,000 gift that allows us to continue to exist as a church. And that's what we needed. If we didn't get that from World Overcomers, we would not have survived. I don't think we needed that gift. Since getting $17,000 given to us so that we could function as an organization, do you know that we have given away since then over $125,000 to other people? The organizations outside of Grace, more than six-fold what we were given. We've had the opportunity to do that. That's God's goodness here. When I got here, I looked at the student ministry and I said, oh gosh, it's really top-heavy. We've got a bunch of upperclassmen who didn't care anything about me or what's happening at Grace. They're going to graduate, and then there's this dearth of people following. There's like nobody there. We've got like a year and a half to figure this out because we have families in elementary school, and when their kids start to age into this, they're going to bolt if we don't have a student ministry set up, and this place is going to implode in a year and a half, and that's like all I thought about and prayed about. These past two weeks, we've had more kids on Sunday night than we've had in years. Over 40 kids back-to-back weeks. It's remarkable what God is doing here, his provision. I asked Kyle, how's student ministry going? Expecting him to say like it's tough, and I was going to try to pick him up, and he was like, it's great. We have kids coming out of the woodwork. I don't know where they're coming from. I love it. This is so much fun. I said, really? He goes, yeah. I've got a bunch of middle school kids. He said, they're actually coming up to him going, is it okay if we invite our friends to this? Is this just for us, or can other people come? He's like, yes, invite friends. It's amazing. When Jen and I visited, we went home, and we said, this is a great church. She goes, I don't know who we're going to be friends with. There's like nobody there our age. They all look like they're kind of our parents' age. What are we going to do about this? And I said, I think this is where the Lord wants us to go. Preschool age kids and families is the fastest growing segment of grace right now. God's providing. We're multi-generational in a really fun way. Erin has more kids on her roster right now than she's ever had, and she's been here for six or seven years. Guys, God's doing amazing things here. He's blessing us in remarkable ways. And I don't want us to be so focused on what's in the future for grace that we don't stop and say, man, God, thank you. Thanks for everything that you've done here. So the hootenanny, that's what we celebrate. Everything that God is doing. And not just the numbers and how that's all going, but each one of those is a story. Each one of those is a family. Each one of those is a marriage solidified as friendships formed, as people walking alongside other friends and fighting for them in their walk with the Lord. So each one of those things matters to God, and he continues to provide for us here. So in a minute, we're going to go celebrate. We're going to go outside. We're going to have a great time, and I want us to do that. It's incredibly appropriate. God created good times and joy. He did. And as we do that, let's all promise each other we're not going to think about what we want next. We're going to be grateful for what we have right now. And let's celebrate God's goodness and provision in our lives together. Let's pray. Father, we are so grateful for you. We love you so very much. We thank you for all the ways that you've provided for us, all the things that you've given us. God, some of us here have some really compelling reasons to be anxious about tomorrow, to be focused on the future. But God, you know those reasons, and you're in those situations. Give us the peace of mind today to slow down and simply be grateful for what you've given us. And let that assure us that you'll take care of us moving forward. Thank you so much for the opportunity to celebrate you and all that you've done today. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. Before I launch into the sermon, I did want to say this on Hootenanny Sunday. A couple of weeks ago, it was in the middle of the week, and we were going into the first full Sunday in September when we were going to go back to two services as a church. And, you know, Jen and I were having a conversation, Jen's my wife, and I said, hey, you know, this Sunday we go back to two services because for the summer we were at one. It was our summer schedule and everybody was at church together. And she goes, yeah, I know, two services. Are you excited? And I said, not really. I don't really want to go to two services. And she goes, yeah, I'm not either. She goes, why don't you want to go to two services? And I said, well, I just really like everybody being together. I like everybody going to church together, having service together. I like being able to see everybody all at the same time. Like, it's one big family, and I really kind of like that. But, you know, it's full. So we either decide to keep it all to ourselves, or we open up to two services, and we invite other people into what God's doing here and what we think is special. And so that's what we've done. And so we're all in this together. But I point that out because in a few minutes, we're going to leave from here. We're going to go outside and celebrate and have our hootenanny, have a big party. And hopefully everyone is together in one place and we get to be a big family of faith after this. So even though we have two services, we want to try to continue to intentionally put things in our calendar and in the life of the church where we can all come together as one and get to see everybody that we love and care about, and then other people who we don't love or care about. This morning, we're getting into the third part of our series called Feasts. In the Old Testament, the book of Leviticus chapter 26, God gives us six festivals that, or gives the Hebrew people six festivals that he wants them to observe for the rest of their history. What's going on is they've been led out of slavery. They're living in the desert around Egypt. They are trying to figure out life. They're starting a society and a culture. And God says, as you do this, here's some laws. Here's some ways that you can relate to me. Here's where I want you to go. Here's your leader, Moses. Here's all this provision. But I also want you to celebrate these things, these six things throughout the year. Sometimes it's a week. Sometimes it's a day, but these are the six holidays or festivals that I want you to have. And what we've said since week one is a holiday is important and vital because what it does for us is amidst the craziness of life, the stress of life, the distractions of life, all the things that we get caught up in and give our days to, what a holiday does is it stops and slows us down and focuses us in on something that we say is important. So I think it's really interesting and worthwhile to go, well, what are the six things that God wanted his people to slow down and focus on for a day or for a period of time? So this week we arrive at a festival that has a lot of names. It can be the Feast of Tabernacles, the Feast of Tents, the Feast of Booths. The Hebrew name for it is Sukkot. So any of those will do. We'll call it the Feast of Tents, but it does have a lot of names. And what they would do, it was the most festive holiday of the year for the Hebrew people. This was the big, this was the big, fun, joy-filled one. This is the one that makes me think of Christmas because it was just, it was just about celebrating. And so what they would do for this holiday, the reason it was called the Feast of Tents is that they would all, every family in Israel would set up a tent at their house that they would live in. So it would be in the front yard or on the porch. If they were urban, it would be up on the roof and they would live in this tent as much as the weather would permit. They would sleep and have meals out there if they could. And they decorated them with different kinds of fruits that meant different things and different kinds of branches that meant different things. And I read that they were very brightly colored and it was very festive. It kind of reminded me of our Christmas season, right? Where decorations go up around the neighborhood. And I would be even willing to bet that there was a sort of like competition culture with the different tents. Like, oh, Phil's got the big lights this year. Like you do with Christmas, like he's pulled out the inflatable, like Santa, we got to step up our game over here. We look like a bunch of chumps. So I bet that the different tents for the different families looked pretty good and that they made little additions and that it was a big family thing. So it was a festive holiday. It was a festive time of year in Israel. And it was always positioned at the end of harvest season. The crops in Israel, the big ones were olives and grapes, and those are harvested in the fall. And so they've been praying to their God. They've been praying to God that he'll bring about a fruit and bring about a good harvest, that the fields would be okay, that everything would go well, that they'd be injury-free, they'd be able to reap their harvest and whatever it was. And a lot of effort had gone into this, and now the Lord had provided. There was provision there. And so they wanted to stop and celebrate and acknowledge that provision. How often do we pray for something, implore God for something, ask Him for something, and then get it, and then just move on with our lives without ever stopping to acknowledge that He's the one that gave it to us. And so that's what they were doing, is they're pausing after harvest season and saying, God, you are good. You have provided for us yet again. And they did that by living in these tents for a week as a tip of the hat, as an acknowledgement to their ancestors who had to live in the tents in the desert. It's a reference back to the time when they had escaped out of Egypt. They were slaves in Egypt. Moses led them away. And then for 40 years, between three and 500,000 of Abraham's descendants, the Hebrew people, lived in the desert. And so they were a nomadic people. They had a tent and they would set it up. Their family would stay there. In the center of the camp was the tabernacle, which was God's big tent that was the forefather of the shadow of the temple. It would become the temple later. It was the model of the temple in the middle of their camp. And then there was God's big tent, and then they would set up theirs all around it. And then when God decided it was time to move, everybody would pack up stuff and move until God told them to set down camp again. Then they'd set down camp again and they'd live in this tent. And they did that for 40 years. And so celebrating this feast is an acknowledgement of what their ancestors did in the desert. It reminded them where they came from. It reminded them of God's provision in the desert. And then it celebrated God's provision in the harvest. That was the point of the festival. And it's a good thing to acknowledge it ties together very well because this time spent in the desert was really some of the most visible time of provision in all of history from the Lord. God provided for his people in incredible ways. I've already mentioned to you that there was between three and five,000 people in the desert, right? So they leave Egypt. They don't have discernible skills. They don't know how to grow stuff yet on their own in their own fields. They're out in the desert. They can't do it there. There's not enough grass to feed all of their flocks. There's a real logistics issue going on. How are we going to feed all these people? How are we going to make sure they have enough to drink? How are we going to keep their flocks alive? And so what God does to provide for his people is every day when they would walk out, there was a substance on the ground that was a lot like bread that they called manna. And you guys know this. A lot of you guys know this. A lot of you guys know that the word manna literally means, what is it? What's that? But every day they would walk out and on the desert floor waiting for them was their provision for the day, was their manna. It's the food and the sustenance that they needed for both them and their flocks. It was the way that God provided for them in the desert. It's this remarkable provision. And God in his grace, even when they complained about it and said, we'd really like something different. Are there more options on the menu up there, God? He said, okay, for a little while, we'll give you some quail. And so they had quail. I mean, how great would that be to wake up every day, walk outside, grab the food for the day, not have to go grocery shopping, run to Harris Teeter, wherever it is you go, not have to worry about buying it. Just walk outside and grab it and walk inside, and there you go, and you're done. And then maybe you could be like, well, God, tomorrow, I'd like a couple more. It's a big day. We've got some people coming over. Like, whatever it is, but you could go outside and you could get it. And then, because they're in the desert and they don't know where to go, God guides them. We're told that by day, God was a pillar of cloud and that by night, he was a pillar of fire. And he was telling his people, walk towards me, follow me, and I'll take you where you need to go. It's the world's very first GPS system. I don't know if you realize that. And then he would also provide for them water. They're bound to get thirsty. And one time Moses strikes a rock and water comes out of the rock and gives everybody there something to drink. God provided for his people at that time in remarkable ways. And you would think, based on all the daily provision happening in the desert, you would think that these people were particularly grateful people. You would think that they would be characterized by gratitude. You would think that they would marvel every day at the fact that God has provided for us yet again. Every day I walk outside, every day my food is there. Where are we going to go today? I don't know. Well, there's the cloud. Let's walk that way. It seems a little bit like retiring and moving into an all-inclusive resort. Like you just wake up every day and there's the food that you need and we're going to look at the clouds today. Like that's what you're going to do. It sounds like a pretty great gig. You would think that they would be people who are incredibly grateful for God. When they are thirsty and they cry out, hit that rock and here comes water. When they don't understand how to relate to their God, well, let me take your leader up on a mountain and give him some laws, and I'm going to give you some parameters around this so you don't have to figure it out on your own. Let me give you a way that you can make yourself right with me, a sacrificial system. Let me provide that for you. You would think the generation that saw what happened at the Red outmanned for. It was like, you know, App State and UNC yesterday, and like the underdog would win all the time. They watched this provision throughout their entire life, so you would think that they would be characterized by a gratitude. But really what we see when we read the Old Testament, when we read the first five books of the Bible, when we learn about the people in the desert, is amidst all this provision, everything that God was doing for them daily, these remarkable things, He healed them of bites of snakes just in an instant. Rather than being characterized by gratitude, they were characterized by grumbling. What we see is in the desert, God's people were characterized by grumbling rather than gratitude. They were characterized by complaining. We see it in Exodus 16 and Numbers 11 and Numbers 14, all throughout the Old Testament where we read about the life of the people in the desert. They complained and they grumbled. The reason God gave them quail that one time is because they complained that they were tired of manna. They were tired of the taste of their free food that they didn't have to work for. At one point, do you know that they actually had the gall to go to Moses, God's representative, and say, we were better off as slaves in Egypt. Why have you brought us out here? Are you kidding me? What a bunch of spoiled brats. In the face of God's provision, we wish that we were still slaves. This is the worst. Another time when Moses was off talking to God going, what are we going to do with these people? They all got together and took all the jewelry that they stole from the Egyptians so that they could have some wealth, which God told them to do anyways, and then melted it down, fashioned it together into a calf, thinking maybe this golden calf can provide for us better than our God does. They're characterized by grumbling, and it blows me away in the midst of all this provision, of all these regular daily miracles by God, that they would still complain. And what I realized about them, the reason that this was happening is because they were so focused on what they wanted God to do that they forgot what he had done. The people in the desert, those folks, they were so focused on what they wanted God to do. We need better food. We need a place to live. I'm tired of living in this tent. The desert is getting old. I'd love to set up a shop of some sort. This is miserable. God, we are better off as slaves. They were so focused on what they wanted God to do, on what they were waiting for, on what they were praying for, on what they were anticipating and hoping for, that in the midst of that looking forward, they forgot to acknowledge what God was doing right in front of them. And when I think about that, I realize that maybe they were spoiled brats, but that I'm the same way. We get so locked in on what we want in the future that we forget what God has provided in the present. I think about the last three and a half years that I had at the previous church that I was at outside of Atlanta. And I was talking with Jen about this time, and we look back on it now, and we wouldn't have admitted it at the time, but now as I look back, I realize that we just really weren't happy. I mean, we were happy with each other, I assume. I don't know if she was unhappy with me or not. She's never told me. But we just weren't happy in life. There's a lot of things we wanted that we didn't have. It was a hard season. I think most pointedly, we really wanted a family. We wanted a child. And for whatever reason, we just weren't having kids at the time. We just couldn't get pregnant. It was just a struggle for us. And it was especially hard when all of our friends at church, everybody around us started having kids. Everybody our age started having kids. And then that got really hard because all we could think about is this thing that we want. And then to make it even worse, it wasn't just the people who are our age, but we both, I was a student pastor for a long time. She's taught school. And some of the kids that we used to know and lead and pour into, now they're growing up and they're having families. And we're just going, God, are you kidding me? It's like they're having kids on accident. We can't have one on purpose. It was a hard season. Not only that, but Jen was a school teacher at a private school, and I was a youth pastor, so I don't think that affluent is a word that I would choose to describe us at the time. But we had friends, we had peers, and they all had more lucrative jobs than I did. And they started buying houses that were bigger than ours and going on vacations that were better than us. They'd go to Ireland, we'd go to Gatlinburg, you know? And then some of them built houses all in the same community and we're friends with everybody and we want to go and be a part of that. We wish we could live out there. That's not the life that God's chosen for us, and it kind of made us unhappy, and sometimes we drive out there in our station wagon like Cousin Eddie, like, hey, guys, what are you doing over here? Can we eat your food and drink your things? It was tough. Jen had a job that she liked, a teacher, and she moved to a part-time job. That was fine. She wasn't necessarily unhappy there, but she wasn't fulfilled in that job like she was. But she did that to prepare for us to have a kid that never came or that wasn't coming at the time. I was really unhappy in my job. I was unhappy with my role at the church. I wanted to do more. I couldn't understand why I was so limited in what I was able to do there. And I was chomping at the bit with God, like, give me more, give me more opportunity. And I would even pray, like, can I do something else? Can I look somewhere else? And I just felt like he would go, no, why don't you just chill out for a second, be quiet, hang in there. And when I think about that time, I realize that we weren't super happy with life. We wanted a lot of things that we didn't have. And we couldn't understand a lot of the situations that we were in. And if you were to really ask us, we probably would have said something to the effect of, you know, we don't really deserve to be walking through all of these things. At least I would have. Jen wouldn't have. She's a better person than me. But now as I look back on that time, as we look back on that time, I'm embarrassed about my attitude during that season. Because what I saw as God not providing, he was preparing. When I look back on that season and I asked Jen, and we talked about this this week, I said, when you think about that season, what are you now grateful for? What were we missing there? What did we not acknowledge during that season when we were grumbling? What were we ungrateful for? And the first thing out of her mouth was the first thing that I thought. She said, you know, that season to me is marked by a real sweet time of friendship. And it was. During that season of our life, God provided us with some really good friends. They're our sweatpants friends, you know? The ones that you don't have to dress up for. The ones that you can like leave stuff on the counter. You don't have to clean up. They can just come over. They were those kinds of friends. In fact, I remember one of the things we used to do all the time. Once a month, we would get in the car, we would drive an hour and a half, and we would go to this place that had all-you-can-eat crab legs, and we would eat an unhealthy amount of crab legs. I ate so many crab legs, I got tired of the juice jippering onto my jeans that I used to eat in wristbands, you know? And like, these are the friends that you can do this with. I would text them at like nine o'clock or 9.30 at night when we were really, you know, going at it hard, 9.30 at night. And I would text them like, hey, fro-yo? Just one word to eight people. Fro-yo with a question mark. And I don't know if the frozen yogurt wave hit Raleigh as hard as it hit Gwinnett County, where I was from outside of Atlanta, but you would go to these places and there would be all of these different flavors of frozen yogurt. And then there would be this bar and you could get all the flavors you want. You put it in your own cup and then you put all the toppings on it that you want. And then at the end, it was beautiful. They didn't have like a price. You just weighed it, right? You just put it on the scale and they charge you per ounce. And what I realized very quickly is there's a cap on how much they'll charge you. So once you hit the cap, man, just go nuts. Just get it all on there. And it's frozen yogurt, so it's good for you. You don't have to feel bad about it. So I would text them at like 9 or 9.30 at night, hey, fro-yo? And within 15 or 20 minutes, eight of us are sitting out in a parking lot, talking, laughing, sharing stories, catching up, sitting in the back of a truck, sitting in chairs. Guys are talking over here, girls are talking over there. And I just think, as I think about that time now, it's like, man, what sweet time of community that was. What freedom we had that we weren't grateful for then. And they're our vacation friends now. God formed some good, what we believe to be lifelong friendships during that season. We waited for Lily. Which to us, our hearts are full with her. She's our three-year-old daughter. We love her. What I saw as a lack of God's provision and opportunity at Greystone at the time was really a provision of Him preparing me and preparing us for what was next. Sometimes I got the tasks that other people didn't want. I was kind of the catch-all on staff, like, oh, we got to go visit so-and-so, we got to go do this wedding, we got to go do this thing, and all of that fell to me. And I can remember at times resenting it because it felt like I was just kind of a catch-all. Now, guess what I am at Grace? All that stuff. God was preparing me. He was giving me an opportunity to find my voice because one day I was going to have to do this every week. He knew that. He was preparing Jen in different ways. I missed all that at the time because all I did every day is wake up thinking about what I wanted and how I was going to bring it about and wake up thinking about praying for it and asking God for it and then being unsatisfied when I didn't have it. And I missed everything that he was providing all along the way. And I think that this is why we have the Feast of Tents. It's God's way of encouraging us, of making us stop and focus on what He has provided, on helping us to remember what He has done for us. I think that you guys are probably not dissimilar to me in that way. I would be willing to bet that just about everybody in this room has already thought about something that they want in the future today. I bet we've already thought about something that we don't have now that we want, something that we're asking God for that we hope he provides. I would be willing to bet, I almost asked you guys to raise your hands just to out everybody. I wonder how many couples in here, how many married couples within the last month, one of you has looked at the other one and said, you think it's time for a new kitchen? There's some hands. You think it's time for a new kitchen? Should we sell? Buy a new house? We'll redo the bathroom. I need heated floors. My toesies are cold. How many of us in the last couple of weeks have hoped for a new job? For a new opportunity? Instead of unhappy in this relationship, I hope that it gets fixed. How many of us have had our thought life and our prayer life dominated by something that someone we love is going through? Whether it's a struggle or an illness or a diagnosis. How much of our energy goes towards things that we want to be different in the future? How much of us are so focused, or how many of us are so focused on something that's happening with our kids and just hoping that we can get on the other side of this with them? What is life going to look like on the other side of this thing? What's life going to look like in a month, a year from now? What would life look like if I could have a better job that gave me purpose? What would life look like if we could get out of this financial situation? And I think all of us, as we came in today, as we arrived at church, all of us have things in our life with which we are unsatisfied, and we are very likely appealing to God to fix those things and change those things and bring those things about. And listen, that's not bad. We're told that we have not because we ask not. We're told that we should bring our cares to God. We are told that we should go to him in prayer. It's not bad to hope for good things, and it's not bad to appeal to God for good things. But when that's all we ever do is want the next thing, then we perpetually forget to focus on the thing that we have. When all we want is future provision, then we forget today's provision. And when we do that, this isn't my idea. I got this from some guy in a TED Talk. When we do that, when we are constantly focused on what's next, then we fundamentally eliminate happiness in our life. We fundamentally eliminate joy because we never give ourselves a chance to enjoy what's happening in our life right now because we're always wanting the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. And I think that that's why God installed the Feast of Tenths in the calendar of His people because the Feast of Tenths invites us into a day where we don't think about what we want and we choose gratitude for what we have. The Feast of Tenths invites us into a day where just for a day, just for a couple of hours, we stop thinking about the things that we want. We stop thinking about the things that we're hoping for. We stop thinking about the things that maybe have been dominating our thought life or our prayer life for months or weeks or years, and we just stop and we say, for today, I'm not going to focus on what I want. I'm going to be grateful for what I have. And I want to invite us into that celebration today. I want to invite you into that celebration today. It's a very human, normal, fine thing to want different things in the future. It's a very human and all right thing to not be happy with the way that something might be right now and to ask that God might change that, to be concerned about very serious things. But if that's all we ever do, then we miss out on all the provision that God has given us right now. So today I want to invite you into that, just for today. Can you commit to not thinking about something that I want tomorrow? I'm not going to think about that. I'm not going to think about what I hope breaks my way. I'm not even for today, God's heard my prayers. He knows what's on my heart. For today, I'm not even going to pray for that thing. I'm just going to think about what he's given me today. And if I were to ask you, what would you tell me? If I were to ask you, what do you have to celebrate today? As a matter of fact, I don't know if you've given me homework authority in your life. I don't know if I have that. But if you have, if I can give you homework, I would make this the assignment. At some point today, have this conversation with somebody. Talk with somebody else who heard this sermon and say, what do you have to celebrate today? What has God provided for you? What has our good, good Father who knows how to give good and perfect gifts, what has He given you today? If I could ask you, what would you tell me? Do you have people in your life who love you? Do you have someone that you know loves you, who's rooting for you? Who wants the best for you? What a blessing that is. Are you in a sweet season of friendships with people? Do you have sweet memories of someone? When you think about who they are, what they said, you could smile right now. Do you have somebody in your life that if you called them, they would actually answer? And if you said, hey, I need, that it wouldn't matter what followed after that because they would do it for you. Do you have those people in your life? Do you have memories of a good family? Do you have a loved one? Do you have moms and dads that you can call up right now? If you don't, do you have fond memories of them? Do you have a job that you enjoy, and if you don't love it, it at least gives you the opportunity to live towards another purpose? It at least pays your bills? Do you have a job that you're grateful for? Do you have a house that you like, even if the kitchen stinks? Do you have a car that gets you where you need to go? Do you have plans today? People that you're going to see? Games that you're going to watch? Relaxing that needs to happen? Do you have those things? And God's provided so much for us in so many ways. And I'm convinced that like the people in the desert, we continually focus so much on what we want that we forget to be grateful for what we have. And this, I think, is the simple wisdom of David in Psalm 118. Many of you guys know this psalm. You might not know that you know it, but Psalm 118, 24, you say, if you grew up in church, you probably sang it. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. I think that's the wisdom. We have today. This is our reality. Right now, today, we have the things we hope for in the future. Some of them will happen. Some of them won't. But right now, we have today. And what are we grateful for today? Today is the day the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it. And as I looked into the passage, what I realized is Psalm 118 has a lot of verses. This is the day the Lord has made all rejoicing and glad in it. That's verse 24. The 23 verses preceding that verse are David listing out all the things that God had done for him. You've handed me victory when I did not think I could have it. You've provided for me people to love. You came through in this way and in this way and in this way. And all of the provisions of God in the past lead him to this conclusion that this is also a day that you have made, and I'll rejoice in you. And then he caps it off. He doesn't stop there with verse 24. It ends in verse 29 when it says, Oh, give thanks to if we'll stop and slow down and be grateful for what we do have, that it will engender in us, rather than grumbling, it will engender in us this gratitude that will compel us to a love and appreciation of God. Not only is today the day that He's made, but let us rejoice and be glad for the love of God endures forever. If today is good and he's the author of it, then he's the author of tomorrow too. And I know that when I get there, I can praise him for the provision that he's made in my life. And so the feast of tents is joyful because it's a day where we stop, we refuse to think about what we want, and we focus on what we have. And as we go out in a minute and we celebrate together, the hootenanny, the party for grace, it's appropriate that we stop and acknowledge all that God has done here at Grace. Because I think a lot about the future of Grace. I think a lot about where God wants to take us and what we might do. We've got some plans coming up that I think people are going to be excited about, but that's all down the road. I know our elders think about it. I know our staff and our partners think about what's the future of grace, where are we going, and what's that going to look like. But on the hootenanny, on this party, we stop and we slow down for a festival that's positioned at the end of the harvest season, and we say, God, we are so grateful for what you've done here. And so for me, I don't just celebrate what God has done in my life, but I want to invite you as church partners and church family to celebrate what God is doing in this place. Because I don't know if you thought about it, but it's pretty remarkable. When I got here two and a half years ago, we were in debt. We didn't have any money. And we owed this church down the street. I was looking at everything that we owed and trying to figure out how can I wiggle out of this. And I looked at this church down the street, World Overcomers, right next door. And we owed them $17,000 because of an agreement that we made about some space. And I emailed them. I didn't have any pride or dignity. I was too young for that. So I emailed them. I said, hey, listen, we owe you $17,000. We cannot pay it. If we try to pay it now, like, we will not exist as a church. Can we please defer this to the end of the year? Or maybe you'll just say, like, don't worry about it. And they said, we love God. We love His church. We believe in the sameness of purpose. And if it will help you, don't pay it. Don't worry about it. It's remarkable. $17,000 gift that allows us to continue to exist as a church. And that's what we needed. If we didn't get that from World Overcomers, we would not have survived. I don't think we needed that gift. Since getting $17,000 given to us so that we could function as an organization, do you know that we have given away since then over $125,000 to other people? The organizations outside of Grace, more than six-fold what we were given. We've had the opportunity to do that. That's God's goodness here. When I got here, I looked at the student ministry and I said, oh gosh, it's really top-heavy. We've got a bunch of upperclassmen who didn't care anything about me or what's happening at Grace. They're going to graduate, and then there's this dearth of people following. There's like nobody there. We've got like a year and a half to figure this out because we have families in elementary school, and when their kids start to age into this, they're going to bolt if we don't have a student ministry set up, and this place is going to implode in a year and a half, and that's like all I thought about and prayed about. These past two weeks, we've had more kids on Sunday night than we've had in years. Over 40 kids back-to-back weeks. It's remarkable what God is doing here, his provision. I asked Kyle, how's student ministry going? Expecting him to say like it's tough, and I was going to try to pick him up, and he was like, it's great. We have kids coming out of the woodwork. I don't know where they're coming from. I love it. This is so much fun. I said, really? He goes, yeah. I've got a bunch of middle school kids. He said, they're actually coming up to him going, is it okay if we invite our friends to this? Is this just for us, or can other people come? He's like, yes, invite friends. It's amazing. When Jen and I visited, we went home, and we said, this is a great church. She goes, I don't know who we're going to be friends with. There's like nobody there our age. They all look like they're kind of our parents' age. What are we going to do about this? And I said, I think this is where the Lord wants us to go. Preschool age kids and families is the fastest growing segment of grace right now. God's providing. We're multi-generational in a really fun way. Erin has more kids on her roster right now than she's ever had, and she's been here for six or seven years. Guys, God's doing amazing things here. He's blessing us in remarkable ways. And I don't want us to be so focused on what's in the future for grace that we don't stop and say, man, God, thank you. Thanks for everything that you've done here. So the hootenanny, that's what we celebrate. Everything that God is doing. And not just the numbers and how that's all going, but each one of those is a story. Each one of those is a family. Each one of those is a marriage solidified as friendships formed, as people walking alongside other friends and fighting for them in their walk with the Lord. So each one of those things matters to God, and he continues to provide for us here. So in a minute, we're going to go celebrate. We're going to go outside. We're going to have a great time, and I want us to do that. It's incredibly appropriate. God created good times and joy. He did. And as we do that, let's all promise each other we're not going to think about what we want next. We're going to be grateful for what we have right now. And let's celebrate God's goodness and provision in our lives together. Let's pray. Father, we are so grateful for you. We love you so very much. We thank you for all the ways that you've provided for us, all the things that you've given us. God, some of us here have some really compelling reasons to be anxious about tomorrow, to be focused on the future. But God, you know those reasons, and you're in those situations. Give us the peace of mind today to slow down and simply be grateful for what you've given us. And let that assure us that you'll take care of us moving forward. Thank you so much for the opportunity to celebrate you and all that you've done today. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. Before I launch into the sermon, I did want to say this on Hootenanny Sunday. A couple of weeks ago, it was in the middle of the week, and we were going into the first full Sunday in September when we were going to go back to two services as a church. And, you know, Jen and I were having a conversation, Jen's my wife, and I said, hey, you know, this Sunday we go back to two services because for the summer we were at one. It was our summer schedule and everybody was at church together. And she goes, yeah, I know, two services. Are you excited? And I said, not really. I don't really want to go to two services. And she goes, yeah, I'm not either. She goes, why don't you want to go to two services? And I said, well, I just really like everybody being together. I like everybody going to church together, having service together. I like being able to see everybody all at the same time. Like, it's one big family, and I really kind of like that. But, you know, it's full. So we either decide to keep it all to ourselves, or we open up to two services, and we invite other people into what God's doing here and what we think is special. And so that's what we've done. And so we're all in this together. But I point that out because in a few minutes, we're going to leave from here. We're going to go outside and celebrate and have our hootenanny, have a big party. And hopefully everyone is together in one place and we get to be a big family of faith after this. So even though we have two services, we want to try to continue to intentionally put things in our calendar and in the life of the church where we can all come together as one and get to see everybody that we love and care about, and then other people who we don't love or care about. This morning, we're getting into the third part of our series called Feasts. In the Old Testament, the book of Leviticus chapter 26, God gives us six festivals that, or gives the Hebrew people six festivals that he wants them to observe for the rest of their history. What's going on is they've been led out of slavery. They're living in the desert around Egypt. They are trying to figure out life. They're starting a society and a culture. And God says, as you do this, here's some laws. Here's some ways that you can relate to me. Here's where I want you to go. Here's your leader, Moses. Here's all this provision. But I also want you to celebrate these things, these six things throughout the year. Sometimes it's a week. Sometimes it's a day, but these are the six holidays or festivals that I want you to have. And what we've said since week one is a holiday is important and vital because what it does for us is amidst the craziness of life, the stress of life, the distractions of life, all the things that we get caught up in and give our days to, what a holiday does is it stops and slows us down and focuses us in on something that we say is important. So I think it's really interesting and worthwhile to go, well, what are the six things that God wanted his people to slow down and focus on for a day or for a period of time? So this week we arrive at a festival that has a lot of names. It can be the Feast of Tabernacles, the Feast of Tents, the Feast of Booths. The Hebrew name for it is Sukkot. So any of those will do. We'll call it the Feast of Tents, but it does have a lot of names. And what they would do, it was the most festive holiday of the year for the Hebrew people. This was the big, this was the big, fun, joy-filled one. This is the one that makes me think of Christmas because it was just, it was just about celebrating. And so what they would do for this holiday, the reason it was called the Feast of Tents is that they would all, every family in Israel would set up a tent at their house that they would live in. So it would be in the front yard or on the porch. If they were urban, it would be up on the roof and they would live in this tent as much as the weather would permit. They would sleep and have meals out there if they could. And they decorated them with different kinds of fruits that meant different things and different kinds of branches that meant different things. And I read that they were very brightly colored and it was very festive. It kind of reminded me of our Christmas season, right? Where decorations go up around the neighborhood. And I would be even willing to bet that there was a sort of like competition culture with the different tents. Like, oh, Phil's got the big lights this year. Like you do with Christmas, like he's pulled out the inflatable, like Santa, we got to step up our game over here. We look like a bunch of chumps. So I bet that the different tents for the different families looked pretty good and that they made little additions and that it was a big family thing. So it was a festive holiday. It was a festive time of year in Israel. And it was always positioned at the end of harvest season. The crops in Israel, the big ones were olives and grapes, and those are harvested in the fall. And so they've been praying to their God. They've been praying to God that he'll bring about a fruit and bring about a good harvest, that the fields would be okay, that everything would go well, that they'd be injury-free, they'd be able to reap their harvest and whatever it was. And a lot of effort had gone into this, and now the Lord had provided. There was provision there. And so they wanted to stop and celebrate and acknowledge that provision. How often do we pray for something, implore God for something, ask Him for something, and then get it, and then just move on with our lives without ever stopping to acknowledge that He's the one that gave it to us. And so that's what they were doing, is they're pausing after harvest season and saying, God, you are good. You have provided for us yet again. And they did that by living in these tents for a week as a tip of the hat, as an acknowledgement to their ancestors who had to live in the tents in the desert. It's a reference back to the time when they had escaped out of Egypt. They were slaves in Egypt. Moses led them away. And then for 40 years, between three and 500,000 of Abraham's descendants, the Hebrew people, lived in the desert. And so they were a nomadic people. They had a tent and they would set it up. Their family would stay there. In the center of the camp was the tabernacle, which was God's big tent that was the forefather of the shadow of the temple. It would become the temple later. It was the model of the temple in the middle of their camp. And then there was God's big tent, and then they would set up theirs all around it. And then when God decided it was time to move, everybody would pack up stuff and move until God told them to set down camp again. Then they'd set down camp again and they'd live in this tent. And they did that for 40 years. And so celebrating this feast is an acknowledgement of what their ancestors did in the desert. It reminded them where they came from. It reminded them of God's provision in the desert. And then it celebrated God's provision in the harvest. That was the point of the festival. And it's a good thing to acknowledge it ties together very well because this time spent in the desert was really some of the most visible time of provision in all of history from the Lord. God provided for his people in incredible ways. I've already mentioned to you that there was between three and five,000 people in the desert, right? So they leave Egypt. They don't have discernible skills. They don't know how to grow stuff yet on their own in their own fields. They're out in the desert. They can't do it there. There's not enough grass to feed all of their flocks. There's a real logistics issue going on. How are we going to feed all these people? How are we going to make sure they have enough to drink? How are we going to keep their flocks alive? And so what God does to provide for his people is every day when they would walk out, there was a substance on the ground that was a lot like bread that they called manna. And you guys know this. A lot of you guys know this. A lot of you guys know that the word manna literally means, what is it? What's that? But every day they would walk out and on the desert floor waiting for them was their provision for the day, was their manna. It's the food and the sustenance that they needed for both them and their flocks. It was the way that God provided for them in the desert. It's this remarkable provision. And God in his grace, even when they complained about it and said, we'd really like something different. Are there more options on the menu up there, God? He said, okay, for a little while, we'll give you some quail. And so they had quail. I mean, how great would that be to wake up every day, walk outside, grab the food for the day, not have to go grocery shopping, run to Harris Teeter, wherever it is you go, not have to worry about buying it. Just walk outside and grab it and walk inside, and there you go, and you're done. And then maybe you could be like, well, God, tomorrow, I'd like a couple more. It's a big day. We've got some people coming over. Like, whatever it is, but you could go outside and you could get it. And then, because they're in the desert and they don't know where to go, God guides them. We're told that by day, God was a pillar of cloud and that by night, he was a pillar of fire. And he was telling his people, walk towards me, follow me, and I'll take you where you need to go. It's the world's very first GPS system. I don't know if you realize that. And then he would also provide for them water. They're bound to get thirsty. And one time Moses strikes a rock and water comes out of the rock and gives everybody there something to drink. God provided for his people at that time in remarkable ways. And you would think, based on all the daily provision happening in the desert, you would think that these people were particularly grateful people. You would think that they would be characterized by gratitude. You would think that they would marvel every day at the fact that God has provided for us yet again. Every day I walk outside, every day my food is there. Where are we going to go today? I don't know. Well, there's the cloud. Let's walk that way. It seems a little bit like retiring and moving into an all-inclusive resort. Like you just wake up every day and there's the food that you need and we're going to look at the clouds today. Like that's what you're going to do. It sounds like a pretty great gig. You would think that they would be people who are incredibly grateful for God. When they are thirsty and they cry out, hit that rock and here comes water. When they don't understand how to relate to their God, well, let me take your leader up on a mountain and give him some laws, and I'm going to give you some parameters around this so you don't have to figure it out on your own. Let me give you a way that you can make yourself right with me, a sacrificial system. Let me provide that for you. You would think the generation that saw what happened at the Red outmanned for. It was like, you know, App State and UNC yesterday, and like the underdog would win all the time. They watched this provision throughout their entire life, so you would think that they would be characterized by a gratitude. But really what we see when we read the Old Testament, when we read the first five books of the Bible, when we learn about the people in the desert, is amidst all this provision, everything that God was doing for them daily, these remarkable things, He healed them of bites of snakes just in an instant. Rather than being characterized by gratitude, they were characterized by grumbling. What we see is in the desert, God's people were characterized by grumbling rather than gratitude. They were characterized by complaining. We see it in Exodus 16 and Numbers 11 and Numbers 14, all throughout the Old Testament where we read about the life of the people in the desert. They complained and they grumbled. The reason God gave them quail that one time is because they complained that they were tired of manna. They were tired of the taste of their free food that they didn't have to work for. At one point, do you know that they actually had the gall to go to Moses, God's representative, and say, we were better off as slaves in Egypt. Why have you brought us out here? Are you kidding me? What a bunch of spoiled brats. In the face of God's provision, we wish that we were still slaves. This is the worst. Another time when Moses was off talking to God going, what are we going to do with these people? They all got together and took all the jewelry that they stole from the Egyptians so that they could have some wealth, which God told them to do anyways, and then melted it down, fashioned it together into a calf, thinking maybe this golden calf can provide for us better than our God does. They're characterized by grumbling, and it blows me away in the midst of all this provision, of all these regular daily miracles by God, that they would still complain. And what I realized about them, the reason that this was happening is because they were so focused on what they wanted God to do that they forgot what he had done. The people in the desert, those folks, they were so focused on what they wanted God to do. We need better food. We need a place to live. I'm tired of living in this tent. The desert is getting old. I'd love to set up a shop of some sort. This is miserable. God, we are better off as slaves. They were so focused on what they wanted God to do, on what they were waiting for, on what they were praying for, on what they were anticipating and hoping for, that in the midst of that looking forward, they forgot to acknowledge what God was doing right in front of them. And when I think about that, I realize that maybe they were spoiled brats, but that I'm the same way. We get so locked in on what we want in the future that we forget what God has provided in the present. I think about the last three and a half years that I had at the previous church that I was at outside of Atlanta. And I was talking with Jen about this time, and we look back on it now, and we wouldn't have admitted it at the time, but now as I look back, I realize that we just really weren't happy. I mean, we were happy with each other, I assume. I don't know if she was unhappy with me or not. She's never told me. But we just weren't happy in life. There's a lot of things we wanted that we didn't have. It was a hard season. I think most pointedly, we really wanted a family. We wanted a child. And for whatever reason, we just weren't having kids at the time. We just couldn't get pregnant. It was just a struggle for us. And it was especially hard when all of our friends at church, everybody around us started having kids. Everybody our age started having kids. And then that got really hard because all we could think about is this thing that we want. And then to make it even worse, it wasn't just the people who are our age, but we both, I was a student pastor for a long time. She's taught school. And some of the kids that we used to know and lead and pour into, now they're growing up and they're having families. And we're just going, God, are you kidding me? It's like they're having kids on accident. We can't have one on purpose. It was a hard season. Not only that, but Jen was a school teacher at a private school, and I was a youth pastor, so I don't think that affluent is a word that I would choose to describe us at the time. But we had friends, we had peers, and they all had more lucrative jobs than I did. And they started buying houses that were bigger than ours and going on vacations that were better than us. They'd go to Ireland, we'd go to Gatlinburg, you know? And then some of them built houses all in the same community and we're friends with everybody and we want to go and be a part of that. We wish we could live out there. That's not the life that God's chosen for us, and it kind of made us unhappy, and sometimes we drive out there in our station wagon like Cousin Eddie, like, hey, guys, what are you doing over here? Can we eat your food and drink your things? It was tough. Jen had a job that she liked, a teacher, and she moved to a part-time job. That was fine. She wasn't necessarily unhappy there, but she wasn't fulfilled in that job like she was. But she did that to prepare for us to have a kid that never came or that wasn't coming at the time. I was really unhappy in my job. I was unhappy with my role at the church. I wanted to do more. I couldn't understand why I was so limited in what I was able to do there. And I was chomping at the bit with God, like, give me more, give me more opportunity. And I would even pray, like, can I do something else? Can I look somewhere else? And I just felt like he would go, no, why don't you just chill out for a second, be quiet, hang in there. And when I think about that time, I realize that we weren't super happy with life. We wanted a lot of things that we didn't have. And we couldn't understand a lot of the situations that we were in. And if you were to really ask us, we probably would have said something to the effect of, you know, we don't really deserve to be walking through all of these things. At least I would have. Jen wouldn't have. She's a better person than me. But now as I look back on that time, as we look back on that time, I'm embarrassed about my attitude during that season. Because what I saw as God not providing, he was preparing. When I look back on that season and I asked Jen, and we talked about this this week, I said, when you think about that season, what are you now grateful for? What were we missing there? What did we not acknowledge during that season when we were grumbling? What were we ungrateful for? And the first thing out of her mouth was the first thing that I thought. She said, you know, that season to me is marked by a real sweet time of friendship. And it was. During that season of our life, God provided us with some really good friends. They're our sweatpants friends, you know? The ones that you don't have to dress up for. The ones that you can like leave stuff on the counter. You don't have to clean up. They can just come over. They were those kinds of friends. In fact, I remember one of the things we used to do all the time. Once a month, we would get in the car, we would drive an hour and a half, and we would go to this place that had all-you-can-eat crab legs, and we would eat an unhealthy amount of crab legs. I ate so many crab legs, I got tired of the juice jippering onto my jeans that I used to eat in wristbands, you know? And like, these are the friends that you can do this with. I would text them at like nine o'clock or 9.30 at night when we were really, you know, going at it hard, 9.30 at night. And I would text them like, hey, fro-yo? Just one word to eight people. Fro-yo with a question mark. And I don't know if the frozen yogurt wave hit Raleigh as hard as it hit Gwinnett County, where I was from outside of Atlanta, but you would go to these places and there would be all of these different flavors of frozen yogurt. And then there would be this bar and you could get all the flavors you want. You put it in your own cup and then you put all the toppings on it that you want. And then at the end, it was beautiful. They didn't have like a price. You just weighed it, right? You just put it on the scale and they charge you per ounce. And what I realized very quickly is there's a cap on how much they'll charge you. So once you hit the cap, man, just go nuts. Just get it all on there. And it's frozen yogurt, so it's good for you. You don't have to feel bad about it. So I would text them at like 9 or 9.30 at night, hey, fro-yo? And within 15 or 20 minutes, eight of us are sitting out in a parking lot, talking, laughing, sharing stories, catching up, sitting in the back of a truck, sitting in chairs. Guys are talking over here, girls are talking over there. And I just think, as I think about that time now, it's like, man, what sweet time of community that was. What freedom we had that we weren't grateful for then. And they're our vacation friends now. God formed some good, what we believe to be lifelong friendships during that season. We waited for Lily. Which to us, our hearts are full with her. She's our three-year-old daughter. We love her. What I saw as a lack of God's provision and opportunity at Greystone at the time was really a provision of Him preparing me and preparing us for what was next. Sometimes I got the tasks that other people didn't want. I was kind of the catch-all on staff, like, oh, we got to go visit so-and-so, we got to go do this wedding, we got to go do this thing, and all of that fell to me. And I can remember at times resenting it because it felt like I was just kind of a catch-all. Now, guess what I am at Grace? All that stuff. God was preparing me. He was giving me an opportunity to find my voice because one day I was going to have to do this every week. He knew that. He was preparing Jen in different ways. I missed all that at the time because all I did every day is wake up thinking about what I wanted and how I was going to bring it about and wake up thinking about praying for it and asking God for it and then being unsatisfied when I didn't have it. And I missed everything that he was providing all along the way. And I think that this is why we have the Feast of Tents. It's God's way of encouraging us, of making us stop and focus on what He has provided, on helping us to remember what He has done for us. I think that you guys are probably not dissimilar to me in that way. I would be willing to bet that just about everybody in this room has already thought about something that they want in the future today. I bet we've already thought about something that we don't have now that we want, something that we're asking God for that we hope he provides. I would be willing to bet, I almost asked you guys to raise your hands just to out everybody. I wonder how many couples in here, how many married couples within the last month, one of you has looked at the other one and said, you think it's time for a new kitchen? There's some hands. You think it's time for a new kitchen? Should we sell? Buy a new house? We'll redo the bathroom. I need heated floors. My toesies are cold. How many of us in the last couple of weeks have hoped for a new job? For a new opportunity? Instead of unhappy in this relationship, I hope that it gets fixed. How many of us have had our thought life and our prayer life dominated by something that someone we love is going through? Whether it's a struggle or an illness or a diagnosis. How much of our energy goes towards things that we want to be different in the future? How much of us are so focused, or how many of us are so focused on something that's happening with our kids and just hoping that we can get on the other side of this with them? What is life going to look like on the other side of this thing? What's life going to look like in a month, a year from now? What would life look like if I could have a better job that gave me purpose? What would life look like if we could get out of this financial situation? And I think all of us, as we came in today, as we arrived at church, all of us have things in our life with which we are unsatisfied, and we are very likely appealing to God to fix those things and change those things and bring those things about. And listen, that's not bad. We're told that we have not because we ask not. We're told that we should bring our cares to God. We are told that we should go to him in prayer. It's not bad to hope for good things, and it's not bad to appeal to God for good things. But when that's all we ever do is want the next thing, then we perpetually forget to focus on the thing that we have. When all we want is future provision, then we forget today's provision. And when we do that, this isn't my idea. I got this from some guy in a TED Talk. When we do that, when we are constantly focused on what's next, then we fundamentally eliminate happiness in our life. We fundamentally eliminate joy because we never give ourselves a chance to enjoy what's happening in our life right now because we're always wanting the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. And I think that that's why God installed the Feast of Tenths in the calendar of His people because the Feast of Tenths invites us into a day where we don't think about what we want and we choose gratitude for what we have. The Feast of Tenths invites us into a day where just for a day, just for a couple of hours, we stop thinking about the things that we want. We stop thinking about the things that we're hoping for. We stop thinking about the things that maybe have been dominating our thought life or our prayer life for months or weeks or years, and we just stop and we say, for today, I'm not going to focus on what I want. I'm going to be grateful for what I have. And I want to invite us into that celebration today. I want to invite you into that celebration today. It's a very human, normal, fine thing to want different things in the future. It's a very human and all right thing to not be happy with the way that something might be right now and to ask that God might change that, to be concerned about very serious things. But if that's all we ever do, then we miss out on all the provision that God has given us right now. So today I want to invite you into that, just for today. Can you commit to not thinking about something that I want tomorrow? I'm not going to think about that. I'm not going to think about what I hope breaks my way. I'm not even for today, God's heard my prayers. He knows what's on my heart. For today, I'm not even going to pray for that thing. I'm just going to think about what he's given me today. And if I were to ask you, what would you tell me? If I were to ask you, what do you have to celebrate today? As a matter of fact, I don't know if you've given me homework authority in your life. I don't know if I have that. But if you have, if I can give you homework, I would make this the assignment. At some point today, have this conversation with somebody. Talk with somebody else who heard this sermon and say, what do you have to celebrate today? What has God provided for you? What has our good, good Father who knows how to give good and perfect gifts, what has He given you today? If I could ask you, what would you tell me? Do you have people in your life who love you? Do you have someone that you know loves you, who's rooting for you? Who wants the best for you? What a blessing that is. Are you in a sweet season of friendships with people? Do you have sweet memories of someone? When you think about who they are, what they said, you could smile right now. Do you have somebody in your life that if you called them, they would actually answer? And if you said, hey, I need, that it wouldn't matter what followed after that because they would do it for you. Do you have those people in your life? Do you have memories of a good family? Do you have a loved one? Do you have moms and dads that you can call up right now? If you don't, do you have fond memories of them? Do you have a job that you enjoy, and if you don't love it, it at least gives you the opportunity to live towards another purpose? It at least pays your bills? Do you have a job that you're grateful for? Do you have a house that you like, even if the kitchen stinks? Do you have a car that gets you where you need to go? Do you have plans today? People that you're going to see? Games that you're going to watch? Relaxing that needs to happen? Do you have those things? And God's provided so much for us in so many ways. And I'm convinced that like the people in the desert, we continually focus so much on what we want that we forget to be grateful for what we have. And this, I think, is the simple wisdom of David in Psalm 118. Many of you guys know this psalm. You might not know that you know it, but Psalm 118, 24, you say, if you grew up in church, you probably sang it. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. I think that's the wisdom. We have today. This is our reality. Right now, today, we have the things we hope for in the future. Some of them will happen. Some of them won't. But right now, we have today. And what are we grateful for today? Today is the day the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it. And as I looked into the passage, what I realized is Psalm 118 has a lot of verses. This is the day the Lord has made all rejoicing and glad in it. That's verse 24. The 23 verses preceding that verse are David listing out all the things that God had done for him. You've handed me victory when I did not think I could have it. You've provided for me people to love. You came through in this way and in this way and in this way. And all of the provisions of God in the past lead him to this conclusion that this is also a day that you have made, and I'll rejoice in you. And then he caps it off. He doesn't stop there with verse 24. It ends in verse 29 when it says, Oh, give thanks to if we'll stop and slow down and be grateful for what we do have, that it will engender in us, rather than grumbling, it will engender in us this gratitude that will compel us to a love and appreciation of God. Not only is today the day that He's made, but let us rejoice and be glad for the love of God endures forever. If today is good and he's the author of it, then he's the author of tomorrow too. And I know that when I get there, I can praise him for the provision that he's made in my life. And so the feast of tents is joyful because it's a day where we stop, we refuse to think about what we want, and we focus on what we have. And as we go out in a minute and we celebrate together, the hootenanny, the party for grace, it's appropriate that we stop and acknowledge all that God has done here at Grace. Because I think a lot about the future of Grace. I think a lot about where God wants to take us and what we might do. We've got some plans coming up that I think people are going to be excited about, but that's all down the road. I know our elders think about it. I know our staff and our partners think about what's the future of grace, where are we going, and what's that going to look like. But on the hootenanny, on this party, we stop and we slow down for a festival that's positioned at the end of the harvest season, and we say, God, we are so grateful for what you've done here. And so for me, I don't just celebrate what God has done in my life, but I want to invite you as church partners and church family to celebrate what God is doing in this place. Because I don't know if you thought about it, but it's pretty remarkable. When I got here two and a half years ago, we were in debt. We didn't have any money. And we owed this church down the street. I was looking at everything that we owed and trying to figure out how can I wiggle out of this. And I looked at this church down the street, World Overcomers, right next door. And we owed them $17,000 because of an agreement that we made about some space. And I emailed them. I didn't have any pride or dignity. I was too young for that. So I emailed them. I said, hey, listen, we owe you $17,000. We cannot pay it. If we try to pay it now, like, we will not exist as a church. Can we please defer this to the end of the year? Or maybe you'll just say, like, don't worry about it. And they said, we love God. We love His church. We believe in the sameness of purpose. And if it will help you, don't pay it. Don't worry about it. It's remarkable. $17,000 gift that allows us to continue to exist as a church. And that's what we needed. If we didn't get that from World Overcomers, we would not have survived. I don't think we needed that gift. Since getting $17,000 given to us so that we could function as an organization, do you know that we have given away since then over $125,000 to other people? The organizations outside of Grace, more than six-fold what we were given. We've had the opportunity to do that. That's God's goodness here. When I got here, I looked at the student ministry and I said, oh gosh, it's really top-heavy. We've got a bunch of upperclassmen who didn't care anything about me or what's happening at Grace. They're going to graduate, and then there's this dearth of people following. There's like nobody there. We've got like a year and a half to figure this out because we have families in elementary school, and when their kids start to age into this, they're going to bolt if we don't have a student ministry set up, and this place is going to implode in a year and a half, and that's like all I thought about and prayed about. These past two weeks, we've had more kids on Sunday night than we've had in years. Over 40 kids back-to-back weeks. It's remarkable what God is doing here, his provision. I asked Kyle, how's student ministry going? Expecting him to say like it's tough, and I was going to try to pick him up, and he was like, it's great. We have kids coming out of the woodwork. I don't know where they're coming from. I love it. This is so much fun. I said, really? He goes, yeah. I've got a bunch of middle school kids. He said, they're actually coming up to him going, is it okay if we invite our friends to this? Is this just for us, or can other people come? He's like, yes, invite friends. It's amazing. When Jen and I visited, we went home, and we said, this is a great church. She goes, I don't know who we're going to be friends with. There's like nobody there our age. They all look like they're kind of our parents' age. What are we going to do about this? And I said, I think this is where the Lord wants us to go. Preschool age kids and families is the fastest growing segment of grace right now. God's providing. We're multi-generational in a really fun way. Erin has more kids on her roster right now than she's ever had, and she's been here for six or seven years. Guys, God's doing amazing things here. He's blessing us in remarkable ways. And I don't want us to be so focused on what's in the future for grace that we don't stop and say, man, God, thank you. Thanks for everything that you've done here. So the hootenanny, that's what we celebrate. Everything that God is doing. And not just the numbers and how that's all going, but each one of those is a story. Each one of those is a family. Each one of those is a marriage solidified as friendships formed, as people walking alongside other friends and fighting for them in their walk with the Lord. So each one of those things matters to God, and he continues to provide for us here. So in a minute, we're going to go celebrate. We're going to go outside. We're going to have a great time, and I want us to do that. It's incredibly appropriate. God created good times and joy. He did. And as we do that, let's all promise each other we're not going to think about what we want next. We're going to be grateful for what we have right now. And let's celebrate God's goodness and provision in our lives together. Let's pray. Father, we are so grateful for you. We love you so very much. We thank you for all the ways that you've provided for us, all the things that you've given us. God, some of us here have some really compelling reasons to be anxious about tomorrow, to be focused on the future. But God, you know those reasons, and you're in those situations. Give us the peace of mind today to slow down and simply be grateful for what you've given us. And let that assure us that you'll take care of us moving forward. Thank you so much for the opportunity to celebrate you and all that you've done today. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. Before I launch into the sermon, I did want to say this on Hootenanny Sunday. A couple of weeks ago, it was in the middle of the week, and we were going into the first full Sunday in September when we were going to go back to two services as a church. And, you know, Jen and I were having a conversation, Jen's my wife, and I said, hey, you know, this Sunday we go back to two services because for the summer we were at one. It was our summer schedule and everybody was at church together. And she goes, yeah, I know, two services. Are you excited? And I said, not really. I don't really want to go to two services. And she goes, yeah, I'm not either. She goes, why don't you want to go to two services? And I said, well, I just really like everybody being together. I like everybody going to church together, having service together. I like being able to see everybody all at the same time. Like, it's one big family, and I really kind of like that. But, you know, it's full. So we either decide to keep it all to ourselves, or we open up to two services, and we invite other people into what God's doing here and what we think is special. And so that's what we've done. And so we're all in this together. But I point that out because in a few minutes, we're going to leave from here. We're going to go outside and celebrate and have our hootenanny, have a big party. And hopefully everyone is together in one place and we get to be a big family of faith after this. So even though we have two services, we want to try to continue to intentionally put things in our calendar and in the life of the church where we can all come together as one and get to see everybody that we love and care about, and then other people who we don't love or care about. This morning, we're getting into the third part of our series called Feasts. In the Old Testament, the book of Leviticus chapter 26, God gives us six festivals that, or gives the Hebrew people six festivals that he wants them to observe for the rest of their history. What's going on is they've been led out of slavery. They're living in the desert around Egypt. They are trying to figure out life. They're starting a society and a culture. And God says, as you do this, here's some laws. Here's some ways that you can relate to me. Here's where I want you to go. Here's your leader, Moses. Here's all this provision. But I also want you to celebrate these things, these six things throughout the year. Sometimes it's a week. Sometimes it's a day, but these are the six holidays or festivals that I want you to have. And what we've said since week one is a holiday is important and vital because what it does for us is amidst the craziness of life, the stress of life, the distractions of life, all the things that we get caught up in and give our days to, what a holiday does is it stops and slows us down and focuses us in on something that we say is important. So I think it's really interesting and worthwhile to go, well, what are the six things that God wanted his people to slow down and focus on for a day or for a period of time? So this week we arrive at a festival that has a lot of names. It can be the Feast of Tabernacles, the Feast of Tents, the Feast of Booths. The Hebrew name for it is Sukkot. So any of those will do. We'll call it the Feast of Tents, but it does have a lot of names. And what they would do, it was the most festive holiday of the year for the Hebrew people. This was the big, this was the big, fun, joy-filled one. This is the one that makes me think of Christmas because it was just, it was just about celebrating. And so what they would do for this holiday, the reason it was called the Feast of Tents is that they would all, every family in Israel would set up a tent at their house that they would live in. So it would be in the front yard or on the porch. If they were urban, it would be up on the roof and they would live in this tent as much as the weather would permit. They would sleep and have meals out there if they could. And they decorated them with different kinds of fruits that meant different things and different kinds of branches that meant different things. And I read that they were very brightly colored and it was very festive. It kind of reminded me of our Christmas season, right? Where decorations go up around the neighborhood. And I would be even willing to bet that there was a sort of like competition culture with the different tents. Like, oh, Phil's got the big lights this year. Like you do with Christmas, like he's pulled out the inflatable, like Santa, we got to step up our game over here. We look like a bunch of chumps. So I bet that the different tents for the different families looked pretty good and that they made little additions and that it was a big family thing. So it was a festive holiday. It was a festive time of year in Israel. And it was always positioned at the end of harvest season. The crops in Israel, the big ones were olives and grapes, and those are harvested in the fall. And so they've been praying to their God. They've been praying to God that he'll bring about a fruit and bring about a good harvest, that the fields would be okay, that everything would go well, that they'd be injury-free, they'd be able to reap their harvest and whatever it was. And a lot of effort had gone into this, and now the Lord had provided. There was provision there. And so they wanted to stop and celebrate and acknowledge that provision. How often do we pray for something, implore God for something, ask Him for something, and then get it, and then just move on with our lives without ever stopping to acknowledge that He's the one that gave it to us. And so that's what they were doing, is they're pausing after harvest season and saying, God, you are good. You have provided for us yet again. And they did that by living in these tents for a week as a tip of the hat, as an acknowledgement to their ancestors who had to live in the tents in the desert. It's a reference back to the time when they had escaped out of Egypt. They were slaves in Egypt. Moses led them away. And then for 40 years, between three and 500,000 of Abraham's descendants, the Hebrew people, lived in the desert. And so they were a nomadic people. They had a tent and they would set it up. Their family would stay there. In the center of the camp was the tabernacle, which was God's big tent that was the forefather of the shadow of the temple. It would become the temple later. It was the model of the temple in the middle of their camp. And then there was God's big tent, and then they would set up theirs all around it. And then when God decided it was time to move, everybody would pack up stuff and move until God told them to set down camp again. Then they'd set down camp again and they'd live in this tent. And they did that for 40 years. And so celebrating this feast is an acknowledgement of what their ancestors did in the desert. It reminded them where they came from. It reminded them of God's provision in the desert. And then it celebrated God's provision in the harvest. That was the point of the festival. And it's a good thing to acknowledge it ties together very well because this time spent in the desert was really some of the most visible time of provision in all of history from the Lord. God provided for his people in incredible ways. I've already mentioned to you that there was between three and five,000 people in the desert, right? So they leave Egypt. They don't have discernible skills. They don't know how to grow stuff yet on their own in their own fields. They're out in the desert. They can't do it there. There's not enough grass to feed all of their flocks. There's a real logistics issue going on. How are we going to feed all these people? How are we going to make sure they have enough to drink? How are we going to keep their flocks alive? And so what God does to provide for his people is every day when they would walk out, there was a substance on the ground that was a lot like bread that they called manna. And you guys know this. A lot of you guys know this. A lot of you guys know that the word manna literally means, what is it? What's that? But every day they would walk out and on the desert floor waiting for them was their provision for the day, was their manna. It's the food and the sustenance that they needed for both them and their flocks. It was the way that God provided for them in the desert. It's this remarkable provision. And God in his grace, even when they complained about it and said, we'd really like something different. Are there more options on the menu up there, God? He said, okay, for a little while, we'll give you some quail. And so they had quail. I mean, how great would that be to wake up every day, walk outside, grab the food for the day, not have to go grocery shopping, run to Harris Teeter, wherever it is you go, not have to worry about buying it. Just walk outside and grab it and walk inside, and there you go, and you're done. And then maybe you could be like, well, God, tomorrow, I'd like a couple more. It's a big day. We've got some people coming over. Like, whatever it is, but you could go outside and you could get it. And then, because they're in the desert and they don't know where to go, God guides them. We're told that by day, God was a pillar of cloud and that by night, he was a pillar of fire. And he was telling his people, walk towards me, follow me, and I'll take you where you need to go. It's the world's very first GPS system. I don't know if you realize that. And then he would also provide for them water. They're bound to get thirsty. And one time Moses strikes a rock and water comes out of the rock and gives everybody there something to drink. God provided for his people at that time in remarkable ways. And you would think, based on all the daily provision happening in the desert, you would think that these people were particularly grateful people. You would think that they would be characterized by gratitude. You would think that they would marvel every day at the fact that God has provided for us yet again. Every day I walk outside, every day my food is there. Where are we going to go today? I don't know. Well, there's the cloud. Let's walk that way. It seems a little bit like retiring and moving into an all-inclusive resort. Like you just wake up every day and there's the food that you need and we're going to look at the clouds today. Like that's what you're going to do. It sounds like a pretty great gig. You would think that they would be people who are incredibly grateful for God. When they are thirsty and they cry out, hit that rock and here comes water. When they don't understand how to relate to their God, well, let me take your leader up on a mountain and give him some laws, and I'm going to give you some parameters around this so you don't have to figure it out on your own. Let me give you a way that you can make yourself right with me, a sacrificial system. Let me provide that for you. You would think the generation that saw what happened at the Red outmanned for. It was like, you know, App State and UNC yesterday, and like the underdog would win all the time. They watched this provision throughout their entire life, so you would think that they would be characterized by a gratitude. But really what we see when we read the Old Testament, when we read the first five books of the Bible, when we learn about the people in the desert, is amidst all this provision, everything that God was doing for them daily, these remarkable things, He healed them of bites of snakes just in an instant. Rather than being characterized by gratitude, they were characterized by grumbling. What we see is in the desert, God's people were characterized by grumbling rather than gratitude. They were characterized by complaining. We see it in Exodus 16 and Numbers 11 and Numbers 14, all throughout the Old Testament where we read about the life of the people in the desert. They complained and they grumbled. The reason God gave them quail that one time is because they complained that they were tired of manna. They were tired of the taste of their free food that they didn't have to work for. At one point, do you know that they actually had the gall to go to Moses, God's representative, and say, we were better off as slaves in Egypt. Why have you brought us out here? Are you kidding me? What a bunch of spoiled brats. In the face of God's provision, we wish that we were still slaves. This is the worst. Another time when Moses was off talking to God going, what are we going to do with these people? They all got together and took all the jewelry that they stole from the Egyptians so that they could have some wealth, which God told them to do anyways, and then melted it down, fashioned it together into a calf, thinking maybe this golden calf can provide for us better than our God does. They're characterized by grumbling, and it blows me away in the midst of all this provision, of all these regular daily miracles by God, that they would still complain. And what I realized about them, the reason that this was happening is because they were so focused on what they wanted God to do that they forgot what he had done. The people in the desert, those folks, they were so focused on what they wanted God to do. We need better food. We need a place to live. I'm tired of living in this tent. The desert is getting old. I'd love to set up a shop of some sort. This is miserable. God, we are better off as slaves. They were so focused on what they wanted God to do, on what they were waiting for, on what they were praying for, on what they were anticipating and hoping for, that in the midst of that looking forward, they forgot to acknowledge what God was doing right in front of them. And when I think about that, I realize that maybe they were spoiled brats, but that I'm the same way. We get so locked in on what we want in the future that we forget what God has provided in the present. I think about the last three and a half years that I had at the previous church that I was at outside of Atlanta. And I was talking with Jen about this time, and we look back on it now, and we wouldn't have admitted it at the time, but now as I look back, I realize that we just really weren't happy. I mean, we were happy with each other, I assume. I don't know if she was unhappy with me or not. She's never told me. But we just weren't happy in life. There's a lot of things we wanted that we didn't have. It was a hard season. I think most pointedly, we really wanted a family. We wanted a child. And for whatever reason, we just weren't having kids at the time. We just couldn't get pregnant. It was just a struggle for us. And it was especially hard when all of our friends at church, everybody around us started having kids. Everybody our age started having kids. And then that got really hard because all we could think about is this thing that we want. And then to make it even worse, it wasn't just the people who are our age, but we both, I was a student pastor for a long time. She's taught school. And some of the kids that we used to know and lead and pour into, now they're growing up and they're having families. And we're just going, God, are you kidding me? It's like they're having kids on accident. We can't have one on purpose. It was a hard season. Not only that, but Jen was a school teacher at a private school, and I was a youth pastor, so I don't think that affluent is a word that I would choose to describe us at the time. But we had friends, we had peers, and they all had more lucrative jobs than I did. And they started buying houses that were bigger than ours and going on vacations that were better than us. They'd go to Ireland, we'd go to Gatlinburg, you know? And then some of them built houses all in the same community and we're friends with everybody and we want to go and be a part of that. We wish we could live out there. That's not the life that God's chosen for us, and it kind of made us unhappy, and sometimes we drive out there in our station wagon like Cousin Eddie, like, hey, guys, what are you doing over here? Can we eat your food and drink your things? It was tough. Jen had a job that she liked, a teacher, and she moved to a part-time job. That was fine. She wasn't necessarily unhappy there, but she wasn't fulfilled in that job like she was. But she did that to prepare for us to have a kid that never came or that wasn't coming at the time. I was really unhappy in my job. I was unhappy with my role at the church. I wanted to do more. I couldn't understand why I was so limited in what I was able to do there. And I was chomping at the bit with God, like, give me more, give me more opportunity. And I would even pray, like, can I do something else? Can I look somewhere else? And I just felt like he would go, no, why don't you just chill out for a second, be quiet, hang in there. And when I think about that time, I realize that we weren't super happy with life. We wanted a lot of things that we didn't have. And we couldn't understand a lot of the situations that we were in. And if you were to really ask us, we probably would have said something to the effect of, you know, we don't really deserve to be walking through all of these things. At least I would have. Jen wouldn't have. She's a better person than me. But now as I look back on that time, as we look back on that time, I'm embarrassed about my attitude during that season. Because what I saw as God not providing, he was preparing. When I look back on that season and I asked Jen, and we talked about this this week, I said, when you think about that season, what are you now grateful for? What were we missing there? What did we not acknowledge during that season when we were grumbling? What were we ungrateful for? And the first thing out of her mouth was the first thing that I thought. She said, you know, that season to me is marked by a real sweet time of friendship. And it was. During that season of our life, God provided us with some really good friends. They're our sweatpants friends, you know? The ones that you don't have to dress up for. The ones that you can like leave stuff on the counter. You don't have to clean up. They can just come over. They were those kinds of friends. In fact, I remember one of the things we used to do all the time. Once a month, we would get in the car, we would drive an hour and a half, and we would go to this place that had all-you-can-eat crab legs, and we would eat an unhealthy amount of crab legs. I ate so many crab legs, I got tired of the juice jippering onto my jeans that I used to eat in wristbands, you know? And like, these are the friends that you can do this with. I would text them at like nine o'clock or 9.30 at night when we were really, you know, going at it hard, 9.30 at night. And I would text them like, hey, fro-yo? Just one word to eight people. Fro-yo with a question mark. And I don't know if the frozen yogurt wave hit Raleigh as hard as it hit Gwinnett County, where I was from outside of Atlanta, but you would go to these places and there would be all of these different flavors of frozen yogurt. And then there would be this bar and you could get all the flavors you want. You put it in your own cup and then you put all the toppings on it that you want. And then at the end, it was beautiful. They didn't have like a price. You just weighed it, right? You just put it on the scale and they charge you per ounce. And what I realized very quickly is there's a cap on how much they'll charge you. So once you hit the cap, man, just go nuts. Just get it all on there. And it's frozen yogurt, so it's good for you. You don't have to feel bad about it. So I would text them at like 9 or 9.30 at night, hey, fro-yo? And within 15 or 20 minutes, eight of us are sitting out in a parking lot, talking, laughing, sharing stories, catching up, sitting in the back of a truck, sitting in chairs. Guys are talking over here, girls are talking over there. And I just think, as I think about that time now, it's like, man, what sweet time of community that was. What freedom we had that we weren't grateful for then. And they're our vacation friends now. God formed some good, what we believe to be lifelong friendships during that season. We waited for Lily. Which to us, our hearts are full with her. She's our three-year-old daughter. We love her. What I saw as a lack of God's provision and opportunity at Greystone at the time was really a provision of Him preparing me and preparing us for what was next. Sometimes I got the tasks that other people didn't want. I was kind of the catch-all on staff, like, oh, we got to go visit so-and-so, we got to go do this wedding, we got to go do this thing, and all of that fell to me. And I can remember at times resenting it because it felt like I was just kind of a catch-all. Now, guess what I am at Grace? All that stuff. God was preparing me. He was giving me an opportunity to find my voice because one day I was going to have to do this every week. He knew that. He was preparing Jen in different ways. I missed all that at the time because all I did every day is wake up thinking about what I wanted and how I was going to bring it about and wake up thinking about praying for it and asking God for it and then being unsatisfied when I didn't have it. And I missed everything that he was providing all along the way. And I think that this is why we have the Feast of Tents. It's God's way of encouraging us, of making us stop and focus on what He has provided, on helping us to remember what He has done for us. I think that you guys are probably not dissimilar to me in that way. I would be willing to bet that just about everybody in this room has already thought about something that they want in the future today. I bet we've already thought about something that we don't have now that we want, something that we're asking God for that we hope he provides. I would be willing to bet, I almost asked you guys to raise your hands just to out everybody. I wonder how many couples in here, how many married couples within the last month, one of you has looked at the other one and said, you think it's time for a new kitchen? There's some hands. You think it's time for a new kitchen? Should we sell? Buy a new house? We'll redo the bathroom. I need heated floors. My toesies are cold. How many of us in the last couple of weeks have hoped for a new job? For a new opportunity? Instead of unhappy in this relationship, I hope that it gets fixed. How many of us have had our thought life and our prayer life dominated by something that someone we love is going through? Whether it's a struggle or an illness or a diagnosis. How much of our energy goes towards things that we want to be different in the future? How much of us are so focused, or how many of us are so focused on something that's happening with our kids and just hoping that we can get on the other side of this with them? What is life going to look like on the other side of this thing? What's life going to look like in a month, a year from now? What would life look like if I could have a better job that gave me purpose? What would life look like if we could get out of this financial situation? And I think all of us, as we came in today, as we arrived at church, all of us have things in our life with which we are unsatisfied, and we are very likely appealing to God to fix those things and change those things and bring those things about. And listen, that's not bad. We're told that we have not because we ask not. We're told that we should bring our cares to God. We are told that we should go to him in prayer. It's not bad to hope for good things, and it's not bad to appeal to God for good things. But when that's all we ever do is want the next thing, then we perpetually forget to focus on the thing that we have. When all we want is future provision, then we forget today's provision. And when we do that, this isn't my idea. I got this from some guy in a TED Talk. When we do that, when we are constantly focused on what's next, then we fundamentally eliminate happiness in our life. We fundamentally eliminate joy because we never give ourselves a chance to enjoy what's happening in our life right now because we're always wanting the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. And I think that that's why God installed the Feast of Tenths in the calendar of His people because the Feast of Tenths invites us into a day where we don't think about what we want and we choose gratitude for what we have. The Feast of Tenths invites us into a day where just for a day, just for a couple of hours, we stop thinking about the things that we want. We stop thinking about the things that we're hoping for. We stop thinking about the things that maybe have been dominating our thought life or our prayer life for months or weeks or years, and we just stop and we say, for today, I'm not going to focus on what I want. I'm going to be grateful for what I have. And I want to invite us into that celebration today. I want to invite you into that celebration today. It's a very human, normal, fine thing to want different things in the future. It's a very human and all right thing to not be happy with the way that something might be right now and to ask that God might change that, to be concerned about very serious things. But if that's all we ever do, then we miss out on all the provision that God has given us right now. So today I want to invite you into that, just for today. Can you commit to not thinking about something that I want tomorrow? I'm not going to think about that. I'm not going to think about what I hope breaks my way. I'm not even for today, God's heard my prayers. He knows what's on my heart. For today, I'm not even going to pray for that thing. I'm just going to think about what he's given me today. And if I were to ask you, what would you tell me? If I were to ask you, what do you have to celebrate today? As a matter of fact, I don't know if you've given me homework authority in your life. I don't know if I have that. But if you have, if I can give you homework, I would make this the assignment. At some point today, have this conversation with somebody. Talk with somebody else who heard this sermon and say, what do you have to celebrate today? What has God provided for you? What has our good, good Father who knows how to give good and perfect gifts, what has He given you today? If I could ask you, what would you tell me? Do you have people in your life who love you? Do you have someone that you know loves you, who's rooting for you? Who wants the best for you? What a blessing that is. Are you in a sweet season of friendships with people? Do you have sweet memories of someone? When you think about who they are, what they said, you could smile right now. Do you have somebody in your life that if you called them, they would actually answer? And if you said, hey, I need, that it wouldn't matter what followed after that because they would do it for you. Do you have those people in your life? Do you have memories of a good family? Do you have a loved one? Do you have moms and dads that you can call up right now? If you don't, do you have fond memories of them? Do you have a job that you enjoy, and if you don't love it, it at least gives you the opportunity to live towards another purpose? It at least pays your bills? Do you have a job that you're grateful for? Do you have a house that you like, even if the kitchen stinks? Do you have a car that gets you where you need to go? Do you have plans today? People that you're going to see? Games that you're going to watch? Relaxing that needs to happen? Do you have those things? And God's provided so much for us in so many ways. And I'm convinced that like the people in the desert, we continually focus so much on what we want that we forget to be grateful for what we have. And this, I think, is the simple wisdom of David in Psalm 118. Many of you guys know this psalm. You might not know that you know it, but Psalm 118, 24, you say, if you grew up in church, you probably sang it. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. I think that's the wisdom. We have today. This is our reality. Right now, today, we have the things we hope for in the future. Some of them will happen. Some of them won't. But right now, we have today. And what are we grateful for today? Today is the day the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it. And as I looked into the passage, what I realized is Psalm 118 has a lot of verses. This is the day the Lord has made all rejoicing and glad in it. That's verse 24. The 23 verses preceding that verse are David listing out all the things that God had done for him. You've handed me victory when I did not think I could have it. You've provided for me people to love. You came through in this way and in this way and in this way. And all of the provisions of God in the past lead him to this conclusion that this is also a day that you have made, and I'll rejoice in you. And then he caps it off. He doesn't stop there with verse 24. It ends in verse 29 when it says, Oh, give thanks to if we'll stop and slow down and be grateful for what we do have, that it will engender in us, rather than grumbling, it will engender in us this gratitude that will compel us to a love and appreciation of God. Not only is today the day that He's made, but let us rejoice and be glad for the love of God endures forever. If today is good and he's the author of it, then he's the author of tomorrow too. And I know that when I get there, I can praise him for the provision that he's made in my life. And so the feast of tents is joyful because it's a day where we stop, we refuse to think about what we want, and we focus on what we have. And as we go out in a minute and we celebrate together, the hootenanny, the party for grace, it's appropriate that we stop and acknowledge all that God has done here at Grace. Because I think a lot about the future of Grace. I think a lot about where God wants to take us and what we might do. We've got some plans coming up that I think people are going to be excited about, but that's all down the road. I know our elders think about it. I know our staff and our partners think about what's the future of grace, where are we going, and what's that going to look like. But on the hootenanny, on this party, we stop and we slow down for a festival that's positioned at the end of the harvest season, and we say, God, we are so grateful for what you've done here. And so for me, I don't just celebrate what God has done in my life, but I want to invite you as church partners and church family to celebrate what God is doing in this place. Because I don't know if you thought about it, but it's pretty remarkable. When I got here two and a half years ago, we were in debt. We didn't have any money. And we owed this church down the street. I was looking at everything that we owed and trying to figure out how can I wiggle out of this. And I looked at this church down the street, World Overcomers, right next door. And we owed them $17,000 because of an agreement that we made about some space. And I emailed them. I didn't have any pride or dignity. I was too young for that. So I emailed them. I said, hey, listen, we owe you $17,000. We cannot pay it. If we try to pay it now, like, we will not exist as a church. Can we please defer this to the end of the year? Or maybe you'll just say, like, don't worry about it. And they said, we love God. We love His church. We believe in the sameness of purpose. And if it will help you, don't pay it. Don't worry about it. It's remarkable. $17,000 gift that allows us to continue to exist as a church. And that's what we needed. If we didn't get that from World Overcomers, we would not have survived. I don't think we needed that gift. Since getting $17,000 given to us so that we could function as an organization, do you know that we have given away since then over $125,000 to other people? The organizations outside of Grace, more than six-fold what we were given. We've had the opportunity to do that. That's God's goodness here. When I got here, I looked at the student ministry and I said, oh gosh, it's really top-heavy. We've got a bunch of upperclassmen who didn't care anything about me or what's happening at Grace. They're going to graduate, and then there's this dearth of people following. There's like nobody there. We've got like a year and a half to figure this out because we have families in elementary school, and when their kids start to age into this, they're going to bolt if we don't have a student ministry set up, and this place is going to implode in a year and a half, and that's like all I thought about and prayed about. These past two weeks, we've had more kids on Sunday night than we've had in years. Over 40 kids back-to-back weeks. It's remarkable what God is doing here, his provision. I asked Kyle, how's student ministry going? Expecting him to say like it's tough, and I was going to try to pick him up, and he was like, it's great. We have kids coming out of the woodwork. I don't know where they're coming from. I love it. This is so much fun. I said, really? He goes, yeah. I've got a bunch of middle school kids. He said, they're actually coming up to him going, is it okay if we invite our friends to this? Is this just for us, or can other people come? He's like, yes, invite friends. It's amazing. When Jen and I visited, we went home, and we said, this is a great church. She goes, I don't know who we're going to be friends with. There's like nobody there our age. They all look like they're kind of our parents' age. What are we going to do about this? And I said, I think this is where the Lord wants us to go. Preschool age kids and families is the fastest growing segment of grace right now. God's providing. We're multi-generational in a really fun way. Erin has more kids on her roster right now than she's ever had, and she's been here for six or seven years. Guys, God's doing amazing things here. He's blessing us in remarkable ways. And I don't want us to be so focused on what's in the future for grace that we don't stop and say, man, God, thank you. Thanks for everything that you've done here. So the hootenanny, that's what we celebrate. Everything that God is doing. And not just the numbers and how that's all going, but each one of those is a story. Each one of those is a family. Each one of those is a marriage solidified as friendships formed, as people walking alongside other friends and fighting for them in their walk with the Lord. So each one of those things matters to God, and he continues to provide for us here. So in a minute, we're going to go celebrate. We're going to go outside. We're going to have a great time, and I want us to do that. It's incredibly appropriate. God created good times and joy. He did. And as we do that, let's all promise each other we're not going to think about what we want next. We're going to be grateful for what we have right now. And let's celebrate God's goodness and provision in our lives together. Let's pray. Father, we are so grateful for you. We love you so very much. We thank you for all the ways that you've provided for us, all the things that you've given us. God, some of us here have some really compelling reasons to be anxious about tomorrow, to be focused on the future. But God, you know those reasons, and you're in those situations. Give us the peace of mind today to slow down and simply be grateful for what you've given us. And let that assure us that you'll take care of us moving forward. Thank you so much for the opportunity to celebrate you and all that you've done today. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. So good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. I've got to tell you, I'm really touched by your attendance this morning. Really and truly. Normally I make a joke on holiday weekends about people coming. And this morning I woke up and I got my email. I had a Duke alert that there's going to be some power outages. Shane, you work for Duke. Fix that. Make sure 9-2-2-1 Kirk Hill is not affected. And I was like, man, it's a holiday weekend, and we have a tropical storm bearing down on us. No one is coming. And look, here you are. This is really, really touching and great, and that was really good worship. If you saw Gibby and I talking as I was setting up, I was laughing at him for messing up in the last song and just crying out Jesus in the middle of a line. Thank you, Kristen. You saw it too. And he said, no, no, I didn't mess up. I was just excited about Jesus. And I don't believe him. But I also do know that he is excited about Jesus. I'm also excited to have the princes here with us this morning. They're here with us for a few weeks. Sarah, you're hosting for us when? Next week? Perfect. And she's going to give us an update and tell us everything. So come back then. Well, I'm so happy to have you guys in town. And we are so happy to be the church that you are part of. We talk a lot about building God's kingdom. And you guys are in South Africa building God's kingdom, and it's a part of our heart that's out there, and so we're glad that you guys are with us this morning. So thanks for joining us. If you don't know them, who cares? It's not a big deal, but we're glad to have them, and you should say hey to them after the service and get to know them a little bit, but they're going to be here with us for the next three weeks. Yes. Perfect. So it's a, it's a big morning and I'm happy to have you here as we continue in our series. And if you're watching online or you're catching up later, thanks so much for doing that. That means a lot to us as you enjoy this weekend, doing whatever it is you're doing. We're in our series in Moses and this series, if I'm just being honest, has been a little bit different for me as a pastor and as someone who has to write sermons every week. You guys make me do this. Typically, when I choose a series, I kind of choose a series, and if you're in the meetings with us with staff, we'll have a series idea, and I'll go, that's a great idea, but then I immediately go, what are the sermons? How do we make this compelling? And the way I think about it is, will that preach? Can I make a sermon out of that? But for this series, it's been a little bit different of an experience, because in this series, I'm telling the story, we are telling the story and going through the story of the life of Moses. And we're telling the story really of the Genesis of the nation of Israel. And so it's really less about will that preach? And it's more about what are the essential elements of the story? I heard somebody say one time, this just comes to mind, the radio sports talk guy, that people should go in the Hall of Fame if you can't tell the story of that sport without their name. Then no matter what they did, they should go into the Hall of Fame. Thank you, Zach, for affirming that. And so this kind of works like that. What are the things, if we're going to walk through the life of Moses together and tell the story of the origin of the Hebrew people together and their exodus from Egypt and their intro into the promised land, what are the elements of that story that we just absolutely cannot pass over? That was Freudian there, the Passover. Look at me. What are the elements that we cannot skip that we must include? And one of those elements is the provision by God in the desert of manna. And a little subtext in that story is the provision of quail. You cannot tell the story of Moses. You cannot tell the story of the birth of the nation of Israel without talking about the provision of manna in the desert by God. You have to tell that part of the story. And so this really isn't about does that preacher, does it not? This is about, we have to tell this part of the story. And then what I'm encumbered with rather than does this preach, is this inspiring? What I'm encumbered with is why does this matter to us now? That's wonderful. It's good to learn about our God. And at a baseline, if all we do is look at the stories and learn about our God and his character and who he is, that's enough. And that's a good exercise and it's time well spent on a Sunday morning. But I think we should press further and say, but what do we learn from it that matters to us now? How does that impact me today? So we're going to look at this story of God's provision, but we're going to be asking the question, how does this impact me today? And we're going to do that by looking at two big questions that really, for me, as I read the story, jump off the page and make me go, why is that the case? And I think if we answer those questions and we can find a way that this really impacts us and should matter to us today and our daily lives as we interact with and hopefully pursue God. So I'm going to point to some scripture in a minute. And actually, this morning is the first time this has happened. I bought this Bible. This is called the pastor's Bible. It's got three tassels that hang out of it, which is an obnoxious amount of tassels. And who would ever need three tassels? But now I have exactly three passages from three different books, and I'm using all three tassels, and I'm so excited. So I've used the first one. That one's out of the way. We're in the book of John. That's where we're going to turn first. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. But before I start jumping around to the passages, I just want to make sure that we know what's happening. Moses is moving the Hebrew people through the desert. They've escaped Pharaoh. Pharaoh's army has been destroyed in the Red Sea with the Sea of Reeds. And now they're wandering through the desert being've escaped Pharaoh Pharaoh's armies been destroyed in the Red Sea with the Sea of Reeds and now they're wandering through the desert being led by God a pillar of cloud by day a pillar of fire by night they're following the pillar they're walking towards God if you look at the way that they're supposed to be arranged this tribe next to this tribe in this direction and yada yada yada they were actually marching through the as one enormous cross, which is pretty cool with Jesus in the center of it as the bronze serpent. So, and we'll get to that story. But there comes up the question of numbers and I think it's relevant this morning. There are different scholars say different things. No one's sure. There's a figure in the Bible where it said there were 600,000 men. And so then you extrapolate that out to women and children. And so some scholars say that there was as little as 300,000 people moving through the desert. Other scholars say there was as much as 2.5 million people walking through the desert. So that's a large delta of difference. But regardless of where you would land on that, and I don't expect anyone to go home and really drill down on the number of Hebrew people in the desert, but if you were to, what you would arrive at is there was a lot. There's a lot. And those are mouths to feed. And some of you know that I like history. I like to study empires. I like to read biographies. Last year, I read a biography on Napoleon Bonaparte, who was, by the way, my least favorite general I've ever studied in my entire life. I can't stand that guy. But he's famous for saying, an army marches on its stomach, meaning the secret to war is supplying your army with what they need. And if you've studied history and you've studied war and you've studied people moving across continents, what you know is they are only as good as their supply chain. They can only fight as hard as they have fresh shoes and fresh socks and fresh food coming to them. And if you disrupt that supply chain, you disrupt the army. By the way, this is what made the Mongols so incredible is they didn't need a supply chain. They just ate everything that they saw, and they were the most fascinating force in the history of history, just for the record. Sorry, I couldn't help myself. But an army marches on its stomach, meaning throughout history. One of the biggest challenges of moving a large group of people transcontinentally is sustaining them. And this is the challenge that Moses was facing. He's got between 500 and 2.5 million people that he's responsible for, and they have to be fed. And they grumble. This is hard to do. It's hard to sustain ourselves in the desert. I would assume that each family left Egypt with some amount of sheep or cattle or something to sustain them. But eventually those resources start to dwindle. And so they grumble that they're not being supplied for, they're not being cared for. And this is a sufficient gripe, right? Moms and dads, you're in the desert, wandering, following a pillar. Moses says we just go that way. In your head, you're thinking, we should be there there by now and you're not. What's going on? You're worried about your kids because you can't feed them every day. You're worried about your mother-in-law because you can't feed her every day and frankly she's cranky when she's hungry. So it'd be really nice if we could take care of her. Some of you are sitting next to your mother-in-laws. Don't laugh at that joke. I just saw somebody turn their head. Sorry. This is a reasonable gripe. We're hungry. We can't feed each other. And so God says, okay, I'm going to provide you with something. In the morning, you're going to wake up and there there's going to be this white, flaky substance on the ground. Gather it up, and that will be all that you need. But only gather what you need for that day, which we're going to come back to that idea, because I think that's interesting. Only gather what you need for that day, and every day I will provide for you. And they called that substance, it was like a doughy bread, but it was flaky. And they called that substance manna, which to my knowledge means, literally, what is it? It's like the terrible mascot for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Izzy. I've never been more disappointed in my life. As a kid growing up in Atlanta, I was so excited that the Olympics were coming to my city. It was such a big deal. And by the way, Andre Agassi and Brooke Shield stayed at my friend's house in their basement because they were a host home for the Olympics, which was really cool. I'll tell you about that sometime. But the mascot, when they revealed it, sorry, I know it's stupid. The mascot was named Izzy, which means what is it? And it's like, the mascot's Manna? This is dumb. What a stupid mascot. But that's what they named the bread because they didn't know what it was. So they called it what is it? And that became the name Manna. That was God's provision. And then at one point or another, after God was providing the Manna, they would go out and they would gather it. And we'll see in a little bit that some of them gathered more than they should. And they incurred the anger of Moses and God. And then at some point or another, they said the reasonable thing, the thing that we would say, God, it's so nice that you're providing this for us. I'd like some steak. Like, I'd like some meat, some protein. I'd settle for fish. I'll go to Long John Silver's if you'll just make it available, like anything, God, besides just this bread, just this daily bread, right? And so they said they wanted some protein. And so God responded and he sent them some quail. But it turned out that that was kind of a bad ask. And we're going to see that part in the narrative. I'm going to pull that out. But for a portion, God provided some quail. And then they decided they didn't want quail anymore. God got his way, and then they were back on manna, and that's what sustained them through the desert. And the import of this gesture and this provision echoes throughout Scripture, which is why we cannot tell the story of Moses without talking about the manna that was provided. The biggest reason is this. The manna was a picture of Jesus. The manna was a picture of Jesus. Many of you know this. And so I'd like to remind you of this and pull your mind back to it. Some of you may not. But the manna was a very intentional picture of Jesus. And this is one of the things that marvels me about our God and his sovereignty. We know that God sees into the future. We know that God knows all things. We know that God is sovereign, that God plans. And I say often, sometimes things happen in our life, we can't see what's down the road, but God can and he knows and he's guiding us down this path. And I think even as we acknowledge that truth, that sometimes in our limited brains and in our limited ways of thinking, we think to ourselves, yeah, God sees six weeks down the road or six months down the road, or maybe six years down the road. But in this one, he's seeing 6,000 years down the road. And we don't think about God thinking like that, but he was because he knew that this manna was an intentional picture that he was painting of his son. It's an illustration of what Jesus is. And just so you know, that idea isn't something that scholars came up with. There wasn't theologians reading the Old Testament and then reading the New Testament and going, goodness, this seems really similar. I think those two things are connected. No, these are the words of Jesus himself. And we find them in John chapter six. Sir, they said, always give us this bread. Then Jesus declared, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. Direct correlation. Jesus is talking to a Hebrew people who are entrenched in their culture and know it well. And so when he says, my father sent you bread from heaven to sustain life because of their natural culture, national culture and institutions, they immediately go back to the time of Moses. We as Americans just got done celebrating the 4th of July. In my house, in my kitchen, we had some friends over and I insisted. I put Lee Greenwood, I'm proud to be an American, on the Alexa as loud as it would go and I made everyone hold their hand over their heart and sing every word that they knew to the song. And it was super fun. And when we think about America, we have some things on the 4th of July that we all celebrate, whatever it means to us. The reality of it is this is the great experiment. This is the great democratic experiment. It's the greatest country to ever exist on the planet. It's the most powerful military to ever exist on the planet. And it's the most wonderful and the most free place to ever exist on the planet. And we ought to be grateful for it no matter what we think about our current state, yes or no. This is a great place to be. And so when we celebrate the 4th of July, we draw upon the history of where we are. In the same way, when Jesus says, you remember God providing in the desert, they draw upon where they had been and where they were. And they immediately understand and go back to God's provision in the desert of manna. It's a direct correlation. And Jesus says, my father gave you bread daily to sustain your life, to give you life. And now he gives you me. I am the bread of life. And the picture is very clear. We are told that when we do not know God, when we are separated from him, that we will surely die. This is the penalty in the Garden of Eden. And so Jesus comes that we might have life and have it to the full. He comes that life might be restored. And so he says, my father sent me to restore our life. Right? He sent me to restore your life and to give you life. He is acquainting himself with the manna and he is saying, I am the bread of life. This is all throughout scripture. So we know that the manna is a picture of Christ. And it's well and good and appropriate that at the end of this sermon today, towards the end of the service, we're going to take communion together. And when we take communion together, we're going to break the bread. And Jesus at the Passover, before he's arrested, takes the bread and he breaks it and he says, this is my body that's broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me. That is not just a quaint illustration of what's about to happen to him. It is an intentional connection to what the Hebrew person understands as the sustenance of God in the desert providing life for them. It is a picture of God's provision. So the first thing we see and know about the manna that matters to us very much is that it's a picture of Jesus and God's provision and how he cares for us. We must lock that in. With that being true, there are two questions for me that jump out of the narrative that I think if we can examine them and maybe wrestle them to the ground, at least that's what I tried to do this week as I prepared, that it can illustrate and illuminate for us how this story matters to us today. The first to me is the question of stockpiling. God put a very specific provision in there. You are not allowed to stockpile the goods. You cannot keep more than one day's provision. As a matter of fact, this is what it says in Exodus 16, 19. So I, so I can orient us towards this thought. In Exodus chapter 16, verse 19, after God has said only take enough for the day, then Moses said to them, no one is to keep any of it until morning. However, some of them paid no attention to Moses. They kept part of me or not, but my largest pet peeve in life is any form of inefficiency. My second largest pet peeve in life, just for the record, is when you impose your noise on me. I don't want to hear your phone in a public place. But I loathe any form of inefficiency. And so this directive to only gather what you need for today goes against what I believe wholeheartedly about efficiency. Doesn't it make more sense? Carter, I know you agree with me on thinking. I know you agree with us. Doesn't it make more sense on Monday for you and the able-bodied people in your family to go gather as much as you can for the rest of the week so you don't have to do it every day and you know that it's there and you have the sense of security that it's there. And it's not like there wasn't enough. We're not talking about being selfish because we're told there in scripture that whatever was left over fades away, that when the sun comes out, it melts it away. So there's more than enough every day, which means if your family wants to go out and get enough on Monday to last until Wednesday, or maybe even Friday, you can do that. And isn't this how we handle our daily sustenance anyways? When you go grocery shopping, do you shop for one day like a lunatic? Or do you shop for the whole week? You shop for the whole week. Of course you do. And if you're really crazy, you shop for the month at Costco, which we went to Costco the other night and it was closed because the power was out. And I've never been so disappointed in my life because we were at Costco without kids and I was so excited to go. We ended up wandering around the mall aimlessly. But this makes sense to us. This is how we think. We don't think about daily, I'm just going to go to Sprouts and get what I need for one day. That's what crazy people do. You shop for the week so you don't have to do it anymore. So it makes the most sense to stockpile it for the week, right? But God said don't do that. And I don't understand why. Because besides the practicality of it, it would also give you the sense of, okay, food has been sparse. It's been difficult to feed my children as a father, as a wife, as a patriarch of the family. I'd like to know my family's provided for it. It makes me feel good to know that we have five days rations. And there's even a provision, if you read the text, of an amount that you can gather for each eating person in your home. So there's a provision for that that God lays out. And when I read this story, I kind of wonder, like, what's the big deal? Why can't you stockpile manna? And the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it's because of this. Because you cannot stockpile Jesus. You cannot store up enough Jesus. If manna is a picture of who Jesus is, and it was always to be intended not just to feed this small group of people relatively for 40 years, but to echo throughout the centuries as to God's provision and what it is, then it's important to know and understand that you cannot stockpile Christ. You cannot gather enough of him on a Monday to sustain you on a Wednesday. You can't go to Christmas and Easter services only and expect that amount of Jesus to sustain you throughout the year. Which right now I'm talking to a group of people who have come to church on a holiday weekend with a tropical storm looming. So you get this. So if you're listening online, this is for you, pal. But in Christianity, I think we do this a little bit. We come to church on Sunday. I get my fill of Jesus. My kids get their fill of Jesus, and we're good. And then I'm going to go throughout the rest of my week and do whatever it is I need to do. And the next Sunday I'll get my fill of Jesus. But that's not how Jesus works. That's not how manna worked. And if you think about it practically, that's not how diets work. If you say you're going on a diet and on Monday you manage against all odds to eat salads with some sort of vinaigrette dressing that's not even good. And then the rest of the week you eat Reuben's and fried foods, which I'm not speaking from experience there, I'm just saying hypothetically. That's not a diet. You can't eat healthy enough on Monday to be healthy on Friday if you don't do it again. And I think the picture that God is painting here with the daily provision and sustenance of Christ is we cannot get enough Jesus on Monday to make us healthy on Wednesday. We should still wake up craving him. This is why at Grace we say one of our five traits is we are people of devotion. And I say often, and I have not said it often enough lately, but this is why I say it, that the single greatest habit that anyone can develop in their life, and I'm completely convinced of this, is to wake up every day and spend time in God's presence through his word and through prayer. There is not a single greater habit that anyone can develop than to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. It's the most important thing. Every day when I get into my office, most days I fail sometimes, but most days the very first thing I do when I get into my office is I get in my office and I shut the door and I read my Bible and I spend time praying over that day. I try to do that every day. We have to do that. We need to get, we need to think of it. Think of a daily devotion in this context of this story as gathering our Jesus every day. Every day we spend time in prayer. Every day we spend time in God's word. Every day we spend time worshiping. And that looks different at different seasons. Sometimes that means you go on a hike, you just walk, or you go on a run and you take your earbuds out and you don't listen to any noise and you just talk to God and you allow God to talk to you and you experience him that day. I'm not saying it has to be formulated every day, but every day we need to be in the habit like the Israelites. This is what the picture is for. It's not to sustain them. It's to remind us for generations of what we should do. We should wake up and gather Jesus. And it's not lost on me that this happened in the morning. Because when the sun gets hot, it melted away. I've always told you, you have your quiet time and your devotional time whenever it works for you. Morning, afternoon, evening, just do it. But that's a little bit insincere because I can't back this up with paperwork, but I kind of think you should do it in the morning anyways. I don't care if you're a night person. Just saying. We should wake up every day and gather Jesus. And we should understand we can't gather enough Jesus on Monday to make that enough on Wednesday. It has to be a daily practice. And so what God's provision reminds us of and what his prohibition reminds us of is we cannot gather enough Jesus to stockpile him for the week. As believers, we must pursue him every day. We must wake up daily and gather Jesus. It's vitally important. The other question that comes up to me in this story, this one's a little bit trickier. It's the provision of the quail. At one point, though God is providing daily, the Hebrew people say, hey, we'd like some variety. Can we get a little bit of a buffet situation going on? Maybe I'd like some Chinese. Like they just want something else besides this manna, this nutrition brick that they get every day. And so God gives into them and he says, okay. And in Exodus, we're told that God provided quail for a little while, but in numbers, we actually get an insight into this portion of the story that provides a lot more color and it becomes very interesting. And it makes me ask some questions. Numbers chapter 11 verses 18 through 20. This is after they've requested the quail. Tell the people, consecrate yourselves in preparation for tomorrow when you will eat meat. The Lord heard when you wailed. If only we had meat to eat, we were better off in Egypt. Now the Lord will give you meat and you will eat it. You will not eat it. This is the funny part. This is crazy. You will not eat it for just one day or two days or five, 10 or 20 days, but for a whole month until it comes out of your nostrils and you loathe it. Gracious God, because you have rejected the Lord who is among you and have willed before him, saying, Why did we ever leave Egypt? I got to be honest. When you read that, it really reads like a vindictive elementary school kid, right? Who's just mad. You want quail? I'll give you quail until it comes out of your stinking nose, you son of a gun. You whiny little cuss. It's just funny, man. And so when I read it, I'm like, what gives, God? Why are you doing that? It seems like a pretty reasonable request. Maybe nutrition bricks get old. And they'd like to eat some meat. That seems fine to me. But it angered God. And he said, I'll give it to you until you're so sick of it that it comes out of your nose and you loathe it. Why did he do this? Well, the answer is right there in the text. If you have implicit rejection of his provision already. It was an implicit rejection of his miraculous provision. They had become used to it. They had grown to expect it. When Jesus first arrived in their life, when they first experienced God's provision, it was a miracle and they were blown away by it. Look at this. Look at all that we have every day. Oh my gosh, look, I don't have to struggle for my family anymore. I don't have to worry about my kids anymore. It just shows up every day. And I don't even have to worry about gathering enough for tomorrow because I know that it's going to be there tomorrow because God's blessings renew daily. I know that this is going to be great. Look at this, look at this, look at this. And then eventually they get tired of it and they're like, yeah, we need some more of God. And they fall into the terrible habit that we do. We have a terrible habit of asking for Jesus and. Don't we? We have a terrible habit of making Jesus not enough. God has miraculously provided for our salvation and for our peace. And his mercies are new every morning. He gives us our daily bread that we can eat of and hunger no more. He makes us a path to righteousness for his name's sake. He makes it so that this life can be viewed as a wisp or a vapor. And that the tragedies that we endure are called by Paul momentary difficulties. God renders those things true by giving us his son, the bread of life. He gives us a hope for a future where all the wrong things will be made right and all the sad things will be untrue. He's provided us everything that we need. He gives us his peace in all situations so that his servant Paul wrote, I have learned what it is to live in little and I have learned what it is to live in much. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. He has given us peace in every situation. He has defeated sin and shame and death so that we do not need to fear those things anymore. He has given us all that we need, and yet we get Jesus. And we say, but can I also have some quail? Can I have you, Jesus, and can I also be comfortable? Can I have you, Jesus, and also go on nice vacations? Can I have you, Jesus, and also drive a car that I'm proud of that signals success to the people who see me? Can I have you, Jesus, and also can you make sure that no one in my family ever gets sick? Can I have you, Jesus, and also can you make sure that I never get sick? Can I have you, Jesus, and can you make sure that my marriage is perfect and that it never struggles and that I never have any problems? Can I have you, Jesus, and can I also have a spouse? Can I have you, Jesus, and can I also have a child? Can I have you, Jesus, and also these other things that I want? Don't we have a terrible habit of craving Jesus and? There have been times in my life when I've been worried about how things were going to go. Where I've been worried that I wasn't going to be the servant that this church needed. And I've thought, maybe I'll lose my job. Maybe I'll need to quit. Maybe they need someone else. Maybe I'm not serving it well. There's been times over the years, for good reasons or bad, that I feared that I would lose everything. And do you know what brings me back to peace in those thoughts? To think, well, I could lose my job. I could lose my house. I'll still have my family. I'll still see my kids every day. Nothing can take their love away from me. Nothing can take my family away from me. My wife and my children. I'll have that. And at the bedrock, no matter what happens, I'll have them. And I'll have their love. And I have some friendships in my life that I know that no matter what happens, that can't be taken from me. And I'm sure that some of you have been there too. If you haven't been there yet, it's just because you're young. You will. But the provision of the quail and the anger of God, I think, reminds us that this is how we ought to think about the provision of Christ. No matter what happens in my life, I have Jesus. No matter what sickness befalls me, what tragedy befalls me, no matter what situations happen in life, no matter what I have or I don't have, whether I live in affluence or I live in poverty, no matter what happens at the end of the day, I have Jesus, and he is enough. And I don't think in our Christian lives we readily enough default to that foundation of love and provision. This is why God gets angry at the request for quail, because it's an implicit rejection and entitlement to what he's already provided us. And so here's what I want to press on us this morning. That when we see this in the Bible, when we encounter manna through Bible lessons or podcasts or sermons or whatever it is we listen to, when we encounter this idea, what I would love to press upon you is this, that the manna in the desert and the provision of the quail should remind us of this. Let's daily gather Jesus and let him be enough. Like the Hebrew people, let's daily go out and gather Jesus in the morning. I need him today. I'm going to spend time with him today. I'm going to appreciate God's provision today. I'm going to reflect on what that means for me today, both today and in eternity. And then let's let that be enough. Come what may, no matter what else happens, I've learned to be at peace with plenty, and I've learned to be at peace with little, but I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Let's let God's provision each day of Jesus be enough. Let me pray for you, and then we're going to take communion and celebrate that provision. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for how you've provided for us. Thank you for your son Jesus. For who he is and for what he means and how he's our daily bread. Thank you that we can eat of him and not be hungry again. God, I pray that we would be people who are people of devotion who daily pursue you and who daily pursue him. Let us diligently, as your children in the desert did, go out and gather him every morning and be nourished by his love and by his peace and by his forgiveness and by his mercy and by his grace and by his humility. Let us be people who pursue him. And God, I pray that he would be enough. There's so many other things that we want, God, and sometimes they're good and sometimes they're not, but they're nothing compared to him. We consider all things rubbish compared to the surpassing goodness of knowing Jesus. I pray that that would be true of us as we gather him and as we pursue you. I pray that you would also help us to remember that he is enough, that your miraculous provision is enough. Please let us never grow entitled to what that is, but to always marvel at your goodness and at the miracle of your provision. In Jesus' name, in the name of the daily bread, we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. So good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. I've got to tell you, I'm really touched by your attendance this morning. Really and truly. Normally I make a joke on holiday weekends about people coming. And this morning I woke up and I got my email. I had a Duke alert that there's going to be some power outages. Shane, you work for Duke. Fix that. Make sure 9-2-2-1 Kirk Hill is not affected. And I was like, man, it's a holiday weekend, and we have a tropical storm bearing down on us. No one is coming. And look, here you are. This is really, really touching and great, and that was really good worship. If you saw Gibby and I talking as I was setting up, I was laughing at him for messing up in the last song and just crying out Jesus in the middle of a line. Thank you, Kristen. You saw it too. And he said, no, no, I didn't mess up. I was just excited about Jesus. And I don't believe him. But I also do know that he is excited about Jesus. I'm also excited to have the princes here with us this morning. They're here with us for a few weeks. Sarah, you're hosting for us when? Next week? Perfect. And she's going to give us an update and tell us everything. So come back then. Well, I'm so happy to have you guys in town. And we are so happy to be the church that you are part of. We talk a lot about building God's kingdom. And you guys are in South Africa building God's kingdom, and it's a part of our heart that's out there, and so we're glad that you guys are with us this morning. So thanks for joining us. If you don't know them, who cares? It's not a big deal, but we're glad to have them, and you should say hey to them after the service and get to know them a little bit, but they're going to be here with us for the next three weeks. Yes. Perfect. So it's a, it's a big morning and I'm happy to have you here as we continue in our series. And if you're watching online or you're catching up later, thanks so much for doing that. That means a lot to us as you enjoy this weekend, doing whatever it is you're doing. We're in our series in Moses and this series, if I'm just being honest, has been a little bit different for me as a pastor and as someone who has to write sermons every week. You guys make me do this. Typically, when I choose a series, I kind of choose a series, and if you're in the meetings with us with staff, we'll have a series idea, and I'll go, that's a great idea, but then I immediately go, what are the sermons? How do we make this compelling? And the way I think about it is, will that preach? Can I make a sermon out of that? But for this series, it's been a little bit different of an experience, because in this series, I'm telling the story, we are telling the story and going through the story of the life of Moses. And we're telling the story really of the Genesis of the nation of Israel. And so it's really less about will that preach? And it's more about what are the essential elements of the story? I heard somebody say one time, this just comes to mind, the radio sports talk guy, that people should go in the Hall of Fame if you can't tell the story of that sport without their name. Then no matter what they did, they should go into the Hall of Fame. Thank you, Zach, for affirming that. And so this kind of works like that. What are the things, if we're going to walk through the life of Moses together and tell the story of the origin of the Hebrew people together and their exodus from Egypt and their intro into the promised land, what are the elements of that story that we just absolutely cannot pass over? That was Freudian there, the Passover. Look at me. What are the elements that we cannot skip that we must include? And one of those elements is the provision by God in the desert of manna. And a little subtext in that story is the provision of quail. You cannot tell the story of Moses. You cannot tell the story of the birth of the nation of Israel without talking about the provision of manna in the desert by God. You have to tell that part of the story. And so this really isn't about does that preacher, does it not? This is about, we have to tell this part of the story. And then what I'm encumbered with rather than does this preach, is this inspiring? What I'm encumbered with is why does this matter to us now? That's wonderful. It's good to learn about our God. And at a baseline, if all we do is look at the stories and learn about our God and his character and who he is, that's enough. And that's a good exercise and it's time well spent on a Sunday morning. But I think we should press further and say, but what do we learn from it that matters to us now? How does that impact me today? So we're going to look at this story of God's provision, but we're going to be asking the question, how does this impact me today? And we're going to do that by looking at two big questions that really, for me, as I read the story, jump off the page and make me go, why is that the case? And I think if we answer those questions and we can find a way that this really impacts us and should matter to us today and our daily lives as we interact with and hopefully pursue God. So I'm going to point to some scripture in a minute. And actually, this morning is the first time this has happened. I bought this Bible. This is called the pastor's Bible. It's got three tassels that hang out of it, which is an obnoxious amount of tassels. And who would ever need three tassels? But now I have exactly three passages from three different books, and I'm using all three tassels, and I'm so excited. So I've used the first one. That one's out of the way. We're in the book of John. That's where we're going to turn first. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. But before I start jumping around to the passages, I just want to make sure that we know what's happening. Moses is moving the Hebrew people through the desert. They've escaped Pharaoh. Pharaoh's army has been destroyed in the Red Sea with the Sea of Reeds. And now they're wandering through the desert being've escaped Pharaoh Pharaoh's armies been destroyed in the Red Sea with the Sea of Reeds and now they're wandering through the desert being led by God a pillar of cloud by day a pillar of fire by night they're following the pillar they're walking towards God if you look at the way that they're supposed to be arranged this tribe next to this tribe in this direction and yada yada yada they were actually marching through the as one enormous cross, which is pretty cool with Jesus in the center of it as the bronze serpent. So, and we'll get to that story. But there comes up the question of numbers and I think it's relevant this morning. There are different scholars say different things. No one's sure. There's a figure in the Bible where it said there were 600,000 men. And so then you extrapolate that out to women and children. And so some scholars say that there was as little as 300,000 people moving through the desert. Other scholars say there was as much as 2.5 million people walking through the desert. So that's a large delta of difference. But regardless of where you would land on that, and I don't expect anyone to go home and really drill down on the number of Hebrew people in the desert, but if you were to, what you would arrive at is there was a lot. There's a lot. And those are mouths to feed. And some of you know that I like history. I like to study empires. I like to read biographies. Last year, I read a biography on Napoleon Bonaparte, who was, by the way, my least favorite general I've ever studied in my entire life. I can't stand that guy. But he's famous for saying, an army marches on its stomach, meaning the secret to war is supplying your army with what they need. And if you've studied history and you've studied war and you've studied people moving across continents, what you know is they are only as good as their supply chain. They can only fight as hard as they have fresh shoes and fresh socks and fresh food coming to them. And if you disrupt that supply chain, you disrupt the army. By the way, this is what made the Mongols so incredible is they didn't need a supply chain. They just ate everything that they saw, and they were the most fascinating force in the history of history, just for the record. Sorry, I couldn't help myself. But an army marches on its stomach, meaning throughout history. One of the biggest challenges of moving a large group of people transcontinentally is sustaining them. And this is the challenge that Moses was facing. He's got between 500 and 2.5 million people that he's responsible for, and they have to be fed. And they grumble. This is hard to do. It's hard to sustain ourselves in the desert. I would assume that each family left Egypt with some amount of sheep or cattle or something to sustain them. But eventually those resources start to dwindle. And so they grumble that they're not being supplied for, they're not being cared for. And this is a sufficient gripe, right? Moms and dads, you're in the desert, wandering, following a pillar. Moses says we just go that way. In your head, you're thinking, we should be there there by now and you're not. What's going on? You're worried about your kids because you can't feed them every day. You're worried about your mother-in-law because you can't feed her every day and frankly she's cranky when she's hungry. So it'd be really nice if we could take care of her. Some of you are sitting next to your mother-in-laws. Don't laugh at that joke. I just saw somebody turn their head. Sorry. This is a reasonable gripe. We're hungry. We can't feed each other. And so God says, okay, I'm going to provide you with something. In the morning, you're going to wake up and there there's going to be this white, flaky substance on the ground. Gather it up, and that will be all that you need. But only gather what you need for that day, which we're going to come back to that idea, because I think that's interesting. Only gather what you need for that day, and every day I will provide for you. And they called that substance, it was like a doughy bread, but it was flaky. And they called that substance manna, which to my knowledge means, literally, what is it? It's like the terrible mascot for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Izzy. I've never been more disappointed in my life. As a kid growing up in Atlanta, I was so excited that the Olympics were coming to my city. It was such a big deal. And by the way, Andre Agassi and Brooke Shield stayed at my friend's house in their basement because they were a host home for the Olympics, which was really cool. I'll tell you about that sometime. But the mascot, when they revealed it, sorry, I know it's stupid. The mascot was named Izzy, which means what is it? And it's like, the mascot's Manna? This is dumb. What a stupid mascot. But that's what they named the bread because they didn't know what it was. So they called it what is it? And that became the name Manna. That was God's provision. And then at one point or another, after God was providing the Manna, they would go out and they would gather it. And we'll see in a little bit that some of them gathered more than they should. And they incurred the anger of Moses and God. And then at some point or another, they said the reasonable thing, the thing that we would say, God, it's so nice that you're providing this for us. I'd like some steak. Like, I'd like some meat, some protein. I'd settle for fish. I'll go to Long John Silver's if you'll just make it available, like anything, God, besides just this bread, just this daily bread, right? And so they said they wanted some protein. And so God responded and he sent them some quail. But it turned out that that was kind of a bad ask. And we're going to see that part in the narrative. I'm going to pull that out. But for a portion, God provided some quail. And then they decided they didn't want quail anymore. God got his way, and then they were back on manna, and that's what sustained them through the desert. And the import of this gesture and this provision echoes throughout Scripture, which is why we cannot tell the story of Moses without talking about the manna that was provided. The biggest reason is this. The manna was a picture of Jesus. The manna was a picture of Jesus. Many of you know this. And so I'd like to remind you of this and pull your mind back to it. Some of you may not. But the manna was a very intentional picture of Jesus. And this is one of the things that marvels me about our God and his sovereignty. We know that God sees into the future. We know that God knows all things. We know that God is sovereign, that God plans. And I say often, sometimes things happen in our life, we can't see what's down the road, but God can and he knows and he's guiding us down this path. And I think even as we acknowledge that truth, that sometimes in our limited brains and in our limited ways of thinking, we think to ourselves, yeah, God sees six weeks down the road or six months down the road, or maybe six years down the road. But in this one, he's seeing 6,000 years down the road. And we don't think about God thinking like that, but he was because he knew that this manna was an intentional picture that he was painting of his son. It's an illustration of what Jesus is. And just so you know, that idea isn't something that scholars came up with. There wasn't theologians reading the Old Testament and then reading the New Testament and going, goodness, this seems really similar. I think those two things are connected. No, these are the words of Jesus himself. And we find them in John chapter six. Sir, they said, always give us this bread. Then Jesus declared, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. Direct correlation. Jesus is talking to a Hebrew people who are entrenched in their culture and know it well. And so when he says, my father sent you bread from heaven to sustain life because of their natural culture, national culture and institutions, they immediately go back to the time of Moses. We as Americans just got done celebrating the 4th of July. In my house, in my kitchen, we had some friends over and I insisted. I put Lee Greenwood, I'm proud to be an American, on the Alexa as loud as it would go and I made everyone hold their hand over their heart and sing every word that they knew to the song. And it was super fun. And when we think about America, we have some things on the 4th of July that we all celebrate, whatever it means to us. The reality of it is this is the great experiment. This is the great democratic experiment. It's the greatest country to ever exist on the planet. It's the most powerful military to ever exist on the planet. And it's the most wonderful and the most free place to ever exist on the planet. And we ought to be grateful for it no matter what we think about our current state, yes or no. This is a great place to be. And so when we celebrate the 4th of July, we draw upon the history of where we are. In the same way, when Jesus says, you remember God providing in the desert, they draw upon where they had been and where they were. And they immediately understand and go back to God's provision in the desert of manna. It's a direct correlation. And Jesus says, my father gave you bread daily to sustain your life, to give you life. And now he gives you me. I am the bread of life. And the picture is very clear. We are told that when we do not know God, when we are separated from him, that we will surely die. This is the penalty in the Garden of Eden. And so Jesus comes that we might have life and have it to the full. He comes that life might be restored. And so he says, my father sent me to restore our life. Right? He sent me to restore your life and to give you life. He is acquainting himself with the manna and he is saying, I am the bread of life. This is all throughout scripture. So we know that the manna is a picture of Christ. And it's well and good and appropriate that at the end of this sermon today, towards the end of the service, we're going to take communion together. And when we take communion together, we're going to break the bread. And Jesus at the Passover, before he's arrested, takes the bread and he breaks it and he says, this is my body that's broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me. That is not just a quaint illustration of what's about to happen to him. It is an intentional connection to what the Hebrew person understands as the sustenance of God in the desert providing life for them. It is a picture of God's provision. So the first thing we see and know about the manna that matters to us very much is that it's a picture of Jesus and God's provision and how he cares for us. We must lock that in. With that being true, there are two questions for me that jump out of the narrative that I think if we can examine them and maybe wrestle them to the ground, at least that's what I tried to do this week as I prepared, that it can illustrate and illuminate for us how this story matters to us today. The first to me is the question of stockpiling. God put a very specific provision in there. You are not allowed to stockpile the goods. You cannot keep more than one day's provision. As a matter of fact, this is what it says in Exodus 16, 19. So I, so I can orient us towards this thought. In Exodus chapter 16, verse 19, after God has said only take enough for the day, then Moses said to them, no one is to keep any of it until morning. However, some of them paid no attention to Moses. They kept part of me or not, but my largest pet peeve in life is any form of inefficiency. My second largest pet peeve in life, just for the record, is when you impose your noise on me. I don't want to hear your phone in a public place. But I loathe any form of inefficiency. And so this directive to only gather what you need for today goes against what I believe wholeheartedly about efficiency. Doesn't it make more sense? Carter, I know you agree with me on thinking. I know you agree with us. Doesn't it make more sense on Monday for you and the able-bodied people in your family to go gather as much as you can for the rest of the week so you don't have to do it every day and you know that it's there and you have the sense of security that it's there. And it's not like there wasn't enough. We're not talking about being selfish because we're told there in scripture that whatever was left over fades away, that when the sun comes out, it melts it away. So there's more than enough every day, which means if your family wants to go out and get enough on Monday to last until Wednesday, or maybe even Friday, you can do that. And isn't this how we handle our daily sustenance anyways? When you go grocery shopping, do you shop for one day like a lunatic? Or do you shop for the whole week? You shop for the whole week. Of course you do. And if you're really crazy, you shop for the month at Costco, which we went to Costco the other night and it was closed because the power was out. And I've never been so disappointed in my life because we were at Costco without kids and I was so excited to go. We ended up wandering around the mall aimlessly. But this makes sense to us. This is how we think. We don't think about daily, I'm just going to go to Sprouts and get what I need for one day. That's what crazy people do. You shop for the week so you don't have to do it anymore. So it makes the most sense to stockpile it for the week, right? But God said don't do that. And I don't understand why. Because besides the practicality of it, it would also give you the sense of, okay, food has been sparse. It's been difficult to feed my children as a father, as a wife, as a patriarch of the family. I'd like to know my family's provided for it. It makes me feel good to know that we have five days rations. And there's even a provision, if you read the text, of an amount that you can gather for each eating person in your home. So there's a provision for that that God lays out. And when I read this story, I kind of wonder, like, what's the big deal? Why can't you stockpile manna? And the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it's because of this. Because you cannot stockpile Jesus. You cannot store up enough Jesus. If manna is a picture of who Jesus is, and it was always to be intended not just to feed this small group of people relatively for 40 years, but to echo throughout the centuries as to God's provision and what it is, then it's important to know and understand that you cannot stockpile Christ. You cannot gather enough of him on a Monday to sustain you on a Wednesday. You can't go to Christmas and Easter services only and expect that amount of Jesus to sustain you throughout the year. Which right now I'm talking to a group of people who have come to church on a holiday weekend with a tropical storm looming. So you get this. So if you're listening online, this is for you, pal. But in Christianity, I think we do this a little bit. We come to church on Sunday. I get my fill of Jesus. My kids get their fill of Jesus, and we're good. And then I'm going to go throughout the rest of my week and do whatever it is I need to do. And the next Sunday I'll get my fill of Jesus. But that's not how Jesus works. That's not how manna worked. And if you think about it practically, that's not how diets work. If you say you're going on a diet and on Monday you manage against all odds to eat salads with some sort of vinaigrette dressing that's not even good. And then the rest of the week you eat Reuben's and fried foods, which I'm not speaking from experience there, I'm just saying hypothetically. That's not a diet. You can't eat healthy enough on Monday to be healthy on Friday if you don't do it again. And I think the picture that God is painting here with the daily provision and sustenance of Christ is we cannot get enough Jesus on Monday to make us healthy on Wednesday. We should still wake up craving him. This is why at Grace we say one of our five traits is we are people of devotion. And I say often, and I have not said it often enough lately, but this is why I say it, that the single greatest habit that anyone can develop in their life, and I'm completely convinced of this, is to wake up every day and spend time in God's presence through his word and through prayer. There is not a single greater habit that anyone can develop than to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. It's the most important thing. Every day when I get into my office, most days I fail sometimes, but most days the very first thing I do when I get into my office is I get in my office and I shut the door and I read my Bible and I spend time praying over that day. I try to do that every day. We have to do that. We need to get, we need to think of it. Think of a daily devotion in this context of this story as gathering our Jesus every day. Every day we spend time in prayer. Every day we spend time in God's word. Every day we spend time worshiping. And that looks different at different seasons. Sometimes that means you go on a hike, you just walk, or you go on a run and you take your earbuds out and you don't listen to any noise and you just talk to God and you allow God to talk to you and you experience him that day. I'm not saying it has to be formulated every day, but every day we need to be in the habit like the Israelites. This is what the picture is for. It's not to sustain them. It's to remind us for generations of what we should do. We should wake up and gather Jesus. And it's not lost on me that this happened in the morning. Because when the sun gets hot, it melted away. I've always told you, you have your quiet time and your devotional time whenever it works for you. Morning, afternoon, evening, just do it. But that's a little bit insincere because I can't back this up with paperwork, but I kind of think you should do it in the morning anyways. I don't care if you're a night person. Just saying. We should wake up every day and gather Jesus. And we should understand we can't gather enough Jesus on Monday to make that enough on Wednesday. It has to be a daily practice. And so what God's provision reminds us of and what his prohibition reminds us of is we cannot gather enough Jesus to stockpile him for the week. As believers, we must pursue him every day. We must wake up daily and gather Jesus. It's vitally important. The other question that comes up to me in this story, this one's a little bit trickier. It's the provision of the quail. At one point, though God is providing daily, the Hebrew people say, hey, we'd like some variety. Can we get a little bit of a buffet situation going on? Maybe I'd like some Chinese. Like they just want something else besides this manna, this nutrition brick that they get every day. And so God gives into them and he says, okay. And in Exodus, we're told that God provided quail for a little while, but in numbers, we actually get an insight into this portion of the story that provides a lot more color and it becomes very interesting. And it makes me ask some questions. Numbers chapter 11 verses 18 through 20. This is after they've requested the quail. Tell the people, consecrate yourselves in preparation for tomorrow when you will eat meat. The Lord heard when you wailed. If only we had meat to eat, we were better off in Egypt. Now the Lord will give you meat and you will eat it. You will not eat it. This is the funny part. This is crazy. You will not eat it for just one day or two days or five, 10 or 20 days, but for a whole month until it comes out of your nostrils and you loathe it. Gracious God, because you have rejected the Lord who is among you and have willed before him, saying, Why did we ever leave Egypt? I got to be honest. When you read that, it really reads like a vindictive elementary school kid, right? Who's just mad. You want quail? I'll give you quail until it comes out of your stinking nose, you son of a gun. You whiny little cuss. It's just funny, man. And so when I read it, I'm like, what gives, God? Why are you doing that? It seems like a pretty reasonable request. Maybe nutrition bricks get old. And they'd like to eat some meat. That seems fine to me. But it angered God. And he said, I'll give it to you until you're so sick of it that it comes out of your nose and you loathe it. Why did he do this? Well, the answer is right there in the text. If you have implicit rejection of his provision already. It was an implicit rejection of his miraculous provision. They had become used to it. They had grown to expect it. When Jesus first arrived in their life, when they first experienced God's provision, it was a miracle and they were blown away by it. Look at this. Look at all that we have every day. Oh my gosh, look, I don't have to struggle for my family anymore. I don't have to worry about my kids anymore. It just shows up every day. And I don't even have to worry about gathering enough for tomorrow because I know that it's going to be there tomorrow because God's blessings renew daily. I know that this is going to be great. Look at this, look at this, look at this. And then eventually they get tired of it and they're like, yeah, we need some more of God. And they fall into the terrible habit that we do. We have a terrible habit of asking for Jesus and. Don't we? We have a terrible habit of making Jesus not enough. God has miraculously provided for our salvation and for our peace. And his mercies are new every morning. He gives us our daily bread that we can eat of and hunger no more. He makes us a path to righteousness for his name's sake. He makes it so that this life can be viewed as a wisp or a vapor. And that the tragedies that we endure are called by Paul momentary difficulties. God renders those things true by giving us his son, the bread of life. He gives us a hope for a future where all the wrong things will be made right and all the sad things will be untrue. He's provided us everything that we need. He gives us his peace in all situations so that his servant Paul wrote, I have learned what it is to live in little and I have learned what it is to live in much. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. He has given us peace in every situation. He has defeated sin and shame and death so that we do not need to fear those things anymore. He has given us all that we need, and yet we get Jesus. And we say, but can I also have some quail? Can I have you, Jesus, and can I also be comfortable? Can I have you, Jesus, and also go on nice vacations? Can I have you, Jesus, and also drive a car that I'm proud of that signals success to the people who see me? Can I have you, Jesus, and also can you make sure that no one in my family ever gets sick? Can I have you, Jesus, and also can you make sure that I never get sick? Can I have you, Jesus, and can you make sure that my marriage is perfect and that it never struggles and that I never have any problems? Can I have you, Jesus, and can I also have a spouse? Can I have you, Jesus, and can I also have a child? Can I have you, Jesus, and also these other things that I want? Don't we have a terrible habit of craving Jesus and? There have been times in my life when I've been worried about how things were going to go. Where I've been worried that I wasn't going to be the servant that this church needed. And I've thought, maybe I'll lose my job. Maybe I'll need to quit. Maybe they need someone else. Maybe I'm not serving it well. There's been times over the years, for good reasons or bad, that I feared that I would lose everything. And do you know what brings me back to peace in those thoughts? To think, well, I could lose my job. I could lose my house. I'll still have my family. I'll still see my kids every day. Nothing can take their love away from me. Nothing can take my family away from me. My wife and my children. I'll have that. And at the bedrock, no matter what happens, I'll have them. And I'll have their love. And I have some friendships in my life that I know that no matter what happens, that can't be taken from me. And I'm sure that some of you have been there too. If you haven't been there yet, it's just because you're young. You will. But the provision of the quail and the anger of God, I think, reminds us that this is how we ought to think about the provision of Christ. No matter what happens in my life, I have Jesus. No matter what sickness befalls me, what tragedy befalls me, no matter what situations happen in life, no matter what I have or I don't have, whether I live in affluence or I live in poverty, no matter what happens at the end of the day, I have Jesus, and he is enough. And I don't think in our Christian lives we readily enough default to that foundation of love and provision. This is why God gets angry at the request for quail, because it's an implicit rejection and entitlement to what he's already provided us. And so here's what I want to press on us this morning. That when we see this in the Bible, when we encounter manna through Bible lessons or podcasts or sermons or whatever it is we listen to, when we encounter this idea, what I would love to press upon you is this, that the manna in the desert and the provision of the quail should remind us of this. Let's daily gather Jesus and let him be enough. Like the Hebrew people, let's daily go out and gather Jesus in the morning. I need him today. I'm going to spend time with him today. I'm going to appreciate God's provision today. I'm going to reflect on what that means for me today, both today and in eternity. And then let's let that be enough. Come what may, no matter what else happens, I've learned to be at peace with plenty, and I've learned to be at peace with little, but I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Let's let God's provision each day of Jesus be enough. Let me pray for you, and then we're going to take communion and celebrate that provision. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for how you've provided for us. Thank you for your son Jesus. For who he is and for what he means and how he's our daily bread. Thank you that we can eat of him and not be hungry again. God, I pray that we would be people who are people of devotion who daily pursue you and who daily pursue him. Let us diligently, as your children in the desert did, go out and gather him every morning and be nourished by his love and by his peace and by his forgiveness and by his mercy and by his grace and by his humility. Let us be people who pursue him. And God, I pray that he would be enough. There's so many other things that we want, God, and sometimes they're good and sometimes they're not, but they're nothing compared to him. We consider all things rubbish compared to the surpassing goodness of knowing Jesus. I pray that that would be true of us as we gather him and as we pursue you. I pray that you would also help us to remember that he is enough, that your miraculous provision is enough. Please let us never grow entitled to what that is, but to always marvel at your goodness and at the miracle of your provision. In Jesus' name, in the name of the daily bread, we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. So good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. I've got to tell you, I'm really touched by your attendance this morning. Really and truly. Normally I make a joke on holiday weekends about people coming. And this morning I woke up and I got my email. I had a Duke alert that there's going to be some power outages. Shane, you work for Duke. Fix that. Make sure 9-2-2-1 Kirk Hill is not affected. And I was like, man, it's a holiday weekend, and we have a tropical storm bearing down on us. No one is coming. And look, here you are. This is really, really touching and great, and that was really good worship. If you saw Gibby and I talking as I was setting up, I was laughing at him for messing up in the last song and just crying out Jesus in the middle of a line. Thank you, Kristen. You saw it too. And he said, no, no, I didn't mess up. I was just excited about Jesus. And I don't believe him. But I also do know that he is excited about Jesus. I'm also excited to have the princes here with us this morning. They're here with us for a few weeks. Sarah, you're hosting for us when? Next week? Perfect. And she's going to give us an update and tell us everything. So come back then. Well, I'm so happy to have you guys in town. And we are so happy to be the church that you are part of. We talk a lot about building God's kingdom. And you guys are in South Africa building God's kingdom, and it's a part of our heart that's out there, and so we're glad that you guys are with us this morning. So thanks for joining us. If you don't know them, who cares? It's not a big deal, but we're glad to have them, and you should say hey to them after the service and get to know them a little bit, but they're going to be here with us for the next three weeks. Yes. Perfect. So it's a, it's a big morning and I'm happy to have you here as we continue in our series. And if you're watching online or you're catching up later, thanks so much for doing that. That means a lot to us as you enjoy this weekend, doing whatever it is you're doing. We're in our series in Moses and this series, if I'm just being honest, has been a little bit different for me as a pastor and as someone who has to write sermons every week. You guys make me do this. Typically, when I choose a series, I kind of choose a series, and if you're in the meetings with us with staff, we'll have a series idea, and I'll go, that's a great idea, but then I immediately go, what are the sermons? How do we make this compelling? And the way I think about it is, will that preach? Can I make a sermon out of that? But for this series, it's been a little bit different of an experience, because in this series, I'm telling the story, we are telling the story and going through the story of the life of Moses. And we're telling the story really of the Genesis of the nation of Israel. And so it's really less about will that preach? And it's more about what are the essential elements of the story? I heard somebody say one time, this just comes to mind, the radio sports talk guy, that people should go in the Hall of Fame if you can't tell the story of that sport without their name. Then no matter what they did, they should go into the Hall of Fame. Thank you, Zach, for affirming that. And so this kind of works like that. What are the things, if we're going to walk through the life of Moses together and tell the story of the origin of the Hebrew people together and their exodus from Egypt and their intro into the promised land, what are the elements of that story that we just absolutely cannot pass over? That was Freudian there, the Passover. Look at me. What are the elements that we cannot skip that we must include? And one of those elements is the provision by God in the desert of manna. And a little subtext in that story is the provision of quail. You cannot tell the story of Moses. You cannot tell the story of the birth of the nation of Israel without talking about the provision of manna in the desert by God. You have to tell that part of the story. And so this really isn't about does that preacher, does it not? This is about, we have to tell this part of the story. And then what I'm encumbered with rather than does this preach, is this inspiring? What I'm encumbered with is why does this matter to us now? That's wonderful. It's good to learn about our God. And at a baseline, if all we do is look at the stories and learn about our God and his character and who he is, that's enough. And that's a good exercise and it's time well spent on a Sunday morning. But I think we should press further and say, but what do we learn from it that matters to us now? How does that impact me today? So we're going to look at this story of God's provision, but we're going to be asking the question, how does this impact me today? And we're going to do that by looking at two big questions that really, for me, as I read the story, jump off the page and make me go, why is that the case? And I think if we answer those questions and we can find a way that this really impacts us and should matter to us today and our daily lives as we interact with and hopefully pursue God. So I'm going to point to some scripture in a minute. And actually, this morning is the first time this has happened. I bought this Bible. This is called the pastor's Bible. It's got three tassels that hang out of it, which is an obnoxious amount of tassels. And who would ever need three tassels? But now I have exactly three passages from three different books, and I'm using all three tassels, and I'm so excited. So I've used the first one. That one's out of the way. We're in the book of John. That's where we're going to turn first. If you have a Bible, you can turn there. But before I start jumping around to the passages, I just want to make sure that we know what's happening. Moses is moving the Hebrew people through the desert. They've escaped Pharaoh. Pharaoh's army has been destroyed in the Red Sea with the Sea of Reeds. And now they're wandering through the desert being've escaped Pharaoh Pharaoh's armies been destroyed in the Red Sea with the Sea of Reeds and now they're wandering through the desert being led by God a pillar of cloud by day a pillar of fire by night they're following the pillar they're walking towards God if you look at the way that they're supposed to be arranged this tribe next to this tribe in this direction and yada yada yada they were actually marching through the as one enormous cross, which is pretty cool with Jesus in the center of it as the bronze serpent. So, and we'll get to that story. But there comes up the question of numbers and I think it's relevant this morning. There are different scholars say different things. No one's sure. There's a figure in the Bible where it said there were 600,000 men. And so then you extrapolate that out to women and children. And so some scholars say that there was as little as 300,000 people moving through the desert. Other scholars say there was as much as 2.5 million people walking through the desert. So that's a large delta of difference. But regardless of where you would land on that, and I don't expect anyone to go home and really drill down on the number of Hebrew people in the desert, but if you were to, what you would arrive at is there was a lot. There's a lot. And those are mouths to feed. And some of you know that I like history. I like to study empires. I like to read biographies. Last year, I read a biography on Napoleon Bonaparte, who was, by the way, my least favorite general I've ever studied in my entire life. I can't stand that guy. But he's famous for saying, an army marches on its stomach, meaning the secret to war is supplying your army with what they need. And if you've studied history and you've studied war and you've studied people moving across continents, what you know is they are only as good as their supply chain. They can only fight as hard as they have fresh shoes and fresh socks and fresh food coming to them. And if you disrupt that supply chain, you disrupt the army. By the way, this is what made the Mongols so incredible is they didn't need a supply chain. They just ate everything that they saw, and they were the most fascinating force in the history of history, just for the record. Sorry, I couldn't help myself. But an army marches on its stomach, meaning throughout history. One of the biggest challenges of moving a large group of people transcontinentally is sustaining them. And this is the challenge that Moses was facing. He's got between 500 and 2.5 million people that he's responsible for, and they have to be fed. And they grumble. This is hard to do. It's hard to sustain ourselves in the desert. I would assume that each family left Egypt with some amount of sheep or cattle or something to sustain them. But eventually those resources start to dwindle. And so they grumble that they're not being supplied for, they're not being cared for. And this is a sufficient gripe, right? Moms and dads, you're in the desert, wandering, following a pillar. Moses says we just go that way. In your head, you're thinking, we should be there there by now and you're not. What's going on? You're worried about your kids because you can't feed them every day. You're worried about your mother-in-law because you can't feed her every day and frankly she's cranky when she's hungry. So it'd be really nice if we could take care of her. Some of you are sitting next to your mother-in-laws. Don't laugh at that joke. I just saw somebody turn their head. Sorry. This is a reasonable gripe. We're hungry. We can't feed each other. And so God says, okay, I'm going to provide you with something. In the morning, you're going to wake up and there there's going to be this white, flaky substance on the ground. Gather it up, and that will be all that you need. But only gather what you need for that day, which we're going to come back to that idea, because I think that's interesting. Only gather what you need for that day, and every day I will provide for you. And they called that substance, it was like a doughy bread, but it was flaky. And they called that substance manna, which to my knowledge means, literally, what is it? It's like the terrible mascot for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Izzy. I've never been more disappointed in my life. As a kid growing up in Atlanta, I was so excited that the Olympics were coming to my city. It was such a big deal. And by the way, Andre Agassi and Brooke Shield stayed at my friend's house in their basement because they were a host home for the Olympics, which was really cool. I'll tell you about that sometime. But the mascot, when they revealed it, sorry, I know it's stupid. The mascot was named Izzy, which means what is it? And it's like, the mascot's Manna? This is dumb. What a stupid mascot. But that's what they named the bread because they didn't know what it was. So they called it what is it? And that became the name Manna. That was God's provision. And then at one point or another, after God was providing the Manna, they would go out and they would gather it. And we'll see in a little bit that some of them gathered more than they should. And they incurred the anger of Moses and God. And then at some point or another, they said the reasonable thing, the thing that we would say, God, it's so nice that you're providing this for us. I'd like some steak. Like, I'd like some meat, some protein. I'd settle for fish. I'll go to Long John Silver's if you'll just make it available, like anything, God, besides just this bread, just this daily bread, right? And so they said they wanted some protein. And so God responded and he sent them some quail. But it turned out that that was kind of a bad ask. And we're going to see that part in the narrative. I'm going to pull that out. But for a portion, God provided some quail. And then they decided they didn't want quail anymore. God got his way, and then they were back on manna, and that's what sustained them through the desert. And the import of this gesture and this provision echoes throughout Scripture, which is why we cannot tell the story of Moses without talking about the manna that was provided. The biggest reason is this. The manna was a picture of Jesus. The manna was a picture of Jesus. Many of you know this. And so I'd like to remind you of this and pull your mind back to it. Some of you may not. But the manna was a very intentional picture of Jesus. And this is one of the things that marvels me about our God and his sovereignty. We know that God sees into the future. We know that God knows all things. We know that God is sovereign, that God plans. And I say often, sometimes things happen in our life, we can't see what's down the road, but God can and he knows and he's guiding us down this path. And I think even as we acknowledge that truth, that sometimes in our limited brains and in our limited ways of thinking, we think to ourselves, yeah, God sees six weeks down the road or six months down the road, or maybe six years down the road. But in this one, he's seeing 6,000 years down the road. And we don't think about God thinking like that, but he was because he knew that this manna was an intentional picture that he was painting of his son. It's an illustration of what Jesus is. And just so you know, that idea isn't something that scholars came up with. There wasn't theologians reading the Old Testament and then reading the New Testament and going, goodness, this seems really similar. I think those two things are connected. No, these are the words of Jesus himself. And we find them in John chapter six. Sir, they said, always give us this bread. Then Jesus declared, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. Direct correlation. Jesus is talking to a Hebrew people who are entrenched in their culture and know it well. And so when he says, my father sent you bread from heaven to sustain life because of their natural culture, national culture and institutions, they immediately go back to the time of Moses. We as Americans just got done celebrating the 4th of July. In my house, in my kitchen, we had some friends over and I insisted. I put Lee Greenwood, I'm proud to be an American, on the Alexa as loud as it would go and I made everyone hold their hand over their heart and sing every word that they knew to the song. And it was super fun. And when we think about America, we have some things on the 4th of July that we all celebrate, whatever it means to us. The reality of it is this is the great experiment. This is the great democratic experiment. It's the greatest country to ever exist on the planet. It's the most powerful military to ever exist on the planet. And it's the most wonderful and the most free place to ever exist on the planet. And we ought to be grateful for it no matter what we think about our current state, yes or no. This is a great place to be. And so when we celebrate the 4th of July, we draw upon the history of where we are. In the same way, when Jesus says, you remember God providing in the desert, they draw upon where they had been and where they were. And they immediately understand and go back to God's provision in the desert of manna. It's a direct correlation. And Jesus says, my father gave you bread daily to sustain your life, to give you life. And now he gives you me. I am the bread of life. And the picture is very clear. We are told that when we do not know God, when we are separated from him, that we will surely die. This is the penalty in the Garden of Eden. And so Jesus comes that we might have life and have it to the full. He comes that life might be restored. And so he says, my father sent me to restore our life. Right? He sent me to restore your life and to give you life. He is acquainting himself with the manna and he is saying, I am the bread of life. This is all throughout scripture. So we know that the manna is a picture of Christ. And it's well and good and appropriate that at the end of this sermon today, towards the end of the service, we're going to take communion together. And when we take communion together, we're going to break the bread. And Jesus at the Passover, before he's arrested, takes the bread and he breaks it and he says, this is my body that's broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me. That is not just a quaint illustration of what's about to happen to him. It is an intentional connection to what the Hebrew person understands as the sustenance of God in the desert providing life for them. It is a picture of God's provision. So the first thing we see and know about the manna that matters to us very much is that it's a picture of Jesus and God's provision and how he cares for us. We must lock that in. With that being true, there are two questions for me that jump out of the narrative that I think if we can examine them and maybe wrestle them to the ground, at least that's what I tried to do this week as I prepared, that it can illustrate and illuminate for us how this story matters to us today. The first to me is the question of stockpiling. God put a very specific provision in there. You are not allowed to stockpile the goods. You cannot keep more than one day's provision. As a matter of fact, this is what it says in Exodus 16, 19. So I, so I can orient us towards this thought. In Exodus chapter 16, verse 19, after God has said only take enough for the day, then Moses said to them, no one is to keep any of it until morning. However, some of them paid no attention to Moses. They kept part of me or not, but my largest pet peeve in life is any form of inefficiency. My second largest pet peeve in life, just for the record, is when you impose your noise on me. I don't want to hear your phone in a public place. But I loathe any form of inefficiency. And so this directive to only gather what you need for today goes against what I believe wholeheartedly about efficiency. Doesn't it make more sense? Carter, I know you agree with me on thinking. I know you agree with us. Doesn't it make more sense on Monday for you and the able-bodied people in your family to go gather as much as you can for the rest of the week so you don't have to do it every day and you know that it's there and you have the sense of security that it's there. And it's not like there wasn't enough. We're not talking about being selfish because we're told there in scripture that whatever was left over fades away, that when the sun comes out, it melts it away. So there's more than enough every day, which means if your family wants to go out and get enough on Monday to last until Wednesday, or maybe even Friday, you can do that. And isn't this how we handle our daily sustenance anyways? When you go grocery shopping, do you shop for one day like a lunatic? Or do you shop for the whole week? You shop for the whole week. Of course you do. And if you're really crazy, you shop for the month at Costco, which we went to Costco the other night and it was closed because the power was out. And I've never been so disappointed in my life because we were at Costco without kids and I was so excited to go. We ended up wandering around the mall aimlessly. But this makes sense to us. This is how we think. We don't think about daily, I'm just going to go to Sprouts and get what I need for one day. That's what crazy people do. You shop for the week so you don't have to do it anymore. So it makes the most sense to stockpile it for the week, right? But God said don't do that. And I don't understand why. Because besides the practicality of it, it would also give you the sense of, okay, food has been sparse. It's been difficult to feed my children as a father, as a wife, as a patriarch of the family. I'd like to know my family's provided for it. It makes me feel good to know that we have five days rations. And there's even a provision, if you read the text, of an amount that you can gather for each eating person in your home. So there's a provision for that that God lays out. And when I read this story, I kind of wonder, like, what's the big deal? Why can't you stockpile manna? And the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it's because of this. Because you cannot stockpile Jesus. You cannot store up enough Jesus. If manna is a picture of who Jesus is, and it was always to be intended not just to feed this small group of people relatively for 40 years, but to echo throughout the centuries as to God's provision and what it is, then it's important to know and understand that you cannot stockpile Christ. You cannot gather enough of him on a Monday to sustain you on a Wednesday. You can't go to Christmas and Easter services only and expect that amount of Jesus to sustain you throughout the year. Which right now I'm talking to a group of people who have come to church on a holiday weekend with a tropical storm looming. So you get this. So if you're listening online, this is for you, pal. But in Christianity, I think we do this a little bit. We come to church on Sunday. I get my fill of Jesus. My kids get their fill of Jesus, and we're good. And then I'm going to go throughout the rest of my week and do whatever it is I need to do. And the next Sunday I'll get my fill of Jesus. But that's not how Jesus works. That's not how manna worked. And if you think about it practically, that's not how diets work. If you say you're going on a diet and on Monday you manage against all odds to eat salads with some sort of vinaigrette dressing that's not even good. And then the rest of the week you eat Reuben's and fried foods, which I'm not speaking from experience there, I'm just saying hypothetically. That's not a diet. You can't eat healthy enough on Monday to be healthy on Friday if you don't do it again. And I think the picture that God is painting here with the daily provision and sustenance of Christ is we cannot get enough Jesus on Monday to make us healthy on Wednesday. We should still wake up craving him. This is why at Grace we say one of our five traits is we are people of devotion. And I say often, and I have not said it often enough lately, but this is why I say it, that the single greatest habit that anyone can develop in their life, and I'm completely convinced of this, is to wake up every day and spend time in God's presence through his word and through prayer. There is not a single greater habit that anyone can develop than to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer. It's the most important thing. Every day when I get into my office, most days I fail sometimes, but most days the very first thing I do when I get into my office is I get in my office and I shut the door and I read my Bible and I spend time praying over that day. I try to do that every day. We have to do that. We need to get, we need to think of it. Think of a daily devotion in this context of this story as gathering our Jesus every day. Every day we spend time in prayer. Every day we spend time in God's word. Every day we spend time worshiping. And that looks different at different seasons. Sometimes that means you go on a hike, you just walk, or you go on a run and you take your earbuds out and you don't listen to any noise and you just talk to God and you allow God to talk to you and you experience him that day. I'm not saying it has to be formulated every day, but every day we need to be in the habit like the Israelites. This is what the picture is for. It's not to sustain them. It's to remind us for generations of what we should do. We should wake up and gather Jesus. And it's not lost on me that this happened in the morning. Because when the sun gets hot, it melted away. I've always told you, you have your quiet time and your devotional time whenever it works for you. Morning, afternoon, evening, just do it. But that's a little bit insincere because I can't back this up with paperwork, but I kind of think you should do it in the morning anyways. I don't care if you're a night person. Just saying. We should wake up every day and gather Jesus. And we should understand we can't gather enough Jesus on Monday to make that enough on Wednesday. It has to be a daily practice. And so what God's provision reminds us of and what his prohibition reminds us of is we cannot gather enough Jesus to stockpile him for the week. As believers, we must pursue him every day. We must wake up daily and gather Jesus. It's vitally important. The other question that comes up to me in this story, this one's a little bit trickier. It's the provision of the quail. At one point, though God is providing daily, the Hebrew people say, hey, we'd like some variety. Can we get a little bit of a buffet situation going on? Maybe I'd like some Chinese. Like they just want something else besides this manna, this nutrition brick that they get every day. And so God gives into them and he says, okay. And in Exodus, we're told that God provided quail for a little while, but in numbers, we actually get an insight into this portion of the story that provides a lot more color and it becomes very interesting. And it makes me ask some questions. Numbers chapter 11 verses 18 through 20. This is after they've requested the quail. Tell the people, consecrate yourselves in preparation for tomorrow when you will eat meat. The Lord heard when you wailed. If only we had meat to eat, we were better off in Egypt. Now the Lord will give you meat and you will eat it. You will not eat it. This is the funny part. This is crazy. You will not eat it for just one day or two days or five, 10 or 20 days, but for a whole month until it comes out of your nostrils and you loathe it. Gracious God, because you have rejected the Lord who is among you and have willed before him, saying, Why did we ever leave Egypt? I got to be honest. When you read that, it really reads like a vindictive elementary school kid, right? Who's just mad. You want quail? I'll give you quail until it comes out of your stinking nose, you son of a gun. You whiny little cuss. It's just funny, man. And so when I read it, I'm like, what gives, God? Why are you doing that? It seems like a pretty reasonable request. Maybe nutrition bricks get old. And they'd like to eat some meat. That seems fine to me. But it angered God. And he said, I'll give it to you until you're so sick of it that it comes out of your nose and you loathe it. Why did he do this? Well, the answer is right there in the text. If you have implicit rejection of his provision already. It was an implicit rejection of his miraculous provision. They had become used to it. They had grown to expect it. When Jesus first arrived in their life, when they first experienced God's provision, it was a miracle and they were blown away by it. Look at this. Look at all that we have every day. Oh my gosh, look, I don't have to struggle for my family anymore. I don't have to worry about my kids anymore. It just shows up every day. And I don't even have to worry about gathering enough for tomorrow because I know that it's going to be there tomorrow because God's blessings renew daily. I know that this is going to be great. Look at this, look at this, look at this. And then eventually they get tired of it and they're like, yeah, we need some more of God. And they fall into the terrible habit that we do. We have a terrible habit of asking for Jesus and. Don't we? We have a terrible habit of making Jesus not enough. God has miraculously provided for our salvation and for our peace. And his mercies are new every morning. He gives us our daily bread that we can eat of and hunger no more. He makes us a path to righteousness for his name's sake. He makes it so that this life can be viewed as a wisp or a vapor. And that the tragedies that we endure are called by Paul momentary difficulties. God renders those things true by giving us his son, the bread of life. He gives us a hope for a future where all the wrong things will be made right and all the sad things will be untrue. He's provided us everything that we need. He gives us his peace in all situations so that his servant Paul wrote, I have learned what it is to live in little and I have learned what it is to live in much. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. He has given us peace in every situation. He has defeated sin and shame and death so that we do not need to fear those things anymore. He has given us all that we need, and yet we get Jesus. And we say, but can I also have some quail? Can I have you, Jesus, and can I also be comfortable? Can I have you, Jesus, and also go on nice vacations? Can I have you, Jesus, and also drive a car that I'm proud of that signals success to the people who see me? Can I have you, Jesus, and also can you make sure that no one in my family ever gets sick? Can I have you, Jesus, and also can you make sure that I never get sick? Can I have you, Jesus, and can you make sure that my marriage is perfect and that it never struggles and that I never have any problems? Can I have you, Jesus, and can I also have a spouse? Can I have you, Jesus, and can I also have a child? Can I have you, Jesus, and also these other things that I want? Don't we have a terrible habit of craving Jesus and? There have been times in my life when I've been worried about how things were going to go. Where I've been worried that I wasn't going to be the servant that this church needed. And I've thought, maybe I'll lose my job. Maybe I'll need to quit. Maybe they need someone else. Maybe I'm not serving it well. There's been times over the years, for good reasons or bad, that I feared that I would lose everything. And do you know what brings me back to peace in those thoughts? To think, well, I could lose my job. I could lose my house. I'll still have my family. I'll still see my kids every day. Nothing can take their love away from me. Nothing can take my family away from me. My wife and my children. I'll have that. And at the bedrock, no matter what happens, I'll have them. And I'll have their love. And I have some friendships in my life that I know that no matter what happens, that can't be taken from me. And I'm sure that some of you have been there too. If you haven't been there yet, it's just because you're young. You will. But the provision of the quail and the anger of God, I think, reminds us that this is how we ought to think about the provision of Christ. No matter what happens in my life, I have Jesus. No matter what sickness befalls me, what tragedy befalls me, no matter what situations happen in life, no matter what I have or I don't have, whether I live in affluence or I live in poverty, no matter what happens at the end of the day, I have Jesus, and he is enough. And I don't think in our Christian lives we readily enough default to that foundation of love and provision. This is why God gets angry at the request for quail, because it's an implicit rejection and entitlement to what he's already provided us. And so here's what I want to press on us this morning. That when we see this in the Bible, when we encounter manna through Bible lessons or podcasts or sermons or whatever it is we listen to, when we encounter this idea, what I would love to press upon you is this, that the manna in the desert and the provision of the quail should remind us of this. Let's daily gather Jesus and let him be enough. Like the Hebrew people, let's daily go out and gather Jesus in the morning. I need him today. I'm going to spend time with him today. I'm going to appreciate God's provision today. I'm going to reflect on what that means for me today, both today and in eternity. And then let's let that be enough. Come what may, no matter what else happens, I've learned to be at peace with plenty, and I've learned to be at peace with little, but I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. Let's let God's provision each day of Jesus be enough. Let me pray for you, and then we're going to take communion and celebrate that provision. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for how you've provided for us. Thank you for your son Jesus. For who he is and for what he means and how he's our daily bread. Thank you that we can eat of him and not be hungry again. God, I pray that we would be people who are people of devotion who daily pursue you and who daily pursue him. Let us diligently, as your children in the desert did, go out and gather him every morning and be nourished by his love and by his peace and by his forgiveness and by his mercy and by his grace and by his humility. Let us be people who pursue him. And God, I pray that he would be enough. There's so many other things that we want, God, and sometimes they're good and sometimes they're not, but they're nothing compared to him. We consider all things rubbish compared to the surpassing goodness of knowing Jesus. I pray that that would be true of us as we gather him and as we pursue you. I pray that you would also help us to remember that he is enough, that your miraculous provision is enough. Please let us never grow entitled to what that is, but to always marvel at your goodness and at the miracle of your provision. In Jesus' name, in the name of the daily bread, we pray. Amen.