Philippians

All right, well, good morning, everyone. It's so good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. I kind of had a feeling that this Sunday would look like this. Last Sunday, people begged out because of the weather, and we have a pretty good every other week crowd. So if everyone didn't come last week, I thought, you know, we might have some folding chairs up this week. So it's good to see everybody. I hope that you had a good week. For those of you that were able to enjoy the snow, I hope that that was fun and a nice reprieve for you. This morning we continue in our series called Mark's Jesus, where we're going through the Gospel of Mark, just looking at different stories and aspects of the life of Christ that Mark records. This week, we get to probably the most famous parable that Jesus teaches. Parables are the way that Jesus chose to teach most of the time. And parables are short, made-up stories that are told to make a point. And stories stick with us better. They help us think through things. They tend to drive the point home a little bit better. I've told you before, in a previous life, I was a Bible teacher and an assistant high school football coach. And the head football coach was a guy named Coach McCready. He was a recon Marine in Vietnam. I love that man so much. And whenever I'd ask him a question about what to do in life, he'd go, baby. And he'd tell me a story. He called everybody baby or everybody sugar. So sugar, sit down. And he'd tell me a story about him and Nam and the way that he had to handle some troops sometime. Or he did about when he ran an envelope factory after that in the 70s. He'd tell me about a problem employee that he would have. And he would never answer my question. He would just tell me a story. And I'd be thinking like, this old man's crazy. Like he's just, he's lost it. He's not paying attention to me anymore. But by the time he got to the end of the story, I realized, oh, and I had some clarity about what I needed to do in a situation. And so Jesus taught in similar ways. He taught through telling stories. And part of this, he tells us, is so that you kind of have to work to understand it a little bit because some of the Pharisees, he says, are ever seeing, but never perceiving, never hearing, never understanding. And so he wanted to teach this way to make things more memorable, to help you along, and to make you work for it a little bit. Now, you may have your favorite parable. You may know a bunch of parables. One of my favorite parables is the one about the unforgiving servant, the servant that was forgiven a ton by the king, this huge debt, and then turns around and he won't forgive a much smaller debt to a peer, and he gets in trouble for that one. And there's different, there's the workers in the vineyard, there's the pearl of great price, there's a bunch of different parables. But this parable that we're going to look at today is actually kind of the apex parable in that Jesus tells it to help us understand how we are to process the rest of the parables and the rest of the teachings of Jesus. So rather than sum up the parable, I'm just going to read it to you. It's in Mark chapter 4. We're going to look first at verses 3 through 8. Then we're going to look at verse 14. Then we'll go 15 to 20. So we're going to do a lot of work in Mark chapter 4 today. So if you have a Bible or you can reach that one in front of you, grab that and let's go through it together. I always try to encourage you, bring your Bibles to church, mark them up, take notes. I've been told recently I'm starting to make up words. So you could keep a list of the words that I'm making up. Tom was right last week. I made up the paralyzation. Yeah, yeah, paralyzation. That's not a word. Paralysis will do fine. You don't have to say paralyzation. So you can keep a list of those if you want to. But bring your Bible, mark them up, and let's have a spiritual track record of where we're going and what we're learning. This morning in Mark chapter 4, Jesus shares with us the parable of the sower. And it goes like this in verse 3. Listen. and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among the thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew, and produced a crop, some multiplying 30, some 60, some 100 times. So when you hear this parable on the surface without any context, it is a little bit difficult to understand. Like, okay, great. There's a farmer, throws out some seed. There seems to be four different kinds of soils. Four different things happen on those four different kinds of soils. Only one of them's good. But what are you talking about, Jesus? With no context, it's a little bit tricky to understand. And so the following verses, 9 through 13, are the disciples saying, hey, what are you talking about? What do you mean by that? And when you read the Gospels carefully, you see the disciples doing this often. What is he talking about? Maybe they don't even ask each other or ask him because they don't have the guts to do it. But he leaves and Peter will be like, did anybody get that? And they're like, no, we have no idea. And then they just have to try to pick it up the next time. But in this particular instance, lucky for us, Jesus explains it. And we have access to this explanation. Now here's one of the things that's really interesting to me as I dug in and studied this parable this time around. Many, many, many, I'm not going to raise your hand because I don't want to embarrass people who don't raise their hand, but I would bet that most of you in this room have heard that parable before. Most of you in this room, if I say the parable of the sower, you can at least, before you walked in today, you could have at least gotten two out of those four soils right. You know what I'm talking about. And so if you're a church person, we tend to think that that seed that goes out is the gospel. That's us sharing our faith, going throughout the world and planting the gospel. And we tend to make this parable about what we should do to plant the gospel of Jesus Christ, what we should do to share the good news of Jesus Christ with our unbelieving friends, neighbors, and cultures. And when we do that, it makes it reductive. It makes the parable smaller than it's supposed to be, I think. Because we make it this one-time deal. We make it this one-time thing where we throw the seed out, and if you respond to the gospel, there's four different ways to respond to the gospel. Three of them are bad. One of them are good. I'm going to throw out this gospel seed and hope that it lands on the good soil, and then I'm going to keep moving on. But it doesn't apply to us anymore because I'm a Christian. And when the seed landed on me, lucky me, I was good soil, and now this plant springs forth, and I have a spiritual life. So this is good. The way that the parable of the sower applies to me is that it's my job to sow the seeds because we say that the seed is the gospel. But that's not what it says. And that's not what Jesus says. Look at verse 14. This will not be on the screen, but look at verse 14. This is Jesus explaining the parable. The farmer sows the word. The farmer sows the word. The seed is the word, not the gospel. It's the word of God, not the gospel of God. Now, is the gospel part of the word of God? Yes. But so is Ecclesiastes, and the gospel is not abundantly clear in Ecclesiastes. Is the gospel part of the word of God? Absolutely, but God's word is so much more expansive than simply the salvation message. Now, everything in scripture points to Christ in one way or another. There's a scarlet thread woven through all 66 books where you can go through any portion of scripture and show how that eventually is pointing you and leading you to Christ. That's the whole point of it. But when we say God's word is the gospel, we either expand the gospel to include every possible thing that God says, or we reduce the word to just the gospel. And that's not right either. So when Jesus says the farmer sows the word, what he means is the word of God. So for us, that's any teaching based on scripture, any song that we would sing that's based on scripture, any word that we have from Jesus, anything that comes from God's word, any words that come from God, when we hear those, when we are taught those, when we sing those, when we talk about those, when we discuss those, that's the word of God. And so what he's saying is, what Jesus is saying is, the farmer sows the word. And if that's true, and the seed lands more than one time on us, but it's not just when we receive the gospel, it's every time the word of God is spoken or preached or sung, then what we see in this parable is this. This parable shows us that we can be different soils in different seasons. This parable shows us that we can be different soils in different seasons. So for us long-time Christians who always hear the parable of the sower and think it's my job to spread the seed. I've already received the gospel. I'm good. You have received the gospel. But you are, hopefully as a Christian, regularly, daily, multiple times a day, through a quiet time, through prayer, through what we're listening to, through what we consume, through our discourse, hopefully multiple times a day, the seed of God's word is landing on our soil. And this is helpful because we are reminded that we can be different soils in different seasons. I heard one time somebody said that a good book is 50% content and 50% timing. That you can read one great book in one season of your life and it just doesn't hit right. And you can read it 10 years later and oh my gosh, this is the most amazing thing I've ever read. I suppose that works for movies and TV shows as well for you Neanderthals who don't read. But I think that that's true. And I think that that's true of different sermons. I know for me, there are sermons that I preached. I'll just be honest with you, okay? Haley Lee, she did our announcements last week, did a phenomenal job doing the announcements. She and I were talking before the service and she said, nobody's coming this week because it was just because the weather was miserable. And word had gotten out that she was hosting, and so people said, I'll mail this one in. And I said to her, and I meant this in all sincerity, I said, that's fine with me. This sermon is the worst one I've preached in like six weeks. She goes, what? And I go, yeah, I don't like it. It's not very good. Like I, it is, it's, it honors the text. It is what it is. But the last five I've preached, I've liked more than this one. And she was like, well, do your best. And I tried. And the wild part to me is, um, I'm almost eight years in now. It'll be, it'll be, uh, Easter will be my eighth anniversary. So I'm almost eight years in here. And after doing this for eight years, week in and week out, you know, there's some sermons that you preach. And the only people who say a word to you about them are the ones that happen to make the mistake of looking you in the eye in the lobby. And they kind of see it and they're like, good job. Like, right? And it's only because they saw you. They don't mean it, and I know you don't mean it. That's fine. But then there's others that people, like, pull you aside, and they want to talk about it, and yada, yada, yada. You can kind of tell based on the feedback. And after I preached this one last week, the feedback I got, I was like, oh, okay, God. That must have landed on good soil. That must have been something that people needed to hear. So it's sometimes you preach a sermon, and you think it's going to be great. I'm going to rip their faces off. I'm going to light them on fire. This is going to be fantastic. And people are like, yeah, good job. And then other times I'm like, God, I'm sorry for this one. I'll try better next time. And then he uses it. So different, different teachings, sometimes different songs, sometimes different conversations we have with godly people who love Jesusesus and we just talk about spiritual things hit differently at different times of life and i think that this is tremendously encouraging particularly for those of you with children their soil changes season to season what they reject at one age they may receive at another what the enemy snatches up at one point may actually have time to germinate at another. Those of you sharing your faith and sowing seeds with your coworkers and with family members and with friends and with loved ones, keep spreading it. There's different soils at different seasons, and it may catch them differently if it got rejected the first time. But I think it's tremendously helpful to approach this parable not as a depiction of what happens when we share the gospel. That's a limited understanding of it. But let's approach this parable as an explanation from Jesus himself of what happens when we receive teaching about God's word, when we hear the good news of God's word, and how we receive that and what happens when we do. Because in that way, it continues to apply to us until we enter into eternity. So let's look at the explanations of Christ of each of the soils and understand what they are and what they're doing and identify those things in our own seasons of our own lives. Let's look at Mark 4.15. He describes the first one. Some people are like seed along the path where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. Okay. So that's the first kind of soil. It's like seed that's thrown along the path, never even has a chance to get into any soil at all, lands on concrete, lands on hard ground, cannot germinate, and Satan comes by and he scoops it up and he knocks it away. Okay. So how do we understand this soil in our own life? Well, we don't talk a lot about Satan around here. I've found that doing sermons on the devil are not the most fun. So we don't talk a lot about him, but when Satan comes up, I try to remind you guys that here's what's true, whether we're comfortable with this idea of an enemy or not, that Satan is real and he is against you. Satan is very much real and he is very much against you and your family and your children and your spouse and your friends. And he is constantly scheming on how to break up what God is doing. God is about the kingdom of God and inviting us to be in, participate in the building of the kingdom of God. Satan is about the tearing down of the kingdom of God. And anytime we get serious about building God's kingdom up, Satan gets serious about tearing us down. We're told that he prowls about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, that he is a liar and the father of lies, that his native tongue is lies. So we know that Satan is real and that he is against us. And the last thing Satan wants is for God's word to land on someone's life and take hold of it. So he's constantly trying to sweep those away. I don't have specific guesses for how Satan is active in our lives and in our world and in our communities. I don't have guesses for you there. But I do think that in the United States that Satan doesn't have to work very hard. I think he may have even set us on cruise control and gone and tended to other countries where the church is flourishing. Because I think that one of the greatest tools of Satan, I'm absolutely convinced of this, particularly in this generation, in this day and age, one of the greatest tools of Satan is simply distraction. He will just distract you. You stop at a red light. How many of you, don't raise your hand, how many of you, you can't just sit at a red light in peace. You reach down, you grab your phone, you start to do this. You can't just sit for 30 seconds. You're in the doctor's office, the wait is five minutes. You're picking something up to read or do. Because you look like a psychopath if you just stare at the wall. You've got to at least not intimidate other people even if you're not doing anything. But we are easily the most distracted, when I say generation, I mean historical generation, like people who are alive. I'm not talking about X's and millennials. I'm talking about everyone in the room, one generation of history. We are easily the most distracted generation in history. And I believe that that distraction is a tool of Satan to keep us from thinking about what actually matters, to keep seeds from germinating in our lives. We might be very moved by what happens in a service on a Sunday morning, and then as soon as we exit those doors, what do you want to do for lunch? What do you want to do about this? What do you want to do about this? We get into the car, whatever was playing on our phone that morning when we got to church, it starts to play again. And that begins to distract us. It takes our thought away. We've removed all time for contemplation. We've removed all time for stillness. There was one time, some of y'all will remember, I got so concerned about the distractions of the world and our need for stillness and silence that I tricked you guys. I didn't tell anybody. I brought you in here for a Sunday morning service. Emil knows what I'm talking about. Emil, our keyboardist, he remembers this. Me and him were laughing about it because I tricked everyone. And then we did a silent service. I shut the lights down. We played soft music. I put words on the screen and I made you preach to yourself through God's word and I didn't say anything. And some of y'all were like, that was amazing. And others of you said, never do that to me again. You've got to tell us. That's not fair. We have so little space for silence and contemplation in our lives, and I believe that that's absolutely a trick of Satan to keep things from germinating that should take hold. So if you are a person who's constantly distracted, who's constantly looking, who's constantly watching, who's constantly listening, who has no stillness, who has no peace, there's always noise in your life, I just want you to think about whether or not that's a trick of the enemy to keep you from thinking about what you really need to think about and to keep God's word from germinating in your life in the ways that it needs to. The other reason I think Satan doesn't have to work very hard in our culture is that, and I don't want to get too existential here, but we are the result of Greek thought as a culture. We are materialistic. And when I say materialistic, I don't mean we're greedy and we want things, although we are greedy and we do want things, and we are materialistic in that way. But I mean materialistic in that in our culture, if you can't taste it, touch it, smell it, feel it, it's not real. We insist that everything makes sense to us. We have even reduced emotions to chemicals in our brains. And until we can understand how those chemicals interact, we refuse to believe that emotions actually exist. We think that we've fabricated everything. We have no space for wonder left in our culture. We have no space for the fanciful. We have no patience for not understanding. And I think it is to our detriment that when we walk outside, we can't see stars anymore because we live too close to the city. There's this great book. I'll just throw this out here. This is for only one person, and I don't know who, but maybe it's you. Write it down. Abraham Kuyper was the Dutch prime minister, I think, in about 1900. He was a Christian, and he was a scientist, and he wrote a book called Wisdom and Wonder about this, about the things that we should try to know and the things that we should be so glad that we don't know and wonder at. We've lost our childlike ability to wonder and to wonder. And when we insist that everything makes sense to us all the time, I think we become way overly reductive with our faith. Because if you're trying to shrink it to what you can understand, I don't need to finish that thought. It's very easy to have a quick emotional response to a sermon or to a song or to a discussion. It's very easy to feel that quick conviction. Churches even know how to do this. Sometimes there'll be a cue at the end of the sermon, and Aaron knows that at that cue, when I say this word, you come up and you start to play soft music behind me, and it's going to make what I say a lot more impactful, right? Like we know those little tricks. I try not to use them very much because I'm not good at them, and then I feel this undue pressure to actually say something that matters at the end, and I'd rather just coast it out. But we know how to have emotional responses to things, and oftentimes church does this. How many times have you left, because I say this all the time, you guys know that I say this all the time. There's no more important habit that anyone in their life can develop than, a lot of you can complete the sentence, than to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. How many of you have heard me preach a sermon on that and prayed at the end and said, God, I am reading my Bible every day, and you didn't make it a week? Multiple times, I bet, we've done that. How many times have I been convicted? I've had more day ones at the gym than anybody that's 44 ever. How many times do we hear things we should do, we receive conviction about it, and we go, yes, this is what I'm going to do, and then we flare out. That's the gospel landing on rocky soil. It flourishes, it shoots up quick. But it doesn't have any roots. And we don't tend it. And it gets crowded out. And we forget it. This is what happens. I've seen this over and over again. I don't mean to be too cynical. But I've seen people who come to church. They're new. They're coming from a different church. Or they're moving into town. Or they started to go to church again or whatever. And they come. they want to meet everybody. They meet everybody. They're such sweet people. They want to meet me. They want me to hear their story. I want to hear their story. They come to the very first Discover Grace that we have or the very first newcomers class that we have, and they sign up for all the things. They are on fire. I just know, I just know, this person's going to leave as easily as they came. There's other people who come and they sit back there and they're just kind of, who are these weirdos? What are they about? Sometimes their worship pastor stops singing and the rest of them just kind of keep doing it. What's going on? Is that pastor for real? Is he always like that? Yeah, yeah. And there's just slow germination. And then after about a year, they're like, maybe I'll help you hand out some bulletins. Great. Often that's signs of seed germinating and taking root because they're taking their time and there's deep soil there. I can remember going to camp when I was 17 and I came home absolutely on fire for God, camp high. And I told my dad, my life has changed. I'm going to make disciples. I'm giving my whole life to Christ. I'm doing all the things. Dad, I just, I can't wait to serve God. And my dad's response was, that's great, son. Be nice to your mom and your sister. Let it take root. Otherwise, I don't believe you. This happens to us, these flash-in-the-pan convictions. So my encouragement to you is if you're convicted about reading your Bible, don't tell anyone that you're going to do it every day. Just set your alarm. If you're convicted about praying with your spouse, don't tell her that you're going to pray with her every day. Just go grab her and say, can we pray? If you're convicted by God's word about something that you need to do or change, don't tell anybody. Just do it and let other people notice your conviction. But let's not be the flash in the pan faith that happens with this soil. The next one, 18 and 19. Still others, like seeds sown among thorns, hear the word, but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth, and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. This is a picture of a cluttered life, of a life that's not correctly prioritized. The seed of God's word lands in a place that's able to convict us, lands in a place where it's able to germinate. The problem is our soil is so riddled with weeds and other things that it has no space where it can grow and call its own. This is a life where we've over-prioritized career. We've over-prioritized physical health, physical fitness. We've over-prioritized sometimes even family or friends. Often it's a life where we've over-prioritized pleasure and rest. And God's word starts to germinate in our life, but as it does, it requires of us. It requires space. It requires energy. It requires effort. It needs to grow. It needs the resources and nutrients offered by the soil that we're following along with the parable and with the metaphor, it needs its resources, but we're taking the resources that are needed to allow God's word to grow in our life and to grow us, and we're allocating them to other things that are not as important. This is the description of a life that's not correctly prioritized. Yeah, I know that I should probably go to a women's group, but I've got work. I know that I should probably go to a women's group, but I'm already out three nights a week, and so I can't add another night. And so instead of thinking about what's taking us out the other three nights and going, that can't possibly be as important as the spiritual health and the seed within me that is germinating. That can't possibly be as important. So let me rearrange my schedule around allowing God to grow me. We just say, I can't do that right now. I'm not available for that. I'd like to go to small group, but I'm shy and I don't really feel comfortable doing that. So I'm not going to prioritize that. I know I need to get up early and read my Bible, but it's just, I'm so tired in the mornings and it doesn't occur to us. Okay, well, what were you doing last night? That's making you tired. How late were you up? How do you, how do you, how can you recalibrate? I'll just tell you this, this year, one of my, one of the things I've been doing this year is I try to get up every day at five. I just, I just feel like that's a healthy pattern for me. I try to get up every day at five. And at first it was really tough because I'm not getting tired until 1130 or 12 o'clock at night and I'm only getting four or five hours of sleep at night. But you know what started happening? My body changed. Now at like 845, I'm like, Jen, we gotta get in bed. I got one episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine in me and then I'm out. And now I wake up at 430 with no alarm. My body just changed. I said, okay, if this is what you're going to do, let's do this. So we come up with excuses to not follow through on the things that we're convicted about without thinking about how do I actually tend my soil to make space for God's Word to grow. This is what the author of Hebrews is talking about when he tells us that to run our race well, we should throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. The things that we have in our life that prevent God's word from growing and taking hold and taking root and radically changing us aren't always out and out sin. It's just things that we allocate energy to that is displaced. So I would challenge us this morning as we reflect on this soil, how much are you prioritizing your spiritual health and allowing God's word to grow in your life? And how much have you just allocated just a passive corner of your lot to it so that you can tend to everything else. Lastly is the good soil. Verse 20. Others, like seeds sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop, some 30, some 60, some 100 times what is sown. This is obviously what we want to be. This is obviously what we're hoping for when we share God's word with other people. But here's what's interesting to me about this good soil. In both the telling and in the explanation, Jesus makes sure to make that point, and it reproduces some 30, some 60, some even 100 times. I'm reminded of the parable of the talents, where the expectation of the master going out of town, who he gives the talents to his servants, is that they would produce more, that they would double what they're left behind. We are always expected to produce. The vine and the branches illustration in John chapter 15, abide in me and I in you. I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and you will bear much fruit. Here's the thing, is good soil always bears fruit. Good soil, where the seed is growing, where there is good healthy life, a good spiritual life will always, always, always bear fruit. We cannot both be flourishing and barren within the kingdom of God. Do you see? If we are growing and flourishing, if that seed has taken root, if we are becoming the people that God has created us to be because we are his workmanship created for good works, if we are doing that, then we will absolutely produce fruit without question. Now, what does fruit look like? That's an important thing to understand, and I think it's an important thing for us to have a communal definition of. To produce fruit, and there's a bunch of ways to explain this, but let's explain it this way. Let's understand it this way this morning. To produce fruit means to grow God's kingdom in breadth or depth. That's what it means. If you are producing fruit in the kingdom of God, God is using you to grow it in its breadth or depth. Grow it in its breadth, evangelism, telling other people about Jesus. If you have been producing fruit by growing God's kingdom in its breadth, then in your wake, in your past, in the last six months, three years, five years, there are people who would say, because this person is in my life, because Jim Price is in my life, I am closer to God than I was when I met him. It's a wake of people who do not know the Father or are far from Jesus who have moved closer to him because God has placed you in their life. It's growing the kingdom of God in breadth. And so I would ask you, Christians, are there people in your past, in the last six months, three years, five years, who would point to you and say, because you exist in my life, I moved from being very far from Jesus to much closer to him. If that's true, then God is using you to produce and to bear fruit. And then hopefully they do that and they do that and they do that. And that's how it gets to 30, 60, 100 fold. And when we produce fruit, we grow the kingdom in depth. We disciple other people. We help people along in their sanctification journey. We help people become deeper in their spiritual walk to take their faith more seriously. And this way you look at the wake of your life and there are people who are in your life who say, yeah, when I met Jeff Lemons, I knew Jesus, but because God placed him in my life, I now know him in a more deep and passionate way. I would never know Jesus as deeply as I do if I had not been friends with Linda Sartorius. When people start to say things like that about you, that means that you are producing fruit. So if we are going to be the good soil, we will bear fruit. It's not we must bear fruit. It's not that we have to try to bear fruit. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. All we have to do is try to follow Jesus. All we have to do is make ourselves receptive to God's word. He does the rest. We don't have to come up with some plan. He handles it. Which is why I'm so confident that a byproduct of walking with Jesus is producing fruit, growing God's kingdom in breadth and in depth. And that's what we should be doing. And I would say this, if you look at your life, I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad, but if you look, if you've been a Christian for three years, at least, and you look at the last three years of your life, and you ask yourself, who's closer to Jesus because God placed me in their life? Who have I had the honor and privilege of walking with as I watch them grow in their faith? If you can't point to anybody, there's a good chance that some of those other soils are happening in your life, that your priorities are crowding out God's word, that the schemes of Satan are actually working on you and keeping things from taking root. There's a good chance that the first three might apply to you. And that's for your soul to search. That's a question for you to answer. But here's how this applies to all of us. Because this is true that this parable, because this is true that this parable isn't just about the moment that we receive the news of the gospel, but it's about every moment that we receive the teachings of God's word. And it's ongoing for our whole life. We're different soils at different seasons because it continues to apply to us both as we share and as we receive. What should we do in light of this parable? What would Jesus have us do? I think it's this, keep spreading and keep tending. Christians, keep spreading God's word. Keep teaching God's word. Keep sharing God's word. Keep singing God's word. Keep inviting people into God's word. And keep tending. Keep tending your soil so that when you hear God's word, you can be receptive to it. To this end, this is not my point. This is a point that I heard another pastor named Alistair Beg make, and I thought it was fantastic. He didn't say it like this, but I am. Beware the spiritual atrophy of the informed. Church people, beware the spiritual atrophy of the informed. Here's what I mean. When you've been going to church long enough, when you've heard enough sermons, it doesn't take you but a minute or two to get into a sermon and figure out what the pastor's going to be talking about. You start a sermon, pastor says, open up John 15. You go, okay, we're doing Abiding in Christ this morning. Cool. Open up to 1 Samuel 17. Oh, good, we get to do David and Goliath, right? Open up to Philippians 3. Oh, I can do all things. Or 4. We know what it's going to be about. What I said this morning, we're going to be talking about the parable of the sower. A lot of us went, okay, I know what that one is. And what happens when we already know is that our knowledge inoculates us against truth. We're callous to it. I've heard that before. That's not for me. I actually know some people. I love them very much. They do not go to this church all the time. They have told me. They have told me that they don't go to church on Christmas and Easter because church is always really crowded on those holidays, and they already know those stories. They know what the message is going to be. The message is not for us. It's for the people who don't come very regularly, so we want to make sure that they have a parking space and that they have seats, which is an incredibly well-tuned argument of bullcrap. It's just a smoke screen for we don't want to deal with the crowds. That's all it is. That's all it is. But here's the sad part about that. How do we get to a place as Christians where we say, the message of the resurrection is not for me? The pastor, listen, I'm not complaining, okay? I'm not complaining, I'm not whining, but I know what it is to listen to sermons too. And I know that when I listen to sermons, you know what I want? Tell me something about this passage I don't know yet. Take a different angle. Ooh, I haven't seen it done that way before. We want something new. We want something shiny. We want something that we can chew on. We want something different. We don't want same. And in that way, our knowledge inoculates us from truth because we're not receptive to it anymore. May we Christians, longtime Christians, who already know where the sermon is going before it starts, may we be people who freshly open up our hearts to the truth of God's word so that it might take root in ways that it hasn't in years. And maybe, maybe, if we're not producing very much fruit, maybe it's because we're in spiritual atrophy because we know too much. And those of us who do, let us open our hearts in renewed ways to God's word that it might grow and produce a fruit 30, 60, and 100-fold. I'm going to pray, and we're going to move into a time of communion together. Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for the truth that is in it. Thank you, God, that its depths are unfathomable. Thank you that we can read the same book in your Bible two dozen times and have it mean something different and reach a different part of us every time. God, for those of us who have allowed our knowledge to inoculate us from your truth, would you please cure us of that? Would you please help us wonder again? Would you please help us be receptive to your word in fresh ways? God, for those of us who are distracted, for those of us who insist on making everything make sense, for those of us who have our priorities out of order. God, I pray that we would see those tendencies in ourself and that we would take very seriously tending our soil to prepare our hearts for your word. And God, here in this family of faith, would you build up healthy people who are flourishing in you and producing fruit beyond their wildest imaginations in whatever way you would have them do that in Jesus name amen

All right, well, good morning, everyone. It's so good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. I kind of had a feeling that this Sunday would look like this. Last Sunday, people begged out because of the weather, and we have a pretty good every other week crowd. So if everyone didn't come last week, I thought, you know, we might have some folding chairs up this week. So it's good to see everybody. I hope that you had a good week. For those of you that were able to enjoy the snow, I hope that that was fun and a nice reprieve for you. This morning we continue in our series called Mark's Jesus, where we're going through the Gospel of Mark, just looking at different stories and aspects of the life of Christ that Mark records. This week, we get to probably the most famous parable that Jesus teaches. Parables are the way that Jesus chose to teach most of the time. And parables are short, made-up stories that are told to make a point. And stories stick with us better. They help us think through things. They tend to drive the point home a little bit better. I've told you before, in a previous life, I was a Bible teacher and an assistant high school football coach. And the head football coach was a guy named Coach McCready. He was a recon Marine in Vietnam. I love that man so much. And whenever I'd ask him a question about what to do in life, he'd go, baby. And he'd tell me a story. He called everybody baby or everybody sugar. So sugar, sit down. And he'd tell me a story about him and Nam and the way that he had to handle some troops sometime. Or he did about when he ran an envelope factory after that in the 70s. He'd tell me about a problem employee that he would have. And he would never answer my question. He would just tell me a story. And I'd be thinking like, this old man's crazy. Like he's just, he's lost it. He's not paying attention to me anymore. But by the time he got to the end of the story, I realized, oh, and I had some clarity about what I needed to do in a situation. And so Jesus taught in similar ways. He taught through telling stories. And part of this, he tells us, is so that you kind of have to work to understand it a little bit because some of the Pharisees, he says, are ever seeing, but never perceiving, never hearing, never understanding. And so he wanted to teach this way to make things more memorable, to help you along, and to make you work for it a little bit. Now, you may have your favorite parable. You may know a bunch of parables. One of my favorite parables is the one about the unforgiving servant, the servant that was forgiven a ton by the king, this huge debt, and then turns around and he won't forgive a much smaller debt to a peer, and he gets in trouble for that one. And there's different, there's the workers in the vineyard, there's the pearl of great price, there's a bunch of different parables. But this parable that we're going to look at today is actually kind of the apex parable in that Jesus tells it to help us understand how we are to process the rest of the parables and the rest of the teachings of Jesus. So rather than sum up the parable, I'm just going to read it to you. It's in Mark chapter 4. We're going to look first at verses 3 through 8. Then we're going to look at verse 14. Then we'll go 15 to 20. So we're going to do a lot of work in Mark chapter 4 today. So if you have a Bible or you can reach that one in front of you, grab that and let's go through it together. I always try to encourage you, bring your Bibles to church, mark them up, take notes. I've been told recently I'm starting to make up words. So you could keep a list of the words that I'm making up. Tom was right last week. I made up the paralyzation. Yeah, yeah, paralyzation. That's not a word. Paralysis will do fine. You don't have to say paralyzation. So you can keep a list of those if you want to. But bring your Bible, mark them up, and let's have a spiritual track record of where we're going and what we're learning. This morning in Mark chapter 4, Jesus shares with us the parable of the sower. And it goes like this in verse 3. Listen. and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among the thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew, and produced a crop, some multiplying 30, some 60, some 100 times. So when you hear this parable on the surface without any context, it is a little bit difficult to understand. Like, okay, great. There's a farmer, throws out some seed. There seems to be four different kinds of soils. Four different things happen on those four different kinds of soils. Only one of them's good. But what are you talking about, Jesus? With no context, it's a little bit tricky to understand. And so the following verses, 9 through 13, are the disciples saying, hey, what are you talking about? What do you mean by that? And when you read the Gospels carefully, you see the disciples doing this often. What is he talking about? Maybe they don't even ask each other or ask him because they don't have the guts to do it. But he leaves and Peter will be like, did anybody get that? And they're like, no, we have no idea. And then they just have to try to pick it up the next time. But in this particular instance, lucky for us, Jesus explains it. And we have access to this explanation. Now here's one of the things that's really interesting to me as I dug in and studied this parable this time around. Many, many, many, I'm not going to raise your hand because I don't want to embarrass people who don't raise their hand, but I would bet that most of you in this room have heard that parable before. Most of you in this room, if I say the parable of the sower, you can at least, before you walked in today, you could have at least gotten two out of those four soils right. You know what I'm talking about. And so if you're a church person, we tend to think that that seed that goes out is the gospel. That's us sharing our faith, going throughout the world and planting the gospel. And we tend to make this parable about what we should do to plant the gospel of Jesus Christ, what we should do to share the good news of Jesus Christ with our unbelieving friends, neighbors, and cultures. And when we do that, it makes it reductive. It makes the parable smaller than it's supposed to be, I think. Because we make it this one-time deal. We make it this one-time thing where we throw the seed out, and if you respond to the gospel, there's four different ways to respond to the gospel. Three of them are bad. One of them are good. I'm going to throw out this gospel seed and hope that it lands on the good soil, and then I'm going to keep moving on. But it doesn't apply to us anymore because I'm a Christian. And when the seed landed on me, lucky me, I was good soil, and now this plant springs forth, and I have a spiritual life. So this is good. The way that the parable of the sower applies to me is that it's my job to sow the seeds because we say that the seed is the gospel. But that's not what it says. And that's not what Jesus says. Look at verse 14. This will not be on the screen, but look at verse 14. This is Jesus explaining the parable. The farmer sows the word. The farmer sows the word. The seed is the word, not the gospel. It's the word of God, not the gospel of God. Now, is the gospel part of the word of God? Yes. But so is Ecclesiastes, and the gospel is not abundantly clear in Ecclesiastes. Is the gospel part of the word of God? Absolutely, but God's word is so much more expansive than simply the salvation message. Now, everything in scripture points to Christ in one way or another. There's a scarlet thread woven through all 66 books where you can go through any portion of scripture and show how that eventually is pointing you and leading you to Christ. That's the whole point of it. But when we say God's word is the gospel, we either expand the gospel to include every possible thing that God says, or we reduce the word to just the gospel. And that's not right either. So when Jesus says the farmer sows the word, what he means is the word of God. So for us, that's any teaching based on scripture, any song that we would sing that's based on scripture, any word that we have from Jesus, anything that comes from God's word, any words that come from God, when we hear those, when we are taught those, when we sing those, when we talk about those, when we discuss those, that's the word of God. And so what he's saying is, what Jesus is saying is, the farmer sows the word. And if that's true, and the seed lands more than one time on us, but it's not just when we receive the gospel, it's every time the word of God is spoken or preached or sung, then what we see in this parable is this. This parable shows us that we can be different soils in different seasons. This parable shows us that we can be different soils in different seasons. So for us long-time Christians who always hear the parable of the sower and think it's my job to spread the seed. I've already received the gospel. I'm good. You have received the gospel. But you are, hopefully as a Christian, regularly, daily, multiple times a day, through a quiet time, through prayer, through what we're listening to, through what we consume, through our discourse, hopefully multiple times a day, the seed of God's word is landing on our soil. And this is helpful because we are reminded that we can be different soils in different seasons. I heard one time somebody said that a good book is 50% content and 50% timing. That you can read one great book in one season of your life and it just doesn't hit right. And you can read it 10 years later and oh my gosh, this is the most amazing thing I've ever read. I suppose that works for movies and TV shows as well for you Neanderthals who don't read. But I think that that's true. And I think that that's true of different sermons. I know for me, there are sermons that I preached. I'll just be honest with you, okay? Haley Lee, she did our announcements last week, did a phenomenal job doing the announcements. She and I were talking before the service and she said, nobody's coming this week because it was just because the weather was miserable. And word had gotten out that she was hosting, and so people said, I'll mail this one in. And I said to her, and I meant this in all sincerity, I said, that's fine with me. This sermon is the worst one I've preached in like six weeks. She goes, what? And I go, yeah, I don't like it. It's not very good. Like I, it is, it's, it honors the text. It is what it is. But the last five I've preached, I've liked more than this one. And she was like, well, do your best. And I tried. And the wild part to me is, um, I'm almost eight years in now. It'll be, it'll be, uh, Easter will be my eighth anniversary. So I'm almost eight years in here. And after doing this for eight years, week in and week out, you know, there's some sermons that you preach. And the only people who say a word to you about them are the ones that happen to make the mistake of looking you in the eye in the lobby. And they kind of see it and they're like, good job. Like, right? And it's only because they saw you. They don't mean it, and I know you don't mean it. That's fine. But then there's others that people, like, pull you aside, and they want to talk about it, and yada, yada, yada. You can kind of tell based on the feedback. And after I preached this one last week, the feedback I got, I was like, oh, okay, God. That must have landed on good soil. That must have been something that people needed to hear. So it's sometimes you preach a sermon, and you think it's going to be great. I'm going to rip their faces off. I'm going to light them on fire. This is going to be fantastic. And people are like, yeah, good job. And then other times I'm like, God, I'm sorry for this one. I'll try better next time. And then he uses it. So different, different teachings, sometimes different songs, sometimes different conversations we have with godly people who love Jesusesus and we just talk about spiritual things hit differently at different times of life and i think that this is tremendously encouraging particularly for those of you with children their soil changes season to season what they reject at one age they may receive at another what the enemy snatches up at one point may actually have time to germinate at another. Those of you sharing your faith and sowing seeds with your coworkers and with family members and with friends and with loved ones, keep spreading it. There's different soils at different seasons, and it may catch them differently if it got rejected the first time. But I think it's tremendously helpful to approach this parable not as a depiction of what happens when we share the gospel. That's a limited understanding of it. But let's approach this parable as an explanation from Jesus himself of what happens when we receive teaching about God's word, when we hear the good news of God's word, and how we receive that and what happens when we do. Because in that way, it continues to apply to us until we enter into eternity. So let's look at the explanations of Christ of each of the soils and understand what they are and what they're doing and identify those things in our own seasons of our own lives. Let's look at Mark 4.15. He describes the first one. Some people are like seed along the path where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. Okay. So that's the first kind of soil. It's like seed that's thrown along the path, never even has a chance to get into any soil at all, lands on concrete, lands on hard ground, cannot germinate, and Satan comes by and he scoops it up and he knocks it away. Okay. So how do we understand this soil in our own life? Well, we don't talk a lot about Satan around here. I've found that doing sermons on the devil are not the most fun. So we don't talk a lot about him, but when Satan comes up, I try to remind you guys that here's what's true, whether we're comfortable with this idea of an enemy or not, that Satan is real and he is against you. Satan is very much real and he is very much against you and your family and your children and your spouse and your friends. And he is constantly scheming on how to break up what God is doing. God is about the kingdom of God and inviting us to be in, participate in the building of the kingdom of God. Satan is about the tearing down of the kingdom of God. And anytime we get serious about building God's kingdom up, Satan gets serious about tearing us down. We're told that he prowls about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, that he is a liar and the father of lies, that his native tongue is lies. So we know that Satan is real and that he is against us. And the last thing Satan wants is for God's word to land on someone's life and take hold of it. So he's constantly trying to sweep those away. I don't have specific guesses for how Satan is active in our lives and in our world and in our communities. I don't have guesses for you there. But I do think that in the United States that Satan doesn't have to work very hard. I think he may have even set us on cruise control and gone and tended to other countries where the church is flourishing. Because I think that one of the greatest tools of Satan, I'm absolutely convinced of this, particularly in this generation, in this day and age, one of the greatest tools of Satan is simply distraction. He will just distract you. You stop at a red light. How many of you, don't raise your hand, how many of you, you can't just sit at a red light in peace. You reach down, you grab your phone, you start to do this. You can't just sit for 30 seconds. You're in the doctor's office, the wait is five minutes. You're picking something up to read or do. Because you look like a psychopath if you just stare at the wall. You've got to at least not intimidate other people even if you're not doing anything. But we are easily the most distracted, when I say generation, I mean historical generation, like people who are alive. I'm not talking about X's and millennials. I'm talking about everyone in the room, one generation of history. We are easily the most distracted generation in history. And I believe that that distraction is a tool of Satan to keep us from thinking about what actually matters, to keep seeds from germinating in our lives. We might be very moved by what happens in a service on a Sunday morning, and then as soon as we exit those doors, what do you want to do for lunch? What do you want to do about this? What do you want to do about this? We get into the car, whatever was playing on our phone that morning when we got to church, it starts to play again. And that begins to distract us. It takes our thought away. We've removed all time for contemplation. We've removed all time for stillness. There was one time, some of y'all will remember, I got so concerned about the distractions of the world and our need for stillness and silence that I tricked you guys. I didn't tell anybody. I brought you in here for a Sunday morning service. Emil knows what I'm talking about. Emil, our keyboardist, he remembers this. Me and him were laughing about it because I tricked everyone. And then we did a silent service. I shut the lights down. We played soft music. I put words on the screen and I made you preach to yourself through God's word and I didn't say anything. And some of y'all were like, that was amazing. And others of you said, never do that to me again. You've got to tell us. That's not fair. We have so little space for silence and contemplation in our lives, and I believe that that's absolutely a trick of Satan to keep things from germinating that should take hold. So if you are a person who's constantly distracted, who's constantly looking, who's constantly watching, who's constantly listening, who has no stillness, who has no peace, there's always noise in your life, I just want you to think about whether or not that's a trick of the enemy to keep you from thinking about what you really need to think about and to keep God's word from germinating in your life in the ways that it needs to. The other reason I think Satan doesn't have to work very hard in our culture is that, and I don't want to get too existential here, but we are the result of Greek thought as a culture. We are materialistic. And when I say materialistic, I don't mean we're greedy and we want things, although we are greedy and we do want things, and we are materialistic in that way. But I mean materialistic in that in our culture, if you can't taste it, touch it, smell it, feel it, it's not real. We insist that everything makes sense to us. We have even reduced emotions to chemicals in our brains. And until we can understand how those chemicals interact, we refuse to believe that emotions actually exist. We think that we've fabricated everything. We have no space for wonder left in our culture. We have no space for the fanciful. We have no patience for not understanding. And I think it is to our detriment that when we walk outside, we can't see stars anymore because we live too close to the city. There's this great book. I'll just throw this out here. This is for only one person, and I don't know who, but maybe it's you. Write it down. Abraham Kuyper was the Dutch prime minister, I think, in about 1900. He was a Christian, and he was a scientist, and he wrote a book called Wisdom and Wonder about this, about the things that we should try to know and the things that we should be so glad that we don't know and wonder at. We've lost our childlike ability to wonder and to wonder. And when we insist that everything makes sense to us all the time, I think we become way overly reductive with our faith. Because if you're trying to shrink it to what you can understand, I don't need to finish that thought. It's very easy to have a quick emotional response to a sermon or to a song or to a discussion. It's very easy to feel that quick conviction. Churches even know how to do this. Sometimes there'll be a cue at the end of the sermon, and Aaron knows that at that cue, when I say this word, you come up and you start to play soft music behind me, and it's going to make what I say a lot more impactful, right? Like we know those little tricks. I try not to use them very much because I'm not good at them, and then I feel this undue pressure to actually say something that matters at the end, and I'd rather just coast it out. But we know how to have emotional responses to things, and oftentimes church does this. How many times have you left, because I say this all the time, you guys know that I say this all the time. There's no more important habit that anyone in their life can develop than, a lot of you can complete the sentence, than to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. How many of you have heard me preach a sermon on that and prayed at the end and said, God, I am reading my Bible every day, and you didn't make it a week? Multiple times, I bet, we've done that. How many times have I been convicted? I've had more day ones at the gym than anybody that's 44 ever. How many times do we hear things we should do, we receive conviction about it, and we go, yes, this is what I'm going to do, and then we flare out. That's the gospel landing on rocky soil. It flourishes, it shoots up quick. But it doesn't have any roots. And we don't tend it. And it gets crowded out. And we forget it. This is what happens. I've seen this over and over again. I don't mean to be too cynical. But I've seen people who come to church. They're new. They're coming from a different church. Or they're moving into town. Or they started to go to church again or whatever. And they come. they want to meet everybody. They meet everybody. They're such sweet people. They want to meet me. They want me to hear their story. I want to hear their story. They come to the very first Discover Grace that we have or the very first newcomers class that we have, and they sign up for all the things. They are on fire. I just know, I just know, this person's going to leave as easily as they came. There's other people who come and they sit back there and they're just kind of, who are these weirdos? What are they about? Sometimes their worship pastor stops singing and the rest of them just kind of keep doing it. What's going on? Is that pastor for real? Is he always like that? Yeah, yeah. And there's just slow germination. And then after about a year, they're like, maybe I'll help you hand out some bulletins. Great. Often that's signs of seed germinating and taking root because they're taking their time and there's deep soil there. I can remember going to camp when I was 17 and I came home absolutely on fire for God, camp high. And I told my dad, my life has changed. I'm going to make disciples. I'm giving my whole life to Christ. I'm doing all the things. Dad, I just, I can't wait to serve God. And my dad's response was, that's great, son. Be nice to your mom and your sister. Let it take root. Otherwise, I don't believe you. This happens to us, these flash-in-the-pan convictions. So my encouragement to you is if you're convicted about reading your Bible, don't tell anyone that you're going to do it every day. Just set your alarm. If you're convicted about praying with your spouse, don't tell her that you're going to pray with her every day. Just go grab her and say, can we pray? If you're convicted by God's word about something that you need to do or change, don't tell anybody. Just do it and let other people notice your conviction. But let's not be the flash in the pan faith that happens with this soil. The next one, 18 and 19. Still others, like seeds sown among thorns, hear the word, but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth, and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. This is a picture of a cluttered life, of a life that's not correctly prioritized. The seed of God's word lands in a place that's able to convict us, lands in a place where it's able to germinate. The problem is our soil is so riddled with weeds and other things that it has no space where it can grow and call its own. This is a life where we've over-prioritized career. We've over-prioritized physical health, physical fitness. We've over-prioritized sometimes even family or friends. Often it's a life where we've over-prioritized pleasure and rest. And God's word starts to germinate in our life, but as it does, it requires of us. It requires space. It requires energy. It requires effort. It needs to grow. It needs the resources and nutrients offered by the soil that we're following along with the parable and with the metaphor, it needs its resources, but we're taking the resources that are needed to allow God's word to grow in our life and to grow us, and we're allocating them to other things that are not as important. This is the description of a life that's not correctly prioritized. Yeah, I know that I should probably go to a women's group, but I've got work. I know that I should probably go to a women's group, but I'm already out three nights a week, and so I can't add another night. And so instead of thinking about what's taking us out the other three nights and going, that can't possibly be as important as the spiritual health and the seed within me that is germinating. That can't possibly be as important. So let me rearrange my schedule around allowing God to grow me. We just say, I can't do that right now. I'm not available for that. I'd like to go to small group, but I'm shy and I don't really feel comfortable doing that. So I'm not going to prioritize that. I know I need to get up early and read my Bible, but it's just, I'm so tired in the mornings and it doesn't occur to us. Okay, well, what were you doing last night? That's making you tired. How late were you up? How do you, how do you, how can you recalibrate? I'll just tell you this, this year, one of my, one of the things I've been doing this year is I try to get up every day at five. I just, I just feel like that's a healthy pattern for me. I try to get up every day at five. And at first it was really tough because I'm not getting tired until 1130 or 12 o'clock at night and I'm only getting four or five hours of sleep at night. But you know what started happening? My body changed. Now at like 845, I'm like, Jen, we gotta get in bed. I got one episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine in me and then I'm out. And now I wake up at 430 with no alarm. My body just changed. I said, okay, if this is what you're going to do, let's do this. So we come up with excuses to not follow through on the things that we're convicted about without thinking about how do I actually tend my soil to make space for God's Word to grow. This is what the author of Hebrews is talking about when he tells us that to run our race well, we should throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. The things that we have in our life that prevent God's word from growing and taking hold and taking root and radically changing us aren't always out and out sin. It's just things that we allocate energy to that is displaced. So I would challenge us this morning as we reflect on this soil, how much are you prioritizing your spiritual health and allowing God's word to grow in your life? And how much have you just allocated just a passive corner of your lot to it so that you can tend to everything else. Lastly is the good soil. Verse 20. Others, like seeds sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop, some 30, some 60, some 100 times what is sown. This is obviously what we want to be. This is obviously what we're hoping for when we share God's word with other people. But here's what's interesting to me about this good soil. In both the telling and in the explanation, Jesus makes sure to make that point, and it reproduces some 30, some 60, some even 100 times. I'm reminded of the parable of the talents, where the expectation of the master going out of town, who he gives the talents to his servants, is that they would produce more, that they would double what they're left behind. We are always expected to produce. The vine and the branches illustration in John chapter 15, abide in me and I in you. I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and you will bear much fruit. Here's the thing, is good soil always bears fruit. Good soil, where the seed is growing, where there is good healthy life, a good spiritual life will always, always, always bear fruit. We cannot both be flourishing and barren within the kingdom of God. Do you see? If we are growing and flourishing, if that seed has taken root, if we are becoming the people that God has created us to be because we are his workmanship created for good works, if we are doing that, then we will absolutely produce fruit without question. Now, what does fruit look like? That's an important thing to understand, and I think it's an important thing for us to have a communal definition of. To produce fruit, and there's a bunch of ways to explain this, but let's explain it this way. Let's understand it this way this morning. To produce fruit means to grow God's kingdom in breadth or depth. That's what it means. If you are producing fruit in the kingdom of God, God is using you to grow it in its breadth or depth. Grow it in its breadth, evangelism, telling other people about Jesus. If you have been producing fruit by growing God's kingdom in its breadth, then in your wake, in your past, in the last six months, three years, five years, there are people who would say, because this person is in my life, because Jim Price is in my life, I am closer to God than I was when I met him. It's a wake of people who do not know the Father or are far from Jesus who have moved closer to him because God has placed you in their life. It's growing the kingdom of God in breadth. And so I would ask you, Christians, are there people in your past, in the last six months, three years, five years, who would point to you and say, because you exist in my life, I moved from being very far from Jesus to much closer to him. If that's true, then God is using you to produce and to bear fruit. And then hopefully they do that and they do that and they do that. And that's how it gets to 30, 60, 100 fold. And when we produce fruit, we grow the kingdom in depth. We disciple other people. We help people along in their sanctification journey. We help people become deeper in their spiritual walk to take their faith more seriously. And this way you look at the wake of your life and there are people who are in your life who say, yeah, when I met Jeff Lemons, I knew Jesus, but because God placed him in my life, I now know him in a more deep and passionate way. I would never know Jesus as deeply as I do if I had not been friends with Linda Sartorius. When people start to say things like that about you, that means that you are producing fruit. So if we are going to be the good soil, we will bear fruit. It's not we must bear fruit. It's not that we have to try to bear fruit. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. All we have to do is try to follow Jesus. All we have to do is make ourselves receptive to God's word. He does the rest. We don't have to come up with some plan. He handles it. Which is why I'm so confident that a byproduct of walking with Jesus is producing fruit, growing God's kingdom in breadth and in depth. And that's what we should be doing. And I would say this, if you look at your life, I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad, but if you look, if you've been a Christian for three years, at least, and you look at the last three years of your life, and you ask yourself, who's closer to Jesus because God placed me in their life? Who have I had the honor and privilege of walking with as I watch them grow in their faith? If you can't point to anybody, there's a good chance that some of those other soils are happening in your life, that your priorities are crowding out God's word, that the schemes of Satan are actually working on you and keeping things from taking root. There's a good chance that the first three might apply to you. And that's for your soul to search. That's a question for you to answer. But here's how this applies to all of us. Because this is true that this parable, because this is true that this parable isn't just about the moment that we receive the news of the gospel, but it's about every moment that we receive the teachings of God's word. And it's ongoing for our whole life. We're different soils at different seasons because it continues to apply to us both as we share and as we receive. What should we do in light of this parable? What would Jesus have us do? I think it's this, keep spreading and keep tending. Christians, keep spreading God's word. Keep teaching God's word. Keep sharing God's word. Keep singing God's word. Keep inviting people into God's word. And keep tending. Keep tending your soil so that when you hear God's word, you can be receptive to it. To this end, this is not my point. This is a point that I heard another pastor named Alistair Beg make, and I thought it was fantastic. He didn't say it like this, but I am. Beware the spiritual atrophy of the informed. Church people, beware the spiritual atrophy of the informed. Here's what I mean. When you've been going to church long enough, when you've heard enough sermons, it doesn't take you but a minute or two to get into a sermon and figure out what the pastor's going to be talking about. You start a sermon, pastor says, open up John 15. You go, okay, we're doing Abiding in Christ this morning. Cool. Open up to 1 Samuel 17. Oh, good, we get to do David and Goliath, right? Open up to Philippians 3. Oh, I can do all things. Or 4. We know what it's going to be about. What I said this morning, we're going to be talking about the parable of the sower. A lot of us went, okay, I know what that one is. And what happens when we already know is that our knowledge inoculates us against truth. We're callous to it. I've heard that before. That's not for me. I actually know some people. I love them very much. They do not go to this church all the time. They have told me. They have told me that they don't go to church on Christmas and Easter because church is always really crowded on those holidays, and they already know those stories. They know what the message is going to be. The message is not for us. It's for the people who don't come very regularly, so we want to make sure that they have a parking space and that they have seats, which is an incredibly well-tuned argument of bullcrap. It's just a smoke screen for we don't want to deal with the crowds. That's all it is. That's all it is. But here's the sad part about that. How do we get to a place as Christians where we say, the message of the resurrection is not for me? The pastor, listen, I'm not complaining, okay? I'm not complaining, I'm not whining, but I know what it is to listen to sermons too. And I know that when I listen to sermons, you know what I want? Tell me something about this passage I don't know yet. Take a different angle. Ooh, I haven't seen it done that way before. We want something new. We want something shiny. We want something that we can chew on. We want something different. We don't want same. And in that way, our knowledge inoculates us from truth because we're not receptive to it anymore. May we Christians, longtime Christians, who already know where the sermon is going before it starts, may we be people who freshly open up our hearts to the truth of God's word so that it might take root in ways that it hasn't in years. And maybe, maybe, if we're not producing very much fruit, maybe it's because we're in spiritual atrophy because we know too much. And those of us who do, let us open our hearts in renewed ways to God's word that it might grow and produce a fruit 30, 60, and 100-fold. I'm going to pray, and we're going to move into a time of communion together. Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for the truth that is in it. Thank you, God, that its depths are unfathomable. Thank you that we can read the same book in your Bible two dozen times and have it mean something different and reach a different part of us every time. God, for those of us who have allowed our knowledge to inoculate us from your truth, would you please cure us of that? Would you please help us wonder again? Would you please help us be receptive to your word in fresh ways? God, for those of us who are distracted, for those of us who insist on making everything make sense, for those of us who have our priorities out of order. God, I pray that we would see those tendencies in ourself and that we would take very seriously tending our soil to prepare our hearts for your word. And God, here in this family of faith, would you build up healthy people who are flourishing in you and producing fruit beyond their wildest imaginations in whatever way you would have them do that in Jesus name amen

All right, well, good morning, everyone. It's so good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. I kind of had a feeling that this Sunday would look like this. Last Sunday, people begged out because of the weather, and we have a pretty good every other week crowd. So if everyone didn't come last week, I thought, you know, we might have some folding chairs up this week. So it's good to see everybody. I hope that you had a good week. For those of you that were able to enjoy the snow, I hope that that was fun and a nice reprieve for you. This morning we continue in our series called Mark's Jesus, where we're going through the Gospel of Mark, just looking at different stories and aspects of the life of Christ that Mark records. This week, we get to probably the most famous parable that Jesus teaches. Parables are the way that Jesus chose to teach most of the time. And parables are short, made-up stories that are told to make a point. And stories stick with us better. They help us think through things. They tend to drive the point home a little bit better. I've told you before, in a previous life, I was a Bible teacher and an assistant high school football coach. And the head football coach was a guy named Coach McCready. He was a recon Marine in Vietnam. I love that man so much. And whenever I'd ask him a question about what to do in life, he'd go, baby. And he'd tell me a story. He called everybody baby or everybody sugar. So sugar, sit down. And he'd tell me a story about him and Nam and the way that he had to handle some troops sometime. Or he did about when he ran an envelope factory after that in the 70s. He'd tell me about a problem employee that he would have. And he would never answer my question. He would just tell me a story. And I'd be thinking like, this old man's crazy. Like he's just, he's lost it. He's not paying attention to me anymore. But by the time he got to the end of the story, I realized, oh, and I had some clarity about what I needed to do in a situation. And so Jesus taught in similar ways. He taught through telling stories. And part of this, he tells us, is so that you kind of have to work to understand it a little bit because some of the Pharisees, he says, are ever seeing, but never perceiving, never hearing, never understanding. And so he wanted to teach this way to make things more memorable, to help you along, and to make you work for it a little bit. Now, you may have your favorite parable. You may know a bunch of parables. One of my favorite parables is the one about the unforgiving servant, the servant that was forgiven a ton by the king, this huge debt, and then turns around and he won't forgive a much smaller debt to a peer, and he gets in trouble for that one. And there's different, there's the workers in the vineyard, there's the pearl of great price, there's a bunch of different parables. But this parable that we're going to look at today is actually kind of the apex parable in that Jesus tells it to help us understand how we are to process the rest of the parables and the rest of the teachings of Jesus. So rather than sum up the parable, I'm just going to read it to you. It's in Mark chapter 4. We're going to look first at verses 3 through 8. Then we're going to look at verse 14. Then we'll go 15 to 20. So we're going to do a lot of work in Mark chapter 4 today. So if you have a Bible or you can reach that one in front of you, grab that and let's go through it together. I always try to encourage you, bring your Bibles to church, mark them up, take notes. I've been told recently I'm starting to make up words. So you could keep a list of the words that I'm making up. Tom was right last week. I made up the paralyzation. Yeah, yeah, paralyzation. That's not a word. Paralysis will do fine. You don't have to say paralyzation. So you can keep a list of those if you want to. But bring your Bible, mark them up, and let's have a spiritual track record of where we're going and what we're learning. This morning in Mark chapter 4, Jesus shares with us the parable of the sower. And it goes like this in verse 3. Listen. and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among the thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew, and produced a crop, some multiplying 30, some 60, some 100 times. So when you hear this parable on the surface without any context, it is a little bit difficult to understand. Like, okay, great. There's a farmer, throws out some seed. There seems to be four different kinds of soils. Four different things happen on those four different kinds of soils. Only one of them's good. But what are you talking about, Jesus? With no context, it's a little bit tricky to understand. And so the following verses, 9 through 13, are the disciples saying, hey, what are you talking about? What do you mean by that? And when you read the Gospels carefully, you see the disciples doing this often. What is he talking about? Maybe they don't even ask each other or ask him because they don't have the guts to do it. But he leaves and Peter will be like, did anybody get that? And they're like, no, we have no idea. And then they just have to try to pick it up the next time. But in this particular instance, lucky for us, Jesus explains it. And we have access to this explanation. Now here's one of the things that's really interesting to me as I dug in and studied this parable this time around. Many, many, many, I'm not going to raise your hand because I don't want to embarrass people who don't raise their hand, but I would bet that most of you in this room have heard that parable before. Most of you in this room, if I say the parable of the sower, you can at least, before you walked in today, you could have at least gotten two out of those four soils right. You know what I'm talking about. And so if you're a church person, we tend to think that that seed that goes out is the gospel. That's us sharing our faith, going throughout the world and planting the gospel. And we tend to make this parable about what we should do to plant the gospel of Jesus Christ, what we should do to share the good news of Jesus Christ with our unbelieving friends, neighbors, and cultures. And when we do that, it makes it reductive. It makes the parable smaller than it's supposed to be, I think. Because we make it this one-time deal. We make it this one-time thing where we throw the seed out, and if you respond to the gospel, there's four different ways to respond to the gospel. Three of them are bad. One of them are good. I'm going to throw out this gospel seed and hope that it lands on the good soil, and then I'm going to keep moving on. But it doesn't apply to us anymore because I'm a Christian. And when the seed landed on me, lucky me, I was good soil, and now this plant springs forth, and I have a spiritual life. So this is good. The way that the parable of the sower applies to me is that it's my job to sow the seeds because we say that the seed is the gospel. But that's not what it says. And that's not what Jesus says. Look at verse 14. This will not be on the screen, but look at verse 14. This is Jesus explaining the parable. The farmer sows the word. The farmer sows the word. The seed is the word, not the gospel. It's the word of God, not the gospel of God. Now, is the gospel part of the word of God? Yes. But so is Ecclesiastes, and the gospel is not abundantly clear in Ecclesiastes. Is the gospel part of the word of God? Absolutely, but God's word is so much more expansive than simply the salvation message. Now, everything in scripture points to Christ in one way or another. There's a scarlet thread woven through all 66 books where you can go through any portion of scripture and show how that eventually is pointing you and leading you to Christ. That's the whole point of it. But when we say God's word is the gospel, we either expand the gospel to include every possible thing that God says, or we reduce the word to just the gospel. And that's not right either. So when Jesus says the farmer sows the word, what he means is the word of God. So for us, that's any teaching based on scripture, any song that we would sing that's based on scripture, any word that we have from Jesus, anything that comes from God's word, any words that come from God, when we hear those, when we are taught those, when we sing those, when we talk about those, when we discuss those, that's the word of God. And so what he's saying is, what Jesus is saying is, the farmer sows the word. And if that's true, and the seed lands more than one time on us, but it's not just when we receive the gospel, it's every time the word of God is spoken or preached or sung, then what we see in this parable is this. This parable shows us that we can be different soils in different seasons. This parable shows us that we can be different soils in different seasons. So for us long-time Christians who always hear the parable of the sower and think it's my job to spread the seed. I've already received the gospel. I'm good. You have received the gospel. But you are, hopefully as a Christian, regularly, daily, multiple times a day, through a quiet time, through prayer, through what we're listening to, through what we consume, through our discourse, hopefully multiple times a day, the seed of God's word is landing on our soil. And this is helpful because we are reminded that we can be different soils in different seasons. I heard one time somebody said that a good book is 50% content and 50% timing. That you can read one great book in one season of your life and it just doesn't hit right. And you can read it 10 years later and oh my gosh, this is the most amazing thing I've ever read. I suppose that works for movies and TV shows as well for you Neanderthals who don't read. But I think that that's true. And I think that that's true of different sermons. I know for me, there are sermons that I preached. I'll just be honest with you, okay? Haley Lee, she did our announcements last week, did a phenomenal job doing the announcements. She and I were talking before the service and she said, nobody's coming this week because it was just because the weather was miserable. And word had gotten out that she was hosting, and so people said, I'll mail this one in. And I said to her, and I meant this in all sincerity, I said, that's fine with me. This sermon is the worst one I've preached in like six weeks. She goes, what? And I go, yeah, I don't like it. It's not very good. Like I, it is, it's, it honors the text. It is what it is. But the last five I've preached, I've liked more than this one. And she was like, well, do your best. And I tried. And the wild part to me is, um, I'm almost eight years in now. It'll be, it'll be, uh, Easter will be my eighth anniversary. So I'm almost eight years in here. And after doing this for eight years, week in and week out, you know, there's some sermons that you preach. And the only people who say a word to you about them are the ones that happen to make the mistake of looking you in the eye in the lobby. And they kind of see it and they're like, good job. Like, right? And it's only because they saw you. They don't mean it, and I know you don't mean it. That's fine. But then there's others that people, like, pull you aside, and they want to talk about it, and yada, yada, yada. You can kind of tell based on the feedback. And after I preached this one last week, the feedback I got, I was like, oh, okay, God. That must have landed on good soil. That must have been something that people needed to hear. So it's sometimes you preach a sermon, and you think it's going to be great. I'm going to rip their faces off. I'm going to light them on fire. This is going to be fantastic. And people are like, yeah, good job. And then other times I'm like, God, I'm sorry for this one. I'll try better next time. And then he uses it. So different, different teachings, sometimes different songs, sometimes different conversations we have with godly people who love Jesusesus and we just talk about spiritual things hit differently at different times of life and i think that this is tremendously encouraging particularly for those of you with children their soil changes season to season what they reject at one age they may receive at another what the enemy snatches up at one point may actually have time to germinate at another. Those of you sharing your faith and sowing seeds with your coworkers and with family members and with friends and with loved ones, keep spreading it. There's different soils at different seasons, and it may catch them differently if it got rejected the first time. But I think it's tremendously helpful to approach this parable not as a depiction of what happens when we share the gospel. That's a limited understanding of it. But let's approach this parable as an explanation from Jesus himself of what happens when we receive teaching about God's word, when we hear the good news of God's word, and how we receive that and what happens when we do. Because in that way, it continues to apply to us until we enter into eternity. So let's look at the explanations of Christ of each of the soils and understand what they are and what they're doing and identify those things in our own seasons of our own lives. Let's look at Mark 4.15. He describes the first one. Some people are like seed along the path where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. Okay. So that's the first kind of soil. It's like seed that's thrown along the path, never even has a chance to get into any soil at all, lands on concrete, lands on hard ground, cannot germinate, and Satan comes by and he scoops it up and he knocks it away. Okay. So how do we understand this soil in our own life? Well, we don't talk a lot about Satan around here. I've found that doing sermons on the devil are not the most fun. So we don't talk a lot about him, but when Satan comes up, I try to remind you guys that here's what's true, whether we're comfortable with this idea of an enemy or not, that Satan is real and he is against you. Satan is very much real and he is very much against you and your family and your children and your spouse and your friends. And he is constantly scheming on how to break up what God is doing. God is about the kingdom of God and inviting us to be in, participate in the building of the kingdom of God. Satan is about the tearing down of the kingdom of God. And anytime we get serious about building God's kingdom up, Satan gets serious about tearing us down. We're told that he prowls about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, that he is a liar and the father of lies, that his native tongue is lies. So we know that Satan is real and that he is against us. And the last thing Satan wants is for God's word to land on someone's life and take hold of it. So he's constantly trying to sweep those away. I don't have specific guesses for how Satan is active in our lives and in our world and in our communities. I don't have guesses for you there. But I do think that in the United States that Satan doesn't have to work very hard. I think he may have even set us on cruise control and gone and tended to other countries where the church is flourishing. Because I think that one of the greatest tools of Satan, I'm absolutely convinced of this, particularly in this generation, in this day and age, one of the greatest tools of Satan is simply distraction. He will just distract you. You stop at a red light. How many of you, don't raise your hand, how many of you, you can't just sit at a red light in peace. You reach down, you grab your phone, you start to do this. You can't just sit for 30 seconds. You're in the doctor's office, the wait is five minutes. You're picking something up to read or do. Because you look like a psychopath if you just stare at the wall. You've got to at least not intimidate other people even if you're not doing anything. But we are easily the most distracted, when I say generation, I mean historical generation, like people who are alive. I'm not talking about X's and millennials. I'm talking about everyone in the room, one generation of history. We are easily the most distracted generation in history. And I believe that that distraction is a tool of Satan to keep us from thinking about what actually matters, to keep seeds from germinating in our lives. We might be very moved by what happens in a service on a Sunday morning, and then as soon as we exit those doors, what do you want to do for lunch? What do you want to do about this? What do you want to do about this? We get into the car, whatever was playing on our phone that morning when we got to church, it starts to play again. And that begins to distract us. It takes our thought away. We've removed all time for contemplation. We've removed all time for stillness. There was one time, some of y'all will remember, I got so concerned about the distractions of the world and our need for stillness and silence that I tricked you guys. I didn't tell anybody. I brought you in here for a Sunday morning service. Emil knows what I'm talking about. Emil, our keyboardist, he remembers this. Me and him were laughing about it because I tricked everyone. And then we did a silent service. I shut the lights down. We played soft music. I put words on the screen and I made you preach to yourself through God's word and I didn't say anything. And some of y'all were like, that was amazing. And others of you said, never do that to me again. You've got to tell us. That's not fair. We have so little space for silence and contemplation in our lives, and I believe that that's absolutely a trick of Satan to keep things from germinating that should take hold. So if you are a person who's constantly distracted, who's constantly looking, who's constantly watching, who's constantly listening, who has no stillness, who has no peace, there's always noise in your life, I just want you to think about whether or not that's a trick of the enemy to keep you from thinking about what you really need to think about and to keep God's word from germinating in your life in the ways that it needs to. The other reason I think Satan doesn't have to work very hard in our culture is that, and I don't want to get too existential here, but we are the result of Greek thought as a culture. We are materialistic. And when I say materialistic, I don't mean we're greedy and we want things, although we are greedy and we do want things, and we are materialistic in that way. But I mean materialistic in that in our culture, if you can't taste it, touch it, smell it, feel it, it's not real. We insist that everything makes sense to us. We have even reduced emotions to chemicals in our brains. And until we can understand how those chemicals interact, we refuse to believe that emotions actually exist. We think that we've fabricated everything. We have no space for wonder left in our culture. We have no space for the fanciful. We have no patience for not understanding. And I think it is to our detriment that when we walk outside, we can't see stars anymore because we live too close to the city. There's this great book. I'll just throw this out here. This is for only one person, and I don't know who, but maybe it's you. Write it down. Abraham Kuyper was the Dutch prime minister, I think, in about 1900. He was a Christian, and he was a scientist, and he wrote a book called Wisdom and Wonder about this, about the things that we should try to know and the things that we should be so glad that we don't know and wonder at. We've lost our childlike ability to wonder and to wonder. And when we insist that everything makes sense to us all the time, I think we become way overly reductive with our faith. Because if you're trying to shrink it to what you can understand, I don't need to finish that thought. It's very easy to have a quick emotional response to a sermon or to a song or to a discussion. It's very easy to feel that quick conviction. Churches even know how to do this. Sometimes there'll be a cue at the end of the sermon, and Aaron knows that at that cue, when I say this word, you come up and you start to play soft music behind me, and it's going to make what I say a lot more impactful, right? Like we know those little tricks. I try not to use them very much because I'm not good at them, and then I feel this undue pressure to actually say something that matters at the end, and I'd rather just coast it out. But we know how to have emotional responses to things, and oftentimes church does this. How many times have you left, because I say this all the time, you guys know that I say this all the time. There's no more important habit that anyone in their life can develop than, a lot of you can complete the sentence, than to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. How many of you have heard me preach a sermon on that and prayed at the end and said, God, I am reading my Bible every day, and you didn't make it a week? Multiple times, I bet, we've done that. How many times have I been convicted? I've had more day ones at the gym than anybody that's 44 ever. How many times do we hear things we should do, we receive conviction about it, and we go, yes, this is what I'm going to do, and then we flare out. That's the gospel landing on rocky soil. It flourishes, it shoots up quick. But it doesn't have any roots. And we don't tend it. And it gets crowded out. And we forget it. This is what happens. I've seen this over and over again. I don't mean to be too cynical. But I've seen people who come to church. They're new. They're coming from a different church. Or they're moving into town. Or they started to go to church again or whatever. And they come. they want to meet everybody. They meet everybody. They're such sweet people. They want to meet me. They want me to hear their story. I want to hear their story. They come to the very first Discover Grace that we have or the very first newcomers class that we have, and they sign up for all the things. They are on fire. I just know, I just know, this person's going to leave as easily as they came. There's other people who come and they sit back there and they're just kind of, who are these weirdos? What are they about? Sometimes their worship pastor stops singing and the rest of them just kind of keep doing it. What's going on? Is that pastor for real? Is he always like that? Yeah, yeah. And there's just slow germination. And then after about a year, they're like, maybe I'll help you hand out some bulletins. Great. Often that's signs of seed germinating and taking root because they're taking their time and there's deep soil there. I can remember going to camp when I was 17 and I came home absolutely on fire for God, camp high. And I told my dad, my life has changed. I'm going to make disciples. I'm giving my whole life to Christ. I'm doing all the things. Dad, I just, I can't wait to serve God. And my dad's response was, that's great, son. Be nice to your mom and your sister. Let it take root. Otherwise, I don't believe you. This happens to us, these flash-in-the-pan convictions. So my encouragement to you is if you're convicted about reading your Bible, don't tell anyone that you're going to do it every day. Just set your alarm. If you're convicted about praying with your spouse, don't tell her that you're going to pray with her every day. Just go grab her and say, can we pray? If you're convicted by God's word about something that you need to do or change, don't tell anybody. Just do it and let other people notice your conviction. But let's not be the flash in the pan faith that happens with this soil. The next one, 18 and 19. Still others, like seeds sown among thorns, hear the word, but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth, and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. This is a picture of a cluttered life, of a life that's not correctly prioritized. The seed of God's word lands in a place that's able to convict us, lands in a place where it's able to germinate. The problem is our soil is so riddled with weeds and other things that it has no space where it can grow and call its own. This is a life where we've over-prioritized career. We've over-prioritized physical health, physical fitness. We've over-prioritized sometimes even family or friends. Often it's a life where we've over-prioritized pleasure and rest. And God's word starts to germinate in our life, but as it does, it requires of us. It requires space. It requires energy. It requires effort. It needs to grow. It needs the resources and nutrients offered by the soil that we're following along with the parable and with the metaphor, it needs its resources, but we're taking the resources that are needed to allow God's word to grow in our life and to grow us, and we're allocating them to other things that are not as important. This is the description of a life that's not correctly prioritized. Yeah, I know that I should probably go to a women's group, but I've got work. I know that I should probably go to a women's group, but I'm already out three nights a week, and so I can't add another night. And so instead of thinking about what's taking us out the other three nights and going, that can't possibly be as important as the spiritual health and the seed within me that is germinating. That can't possibly be as important. So let me rearrange my schedule around allowing God to grow me. We just say, I can't do that right now. I'm not available for that. I'd like to go to small group, but I'm shy and I don't really feel comfortable doing that. So I'm not going to prioritize that. I know I need to get up early and read my Bible, but it's just, I'm so tired in the mornings and it doesn't occur to us. Okay, well, what were you doing last night? That's making you tired. How late were you up? How do you, how do you, how can you recalibrate? I'll just tell you this, this year, one of my, one of the things I've been doing this year is I try to get up every day at five. I just, I just feel like that's a healthy pattern for me. I try to get up every day at five. And at first it was really tough because I'm not getting tired until 1130 or 12 o'clock at night and I'm only getting four or five hours of sleep at night. But you know what started happening? My body changed. Now at like 845, I'm like, Jen, we gotta get in bed. I got one episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine in me and then I'm out. And now I wake up at 430 with no alarm. My body just changed. I said, okay, if this is what you're going to do, let's do this. So we come up with excuses to not follow through on the things that we're convicted about without thinking about how do I actually tend my soil to make space for God's Word to grow. This is what the author of Hebrews is talking about when he tells us that to run our race well, we should throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. The things that we have in our life that prevent God's word from growing and taking hold and taking root and radically changing us aren't always out and out sin. It's just things that we allocate energy to that is displaced. So I would challenge us this morning as we reflect on this soil, how much are you prioritizing your spiritual health and allowing God's word to grow in your life? And how much have you just allocated just a passive corner of your lot to it so that you can tend to everything else. Lastly is the good soil. Verse 20. Others, like seeds sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop, some 30, some 60, some 100 times what is sown. This is obviously what we want to be. This is obviously what we're hoping for when we share God's word with other people. But here's what's interesting to me about this good soil. In both the telling and in the explanation, Jesus makes sure to make that point, and it reproduces some 30, some 60, some even 100 times. I'm reminded of the parable of the talents, where the expectation of the master going out of town, who he gives the talents to his servants, is that they would produce more, that they would double what they're left behind. We are always expected to produce. The vine and the branches illustration in John chapter 15, abide in me and I in you. I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and you will bear much fruit. Here's the thing, is good soil always bears fruit. Good soil, where the seed is growing, where there is good healthy life, a good spiritual life will always, always, always bear fruit. We cannot both be flourishing and barren within the kingdom of God. Do you see? If we are growing and flourishing, if that seed has taken root, if we are becoming the people that God has created us to be because we are his workmanship created for good works, if we are doing that, then we will absolutely produce fruit without question. Now, what does fruit look like? That's an important thing to understand, and I think it's an important thing for us to have a communal definition of. To produce fruit, and there's a bunch of ways to explain this, but let's explain it this way. Let's understand it this way this morning. To produce fruit means to grow God's kingdom in breadth or depth. That's what it means. If you are producing fruit in the kingdom of God, God is using you to grow it in its breadth or depth. Grow it in its breadth, evangelism, telling other people about Jesus. If you have been producing fruit by growing God's kingdom in its breadth, then in your wake, in your past, in the last six months, three years, five years, there are people who would say, because this person is in my life, because Jim Price is in my life, I am closer to God than I was when I met him. It's a wake of people who do not know the Father or are far from Jesus who have moved closer to him because God has placed you in their life. It's growing the kingdom of God in breadth. And so I would ask you, Christians, are there people in your past, in the last six months, three years, five years, who would point to you and say, because you exist in my life, I moved from being very far from Jesus to much closer to him. If that's true, then God is using you to produce and to bear fruit. And then hopefully they do that and they do that and they do that. And that's how it gets to 30, 60, 100 fold. And when we produce fruit, we grow the kingdom in depth. We disciple other people. We help people along in their sanctification journey. We help people become deeper in their spiritual walk to take their faith more seriously. And this way you look at the wake of your life and there are people who are in your life who say, yeah, when I met Jeff Lemons, I knew Jesus, but because God placed him in my life, I now know him in a more deep and passionate way. I would never know Jesus as deeply as I do if I had not been friends with Linda Sartorius. When people start to say things like that about you, that means that you are producing fruit. So if we are going to be the good soil, we will bear fruit. It's not we must bear fruit. It's not that we have to try to bear fruit. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. All we have to do is try to follow Jesus. All we have to do is make ourselves receptive to God's word. He does the rest. We don't have to come up with some plan. He handles it. Which is why I'm so confident that a byproduct of walking with Jesus is producing fruit, growing God's kingdom in breadth and in depth. And that's what we should be doing. And I would say this, if you look at your life, I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad, but if you look, if you've been a Christian for three years, at least, and you look at the last three years of your life, and you ask yourself, who's closer to Jesus because God placed me in their life? Who have I had the honor and privilege of walking with as I watch them grow in their faith? If you can't point to anybody, there's a good chance that some of those other soils are happening in your life, that your priorities are crowding out God's word, that the schemes of Satan are actually working on you and keeping things from taking root. There's a good chance that the first three might apply to you. And that's for your soul to search. That's a question for you to answer. But here's how this applies to all of us. Because this is true that this parable, because this is true that this parable isn't just about the moment that we receive the news of the gospel, but it's about every moment that we receive the teachings of God's word. And it's ongoing for our whole life. We're different soils at different seasons because it continues to apply to us both as we share and as we receive. What should we do in light of this parable? What would Jesus have us do? I think it's this, keep spreading and keep tending. Christians, keep spreading God's word. Keep teaching God's word. Keep sharing God's word. Keep singing God's word. Keep inviting people into God's word. And keep tending. Keep tending your soil so that when you hear God's word, you can be receptive to it. To this end, this is not my point. This is a point that I heard another pastor named Alistair Beg make, and I thought it was fantastic. He didn't say it like this, but I am. Beware the spiritual atrophy of the informed. Church people, beware the spiritual atrophy of the informed. Here's what I mean. When you've been going to church long enough, when you've heard enough sermons, it doesn't take you but a minute or two to get into a sermon and figure out what the pastor's going to be talking about. You start a sermon, pastor says, open up John 15. You go, okay, we're doing Abiding in Christ this morning. Cool. Open up to 1 Samuel 17. Oh, good, we get to do David and Goliath, right? Open up to Philippians 3. Oh, I can do all things. Or 4. We know what it's going to be about. What I said this morning, we're going to be talking about the parable of the sower. A lot of us went, okay, I know what that one is. And what happens when we already know is that our knowledge inoculates us against truth. We're callous to it. I've heard that before. That's not for me. I actually know some people. I love them very much. They do not go to this church all the time. They have told me. They have told me that they don't go to church on Christmas and Easter because church is always really crowded on those holidays, and they already know those stories. They know what the message is going to be. The message is not for us. It's for the people who don't come very regularly, so we want to make sure that they have a parking space and that they have seats, which is an incredibly well-tuned argument of bullcrap. It's just a smoke screen for we don't want to deal with the crowds. That's all it is. That's all it is. But here's the sad part about that. How do we get to a place as Christians where we say, the message of the resurrection is not for me? The pastor, listen, I'm not complaining, okay? I'm not complaining, I'm not whining, but I know what it is to listen to sermons too. And I know that when I listen to sermons, you know what I want? Tell me something about this passage I don't know yet. Take a different angle. Ooh, I haven't seen it done that way before. We want something new. We want something shiny. We want something that we can chew on. We want something different. We don't want same. And in that way, our knowledge inoculates us from truth because we're not receptive to it anymore. May we Christians, longtime Christians, who already know where the sermon is going before it starts, may we be people who freshly open up our hearts to the truth of God's word so that it might take root in ways that it hasn't in years. And maybe, maybe, if we're not producing very much fruit, maybe it's because we're in spiritual atrophy because we know too much. And those of us who do, let us open our hearts in renewed ways to God's word that it might grow and produce a fruit 30, 60, and 100-fold. I'm going to pray, and we're going to move into a time of communion together. Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for the truth that is in it. Thank you, God, that its depths are unfathomable. Thank you that we can read the same book in your Bible two dozen times and have it mean something different and reach a different part of us every time. God, for those of us who have allowed our knowledge to inoculate us from your truth, would you please cure us of that? Would you please help us wonder again? Would you please help us be receptive to your word in fresh ways? God, for those of us who are distracted, for those of us who insist on making everything make sense, for those of us who have our priorities out of order. God, I pray that we would see those tendencies in ourself and that we would take very seriously tending our soil to prepare our hearts for your word. And God, here in this family of faith, would you build up healthy people who are flourishing in you and producing fruit beyond their wildest imaginations in whatever way you would have them do that in Jesus name amen

All right, well, good morning, everyone. It's so good to see you. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday. I kind of had a feeling that this Sunday would look like this. Last Sunday, people begged out because of the weather, and we have a pretty good every other week crowd. So if everyone didn't come last week, I thought, you know, we might have some folding chairs up this week. So it's good to see everybody. I hope that you had a good week. For those of you that were able to enjoy the snow, I hope that that was fun and a nice reprieve for you. This morning we continue in our series called Mark's Jesus, where we're going through the Gospel of Mark, just looking at different stories and aspects of the life of Christ that Mark records. This week, we get to probably the most famous parable that Jesus teaches. Parables are the way that Jesus chose to teach most of the time. And parables are short, made-up stories that are told to make a point. And stories stick with us better. They help us think through things. They tend to drive the point home a little bit better. I've told you before, in a previous life, I was a Bible teacher and an assistant high school football coach. And the head football coach was a guy named Coach McCready. He was a recon Marine in Vietnam. I love that man so much. And whenever I'd ask him a question about what to do in life, he'd go, baby. And he'd tell me a story. He called everybody baby or everybody sugar. So sugar, sit down. And he'd tell me a story about him and Nam and the way that he had to handle some troops sometime. Or he did about when he ran an envelope factory after that in the 70s. He'd tell me about a problem employee that he would have. And he would never answer my question. He would just tell me a story. And I'd be thinking like, this old man's crazy. Like he's just, he's lost it. He's not paying attention to me anymore. But by the time he got to the end of the story, I realized, oh, and I had some clarity about what I needed to do in a situation. And so Jesus taught in similar ways. He taught through telling stories. And part of this, he tells us, is so that you kind of have to work to understand it a little bit because some of the Pharisees, he says, are ever seeing, but never perceiving, never hearing, never understanding. And so he wanted to teach this way to make things more memorable, to help you along, and to make you work for it a little bit. Now, you may have your favorite parable. You may know a bunch of parables. One of my favorite parables is the one about the unforgiving servant, the servant that was forgiven a ton by the king, this huge debt, and then turns around and he won't forgive a much smaller debt to a peer, and he gets in trouble for that one. And there's different, there's the workers in the vineyard, there's the pearl of great price, there's a bunch of different parables. But this parable that we're going to look at today is actually kind of the apex parable in that Jesus tells it to help us understand how we are to process the rest of the parables and the rest of the teachings of Jesus. So rather than sum up the parable, I'm just going to read it to you. It's in Mark chapter 4. We're going to look first at verses 3 through 8. Then we're going to look at verse 14. Then we'll go 15 to 20. So we're going to do a lot of work in Mark chapter 4 today. So if you have a Bible or you can reach that one in front of you, grab that and let's go through it together. I always try to encourage you, bring your Bibles to church, mark them up, take notes. I've been told recently I'm starting to make up words. So you could keep a list of the words that I'm making up. Tom was right last week. I made up the paralyzation. Yeah, yeah, paralyzation. That's not a word. Paralysis will do fine. You don't have to say paralyzation. So you can keep a list of those if you want to. But bring your Bible, mark them up, and let's have a spiritual track record of where we're going and what we're learning. This morning in Mark chapter 4, Jesus shares with us the parable of the sower. And it goes like this in verse 3. Listen. and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among the thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew, and produced a crop, some multiplying 30, some 60, some 100 times. So when you hear this parable on the surface without any context, it is a little bit difficult to understand. Like, okay, great. There's a farmer, throws out some seed. There seems to be four different kinds of soils. Four different things happen on those four different kinds of soils. Only one of them's good. But what are you talking about, Jesus? With no context, it's a little bit tricky to understand. And so the following verses, 9 through 13, are the disciples saying, hey, what are you talking about? What do you mean by that? And when you read the Gospels carefully, you see the disciples doing this often. What is he talking about? Maybe they don't even ask each other or ask him because they don't have the guts to do it. But he leaves and Peter will be like, did anybody get that? And they're like, no, we have no idea. And then they just have to try to pick it up the next time. But in this particular instance, lucky for us, Jesus explains it. And we have access to this explanation. Now here's one of the things that's really interesting to me as I dug in and studied this parable this time around. Many, many, many, I'm not going to raise your hand because I don't want to embarrass people who don't raise their hand, but I would bet that most of you in this room have heard that parable before. Most of you in this room, if I say the parable of the sower, you can at least, before you walked in today, you could have at least gotten two out of those four soils right. You know what I'm talking about. And so if you're a church person, we tend to think that that seed that goes out is the gospel. That's us sharing our faith, going throughout the world and planting the gospel. And we tend to make this parable about what we should do to plant the gospel of Jesus Christ, what we should do to share the good news of Jesus Christ with our unbelieving friends, neighbors, and cultures. And when we do that, it makes it reductive. It makes the parable smaller than it's supposed to be, I think. Because we make it this one-time deal. We make it this one-time thing where we throw the seed out, and if you respond to the gospel, there's four different ways to respond to the gospel. Three of them are bad. One of them are good. I'm going to throw out this gospel seed and hope that it lands on the good soil, and then I'm going to keep moving on. But it doesn't apply to us anymore because I'm a Christian. And when the seed landed on me, lucky me, I was good soil, and now this plant springs forth, and I have a spiritual life. So this is good. The way that the parable of the sower applies to me is that it's my job to sow the seeds because we say that the seed is the gospel. But that's not what it says. And that's not what Jesus says. Look at verse 14. This will not be on the screen, but look at verse 14. This is Jesus explaining the parable. The farmer sows the word. The farmer sows the word. The seed is the word, not the gospel. It's the word of God, not the gospel of God. Now, is the gospel part of the word of God? Yes. But so is Ecclesiastes, and the gospel is not abundantly clear in Ecclesiastes. Is the gospel part of the word of God? Absolutely, but God's word is so much more expansive than simply the salvation message. Now, everything in scripture points to Christ in one way or another. There's a scarlet thread woven through all 66 books where you can go through any portion of scripture and show how that eventually is pointing you and leading you to Christ. That's the whole point of it. But when we say God's word is the gospel, we either expand the gospel to include every possible thing that God says, or we reduce the word to just the gospel. And that's not right either. So when Jesus says the farmer sows the word, what he means is the word of God. So for us, that's any teaching based on scripture, any song that we would sing that's based on scripture, any word that we have from Jesus, anything that comes from God's word, any words that come from God, when we hear those, when we are taught those, when we sing those, when we talk about those, when we discuss those, that's the word of God. And so what he's saying is, what Jesus is saying is, the farmer sows the word. And if that's true, and the seed lands more than one time on us, but it's not just when we receive the gospel, it's every time the word of God is spoken or preached or sung, then what we see in this parable is this. This parable shows us that we can be different soils in different seasons. This parable shows us that we can be different soils in different seasons. So for us long-time Christians who always hear the parable of the sower and think it's my job to spread the seed. I've already received the gospel. I'm good. You have received the gospel. But you are, hopefully as a Christian, regularly, daily, multiple times a day, through a quiet time, through prayer, through what we're listening to, through what we consume, through our discourse, hopefully multiple times a day, the seed of God's word is landing on our soil. And this is helpful because we are reminded that we can be different soils in different seasons. I heard one time somebody said that a good book is 50% content and 50% timing. That you can read one great book in one season of your life and it just doesn't hit right. And you can read it 10 years later and oh my gosh, this is the most amazing thing I've ever read. I suppose that works for movies and TV shows as well for you Neanderthals who don't read. But I think that that's true. And I think that that's true of different sermons. I know for me, there are sermons that I preached. I'll just be honest with you, okay? Haley Lee, she did our announcements last week, did a phenomenal job doing the announcements. She and I were talking before the service and she said, nobody's coming this week because it was just because the weather was miserable. And word had gotten out that she was hosting, and so people said, I'll mail this one in. And I said to her, and I meant this in all sincerity, I said, that's fine with me. This sermon is the worst one I've preached in like six weeks. She goes, what? And I go, yeah, I don't like it. It's not very good. Like I, it is, it's, it honors the text. It is what it is. But the last five I've preached, I've liked more than this one. And she was like, well, do your best. And I tried. And the wild part to me is, um, I'm almost eight years in now. It'll be, it'll be, uh, Easter will be my eighth anniversary. So I'm almost eight years in here. And after doing this for eight years, week in and week out, you know, there's some sermons that you preach. And the only people who say a word to you about them are the ones that happen to make the mistake of looking you in the eye in the lobby. And they kind of see it and they're like, good job. Like, right? And it's only because they saw you. They don't mean it, and I know you don't mean it. That's fine. But then there's others that people, like, pull you aside, and they want to talk about it, and yada, yada, yada. You can kind of tell based on the feedback. And after I preached this one last week, the feedback I got, I was like, oh, okay, God. That must have landed on good soil. That must have been something that people needed to hear. So it's sometimes you preach a sermon, and you think it's going to be great. I'm going to rip their faces off. I'm going to light them on fire. This is going to be fantastic. And people are like, yeah, good job. And then other times I'm like, God, I'm sorry for this one. I'll try better next time. And then he uses it. So different, different teachings, sometimes different songs, sometimes different conversations we have with godly people who love Jesusesus and we just talk about spiritual things hit differently at different times of life and i think that this is tremendously encouraging particularly for those of you with children their soil changes season to season what they reject at one age they may receive at another what the enemy snatches up at one point may actually have time to germinate at another. Those of you sharing your faith and sowing seeds with your coworkers and with family members and with friends and with loved ones, keep spreading it. There's different soils at different seasons, and it may catch them differently if it got rejected the first time. But I think it's tremendously helpful to approach this parable not as a depiction of what happens when we share the gospel. That's a limited understanding of it. But let's approach this parable as an explanation from Jesus himself of what happens when we receive teaching about God's word, when we hear the good news of God's word, and how we receive that and what happens when we do. Because in that way, it continues to apply to us until we enter into eternity. So let's look at the explanations of Christ of each of the soils and understand what they are and what they're doing and identify those things in our own seasons of our own lives. Let's look at Mark 4.15. He describes the first one. Some people are like seed along the path where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. Okay. So that's the first kind of soil. It's like seed that's thrown along the path, never even has a chance to get into any soil at all, lands on concrete, lands on hard ground, cannot germinate, and Satan comes by and he scoops it up and he knocks it away. Okay. So how do we understand this soil in our own life? Well, we don't talk a lot about Satan around here. I've found that doing sermons on the devil are not the most fun. So we don't talk a lot about him, but when Satan comes up, I try to remind you guys that here's what's true, whether we're comfortable with this idea of an enemy or not, that Satan is real and he is against you. Satan is very much real and he is very much against you and your family and your children and your spouse and your friends. And he is constantly scheming on how to break up what God is doing. God is about the kingdom of God and inviting us to be in, participate in the building of the kingdom of God. Satan is about the tearing down of the kingdom of God. And anytime we get serious about building God's kingdom up, Satan gets serious about tearing us down. We're told that he prowls about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, that he is a liar and the father of lies, that his native tongue is lies. So we know that Satan is real and that he is against us. And the last thing Satan wants is for God's word to land on someone's life and take hold of it. So he's constantly trying to sweep those away. I don't have specific guesses for how Satan is active in our lives and in our world and in our communities. I don't have guesses for you there. But I do think that in the United States that Satan doesn't have to work very hard. I think he may have even set us on cruise control and gone and tended to other countries where the church is flourishing. Because I think that one of the greatest tools of Satan, I'm absolutely convinced of this, particularly in this generation, in this day and age, one of the greatest tools of Satan is simply distraction. He will just distract you. You stop at a red light. How many of you, don't raise your hand, how many of you, you can't just sit at a red light in peace. You reach down, you grab your phone, you start to do this. You can't just sit for 30 seconds. You're in the doctor's office, the wait is five minutes. You're picking something up to read or do. Because you look like a psychopath if you just stare at the wall. You've got to at least not intimidate other people even if you're not doing anything. But we are easily the most distracted, when I say generation, I mean historical generation, like people who are alive. I'm not talking about X's and millennials. I'm talking about everyone in the room, one generation of history. We are easily the most distracted generation in history. And I believe that that distraction is a tool of Satan to keep us from thinking about what actually matters, to keep seeds from germinating in our lives. We might be very moved by what happens in a service on a Sunday morning, and then as soon as we exit those doors, what do you want to do for lunch? What do you want to do about this? What do you want to do about this? We get into the car, whatever was playing on our phone that morning when we got to church, it starts to play again. And that begins to distract us. It takes our thought away. We've removed all time for contemplation. We've removed all time for stillness. There was one time, some of y'all will remember, I got so concerned about the distractions of the world and our need for stillness and silence that I tricked you guys. I didn't tell anybody. I brought you in here for a Sunday morning service. Emil knows what I'm talking about. Emil, our keyboardist, he remembers this. Me and him were laughing about it because I tricked everyone. And then we did a silent service. I shut the lights down. We played soft music. I put words on the screen and I made you preach to yourself through God's word and I didn't say anything. And some of y'all were like, that was amazing. And others of you said, never do that to me again. You've got to tell us. That's not fair. We have so little space for silence and contemplation in our lives, and I believe that that's absolutely a trick of Satan to keep things from germinating that should take hold. So if you are a person who's constantly distracted, who's constantly looking, who's constantly watching, who's constantly listening, who has no stillness, who has no peace, there's always noise in your life, I just want you to think about whether or not that's a trick of the enemy to keep you from thinking about what you really need to think about and to keep God's word from germinating in your life in the ways that it needs to. The other reason I think Satan doesn't have to work very hard in our culture is that, and I don't want to get too existential here, but we are the result of Greek thought as a culture. We are materialistic. And when I say materialistic, I don't mean we're greedy and we want things, although we are greedy and we do want things, and we are materialistic in that way. But I mean materialistic in that in our culture, if you can't taste it, touch it, smell it, feel it, it's not real. We insist that everything makes sense to us. We have even reduced emotions to chemicals in our brains. And until we can understand how those chemicals interact, we refuse to believe that emotions actually exist. We think that we've fabricated everything. We have no space for wonder left in our culture. We have no space for the fanciful. We have no patience for not understanding. And I think it is to our detriment that when we walk outside, we can't see stars anymore because we live too close to the city. There's this great book. I'll just throw this out here. This is for only one person, and I don't know who, but maybe it's you. Write it down. Abraham Kuyper was the Dutch prime minister, I think, in about 1900. He was a Christian, and he was a scientist, and he wrote a book called Wisdom and Wonder about this, about the things that we should try to know and the things that we should be so glad that we don't know and wonder at. We've lost our childlike ability to wonder and to wonder. And when we insist that everything makes sense to us all the time, I think we become way overly reductive with our faith. Because if you're trying to shrink it to what you can understand, I don't need to finish that thought. It's very easy to have a quick emotional response to a sermon or to a song or to a discussion. It's very easy to feel that quick conviction. Churches even know how to do this. Sometimes there'll be a cue at the end of the sermon, and Aaron knows that at that cue, when I say this word, you come up and you start to play soft music behind me, and it's going to make what I say a lot more impactful, right? Like we know those little tricks. I try not to use them very much because I'm not good at them, and then I feel this undue pressure to actually say something that matters at the end, and I'd rather just coast it out. But we know how to have emotional responses to things, and oftentimes church does this. How many times have you left, because I say this all the time, you guys know that I say this all the time. There's no more important habit that anyone in their life can develop than, a lot of you can complete the sentence, than to wake up every day and spend time in God's Word and time in prayer. How many of you have heard me preach a sermon on that and prayed at the end and said, God, I am reading my Bible every day, and you didn't make it a week? Multiple times, I bet, we've done that. How many times have I been convicted? I've had more day ones at the gym than anybody that's 44 ever. How many times do we hear things we should do, we receive conviction about it, and we go, yes, this is what I'm going to do, and then we flare out. That's the gospel landing on rocky soil. It flourishes, it shoots up quick. But it doesn't have any roots. And we don't tend it. And it gets crowded out. And we forget it. This is what happens. I've seen this over and over again. I don't mean to be too cynical. But I've seen people who come to church. They're new. They're coming from a different church. Or they're moving into town. Or they started to go to church again or whatever. And they come. they want to meet everybody. They meet everybody. They're such sweet people. They want to meet me. They want me to hear their story. I want to hear their story. They come to the very first Discover Grace that we have or the very first newcomers class that we have, and they sign up for all the things. They are on fire. I just know, I just know, this person's going to leave as easily as they came. There's other people who come and they sit back there and they're just kind of, who are these weirdos? What are they about? Sometimes their worship pastor stops singing and the rest of them just kind of keep doing it. What's going on? Is that pastor for real? Is he always like that? Yeah, yeah. And there's just slow germination. And then after about a year, they're like, maybe I'll help you hand out some bulletins. Great. Often that's signs of seed germinating and taking root because they're taking their time and there's deep soil there. I can remember going to camp when I was 17 and I came home absolutely on fire for God, camp high. And I told my dad, my life has changed. I'm going to make disciples. I'm giving my whole life to Christ. I'm doing all the things. Dad, I just, I can't wait to serve God. And my dad's response was, that's great, son. Be nice to your mom and your sister. Let it take root. Otherwise, I don't believe you. This happens to us, these flash-in-the-pan convictions. So my encouragement to you is if you're convicted about reading your Bible, don't tell anyone that you're going to do it every day. Just set your alarm. If you're convicted about praying with your spouse, don't tell her that you're going to pray with her every day. Just go grab her and say, can we pray? If you're convicted by God's word about something that you need to do or change, don't tell anybody. Just do it and let other people notice your conviction. But let's not be the flash in the pan faith that happens with this soil. The next one, 18 and 19. Still others, like seeds sown among thorns, hear the word, but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth, and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. This is a picture of a cluttered life, of a life that's not correctly prioritized. The seed of God's word lands in a place that's able to convict us, lands in a place where it's able to germinate. The problem is our soil is so riddled with weeds and other things that it has no space where it can grow and call its own. This is a life where we've over-prioritized career. We've over-prioritized physical health, physical fitness. We've over-prioritized sometimes even family or friends. Often it's a life where we've over-prioritized pleasure and rest. And God's word starts to germinate in our life, but as it does, it requires of us. It requires space. It requires energy. It requires effort. It needs to grow. It needs the resources and nutrients offered by the soil that we're following along with the parable and with the metaphor, it needs its resources, but we're taking the resources that are needed to allow God's word to grow in our life and to grow us, and we're allocating them to other things that are not as important. This is the description of a life that's not correctly prioritized. Yeah, I know that I should probably go to a women's group, but I've got work. I know that I should probably go to a women's group, but I'm already out three nights a week, and so I can't add another night. And so instead of thinking about what's taking us out the other three nights and going, that can't possibly be as important as the spiritual health and the seed within me that is germinating. That can't possibly be as important. So let me rearrange my schedule around allowing God to grow me. We just say, I can't do that right now. I'm not available for that. I'd like to go to small group, but I'm shy and I don't really feel comfortable doing that. So I'm not going to prioritize that. I know I need to get up early and read my Bible, but it's just, I'm so tired in the mornings and it doesn't occur to us. Okay, well, what were you doing last night? That's making you tired. How late were you up? How do you, how do you, how can you recalibrate? I'll just tell you this, this year, one of my, one of the things I've been doing this year is I try to get up every day at five. I just, I just feel like that's a healthy pattern for me. I try to get up every day at five. And at first it was really tough because I'm not getting tired until 1130 or 12 o'clock at night and I'm only getting four or five hours of sleep at night. But you know what started happening? My body changed. Now at like 845, I'm like, Jen, we gotta get in bed. I got one episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine in me and then I'm out. And now I wake up at 430 with no alarm. My body just changed. I said, okay, if this is what you're going to do, let's do this. So we come up with excuses to not follow through on the things that we're convicted about without thinking about how do I actually tend my soil to make space for God's Word to grow. This is what the author of Hebrews is talking about when he tells us that to run our race well, we should throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. The things that we have in our life that prevent God's word from growing and taking hold and taking root and radically changing us aren't always out and out sin. It's just things that we allocate energy to that is displaced. So I would challenge us this morning as we reflect on this soil, how much are you prioritizing your spiritual health and allowing God's word to grow in your life? And how much have you just allocated just a passive corner of your lot to it so that you can tend to everything else. Lastly is the good soil. Verse 20. Others, like seeds sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop, some 30, some 60, some 100 times what is sown. This is obviously what we want to be. This is obviously what we're hoping for when we share God's word with other people. But here's what's interesting to me about this good soil. In both the telling and in the explanation, Jesus makes sure to make that point, and it reproduces some 30, some 60, some even 100 times. I'm reminded of the parable of the talents, where the expectation of the master going out of town, who he gives the talents to his servants, is that they would produce more, that they would double what they're left behind. We are always expected to produce. The vine and the branches illustration in John chapter 15, abide in me and I in you. I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and you will bear much fruit. Here's the thing, is good soil always bears fruit. Good soil, where the seed is growing, where there is good healthy life, a good spiritual life will always, always, always bear fruit. We cannot both be flourishing and barren within the kingdom of God. Do you see? If we are growing and flourishing, if that seed has taken root, if we are becoming the people that God has created us to be because we are his workmanship created for good works, if we are doing that, then we will absolutely produce fruit without question. Now, what does fruit look like? That's an important thing to understand, and I think it's an important thing for us to have a communal definition of. To produce fruit, and there's a bunch of ways to explain this, but let's explain it this way. Let's understand it this way this morning. To produce fruit means to grow God's kingdom in breadth or depth. That's what it means. If you are producing fruit in the kingdom of God, God is using you to grow it in its breadth or depth. Grow it in its breadth, evangelism, telling other people about Jesus. If you have been producing fruit by growing God's kingdom in its breadth, then in your wake, in your past, in the last six months, three years, five years, there are people who would say, because this person is in my life, because Jim Price is in my life, I am closer to God than I was when I met him. It's a wake of people who do not know the Father or are far from Jesus who have moved closer to him because God has placed you in their life. It's growing the kingdom of God in breadth. And so I would ask you, Christians, are there people in your past, in the last six months, three years, five years, who would point to you and say, because you exist in my life, I moved from being very far from Jesus to much closer to him. If that's true, then God is using you to produce and to bear fruit. And then hopefully they do that and they do that and they do that. And that's how it gets to 30, 60, 100 fold. And when we produce fruit, we grow the kingdom in depth. We disciple other people. We help people along in their sanctification journey. We help people become deeper in their spiritual walk to take their faith more seriously. And this way you look at the wake of your life and there are people who are in your life who say, yeah, when I met Jeff Lemons, I knew Jesus, but because God placed him in my life, I now know him in a more deep and passionate way. I would never know Jesus as deeply as I do if I had not been friends with Linda Sartorius. When people start to say things like that about you, that means that you are producing fruit. So if we are going to be the good soil, we will bear fruit. It's not we must bear fruit. It's not that we have to try to bear fruit. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. All we have to do is try to follow Jesus. All we have to do is make ourselves receptive to God's word. He does the rest. We don't have to come up with some plan. He handles it. Which is why I'm so confident that a byproduct of walking with Jesus is producing fruit, growing God's kingdom in breadth and in depth. And that's what we should be doing. And I would say this, if you look at your life, I'm not trying to make anybody feel bad, but if you look, if you've been a Christian for three years, at least, and you look at the last three years of your life, and you ask yourself, who's closer to Jesus because God placed me in their life? Who have I had the honor and privilege of walking with as I watch them grow in their faith? If you can't point to anybody, there's a good chance that some of those other soils are happening in your life, that your priorities are crowding out God's word, that the schemes of Satan are actually working on you and keeping things from taking root. There's a good chance that the first three might apply to you. And that's for your soul to search. That's a question for you to answer. But here's how this applies to all of us. Because this is true that this parable, because this is true that this parable isn't just about the moment that we receive the news of the gospel, but it's about every moment that we receive the teachings of God's word. And it's ongoing for our whole life. We're different soils at different seasons because it continues to apply to us both as we share and as we receive. What should we do in light of this parable? What would Jesus have us do? I think it's this, keep spreading and keep tending. Christians, keep spreading God's word. Keep teaching God's word. Keep sharing God's word. Keep singing God's word. Keep inviting people into God's word. And keep tending. Keep tending your soil so that when you hear God's word, you can be receptive to it. To this end, this is not my point. This is a point that I heard another pastor named Alistair Beg make, and I thought it was fantastic. He didn't say it like this, but I am. Beware the spiritual atrophy of the informed. Church people, beware the spiritual atrophy of the informed. Here's what I mean. When you've been going to church long enough, when you've heard enough sermons, it doesn't take you but a minute or two to get into a sermon and figure out what the pastor's going to be talking about. You start a sermon, pastor says, open up John 15. You go, okay, we're doing Abiding in Christ this morning. Cool. Open up to 1 Samuel 17. Oh, good, we get to do David and Goliath, right? Open up to Philippians 3. Oh, I can do all things. Or 4. We know what it's going to be about. What I said this morning, we're going to be talking about the parable of the sower. A lot of us went, okay, I know what that one is. And what happens when we already know is that our knowledge inoculates us against truth. We're callous to it. I've heard that before. That's not for me. I actually know some people. I love them very much. They do not go to this church all the time. They have told me. They have told me that they don't go to church on Christmas and Easter because church is always really crowded on those holidays, and they already know those stories. They know what the message is going to be. The message is not for us. It's for the people who don't come very regularly, so we want to make sure that they have a parking space and that they have seats, which is an incredibly well-tuned argument of bullcrap. It's just a smoke screen for we don't want to deal with the crowds. That's all it is. That's all it is. But here's the sad part about that. How do we get to a place as Christians where we say, the message of the resurrection is not for me? The pastor, listen, I'm not complaining, okay? I'm not complaining, I'm not whining, but I know what it is to listen to sermons too. And I know that when I listen to sermons, you know what I want? Tell me something about this passage I don't know yet. Take a different angle. Ooh, I haven't seen it done that way before. We want something new. We want something shiny. We want something that we can chew on. We want something different. We don't want same. And in that way, our knowledge inoculates us from truth because we're not receptive to it anymore. May we Christians, longtime Christians, who already know where the sermon is going before it starts, may we be people who freshly open up our hearts to the truth of God's word so that it might take root in ways that it hasn't in years. And maybe, maybe, if we're not producing very much fruit, maybe it's because we're in spiritual atrophy because we know too much. And those of us who do, let us open our hearts in renewed ways to God's word that it might grow and produce a fruit 30, 60, and 100-fold. I'm going to pray, and we're going to move into a time of communion together. Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for the truth that is in it. Thank you, God, that its depths are unfathomable. Thank you that we can read the same book in your Bible two dozen times and have it mean something different and reach a different part of us every time. God, for those of us who have allowed our knowledge to inoculate us from your truth, would you please cure us of that? Would you please help us wonder again? Would you please help us be receptive to your word in fresh ways? God, for those of us who are distracted, for those of us who insist on making everything make sense, for those of us who have our priorities out of order. God, I pray that we would see those tendencies in ourself and that we would take very seriously tending our soil to prepare our hearts for your word. And God, here in this family of faith, would you build up healthy people who are flourishing in you and producing fruit beyond their wildest imaginations in whatever way you would have them do that in Jesus name amen

I was so caught up in worship and prayer that I forgot I was supposed to come up here while she was praying. Whoops. Hey guys, I'm Nate. I'm the normal pastor here. I'm just bad at stuff sometimes. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that in the lobby afterwards if you're up for it. Also, after the service today, we're having Discover Grace in the kids' room next door, which is an opportunity just to learn more about who we are, what we do, what makes us tick as a church. If you're new here or you've never done that and you'd like to, even if you haven't signed up for it, you're invited. We've got space for you and snacks for you. We'd love to see you over there. This morning, we are launching into our new series called The Blessed Life. I always have to double check what the title of the series is because I always tell Carly and Aaron, here's what I'm going to be talking about. In my head, I'm calling it this, but do whatever makes the most sense graphically and then just tell me what you've called it. And then I always call it the wrong thing and they always make fun of me. So this morning I looked, it's the blessed life. I see it there and that's what we're gonna go with. This is a look at the Beatitudes. Jesus's first recorded public address is the most famous sermon ever given. It's the greatest sermon ever given. As a matter of fact, a few years ago, we did a series called The Greatest Sermon, where we looked at the Sermon on the Mount. He begins the Sermon on the Mount with this series of blessings, nine blessings that we refer to as the Beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are Georgia Tech fans, for you understand suffering. Things like that. I went to the NC State game yesterday with Lily and watched Georgia Tech play NC State in regular season college basketball. And my biggest takeaway from going to my first NC State basketball game is, everybody just calm down, all right? Just take it easy. A, it's middle of the season. B, you're NC State. Like, nothing's going to happen. What are you going to do, win the regular season? Who cares? Just relax, people. Just get a Coke, watch the game, talk to your friends. I don't understand what all the noise is for. Anyways, and I'm wearing NC State colors, incidentally. Yeah, yeah. I don't know why I told you that. But we're getting into this series, The Blessed Life. And we're looking at these blessings that Jesus opens with. And I think it's so interesting and poignant and worth pointing out that for the very first time that Jesus addresses the public that we see, he meets them right where they are. He blesses them. He offers them comfort. And he basically says through his words, hey, I see you. I understand your struggles. But as we look at the Beatitudes, and it says blessed are these nine different groups of people, we've got to wonder what it means to be blessed. What is it to be blessed? What is it to be blessed by God? This is something that can be misconstrued in terrible ways, and we can warp our entire theology out of a pursuit of a misunderstood blessing. So when I've understood being blessed historically, normally I kind of think of it as a time in life when you receive unreasonable favor or unreasonable access, and you didn't earn it. Someone just gifts you with it, gifts you with their favor, gifts you with their access, gifts you with this special portion of joy that you would not have otherwise experienced. I kind of think, when I think of being blessed, I kind of think of the spring of 2013. I was on staff at a church called Greystone. I had a really good friend on staff who's still a good friend to this day, a guy named Heath Hollinsworth. And Heath and his family, they have tickets to the Masters and they go every year. Now in 2013, I was not a golf fan. I didn't really keep up with it. This is to my detriment. I missed all the good Tiger years focusing on Peyton Manning and football in general. But I missed some good years, and I wasn't really a huge golf fan at the time, but Heath, in late March, picked up the phone, and he said, hey, I've got some tickets to the Masters. I'm going to go Friday of the tournament. Do you want to come with me? And now, like I said, I wasn't a golf fan at the time, but I've always been a sports fan, and I knew enough about the Masters that if someone says, hey man, you want to go to the Masters with me? You immediately answer yes. Okay? Just life advice for all of you. If you've never heard of it before, if you don't know what it is, and someone says, would you like to go to the Masters with me? Yes, immediately I would. Cancel whatever you have. I'm getting married that day. Doesn't matter. Postpone it. Go to the Masters. You can get married any day, okay? You're not going to get invited back to the Masters again. And so I'm like, yeah, I'll go. And I said, dude, are you sure, though? I don't deserve this. We have friends who are going to be really angry when they find out that you invited me. They deserve to go. They've been watching. They love the Masters. They know the lore of Augusta National, the whole deal. I do not deserve this. He's like, no, I want you to go. I like taking people who have never been before, and I really want to see you just experience it with fresh eyes. I'm like, all right, cool. So we go, and for those of you who don't know what the Masters is, it really is the greatest sporting event on the planet that you can attend in person. It really is. Maybe Wimbledon, I would put up there as like maybe that's neck and neck, but going to Augusta National and experiencing what it is to be a patron, not a fan, is amazing. And if you've seen it on your TV, on CBS with Jim Nance's soft voice, hello friends, and the birds chirping in the background, whenever they start to play the promos in like February, I get all nostalgic in my living room. I'm like, oh man, this is going to be great. And it's a beautiful, beautiful course. I just spent so much money on making it look good. It looked so good that when I got there and I stepped onto the course, I literally had to bend down and touch the grass to make myself believe that it was real. It looked that good. And you walk around all the places and you see all the things. And holes 11, 12, and 13 are called Amen Corner. And when you see it, you understand why. And I'm telling you, it looks like walking around in a painting. It's just, it's unbelievable. And the whole day I'm thinking, I don't deserve this. This is as close to heaven on earth as it possibly gets. When we get to heaven, I'll be like, this feels like hole number eight. This makes sense. The front of Augusta National, there are pearly gates. Do you understand? It's an amazing place. And I couldn't believe that I got to go there. And ever since then, I've loved golf. I play golf. I thought for the rest of my life, I want this to be a part of what I get to experience. And it really did impact me in a great way. But when I think about being blessed, I think about opportunities like that where you're walking around and I'm realizing in every moment, I don't deserve this. I don't deserve to be here. This is amazing. But then I started to dig into what being blessed really means, because I think that we probably all think about blessing being that way. When we have some unearned favor in our life, and we go, gosh, I don't deserve this, but this is great. And there's a part of that that's absolutely true and absolutely is reflective of what it means to be blessed. But when you actually study the words that Jesus was using here, and if you've been a part of Grace for a while, you know I'm not like an in the Greek pastor. That's not really my deal because what that really means is on the Google because people don't know Greek. They just Google it and then they sound smart and be like, the original Greek word is this thing I read this week. But this time it's important because the word that Jesus chose to use there really means fully satisfied. So to be blessed is to be fully satisfied. It's not to experience undue favor, although that is a part of it. It's not to experience unearned access, although I'm sure that is a part of it as well. To be blessed, and this is really how we need to understand it as we move through the series. To be blessed, according to the words that Jesus himself chose, the best we know, means to be fully satisfied. And when you think about it that way, it's a hugely powerful concept. It's a hugely powerful concept that to be blessed means to be fully satisfied. I have a friend who we make fun of for this, but he is never satisfied. We can be having the most fun. I've got this group of eight friends that I've been friends with for over, some for as long as 35 years, some for 25 years. That's still the new guy in the group. And we go on trips, we talk every day. We do all kinds of stuff. And we've had a lot of fun together. We can be in a moment where we are having apex fun. We're at the golf course. We're goofing off. We're around a lake. We're on a boat. We're in Vegas. We're wherever we are. We're having apex fun in the middle of Wrigley Field. And my buddy, Trip, will look at us and he'll say, is there anything we can do to make this more fun? And we're like, no, shut up. Like this is, what you're doing right now is making it less fun. Just soak in the moment, man. This is great. But his mind is always going, is there anything that we could be doing that would make us more satisfied than we are right now? Like, no, man, just chill out. Just enjoy it. That's what being blessed is, is to realize in this moment, in this season, in this time, I don't need anything else to be completely satisfied, to be completely happy, to be completely fulfilled. And when you think about it that way, you see that God has blessed all of us tremendously no matter what season we're in. That more often than not, if we'll just stop and look around, what we'll see is that God has given us everything we need for happiness, for peace, for contentment, to really feel as though we're experiencing blessing. I'll have these moments with Jen where we're sitting in the house and the kids are being sweet. No one's whining. No one's complaining. She and I are joking back and forth. We're laughing at something that Lily or John are doing. Those are our kids. And I'll look at her and I'll just go, who's got it better than us? And she'll go, nobody. And I'm like, no, nobody. This is so happy. This is so great. There's nothing else that could be added to this moment to make me feel more blessed. I have all the things I need in life to experience your blessing. That's why Jordan jokingly pointed to me and said, hey, you love this song. I will build my life upon your love as a firm foundation. But I do, because it reminds me that the foundation of love that God gives us in our life is a foundation of everything that we need to feel blessed, to feel fully happy and fully content and fully satisfied. Our problem is we start to look outside of the blessings of God to experience a joy that we don't need to grasp for, and we just don't see ourselves doing that, which is why this first beatitude this morning might be so helpful for us in how we frame up our thinking around blessing and around what God provides for us. So now that we understand what it means to be blessed, I want us to look at this, the fourth promise. It's the fourth blessing of the nine that Jesus gives when he says this in Matthew 5, verse 6. By the way, if you want to read the Sermon on the Mount, you can find it in Matthew 5, 6, and 7. But it says this in verse 6, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, can mean some different things. In most New Testament contexts, what that means is right standing before God. But in this context, really what it means is, I believe, it's a placeholder for God himself. God bless you. I need the Spirit today. Would you fill me for this conversation? Blessed are those who literally hunger and thirst for righteousness, for God himself, for you will be satisfied. And this beatitude and this idea in scripture is always particularly challenging to me because I'm not one to read this and think to myself, oh yeah, that's me. That's me. When I read through the beatitudes, blessed are those who mourn. I can relate to that. That one's fine. But when I see blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. I don't read this and be like, I'm blessed because I hunger and thirst. I always feel challenged by that. Don't hunger enough for God. I'm not thirsty enough for his word. And I would bet that you feel similarly. This beatitude always reminds me of a psalm, Psalm 42, where David writes, as the deer, and I memorized this when I was young, which means I did it in the King's English, not the ESV, I did it in the KJV. As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longs for you, O God, the living God. And it just makes me wonder, have you ever pantethed? Have you ever just panted because you were just so thirsty? If I don't have a drink, I really might fall out right here because I have, and I'll tell you where. I was in Johannesburg, South Africa. And some of y'all, if you were around in the fall, you know that I had the opportunity to go to South Africa and that part of coming back was I had to make a difficult decision to leave my luggage behind in Johannesburg. That particular piece of luggage had my Crocs in there, and some of y'all know that those have kind of become a part of Grace's subculture. My toothpaste-colored Crocs have been on multiple continents. Jen was elated that those were over in Africa and will never be seen again. But the good African people sent me my bag. I fetched it at RDU and the Crocs live on, baby. So you may know that I went through a couple of tenuous days there where I really thought I'd lost something special. And then the Lord in his goodness brought them back to me. But you may not know why the bag was in Johannesburg. So that's what I'm going to tell you this morning. We go to catch the flight out of Cape Town. And as we get to the Cape Town airport, we're told that our flight is delayed and we're not going to get to Johannesburg at the time that we think we're going to get there. And so we start to do the math and we realize that the window is pretty small because the two flights are not associated with each other. We're flying from Cape Town to Johannesburg on some local South African airline, and then we're flying back on Delta. So they're not associated. So I'm going to have to land in Johannesburg, go to baggage claim, get my baggage, then go back through security and whatever else, and get on the plane and recheck my bag. And that takes a long time. And so we're looking at this window and we're like, we're barely going to make it. And then the flight gets delayed and then it gets delayed and then it gets delayed. And my buddy that I was traveling with looks at me and he's like, how much do you care about what's in that bag? And I said, I mean, it's just clothes. So I guess not very much. And he's like, because you can spend the night and get a new flight or you can make this flight, but you can't do both. And I'm like, I guess we'll just leave it. So it keeps getting tighter and tighter. We are going all over the Cape Town airport to every ticket booth that they have, asking if there's a flight, if we could get on it to get to Johannesburg 20 minutes sooner, because we're starting to worry that we're going to miss our flight back home too, and now we're going to be stuck in Africa for another day. There was talk of just bailing and flying to Amsterdam and spending a day there and then flying back and then telling our wives, like, it's just how the airlines worked out. But we didn't do that. But we're very, very stressed about whether or not we're going to be able to make it home. So we get on the flight and the flight attendant walks past me and I get her attention and I said, ma'am, this particular airline I knew from flying in, they just dismissed you row by row and they asked you not to even stand until you got dismissed, which is an incredibly un-American, non-aggressive way to exit a plane and I hated it because it takes forever, you know. But I know that we're in the middle of the plane. It's going to take a long time to get off this plane and we need every second. So I grabbed the flight attendant and I said, ma'am, could you, here's the situation, could you please help me and my buddy get off the flight first? And she said, what time is your flight? And I said, I'm making these times up, I don't know. I said 9.15 and she goes, we're supposed to land at 9.05. I said, yeah, it's going to be tight. And she goes, listen, you're probably not going to make your flight. And I said, I know, but we've got to try our best, right? She's like, yeah. So she goes, tell you what, will you write down your name and his name and the flight information that you're going to be catching, and I'm going to take it to the pilot. So I'm like, yeah, sure. Here you go. So I write down her name, flight information, the Delta flight, and she takes it up to the cockpit. I'm like, oh, we're getting serious now. So she comes back, and she kneels down next to me, and she's like, okay, listen, I don't want to give you false hope. You are not going to make this flight, but we're going to do everything we can. The pilot is going to radio the pilot of the Delta flight and let them know what's going on. And if they have an extra staff member, they can send that staff member to our gate. And if that staff member wants to help you, then they can try to get you through the airport quicker so that you can get to the Delta flight. But we can't guarantee that any of this is going to work. And I'm like, all right, works for us. So the flight lands, we get to the gate. She does not help us get to the front. So we just get up and walk to the front. And everyone's staring at the Americans like, what's the matter with you? We're like, I know, we're the worst. I get it. And we stand there. The door opens. There is an African angel standing in front of us named Masi. I will never forget this in my whole life. She looked like she was early 20s. She was like 6'2". And she goes, are you so and so and so and so? And we go, yes. And she goes, come, we must hurry. And I'm like, yeah, no kidding. So she takes off through the Johannesburg airport and she is wearing heels, those kinds of heels that the flight attendants wear that are like block heels. And she's taller than both of us. And she's just gliding through this airport. And we've got our bags, and we're stubby Americans who are out of shape, and we're like just fighting along, and I'm looking at my buddy. We're laughing. I'm like, I can't keep up. I need to jog. And he's like, I know, I can't. So we kind of break into this slow jog, and we're going through these back tunnels, and she's scanning things, and people are waving at us, and I'm seeing areas of the airport that I'm not supposed to see, and we're just weaving and going through this, and I'm like, this is amazing. I can't believe this is going to work out, and then we get to security, and security's like, we need your boarding pass, so he hands the phone to her. There's the boarding pass. They scan it in, and I'm like, I don't have a boarding pass. I tried to check in when we landed. It's too late. It will not let me check in. I don't have a boarding pass on my phone. And the lady at security is like, I can't let you through, sir. And I'm like, please, can you just let me through the ticket booth? I know it's right there. I can get a boarding pass. I have one, I promise. And so we're going back and forth. And eventually, a large man walks around the corner. And he looks at me in such a way that told me very clearly, this conversation's over. And I'm like, my buddy's already through. And I look at Masi, and I'm like, Masi, is there anything we can do? And I can see the hurt in her eyes. She hurts for me. And she's like, no. And I'm like, well, what if I give you my passport and my cell phone, and my buddy checks in for me at the gate and gets the boarding pass? Can someone bring that back to me? And she goes, that might work. And I'm like, all right. She goes, give me your phone. Gave her my phone, gave her my passport. They go checking through security. And it occurs to me. And I yell at my buddy, hey. He looks at me and I go, she has my cell phone and my passport. I have nothing. And I'm in a back hallway in the Johannesburg airport. Do not leave me. And he's like, I got you, man. Okay. Little detail about the guy I was traveling with. I had only talked to him like four times in my whole life prior to it. We both went on a whim. I don't even know if I can trust this guy. He takes off, but clearly I can't. So I'm sitting there for about 15 minutes. It's like the loneliest 15 minutes of my life. I'm going through, like, I've still got my wallet. I have an ID. I can go to the U.S. consulate. Maybe I can get some money wired to me. I'm not just totally stranded. As I'm sitting there, another dude comes walking around the corner, and he says, what's your name? And I tell him, and he goes, like that. And so I get up, and I'm going through security, and he literally grabs my bag, shoves my computer in it as I'm going through security, throws it to my chest, and goes, we must run, brother. And I'm like, okay. So we take off. I strap up. I've got my belt in my hand. I'm wearing pants that are intentionally too big because I've got a 19-hour flight. I don't need the belt tucking into my belly, you know? They're a little bit bigger than they need to be. And I'm running through the Johannesburg airport, and he is just gliding, and I am not. It is everything I can do to run behind this guy. And I'm trying to keep up. I'm trying to keep up. I start to huff and puff. I'm, like to keep my pants up and I'm holding my backpack together. And I realized that I might die right here. And I'm regretting every hamburger and every day that I haven't run and every poor choice that I've made for the last two years of my life that led me to this moment of my imminent death. And he keeps stopping and turning and like waiting for me to come around a corner. And I'm, you I'm just terrible, just clotting along. I'm breathing so heavily. We finally make it to the gate. I swear it was a half mile away. On my life, I swear there was the largest distance between the two there could possibly be. We get there. I'm huffing and puffing. I'm giving people stuff. I finally get onto the plane. I get onto the plane, and my buddy's drinking champagne already. He's just standing there. Oh, hey, welcome. I'm like, what in the world's going on here? He's been on the plane for 20 minutes, I guess. First class sees me. They've kind of been alerted to the story. So they kind of like, hey, the dummy's here. And then I go and I sit in my chair and one of the flight attendants brings me this thimble of water, right? I'm huffing and puffing. I can barely breathe. I'm trying not to cough. She gives me a thimble of water. I said, you're going to need to bring me more than that. She goes, she brings me a bottle of water. I pound the bottle of water. Between that bottle of water and takeoff, I'm just trying not to cough. I can't catch my breath. I literally can't breathe. I'm sweating. I feel like the fattest oaf that everyone is staring at. And I'm just trying not to cough because I don't want to be the American that has COVID and is giving it to everyone. And all I could think about was how badly I needed water. And as soon as that plane took off, I went to the galley and just started pounding Dasanis, right? Until I couldn't drink anymore. I panteth. I was that thirsty. When is the last time you truly hungered and thirsted for righteousness? When is the last time you needed Jesus as badly as I needed water on that plane in Johannesburg that day? When is the last time someone gave you a little bit of God? You hear a Bible verse, sing a song. Somebody says something encouraging to you. You're scrolling through social media. Somebody posts something that you find spiritually nourishing. You have a small group or a church service or a good conversation. And it feels like that thimble of water they brought me. And you look at whoever gave it to you and you're like, you're going to have to give me more than this. That ain't enough. When's the last time you just took it all in as much as you could where you needed, geez, my soul longs for God. It pants for him like a deer pants for the water. When is the last time we wanted God that bad? Which is why this beatitude and verses like that always convict me. Because I rarely feel like I need God as bad as I needed water that day. And so my reaction to this beatitude from Jesus, my reaction to the psalm from David, is to just pray for a greater hunger, to pray for more thirst, to pray that I would want it more, that my soul would only be satisfied in Jesus, and to just kind of want it more. But as I thought about it this week, for me and for you, I realized something that I've never really thought about before. The body has ways of telling us when it's hungry and thirsty, right? Our body will let us know, hey, it's time to drink something. It's time to eat. Remember the last time my body told me I was hungry without me really realizing I was hungry. We were driving down the road. Jen and I were running errands, and it was getting a little bit into the early afternoon. I hadn't had lunch yet, and I hadn't had breakfast that day. And I hadn't really thought about it. I was just kind of focused on the things that we were doing, and I'm driving down the road, and all of a sudden, every restaurant looks good, right? I'm like, oh, I wish we could stop there. Could really go for whatever, marinara sauce. And then the one that got me, the one that I realized like, whoa, buddy, you're hungry, you've got a problem here, is when I saw Burger King. And I was like, I could go for a chicken sandwich. I mean, it's been a while, but they get long and flat and they kind of taste like salt. Give me some onion rings and some zesty sauce. I'll be a happy camper. And then I was like, whoa, buddy. You got an issue. There's something else going on here. You're real hungry. And I told Jen, I'm very hungry. Let's get home quick before I stop at a Burger King and make decisions I'm going to regret for a few days. Your body has ways of telling you that you're hungry, right? Sometimes it'll be the middle of the day and I'm just focused on what I've been doing and I'll start to get shaky and feel weak. That's my body saying, hey man, you're hungry. You need to eat something. Sometimes we get a headache in the middle of the day. Two or three o'clock in the afternoon, we get just a little dull headache. Maybe it's our body telling us we haven't had any caffeine. Maybe it's our body telling us, hey, you've had too much caffeine, you're dehydrated. You need to drink a little something. Our throat will get dry. It'll get scratchy. We just won't feel good. We won't feel energetic. We'll feel like we just need a little something. Our body has ways of telling us, hey, you're thirsty. You need to drink something. Hey, you're hungry. You need to eat something. And sometimes we misread the signals and we cover over them. Sometimes we're dehydrated, so we have a headache. And instead of doing what our body needs, instead of drinking water, because we have a headache, we'll take an ibuprofen, or we'll take an Aleve, and we'll make the symptom go away, but we haven't treated the problem, right? Or you hear those terrible stories of people who are lost at sea, and they're thirsty, and the only option they have is to drink the ocean water, so they drink the ocean water, but the salination in the water only makes them thirstier. And so they essentially drink themselves to death because they're drinking the wrong thing. Or we're hungry. And because we're so hungry, we lose our judgment and we eat whatever we eat, Burger King. We eat whatever we can get our hands on. And it's not really what our body needs and it's not really helping us, but it makes it go away in the moment so we can focus on other things. And at its worst, I think this is interesting. When we're starving, when we're experiencing literal famine, when our body hasn't had something to eat in such a long time, it will literally start to eat itself. It will literally start to harm itself. And in thinking about this, how God equipped our physical body with warning lights that tell us that we are hungry and we are thirsty, so did he equip our soul with the same thing. If you listen and you watch for it and you pay attention, your soul tells you when you are hungry and when you are thirsty for righteousness. We just have to learn to see the signs. If you're someone who struggles with anger, you're frustrated all the time about something. And that anger begins to leak out on the people that you love the most who are supposed to love you the most. And you're frustrated at your kids and you're frustrated at your wife and you're an ogre to be around and you're hard to keep pleased and you just think everybody around you is dumb all the time and if they could just get on your level, then life would be so much easier and you start, that anger starts to spill out on the people around you in such a way that the next morning you think to yourself, that's not who I want to be. That's not who I am. I see the way my kids cower from me. I see the way my wife or my husband tries to tiptoe around me and say just the right thing, and I don't want to make the people around me live in discomfort. What is my deal with anger? That's your soul telling you you need Jesus, that you're not living out the passage in James that says that everyone should be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to become angry because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. If you're revving, if you're redlining on anger in your life, if you're frustrated with everybody all the time, that's your soul telling you there's a check engine light going and it's saying you need Jesus, man. You need his peace and his patience and his grace in your life. You need to calm down. There's something going on in you, not everybody around you, that needs to push you closer to Jesus. If you're someone who struggles with anxiety, and I don't mean clinically diagnosed anxiety where there really is a chemical imbalance that needs to be corrected medicinally, but I mean someone who is just prone to worry. And you found yourself in a season of life where you constantly scan the horizon for the next thing to worry about, for the next thing to keep you up, for the next thing to Google, for the next lead to make you end up on WebMD. That's a warning light going on in your soul that's been calibrated to tell you, hey, you need Jesus. You've forgotten Philippians 4, 6, and 7 that says, be anxious for nothing but in everything with prayer be anxious about all the things that you were anxious about when you came in here. You don't have to let them keep you up. You don't have to let them drive your thoughts and chase you like shadows. Jesus offers you peace. That anxiety is your soul telling you that it hungers and thirsts for God. It's your soul telling you you need more of the Spirit and His peace and His presence. Those addictions that we develop, we develop an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. We have some pills that we've been prescribed, and we take them whether we need them or not. And sometimes we take them when we know we don't need them, we just want them. What can that be but your soul telling you, hey, things aren't right. You need more Jesus. You need more righteousness. And the thing is, we know it. We know we need something. We know it's not right. We know life isn't good. We know that we're not doing the right thing. But instead of listening to our soul and giving it what it needs, we do the same thing we do when we get a headache. And what we need is water, and instead we take ibuprofen. We can do the same thing with our souls, where the check engine light is going off, and it's going, hey man, you need Jesus. You need more God in your life. You need to pursue him. You need to experience the peace of the Spirit. And instead of doing that, we salve the wound with the wrong medicine. We pour another bourbon. Or we cut the grass again when it doesn't need to be cut. Or we indulge ourself. We just fall headlong into the hobby that doesn't matter because in the hobby we can escape life. If the thing you want, let me just say this, because I've walked through it and I know, if when you wake up in the morning, the thing you want most in your life is to escape your life, that's your soul saying, hey, you need Jesus. You've lost your way. You need to come back to me. What I want us to see this morning is that our souls were created to hunger and thirst for righteousness. You were made to desire God. You were made to long for him. You were made to need him. Things happen all the time in your life that ought to alert you to, oh my gosh, I need more Jesus. I'm hungry for him. I'm thirsty for him. But we've forgotten how to read those signs. And we're told this throughout scripture that our souls were made to hunger and thirst for righteousness, that our souls were made to hunger and thirst for God. I just have one example for you here, but there's myriad others. In Isaiah, he writes in chapter 26, my soul yearns for you in the night. My spirit within me earnestly seeks you, for when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness. We don't have to pray for more hunger and thirst for God. We have to pray that we would recognize it, that we would see it, that we would acknowledge it for what it is. I do not think that anybody came in this room not hungry enough for God, not thirsty enough for Jesus. I don't think anybody came here not wanting righteousness enough. I think we all came in here not realizing how badly we need it and what our souls are screaming to us. C.S. Lewis sums it up this way. I thought this was a very appropriate quote. He's a theologian and author from about the World War II period. He says, meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. I think you and I have warning lights that go off throughout our lives every day that remind us, hey, your soul was created for Jesus. Your soul was created to commune with God. And you're hungry, man. You're thirsty. You're famished. And the thing that's the hardest is when we don't recognize it for what it is, when we don't see those indicators for what they are, when we misread them and we misappropriate them, we end up handling them in some of the most damaging ways possible. We're drinking salt water, making it worse until we drink ourselves to death. At its worst, when we are most famished, the body begins to do things that harm itself just for the sake of what it believes will be survival. And really, your soul is just saying, hey, I'm in atrophy here. I have nothing. I need Jesus desperately. So my prayer and hope for you this morning is that rather than praying for a greater desire, let us learn to listen to the hunger pangs of our soul. When our soul is crying out for more Jesus, when our soul is crying out for God, and we're just drinking more salt water, we're just taking more medicine, we're just avoiding more signs, let us not pray in those moments, God, give me a greater hunger and thirst for you. No, he's given it to you. Let us pray that we see it and that our souls will only be satisfied in him. And when we hunger and thirst for righteousness, when we see what it is that our souls are telling us, what does God promise? You will be filled. What does it mean to be blessed? You will have all that you need to be fully satisfied. Let us be fully satisfied in our Jesus as we go. Let me pray for you. Father, we love you and are grateful for you. Lord, we need you. We acknowledge that you created in our very souls a hunger and thirst for you, and I pray that we would realize more and more that that can only be filled by you. I don't pray, God, that you would give us a greater desire for you, but we acknowledge that you have intrinsically written that onto our souls, and so I simply pray that we would acknowledge it, that we would see our longings for you as what they are, not salves or substances or substitutes, but that we would see the longing of our soul for exactly what it is, a longing for you. Let us run to you and seek you this morning. Let us run to you and seek you this week. Let us acknowledge that our souls do pant for you whether we realize it or not. And would you please fill us, satisfy us, bless us so that our souls will find rest in you. We ask these things in your son's name. Amen.

I was so caught up in worship and prayer that I forgot I was supposed to come up here while she was praying. Whoops. Hey guys, I'm Nate. I'm the normal pastor here. I'm just bad at stuff sometimes. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that in the lobby afterwards if you're up for it. Also, after the service today, we're having Discover Grace in the kids' room next door, which is an opportunity just to learn more about who we are, what we do, what makes us tick as a church. If you're new here or you've never done that and you'd like to, even if you haven't signed up for it, you're invited. We've got space for you and snacks for you. We'd love to see you over there. This morning, we are launching into our new series called The Blessed Life. I always have to double check what the title of the series is because I always tell Carly and Aaron, here's what I'm going to be talking about. In my head, I'm calling it this, but do whatever makes the most sense graphically and then just tell me what you've called it. And then I always call it the wrong thing and they always make fun of me. So this morning I looked, it's the blessed life. I see it there and that's what we're gonna go with. This is a look at the Beatitudes. Jesus's first recorded public address is the most famous sermon ever given. It's the greatest sermon ever given. As a matter of fact, a few years ago, we did a series called The Greatest Sermon, where we looked at the Sermon on the Mount. He begins the Sermon on the Mount with this series of blessings, nine blessings that we refer to as the Beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are Georgia Tech fans, for you understand suffering. Things like that. I went to the NC State game yesterday with Lily and watched Georgia Tech play NC State in regular season college basketball. And my biggest takeaway from going to my first NC State basketball game is, everybody just calm down, all right? Just take it easy. A, it's middle of the season. B, you're NC State. Like, nothing's going to happen. What are you going to do, win the regular season? Who cares? Just relax, people. Just get a Coke, watch the game, talk to your friends. I don't understand what all the noise is for. Anyways, and I'm wearing NC State colors, incidentally. Yeah, yeah. I don't know why I told you that. But we're getting into this series, The Blessed Life. And we're looking at these blessings that Jesus opens with. And I think it's so interesting and poignant and worth pointing out that for the very first time that Jesus addresses the public that we see, he meets them right where they are. He blesses them. He offers them comfort. And he basically says through his words, hey, I see you. I understand your struggles. But as we look at the Beatitudes, and it says blessed are these nine different groups of people, we've got to wonder what it means to be blessed. What is it to be blessed? What is it to be blessed by God? This is something that can be misconstrued in terrible ways, and we can warp our entire theology out of a pursuit of a misunderstood blessing. So when I've understood being blessed historically, normally I kind of think of it as a time in life when you receive unreasonable favor or unreasonable access, and you didn't earn it. Someone just gifts you with it, gifts you with their favor, gifts you with their access, gifts you with this special portion of joy that you would not have otherwise experienced. I kind of think, when I think of being blessed, I kind of think of the spring of 2013. I was on staff at a church called Greystone. I had a really good friend on staff who's still a good friend to this day, a guy named Heath Hollinsworth. And Heath and his family, they have tickets to the Masters and they go every year. Now in 2013, I was not a golf fan. I didn't really keep up with it. This is to my detriment. I missed all the good Tiger years focusing on Peyton Manning and football in general. But I missed some good years, and I wasn't really a huge golf fan at the time, but Heath, in late March, picked up the phone, and he said, hey, I've got some tickets to the Masters. I'm going to go Friday of the tournament. Do you want to come with me? And now, like I said, I wasn't a golf fan at the time, but I've always been a sports fan, and I knew enough about the Masters that if someone says, hey man, you want to go to the Masters with me? You immediately answer yes. Okay? Just life advice for all of you. If you've never heard of it before, if you don't know what it is, and someone says, would you like to go to the Masters with me? Yes, immediately I would. Cancel whatever you have. I'm getting married that day. Doesn't matter. Postpone it. Go to the Masters. You can get married any day, okay? You're not going to get invited back to the Masters again. And so I'm like, yeah, I'll go. And I said, dude, are you sure, though? I don't deserve this. We have friends who are going to be really angry when they find out that you invited me. They deserve to go. They've been watching. They love the Masters. They know the lore of Augusta National, the whole deal. I do not deserve this. He's like, no, I want you to go. I like taking people who have never been before, and I really want to see you just experience it with fresh eyes. I'm like, all right, cool. So we go, and for those of you who don't know what the Masters is, it really is the greatest sporting event on the planet that you can attend in person. It really is. Maybe Wimbledon, I would put up there as like maybe that's neck and neck, but going to Augusta National and experiencing what it is to be a patron, not a fan, is amazing. And if you've seen it on your TV, on CBS with Jim Nance's soft voice, hello friends, and the birds chirping in the background, whenever they start to play the promos in like February, I get all nostalgic in my living room. I'm like, oh man, this is going to be great. And it's a beautiful, beautiful course. I just spent so much money on making it look good. It looked so good that when I got there and I stepped onto the course, I literally had to bend down and touch the grass to make myself believe that it was real. It looked that good. And you walk around all the places and you see all the things. And holes 11, 12, and 13 are called Amen Corner. And when you see it, you understand why. And I'm telling you, it looks like walking around in a painting. It's just, it's unbelievable. And the whole day I'm thinking, I don't deserve this. This is as close to heaven on earth as it possibly gets. When we get to heaven, I'll be like, this feels like hole number eight. This makes sense. The front of Augusta National, there are pearly gates. Do you understand? It's an amazing place. And I couldn't believe that I got to go there. And ever since then, I've loved golf. I play golf. I thought for the rest of my life, I want this to be a part of what I get to experience. And it really did impact me in a great way. But when I think about being blessed, I think about opportunities like that where you're walking around and I'm realizing in every moment, I don't deserve this. I don't deserve to be here. This is amazing. But then I started to dig into what being blessed really means, because I think that we probably all think about blessing being that way. When we have some unearned favor in our life, and we go, gosh, I don't deserve this, but this is great. And there's a part of that that's absolutely true and absolutely is reflective of what it means to be blessed. But when you actually study the words that Jesus was using here, and if you've been a part of Grace for a while, you know I'm not like an in the Greek pastor. That's not really my deal because what that really means is on the Google because people don't know Greek. They just Google it and then they sound smart and be like, the original Greek word is this thing I read this week. But this time it's important because the word that Jesus chose to use there really means fully satisfied. So to be blessed is to be fully satisfied. It's not to experience undue favor, although that is a part of it. It's not to experience unearned access, although I'm sure that is a part of it as well. To be blessed, and this is really how we need to understand it as we move through the series. To be blessed, according to the words that Jesus himself chose, the best we know, means to be fully satisfied. And when you think about it that way, it's a hugely powerful concept. It's a hugely powerful concept that to be blessed means to be fully satisfied. I have a friend who we make fun of for this, but he is never satisfied. We can be having the most fun. I've got this group of eight friends that I've been friends with for over, some for as long as 35 years, some for 25 years. That's still the new guy in the group. And we go on trips, we talk every day. We do all kinds of stuff. And we've had a lot of fun together. We can be in a moment where we are having apex fun. We're at the golf course. We're goofing off. We're around a lake. We're on a boat. We're in Vegas. We're wherever we are. We're having apex fun in the middle of Wrigley Field. And my buddy, Trip, will look at us and he'll say, is there anything we can do to make this more fun? And we're like, no, shut up. Like this is, what you're doing right now is making it less fun. Just soak in the moment, man. This is great. But his mind is always going, is there anything that we could be doing that would make us more satisfied than we are right now? Like, no, man, just chill out. Just enjoy it. That's what being blessed is, is to realize in this moment, in this season, in this time, I don't need anything else to be completely satisfied, to be completely happy, to be completely fulfilled. And when you think about it that way, you see that God has blessed all of us tremendously no matter what season we're in. That more often than not, if we'll just stop and look around, what we'll see is that God has given us everything we need for happiness, for peace, for contentment, to really feel as though we're experiencing blessing. I'll have these moments with Jen where we're sitting in the house and the kids are being sweet. No one's whining. No one's complaining. She and I are joking back and forth. We're laughing at something that Lily or John are doing. Those are our kids. And I'll look at her and I'll just go, who's got it better than us? And she'll go, nobody. And I'm like, no, nobody. This is so happy. This is so great. There's nothing else that could be added to this moment to make me feel more blessed. I have all the things I need in life to experience your blessing. That's why Jordan jokingly pointed to me and said, hey, you love this song. I will build my life upon your love as a firm foundation. But I do, because it reminds me that the foundation of love that God gives us in our life is a foundation of everything that we need to feel blessed, to feel fully happy and fully content and fully satisfied. Our problem is we start to look outside of the blessings of God to experience a joy that we don't need to grasp for, and we just don't see ourselves doing that, which is why this first beatitude this morning might be so helpful for us in how we frame up our thinking around blessing and around what God provides for us. So now that we understand what it means to be blessed, I want us to look at this, the fourth promise. It's the fourth blessing of the nine that Jesus gives when he says this in Matthew 5, verse 6. By the way, if you want to read the Sermon on the Mount, you can find it in Matthew 5, 6, and 7. But it says this in verse 6, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, can mean some different things. In most New Testament contexts, what that means is right standing before God. But in this context, really what it means is, I believe, it's a placeholder for God himself. God bless you. I need the Spirit today. Would you fill me for this conversation? Blessed are those who literally hunger and thirst for righteousness, for God himself, for you will be satisfied. And this beatitude and this idea in scripture is always particularly challenging to me because I'm not one to read this and think to myself, oh yeah, that's me. That's me. When I read through the beatitudes, blessed are those who mourn. I can relate to that. That one's fine. But when I see blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. I don't read this and be like, I'm blessed because I hunger and thirst. I always feel challenged by that. Don't hunger enough for God. I'm not thirsty enough for his word. And I would bet that you feel similarly. This beatitude always reminds me of a psalm, Psalm 42, where David writes, as the deer, and I memorized this when I was young, which means I did it in the King's English, not the ESV, I did it in the KJV. As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longs for you, O God, the living God. And it just makes me wonder, have you ever pantethed? Have you ever just panted because you were just so thirsty? If I don't have a drink, I really might fall out right here because I have, and I'll tell you where. I was in Johannesburg, South Africa. And some of y'all, if you were around in the fall, you know that I had the opportunity to go to South Africa and that part of coming back was I had to make a difficult decision to leave my luggage behind in Johannesburg. That particular piece of luggage had my Crocs in there, and some of y'all know that those have kind of become a part of Grace's subculture. My toothpaste-colored Crocs have been on multiple continents. Jen was elated that those were over in Africa and will never be seen again. But the good African people sent me my bag. I fetched it at RDU and the Crocs live on, baby. So you may know that I went through a couple of tenuous days there where I really thought I'd lost something special. And then the Lord in his goodness brought them back to me. But you may not know why the bag was in Johannesburg. So that's what I'm going to tell you this morning. We go to catch the flight out of Cape Town. And as we get to the Cape Town airport, we're told that our flight is delayed and we're not going to get to Johannesburg at the time that we think we're going to get there. And so we start to do the math and we realize that the window is pretty small because the two flights are not associated with each other. We're flying from Cape Town to Johannesburg on some local South African airline, and then we're flying back on Delta. So they're not associated. So I'm going to have to land in Johannesburg, go to baggage claim, get my baggage, then go back through security and whatever else, and get on the plane and recheck my bag. And that takes a long time. And so we're looking at this window and we're like, we're barely going to make it. And then the flight gets delayed and then it gets delayed and then it gets delayed. And my buddy that I was traveling with looks at me and he's like, how much do you care about what's in that bag? And I said, I mean, it's just clothes. So I guess not very much. And he's like, because you can spend the night and get a new flight or you can make this flight, but you can't do both. And I'm like, I guess we'll just leave it. So it keeps getting tighter and tighter. We are going all over the Cape Town airport to every ticket booth that they have, asking if there's a flight, if we could get on it to get to Johannesburg 20 minutes sooner, because we're starting to worry that we're going to miss our flight back home too, and now we're going to be stuck in Africa for another day. There was talk of just bailing and flying to Amsterdam and spending a day there and then flying back and then telling our wives, like, it's just how the airlines worked out. But we didn't do that. But we're very, very stressed about whether or not we're going to be able to make it home. So we get on the flight and the flight attendant walks past me and I get her attention and I said, ma'am, this particular airline I knew from flying in, they just dismissed you row by row and they asked you not to even stand until you got dismissed, which is an incredibly un-American, non-aggressive way to exit a plane and I hated it because it takes forever, you know. But I know that we're in the middle of the plane. It's going to take a long time to get off this plane and we need every second. So I grabbed the flight attendant and I said, ma'am, could you, here's the situation, could you please help me and my buddy get off the flight first? And she said, what time is your flight? And I said, I'm making these times up, I don't know. I said 9.15 and she goes, we're supposed to land at 9.05. I said, yeah, it's going to be tight. And she goes, listen, you're probably not going to make your flight. And I said, I know, but we've got to try our best, right? She's like, yeah. So she goes, tell you what, will you write down your name and his name and the flight information that you're going to be catching, and I'm going to take it to the pilot. So I'm like, yeah, sure. Here you go. So I write down her name, flight information, the Delta flight, and she takes it up to the cockpit. I'm like, oh, we're getting serious now. So she comes back, and she kneels down next to me, and she's like, okay, listen, I don't want to give you false hope. You are not going to make this flight, but we're going to do everything we can. The pilot is going to radio the pilot of the Delta flight and let them know what's going on. And if they have an extra staff member, they can send that staff member to our gate. And if that staff member wants to help you, then they can try to get you through the airport quicker so that you can get to the Delta flight. But we can't guarantee that any of this is going to work. And I'm like, all right, works for us. So the flight lands, we get to the gate. She does not help us get to the front. So we just get up and walk to the front. And everyone's staring at the Americans like, what's the matter with you? We're like, I know, we're the worst. I get it. And we stand there. The door opens. There is an African angel standing in front of us named Masi. I will never forget this in my whole life. She looked like she was early 20s. She was like 6'2". And she goes, are you so and so and so and so? And we go, yes. And she goes, come, we must hurry. And I'm like, yeah, no kidding. So she takes off through the Johannesburg airport and she is wearing heels, those kinds of heels that the flight attendants wear that are like block heels. And she's taller than both of us. And she's just gliding through this airport. And we've got our bags, and we're stubby Americans who are out of shape, and we're like just fighting along, and I'm looking at my buddy. We're laughing. I'm like, I can't keep up. I need to jog. And he's like, I know, I can't. So we kind of break into this slow jog, and we're going through these back tunnels, and she's scanning things, and people are waving at us, and I'm seeing areas of the airport that I'm not supposed to see, and we're just weaving and going through this, and I'm like, this is amazing. I can't believe this is going to work out, and then we get to security, and security's like, we need your boarding pass, so he hands the phone to her. There's the boarding pass. They scan it in, and I'm like, I don't have a boarding pass. I tried to check in when we landed. It's too late. It will not let me check in. I don't have a boarding pass on my phone. And the lady at security is like, I can't let you through, sir. And I'm like, please, can you just let me through the ticket booth? I know it's right there. I can get a boarding pass. I have one, I promise. And so we're going back and forth. And eventually, a large man walks around the corner. And he looks at me in such a way that told me very clearly, this conversation's over. And I'm like, my buddy's already through. And I look at Masi, and I'm like, Masi, is there anything we can do? And I can see the hurt in her eyes. She hurts for me. And she's like, no. And I'm like, well, what if I give you my passport and my cell phone, and my buddy checks in for me at the gate and gets the boarding pass? Can someone bring that back to me? And she goes, that might work. And I'm like, all right. She goes, give me your phone. Gave her my phone, gave her my passport. They go checking through security. And it occurs to me. And I yell at my buddy, hey. He looks at me and I go, she has my cell phone and my passport. I have nothing. And I'm in a back hallway in the Johannesburg airport. Do not leave me. And he's like, I got you, man. Okay. Little detail about the guy I was traveling with. I had only talked to him like four times in my whole life prior to it. We both went on a whim. I don't even know if I can trust this guy. He takes off, but clearly I can't. So I'm sitting there for about 15 minutes. It's like the loneliest 15 minutes of my life. I'm going through, like, I've still got my wallet. I have an ID. I can go to the U.S. consulate. Maybe I can get some money wired to me. I'm not just totally stranded. As I'm sitting there, another dude comes walking around the corner, and he says, what's your name? And I tell him, and he goes, like that. And so I get up, and I'm going through security, and he literally grabs my bag, shoves my computer in it as I'm going through security, throws it to my chest, and goes, we must run, brother. And I'm like, okay. So we take off. I strap up. I've got my belt in my hand. I'm wearing pants that are intentionally too big because I've got a 19-hour flight. I don't need the belt tucking into my belly, you know? They're a little bit bigger than they need to be. And I'm running through the Johannesburg airport, and he is just gliding, and I am not. It is everything I can do to run behind this guy. And I'm trying to keep up. I'm trying to keep up. I start to huff and puff. I'm, like to keep my pants up and I'm holding my backpack together. And I realized that I might die right here. And I'm regretting every hamburger and every day that I haven't run and every poor choice that I've made for the last two years of my life that led me to this moment of my imminent death. And he keeps stopping and turning and like waiting for me to come around a corner. And I'm, you I'm just terrible, just clotting along. I'm breathing so heavily. We finally make it to the gate. I swear it was a half mile away. On my life, I swear there was the largest distance between the two there could possibly be. We get there. I'm huffing and puffing. I'm giving people stuff. I finally get onto the plane. I get onto the plane, and my buddy's drinking champagne already. He's just standing there. Oh, hey, welcome. I'm like, what in the world's going on here? He's been on the plane for 20 minutes, I guess. First class sees me. They've kind of been alerted to the story. So they kind of like, hey, the dummy's here. And then I go and I sit in my chair and one of the flight attendants brings me this thimble of water, right? I'm huffing and puffing. I can barely breathe. I'm trying not to cough. She gives me a thimble of water. I said, you're going to need to bring me more than that. She goes, she brings me a bottle of water. I pound the bottle of water. Between that bottle of water and takeoff, I'm just trying not to cough. I can't catch my breath. I literally can't breathe. I'm sweating. I feel like the fattest oaf that everyone is staring at. And I'm just trying not to cough because I don't want to be the American that has COVID and is giving it to everyone. And all I could think about was how badly I needed water. And as soon as that plane took off, I went to the galley and just started pounding Dasanis, right? Until I couldn't drink anymore. I panteth. I was that thirsty. When is the last time you truly hungered and thirsted for righteousness? When is the last time you needed Jesus as badly as I needed water on that plane in Johannesburg that day? When is the last time someone gave you a little bit of God? You hear a Bible verse, sing a song. Somebody says something encouraging to you. You're scrolling through social media. Somebody posts something that you find spiritually nourishing. You have a small group or a church service or a good conversation. And it feels like that thimble of water they brought me. And you look at whoever gave it to you and you're like, you're going to have to give me more than this. That ain't enough. When's the last time you just took it all in as much as you could where you needed, geez, my soul longs for God. It pants for him like a deer pants for the water. When is the last time we wanted God that bad? Which is why this beatitude and verses like that always convict me. Because I rarely feel like I need God as bad as I needed water that day. And so my reaction to this beatitude from Jesus, my reaction to the psalm from David, is to just pray for a greater hunger, to pray for more thirst, to pray that I would want it more, that my soul would only be satisfied in Jesus, and to just kind of want it more. But as I thought about it this week, for me and for you, I realized something that I've never really thought about before. The body has ways of telling us when it's hungry and thirsty, right? Our body will let us know, hey, it's time to drink something. It's time to eat. Remember the last time my body told me I was hungry without me really realizing I was hungry. We were driving down the road. Jen and I were running errands, and it was getting a little bit into the early afternoon. I hadn't had lunch yet, and I hadn't had breakfast that day. And I hadn't really thought about it. I was just kind of focused on the things that we were doing, and I'm driving down the road, and all of a sudden, every restaurant looks good, right? I'm like, oh, I wish we could stop there. Could really go for whatever, marinara sauce. And then the one that got me, the one that I realized like, whoa, buddy, you're hungry, you've got a problem here, is when I saw Burger King. And I was like, I could go for a chicken sandwich. I mean, it's been a while, but they get long and flat and they kind of taste like salt. Give me some onion rings and some zesty sauce. I'll be a happy camper. And then I was like, whoa, buddy. You got an issue. There's something else going on here. You're real hungry. And I told Jen, I'm very hungry. Let's get home quick before I stop at a Burger King and make decisions I'm going to regret for a few days. Your body has ways of telling you that you're hungry, right? Sometimes it'll be the middle of the day and I'm just focused on what I've been doing and I'll start to get shaky and feel weak. That's my body saying, hey man, you're hungry. You need to eat something. Sometimes we get a headache in the middle of the day. Two or three o'clock in the afternoon, we get just a little dull headache. Maybe it's our body telling us we haven't had any caffeine. Maybe it's our body telling us, hey, you've had too much caffeine, you're dehydrated. You need to drink a little something. Our throat will get dry. It'll get scratchy. We just won't feel good. We won't feel energetic. We'll feel like we just need a little something. Our body has ways of telling us, hey, you're thirsty. You need to drink something. Hey, you're hungry. You need to eat something. And sometimes we misread the signals and we cover over them. Sometimes we're dehydrated, so we have a headache. And instead of doing what our body needs, instead of drinking water, because we have a headache, we'll take an ibuprofen, or we'll take an Aleve, and we'll make the symptom go away, but we haven't treated the problem, right? Or you hear those terrible stories of people who are lost at sea, and they're thirsty, and the only option they have is to drink the ocean water, so they drink the ocean water, but the salination in the water only makes them thirstier. And so they essentially drink themselves to death because they're drinking the wrong thing. Or we're hungry. And because we're so hungry, we lose our judgment and we eat whatever we eat, Burger King. We eat whatever we can get our hands on. And it's not really what our body needs and it's not really helping us, but it makes it go away in the moment so we can focus on other things. And at its worst, I think this is interesting. When we're starving, when we're experiencing literal famine, when our body hasn't had something to eat in such a long time, it will literally start to eat itself. It will literally start to harm itself. And in thinking about this, how God equipped our physical body with warning lights that tell us that we are hungry and we are thirsty, so did he equip our soul with the same thing. If you listen and you watch for it and you pay attention, your soul tells you when you are hungry and when you are thirsty for righteousness. We just have to learn to see the signs. If you're someone who struggles with anger, you're frustrated all the time about something. And that anger begins to leak out on the people that you love the most who are supposed to love you the most. And you're frustrated at your kids and you're frustrated at your wife and you're an ogre to be around and you're hard to keep pleased and you just think everybody around you is dumb all the time and if they could just get on your level, then life would be so much easier and you start, that anger starts to spill out on the people around you in such a way that the next morning you think to yourself, that's not who I want to be. That's not who I am. I see the way my kids cower from me. I see the way my wife or my husband tries to tiptoe around me and say just the right thing, and I don't want to make the people around me live in discomfort. What is my deal with anger? That's your soul telling you you need Jesus, that you're not living out the passage in James that says that everyone should be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to become angry because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. If you're revving, if you're redlining on anger in your life, if you're frustrated with everybody all the time, that's your soul telling you there's a check engine light going and it's saying you need Jesus, man. You need his peace and his patience and his grace in your life. You need to calm down. There's something going on in you, not everybody around you, that needs to push you closer to Jesus. If you're someone who struggles with anxiety, and I don't mean clinically diagnosed anxiety where there really is a chemical imbalance that needs to be corrected medicinally, but I mean someone who is just prone to worry. And you found yourself in a season of life where you constantly scan the horizon for the next thing to worry about, for the next thing to keep you up, for the next thing to Google, for the next lead to make you end up on WebMD. That's a warning light going on in your soul that's been calibrated to tell you, hey, you need Jesus. You've forgotten Philippians 4, 6, and 7 that says, be anxious for nothing but in everything with prayer be anxious about all the things that you were anxious about when you came in here. You don't have to let them keep you up. You don't have to let them drive your thoughts and chase you like shadows. Jesus offers you peace. That anxiety is your soul telling you that it hungers and thirsts for God. It's your soul telling you you need more of the Spirit and His peace and His presence. Those addictions that we develop, we develop an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. We have some pills that we've been prescribed, and we take them whether we need them or not. And sometimes we take them when we know we don't need them, we just want them. What can that be but your soul telling you, hey, things aren't right. You need more Jesus. You need more righteousness. And the thing is, we know it. We know we need something. We know it's not right. We know life isn't good. We know that we're not doing the right thing. But instead of listening to our soul and giving it what it needs, we do the same thing we do when we get a headache. And what we need is water, and instead we take ibuprofen. We can do the same thing with our souls, where the check engine light is going off, and it's going, hey man, you need Jesus. You need more God in your life. You need to pursue him. You need to experience the peace of the Spirit. And instead of doing that, we salve the wound with the wrong medicine. We pour another bourbon. Or we cut the grass again when it doesn't need to be cut. Or we indulge ourself. We just fall headlong into the hobby that doesn't matter because in the hobby we can escape life. If the thing you want, let me just say this, because I've walked through it and I know, if when you wake up in the morning, the thing you want most in your life is to escape your life, that's your soul saying, hey, you need Jesus. You've lost your way. You need to come back to me. What I want us to see this morning is that our souls were created to hunger and thirst for righteousness. You were made to desire God. You were made to long for him. You were made to need him. Things happen all the time in your life that ought to alert you to, oh my gosh, I need more Jesus. I'm hungry for him. I'm thirsty for him. But we've forgotten how to read those signs. And we're told this throughout scripture that our souls were made to hunger and thirst for righteousness, that our souls were made to hunger and thirst for God. I just have one example for you here, but there's myriad others. In Isaiah, he writes in chapter 26, my soul yearns for you in the night. My spirit within me earnestly seeks you, for when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness. We don't have to pray for more hunger and thirst for God. We have to pray that we would recognize it, that we would see it, that we would acknowledge it for what it is. I do not think that anybody came in this room not hungry enough for God, not thirsty enough for Jesus. I don't think anybody came here not wanting righteousness enough. I think we all came in here not realizing how badly we need it and what our souls are screaming to us. C.S. Lewis sums it up this way. I thought this was a very appropriate quote. He's a theologian and author from about the World War II period. He says, meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. I think you and I have warning lights that go off throughout our lives every day that remind us, hey, your soul was created for Jesus. Your soul was created to commune with God. And you're hungry, man. You're thirsty. You're famished. And the thing that's the hardest is when we don't recognize it for what it is, when we don't see those indicators for what they are, when we misread them and we misappropriate them, we end up handling them in some of the most damaging ways possible. We're drinking salt water, making it worse until we drink ourselves to death. At its worst, when we are most famished, the body begins to do things that harm itself just for the sake of what it believes will be survival. And really, your soul is just saying, hey, I'm in atrophy here. I have nothing. I need Jesus desperately. So my prayer and hope for you this morning is that rather than praying for a greater desire, let us learn to listen to the hunger pangs of our soul. When our soul is crying out for more Jesus, when our soul is crying out for God, and we're just drinking more salt water, we're just taking more medicine, we're just avoiding more signs, let us not pray in those moments, God, give me a greater hunger and thirst for you. No, he's given it to you. Let us pray that we see it and that our souls will only be satisfied in him. And when we hunger and thirst for righteousness, when we see what it is that our souls are telling us, what does God promise? You will be filled. What does it mean to be blessed? You will have all that you need to be fully satisfied. Let us be fully satisfied in our Jesus as we go. Let me pray for you. Father, we love you and are grateful for you. Lord, we need you. We acknowledge that you created in our very souls a hunger and thirst for you, and I pray that we would realize more and more that that can only be filled by you. I don't pray, God, that you would give us a greater desire for you, but we acknowledge that you have intrinsically written that onto our souls, and so I simply pray that we would acknowledge it, that we would see our longings for you as what they are, not salves or substances or substitutes, but that we would see the longing of our soul for exactly what it is, a longing for you. Let us run to you and seek you this morning. Let us run to you and seek you this week. Let us acknowledge that our souls do pant for you whether we realize it or not. And would you please fill us, satisfy us, bless us so that our souls will find rest in you. We ask these things in your son's name. Amen.

I was so caught up in worship and prayer that I forgot I was supposed to come up here while she was praying. Whoops. Hey guys, I'm Nate. I'm the normal pastor here. I'm just bad at stuff sometimes. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that in the lobby afterwards if you're up for it. Also, after the service today, we're having Discover Grace in the kids' room next door, which is an opportunity just to learn more about who we are, what we do, what makes us tick as a church. If you're new here or you've never done that and you'd like to, even if you haven't signed up for it, you're invited. We've got space for you and snacks for you. We'd love to see you over there. This morning, we are launching into our new series called The Blessed Life. I always have to double check what the title of the series is because I always tell Carly and Aaron, here's what I'm going to be talking about. In my head, I'm calling it this, but do whatever makes the most sense graphically and then just tell me what you've called it. And then I always call it the wrong thing and they always make fun of me. So this morning I looked, it's the blessed life. I see it there and that's what we're gonna go with. This is a look at the Beatitudes. Jesus's first recorded public address is the most famous sermon ever given. It's the greatest sermon ever given. As a matter of fact, a few years ago, we did a series called The Greatest Sermon, where we looked at the Sermon on the Mount. He begins the Sermon on the Mount with this series of blessings, nine blessings that we refer to as the Beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are Georgia Tech fans, for you understand suffering. Things like that. I went to the NC State game yesterday with Lily and watched Georgia Tech play NC State in regular season college basketball. And my biggest takeaway from going to my first NC State basketball game is, everybody just calm down, all right? Just take it easy. A, it's middle of the season. B, you're NC State. Like, nothing's going to happen. What are you going to do, win the regular season? Who cares? Just relax, people. Just get a Coke, watch the game, talk to your friends. I don't understand what all the noise is for. Anyways, and I'm wearing NC State colors, incidentally. Yeah, yeah. I don't know why I told you that. But we're getting into this series, The Blessed Life. And we're looking at these blessings that Jesus opens with. And I think it's so interesting and poignant and worth pointing out that for the very first time that Jesus addresses the public that we see, he meets them right where they are. He blesses them. He offers them comfort. And he basically says through his words, hey, I see you. I understand your struggles. But as we look at the Beatitudes, and it says blessed are these nine different groups of people, we've got to wonder what it means to be blessed. What is it to be blessed? What is it to be blessed by God? This is something that can be misconstrued in terrible ways, and we can warp our entire theology out of a pursuit of a misunderstood blessing. So when I've understood being blessed historically, normally I kind of think of it as a time in life when you receive unreasonable favor or unreasonable access, and you didn't earn it. Someone just gifts you with it, gifts you with their favor, gifts you with their access, gifts you with this special portion of joy that you would not have otherwise experienced. I kind of think, when I think of being blessed, I kind of think of the spring of 2013. I was on staff at a church called Greystone. I had a really good friend on staff who's still a good friend to this day, a guy named Heath Hollinsworth. And Heath and his family, they have tickets to the Masters and they go every year. Now in 2013, I was not a golf fan. I didn't really keep up with it. This is to my detriment. I missed all the good Tiger years focusing on Peyton Manning and football in general. But I missed some good years, and I wasn't really a huge golf fan at the time, but Heath, in late March, picked up the phone, and he said, hey, I've got some tickets to the Masters. I'm going to go Friday of the tournament. Do you want to come with me? And now, like I said, I wasn't a golf fan at the time, but I've always been a sports fan, and I knew enough about the Masters that if someone says, hey man, you want to go to the Masters with me? You immediately answer yes. Okay? Just life advice for all of you. If you've never heard of it before, if you don't know what it is, and someone says, would you like to go to the Masters with me? Yes, immediately I would. Cancel whatever you have. I'm getting married that day. Doesn't matter. Postpone it. Go to the Masters. You can get married any day, okay? You're not going to get invited back to the Masters again. And so I'm like, yeah, I'll go. And I said, dude, are you sure, though? I don't deserve this. We have friends who are going to be really angry when they find out that you invited me. They deserve to go. They've been watching. They love the Masters. They know the lore of Augusta National, the whole deal. I do not deserve this. He's like, no, I want you to go. I like taking people who have never been before, and I really want to see you just experience it with fresh eyes. I'm like, all right, cool. So we go, and for those of you who don't know what the Masters is, it really is the greatest sporting event on the planet that you can attend in person. It really is. Maybe Wimbledon, I would put up there as like maybe that's neck and neck, but going to Augusta National and experiencing what it is to be a patron, not a fan, is amazing. And if you've seen it on your TV, on CBS with Jim Nance's soft voice, hello friends, and the birds chirping in the background, whenever they start to play the promos in like February, I get all nostalgic in my living room. I'm like, oh man, this is going to be great. And it's a beautiful, beautiful course. I just spent so much money on making it look good. It looked so good that when I got there and I stepped onto the course, I literally had to bend down and touch the grass to make myself believe that it was real. It looked that good. And you walk around all the places and you see all the things. And holes 11, 12, and 13 are called Amen Corner. And when you see it, you understand why. And I'm telling you, it looks like walking around in a painting. It's just, it's unbelievable. And the whole day I'm thinking, I don't deserve this. This is as close to heaven on earth as it possibly gets. When we get to heaven, I'll be like, this feels like hole number eight. This makes sense. The front of Augusta National, there are pearly gates. Do you understand? It's an amazing place. And I couldn't believe that I got to go there. And ever since then, I've loved golf. I play golf. I thought for the rest of my life, I want this to be a part of what I get to experience. And it really did impact me in a great way. But when I think about being blessed, I think about opportunities like that where you're walking around and I'm realizing in every moment, I don't deserve this. I don't deserve to be here. This is amazing. But then I started to dig into what being blessed really means, because I think that we probably all think about blessing being that way. When we have some unearned favor in our life, and we go, gosh, I don't deserve this, but this is great. And there's a part of that that's absolutely true and absolutely is reflective of what it means to be blessed. But when you actually study the words that Jesus was using here, and if you've been a part of Grace for a while, you know I'm not like an in the Greek pastor. That's not really my deal because what that really means is on the Google because people don't know Greek. They just Google it and then they sound smart and be like, the original Greek word is this thing I read this week. But this time it's important because the word that Jesus chose to use there really means fully satisfied. So to be blessed is to be fully satisfied. It's not to experience undue favor, although that is a part of it. It's not to experience unearned access, although I'm sure that is a part of it as well. To be blessed, and this is really how we need to understand it as we move through the series. To be blessed, according to the words that Jesus himself chose, the best we know, means to be fully satisfied. And when you think about it that way, it's a hugely powerful concept. It's a hugely powerful concept that to be blessed means to be fully satisfied. I have a friend who we make fun of for this, but he is never satisfied. We can be having the most fun. I've got this group of eight friends that I've been friends with for over, some for as long as 35 years, some for 25 years. That's still the new guy in the group. And we go on trips, we talk every day. We do all kinds of stuff. And we've had a lot of fun together. We can be in a moment where we are having apex fun. We're at the golf course. We're goofing off. We're around a lake. We're on a boat. We're in Vegas. We're wherever we are. We're having apex fun in the middle of Wrigley Field. And my buddy, Trip, will look at us and he'll say, is there anything we can do to make this more fun? And we're like, no, shut up. Like this is, what you're doing right now is making it less fun. Just soak in the moment, man. This is great. But his mind is always going, is there anything that we could be doing that would make us more satisfied than we are right now? Like, no, man, just chill out. Just enjoy it. That's what being blessed is, is to realize in this moment, in this season, in this time, I don't need anything else to be completely satisfied, to be completely happy, to be completely fulfilled. And when you think about it that way, you see that God has blessed all of us tremendously no matter what season we're in. That more often than not, if we'll just stop and look around, what we'll see is that God has given us everything we need for happiness, for peace, for contentment, to really feel as though we're experiencing blessing. I'll have these moments with Jen where we're sitting in the house and the kids are being sweet. No one's whining. No one's complaining. She and I are joking back and forth. We're laughing at something that Lily or John are doing. Those are our kids. And I'll look at her and I'll just go, who's got it better than us? And she'll go, nobody. And I'm like, no, nobody. This is so happy. This is so great. There's nothing else that could be added to this moment to make me feel more blessed. I have all the things I need in life to experience your blessing. That's why Jordan jokingly pointed to me and said, hey, you love this song. I will build my life upon your love as a firm foundation. But I do, because it reminds me that the foundation of love that God gives us in our life is a foundation of everything that we need to feel blessed, to feel fully happy and fully content and fully satisfied. Our problem is we start to look outside of the blessings of God to experience a joy that we don't need to grasp for, and we just don't see ourselves doing that, which is why this first beatitude this morning might be so helpful for us in how we frame up our thinking around blessing and around what God provides for us. So now that we understand what it means to be blessed, I want us to look at this, the fourth promise. It's the fourth blessing of the nine that Jesus gives when he says this in Matthew 5, verse 6. By the way, if you want to read the Sermon on the Mount, you can find it in Matthew 5, 6, and 7. But it says this in verse 6, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, can mean some different things. In most New Testament contexts, what that means is right standing before God. But in this context, really what it means is, I believe, it's a placeholder for God himself. God bless you. I need the Spirit today. Would you fill me for this conversation? Blessed are those who literally hunger and thirst for righteousness, for God himself, for you will be satisfied. And this beatitude and this idea in scripture is always particularly challenging to me because I'm not one to read this and think to myself, oh yeah, that's me. That's me. When I read through the beatitudes, blessed are those who mourn. I can relate to that. That one's fine. But when I see blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. I don't read this and be like, I'm blessed because I hunger and thirst. I always feel challenged by that. Don't hunger enough for God. I'm not thirsty enough for his word. And I would bet that you feel similarly. This beatitude always reminds me of a psalm, Psalm 42, where David writes, as the deer, and I memorized this when I was young, which means I did it in the King's English, not the ESV, I did it in the KJV. As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longs for you, O God, the living God. And it just makes me wonder, have you ever pantethed? Have you ever just panted because you were just so thirsty? If I don't have a drink, I really might fall out right here because I have, and I'll tell you where. I was in Johannesburg, South Africa. And some of y'all, if you were around in the fall, you know that I had the opportunity to go to South Africa and that part of coming back was I had to make a difficult decision to leave my luggage behind in Johannesburg. That particular piece of luggage had my Crocs in there, and some of y'all know that those have kind of become a part of Grace's subculture. My toothpaste-colored Crocs have been on multiple continents. Jen was elated that those were over in Africa and will never be seen again. But the good African people sent me my bag. I fetched it at RDU and the Crocs live on, baby. So you may know that I went through a couple of tenuous days there where I really thought I'd lost something special. And then the Lord in his goodness brought them back to me. But you may not know why the bag was in Johannesburg. So that's what I'm going to tell you this morning. We go to catch the flight out of Cape Town. And as we get to the Cape Town airport, we're told that our flight is delayed and we're not going to get to Johannesburg at the time that we think we're going to get there. And so we start to do the math and we realize that the window is pretty small because the two flights are not associated with each other. We're flying from Cape Town to Johannesburg on some local South African airline, and then we're flying back on Delta. So they're not associated. So I'm going to have to land in Johannesburg, go to baggage claim, get my baggage, then go back through security and whatever else, and get on the plane and recheck my bag. And that takes a long time. And so we're looking at this window and we're like, we're barely going to make it. And then the flight gets delayed and then it gets delayed and then it gets delayed. And my buddy that I was traveling with looks at me and he's like, how much do you care about what's in that bag? And I said, I mean, it's just clothes. So I guess not very much. And he's like, because you can spend the night and get a new flight or you can make this flight, but you can't do both. And I'm like, I guess we'll just leave it. So it keeps getting tighter and tighter. We are going all over the Cape Town airport to every ticket booth that they have, asking if there's a flight, if we could get on it to get to Johannesburg 20 minutes sooner, because we're starting to worry that we're going to miss our flight back home too, and now we're going to be stuck in Africa for another day. There was talk of just bailing and flying to Amsterdam and spending a day there and then flying back and then telling our wives, like, it's just how the airlines worked out. But we didn't do that. But we're very, very stressed about whether or not we're going to be able to make it home. So we get on the flight and the flight attendant walks past me and I get her attention and I said, ma'am, this particular airline I knew from flying in, they just dismissed you row by row and they asked you not to even stand until you got dismissed, which is an incredibly un-American, non-aggressive way to exit a plane and I hated it because it takes forever, you know. But I know that we're in the middle of the plane. It's going to take a long time to get off this plane and we need every second. So I grabbed the flight attendant and I said, ma'am, could you, here's the situation, could you please help me and my buddy get off the flight first? And she said, what time is your flight? And I said, I'm making these times up, I don't know. I said 9.15 and she goes, we're supposed to land at 9.05. I said, yeah, it's going to be tight. And she goes, listen, you're probably not going to make your flight. And I said, I know, but we've got to try our best, right? She's like, yeah. So she goes, tell you what, will you write down your name and his name and the flight information that you're going to be catching, and I'm going to take it to the pilot. So I'm like, yeah, sure. Here you go. So I write down her name, flight information, the Delta flight, and she takes it up to the cockpit. I'm like, oh, we're getting serious now. So she comes back, and she kneels down next to me, and she's like, okay, listen, I don't want to give you false hope. You are not going to make this flight, but we're going to do everything we can. The pilot is going to radio the pilot of the Delta flight and let them know what's going on. And if they have an extra staff member, they can send that staff member to our gate. And if that staff member wants to help you, then they can try to get you through the airport quicker so that you can get to the Delta flight. But we can't guarantee that any of this is going to work. And I'm like, all right, works for us. So the flight lands, we get to the gate. She does not help us get to the front. So we just get up and walk to the front. And everyone's staring at the Americans like, what's the matter with you? We're like, I know, we're the worst. I get it. And we stand there. The door opens. There is an African angel standing in front of us named Masi. I will never forget this in my whole life. She looked like she was early 20s. She was like 6'2". And she goes, are you so and so and so and so? And we go, yes. And she goes, come, we must hurry. And I'm like, yeah, no kidding. So she takes off through the Johannesburg airport and she is wearing heels, those kinds of heels that the flight attendants wear that are like block heels. And she's taller than both of us. And she's just gliding through this airport. And we've got our bags, and we're stubby Americans who are out of shape, and we're like just fighting along, and I'm looking at my buddy. We're laughing. I'm like, I can't keep up. I need to jog. And he's like, I know, I can't. So we kind of break into this slow jog, and we're going through these back tunnels, and she's scanning things, and people are waving at us, and I'm seeing areas of the airport that I'm not supposed to see, and we're just weaving and going through this, and I'm like, this is amazing. I can't believe this is going to work out, and then we get to security, and security's like, we need your boarding pass, so he hands the phone to her. There's the boarding pass. They scan it in, and I'm like, I don't have a boarding pass. I tried to check in when we landed. It's too late. It will not let me check in. I don't have a boarding pass on my phone. And the lady at security is like, I can't let you through, sir. And I'm like, please, can you just let me through the ticket booth? I know it's right there. I can get a boarding pass. I have one, I promise. And so we're going back and forth. And eventually, a large man walks around the corner. And he looks at me in such a way that told me very clearly, this conversation's over. And I'm like, my buddy's already through. And I look at Masi, and I'm like, Masi, is there anything we can do? And I can see the hurt in her eyes. She hurts for me. And she's like, no. And I'm like, well, what if I give you my passport and my cell phone, and my buddy checks in for me at the gate and gets the boarding pass? Can someone bring that back to me? And she goes, that might work. And I'm like, all right. She goes, give me your phone. Gave her my phone, gave her my passport. They go checking through security. And it occurs to me. And I yell at my buddy, hey. He looks at me and I go, she has my cell phone and my passport. I have nothing. And I'm in a back hallway in the Johannesburg airport. Do not leave me. And he's like, I got you, man. Okay. Little detail about the guy I was traveling with. I had only talked to him like four times in my whole life prior to it. We both went on a whim. I don't even know if I can trust this guy. He takes off, but clearly I can't. So I'm sitting there for about 15 minutes. It's like the loneliest 15 minutes of my life. I'm going through, like, I've still got my wallet. I have an ID. I can go to the U.S. consulate. Maybe I can get some money wired to me. I'm not just totally stranded. As I'm sitting there, another dude comes walking around the corner, and he says, what's your name? And I tell him, and he goes, like that. And so I get up, and I'm going through security, and he literally grabs my bag, shoves my computer in it as I'm going through security, throws it to my chest, and goes, we must run, brother. And I'm like, okay. So we take off. I strap up. I've got my belt in my hand. I'm wearing pants that are intentionally too big because I've got a 19-hour flight. I don't need the belt tucking into my belly, you know? They're a little bit bigger than they need to be. And I'm running through the Johannesburg airport, and he is just gliding, and I am not. It is everything I can do to run behind this guy. And I'm trying to keep up. I'm trying to keep up. I start to huff and puff. I'm, like to keep my pants up and I'm holding my backpack together. And I realized that I might die right here. And I'm regretting every hamburger and every day that I haven't run and every poor choice that I've made for the last two years of my life that led me to this moment of my imminent death. And he keeps stopping and turning and like waiting for me to come around a corner. And I'm, you I'm just terrible, just clotting along. I'm breathing so heavily. We finally make it to the gate. I swear it was a half mile away. On my life, I swear there was the largest distance between the two there could possibly be. We get there. I'm huffing and puffing. I'm giving people stuff. I finally get onto the plane. I get onto the plane, and my buddy's drinking champagne already. He's just standing there. Oh, hey, welcome. I'm like, what in the world's going on here? He's been on the plane for 20 minutes, I guess. First class sees me. They've kind of been alerted to the story. So they kind of like, hey, the dummy's here. And then I go and I sit in my chair and one of the flight attendants brings me this thimble of water, right? I'm huffing and puffing. I can barely breathe. I'm trying not to cough. She gives me a thimble of water. I said, you're going to need to bring me more than that. She goes, she brings me a bottle of water. I pound the bottle of water. Between that bottle of water and takeoff, I'm just trying not to cough. I can't catch my breath. I literally can't breathe. I'm sweating. I feel like the fattest oaf that everyone is staring at. And I'm just trying not to cough because I don't want to be the American that has COVID and is giving it to everyone. And all I could think about was how badly I needed water. And as soon as that plane took off, I went to the galley and just started pounding Dasanis, right? Until I couldn't drink anymore. I panteth. I was that thirsty. When is the last time you truly hungered and thirsted for righteousness? When is the last time you needed Jesus as badly as I needed water on that plane in Johannesburg that day? When is the last time someone gave you a little bit of God? You hear a Bible verse, sing a song. Somebody says something encouraging to you. You're scrolling through social media. Somebody posts something that you find spiritually nourishing. You have a small group or a church service or a good conversation. And it feels like that thimble of water they brought me. And you look at whoever gave it to you and you're like, you're going to have to give me more than this. That ain't enough. When's the last time you just took it all in as much as you could where you needed, geez, my soul longs for God. It pants for him like a deer pants for the water. When is the last time we wanted God that bad? Which is why this beatitude and verses like that always convict me. Because I rarely feel like I need God as bad as I needed water that day. And so my reaction to this beatitude from Jesus, my reaction to the psalm from David, is to just pray for a greater hunger, to pray for more thirst, to pray that I would want it more, that my soul would only be satisfied in Jesus, and to just kind of want it more. But as I thought about it this week, for me and for you, I realized something that I've never really thought about before. The body has ways of telling us when it's hungry and thirsty, right? Our body will let us know, hey, it's time to drink something. It's time to eat. Remember the last time my body told me I was hungry without me really realizing I was hungry. We were driving down the road. Jen and I were running errands, and it was getting a little bit into the early afternoon. I hadn't had lunch yet, and I hadn't had breakfast that day. And I hadn't really thought about it. I was just kind of focused on the things that we were doing, and I'm driving down the road, and all of a sudden, every restaurant looks good, right? I'm like, oh, I wish we could stop there. Could really go for whatever, marinara sauce. And then the one that got me, the one that I realized like, whoa, buddy, you're hungry, you've got a problem here, is when I saw Burger King. And I was like, I could go for a chicken sandwich. I mean, it's been a while, but they get long and flat and they kind of taste like salt. Give me some onion rings and some zesty sauce. I'll be a happy camper. And then I was like, whoa, buddy. You got an issue. There's something else going on here. You're real hungry. And I told Jen, I'm very hungry. Let's get home quick before I stop at a Burger King and make decisions I'm going to regret for a few days. Your body has ways of telling you that you're hungry, right? Sometimes it'll be the middle of the day and I'm just focused on what I've been doing and I'll start to get shaky and feel weak. That's my body saying, hey man, you're hungry. You need to eat something. Sometimes we get a headache in the middle of the day. Two or three o'clock in the afternoon, we get just a little dull headache. Maybe it's our body telling us we haven't had any caffeine. Maybe it's our body telling us, hey, you've had too much caffeine, you're dehydrated. You need to drink a little something. Our throat will get dry. It'll get scratchy. We just won't feel good. We won't feel energetic. We'll feel like we just need a little something. Our body has ways of telling us, hey, you're thirsty. You need to drink something. Hey, you're hungry. You need to eat something. And sometimes we misread the signals and we cover over them. Sometimes we're dehydrated, so we have a headache. And instead of doing what our body needs, instead of drinking water, because we have a headache, we'll take an ibuprofen, or we'll take an Aleve, and we'll make the symptom go away, but we haven't treated the problem, right? Or you hear those terrible stories of people who are lost at sea, and they're thirsty, and the only option they have is to drink the ocean water, so they drink the ocean water, but the salination in the water only makes them thirstier. And so they essentially drink themselves to death because they're drinking the wrong thing. Or we're hungry. And because we're so hungry, we lose our judgment and we eat whatever we eat, Burger King. We eat whatever we can get our hands on. And it's not really what our body needs and it's not really helping us, but it makes it go away in the moment so we can focus on other things. And at its worst, I think this is interesting. When we're starving, when we're experiencing literal famine, when our body hasn't had something to eat in such a long time, it will literally start to eat itself. It will literally start to harm itself. And in thinking about this, how God equipped our physical body with warning lights that tell us that we are hungry and we are thirsty, so did he equip our soul with the same thing. If you listen and you watch for it and you pay attention, your soul tells you when you are hungry and when you are thirsty for righteousness. We just have to learn to see the signs. If you're someone who struggles with anger, you're frustrated all the time about something. And that anger begins to leak out on the people that you love the most who are supposed to love you the most. And you're frustrated at your kids and you're frustrated at your wife and you're an ogre to be around and you're hard to keep pleased and you just think everybody around you is dumb all the time and if they could just get on your level, then life would be so much easier and you start, that anger starts to spill out on the people around you in such a way that the next morning you think to yourself, that's not who I want to be. That's not who I am. I see the way my kids cower from me. I see the way my wife or my husband tries to tiptoe around me and say just the right thing, and I don't want to make the people around me live in discomfort. What is my deal with anger? That's your soul telling you you need Jesus, that you're not living out the passage in James that says that everyone should be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to become angry because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. If you're revving, if you're redlining on anger in your life, if you're frustrated with everybody all the time, that's your soul telling you there's a check engine light going and it's saying you need Jesus, man. You need his peace and his patience and his grace in your life. You need to calm down. There's something going on in you, not everybody around you, that needs to push you closer to Jesus. If you're someone who struggles with anxiety, and I don't mean clinically diagnosed anxiety where there really is a chemical imbalance that needs to be corrected medicinally, but I mean someone who is just prone to worry. And you found yourself in a season of life where you constantly scan the horizon for the next thing to worry about, for the next thing to keep you up, for the next thing to Google, for the next lead to make you end up on WebMD. That's a warning light going on in your soul that's been calibrated to tell you, hey, you need Jesus. You've forgotten Philippians 4, 6, and 7 that says, be anxious for nothing but in everything with prayer be anxious about all the things that you were anxious about when you came in here. You don't have to let them keep you up. You don't have to let them drive your thoughts and chase you like shadows. Jesus offers you peace. That anxiety is your soul telling you that it hungers and thirsts for God. It's your soul telling you you need more of the Spirit and His peace and His presence. Those addictions that we develop, we develop an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. We have some pills that we've been prescribed, and we take them whether we need them or not. And sometimes we take them when we know we don't need them, we just want them. What can that be but your soul telling you, hey, things aren't right. You need more Jesus. You need more righteousness. And the thing is, we know it. We know we need something. We know it's not right. We know life isn't good. We know that we're not doing the right thing. But instead of listening to our soul and giving it what it needs, we do the same thing we do when we get a headache. And what we need is water, and instead we take ibuprofen. We can do the same thing with our souls, where the check engine light is going off, and it's going, hey man, you need Jesus. You need more God in your life. You need to pursue him. You need to experience the peace of the Spirit. And instead of doing that, we salve the wound with the wrong medicine. We pour another bourbon. Or we cut the grass again when it doesn't need to be cut. Or we indulge ourself. We just fall headlong into the hobby that doesn't matter because in the hobby we can escape life. If the thing you want, let me just say this, because I've walked through it and I know, if when you wake up in the morning, the thing you want most in your life is to escape your life, that's your soul saying, hey, you need Jesus. You've lost your way. You need to come back to me. What I want us to see this morning is that our souls were created to hunger and thirst for righteousness. You were made to desire God. You were made to long for him. You were made to need him. Things happen all the time in your life that ought to alert you to, oh my gosh, I need more Jesus. I'm hungry for him. I'm thirsty for him. But we've forgotten how to read those signs. And we're told this throughout scripture that our souls were made to hunger and thirst for righteousness, that our souls were made to hunger and thirst for God. I just have one example for you here, but there's myriad others. In Isaiah, he writes in chapter 26, my soul yearns for you in the night. My spirit within me earnestly seeks you, for when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness. We don't have to pray for more hunger and thirst for God. We have to pray that we would recognize it, that we would see it, that we would acknowledge it for what it is. I do not think that anybody came in this room not hungry enough for God, not thirsty enough for Jesus. I don't think anybody came here not wanting righteousness enough. I think we all came in here not realizing how badly we need it and what our souls are screaming to us. C.S. Lewis sums it up this way. I thought this was a very appropriate quote. He's a theologian and author from about the World War II period. He says, meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. I think you and I have warning lights that go off throughout our lives every day that remind us, hey, your soul was created for Jesus. Your soul was created to commune with God. And you're hungry, man. You're thirsty. You're famished. And the thing that's the hardest is when we don't recognize it for what it is, when we don't see those indicators for what they are, when we misread them and we misappropriate them, we end up handling them in some of the most damaging ways possible. We're drinking salt water, making it worse until we drink ourselves to death. At its worst, when we are most famished, the body begins to do things that harm itself just for the sake of what it believes will be survival. And really, your soul is just saying, hey, I'm in atrophy here. I have nothing. I need Jesus desperately. So my prayer and hope for you this morning is that rather than praying for a greater desire, let us learn to listen to the hunger pangs of our soul. When our soul is crying out for more Jesus, when our soul is crying out for God, and we're just drinking more salt water, we're just taking more medicine, we're just avoiding more signs, let us not pray in those moments, God, give me a greater hunger and thirst for you. No, he's given it to you. Let us pray that we see it and that our souls will only be satisfied in him. And when we hunger and thirst for righteousness, when we see what it is that our souls are telling us, what does God promise? You will be filled. What does it mean to be blessed? You will have all that you need to be fully satisfied. Let us be fully satisfied in our Jesus as we go. Let me pray for you. Father, we love you and are grateful for you. Lord, we need you. We acknowledge that you created in our very souls a hunger and thirst for you, and I pray that we would realize more and more that that can only be filled by you. I don't pray, God, that you would give us a greater desire for you, but we acknowledge that you have intrinsically written that onto our souls, and so I simply pray that we would acknowledge it, that we would see our longings for you as what they are, not salves or substances or substitutes, but that we would see the longing of our soul for exactly what it is, a longing for you. Let us run to you and seek you this morning. Let us run to you and seek you this week. Let us acknowledge that our souls do pant for you whether we realize it or not. And would you please fill us, satisfy us, bless us so that our souls will find rest in you. We ask these things in your son's name. Amen.

I was so caught up in worship and prayer that I forgot I was supposed to come up here while she was praying. Whoops. Hey guys, I'm Nate. I'm the normal pastor here. I'm just bad at stuff sometimes. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that in the lobby afterwards if you're up for it. Also, after the service today, we're having Discover Grace in the kids' room next door, which is an opportunity just to learn more about who we are, what we do, what makes us tick as a church. If you're new here or you've never done that and you'd like to, even if you haven't signed up for it, you're invited. We've got space for you and snacks for you. We'd love to see you over there. This morning, we are launching into our new series called The Blessed Life. I always have to double check what the title of the series is because I always tell Carly and Aaron, here's what I'm going to be talking about. In my head, I'm calling it this, but do whatever makes the most sense graphically and then just tell me what you've called it. And then I always call it the wrong thing and they always make fun of me. So this morning I looked, it's the blessed life. I see it there and that's what we're gonna go with. This is a look at the Beatitudes. Jesus's first recorded public address is the most famous sermon ever given. It's the greatest sermon ever given. As a matter of fact, a few years ago, we did a series called The Greatest Sermon, where we looked at the Sermon on the Mount. He begins the Sermon on the Mount with this series of blessings, nine blessings that we refer to as the Beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are Georgia Tech fans, for you understand suffering. Things like that. I went to the NC State game yesterday with Lily and watched Georgia Tech play NC State in regular season college basketball. And my biggest takeaway from going to my first NC State basketball game is, everybody just calm down, all right? Just take it easy. A, it's middle of the season. B, you're NC State. Like, nothing's going to happen. What are you going to do, win the regular season? Who cares? Just relax, people. Just get a Coke, watch the game, talk to your friends. I don't understand what all the noise is for. Anyways, and I'm wearing NC State colors, incidentally. Yeah, yeah. I don't know why I told you that. But we're getting into this series, The Blessed Life. And we're looking at these blessings that Jesus opens with. And I think it's so interesting and poignant and worth pointing out that for the very first time that Jesus addresses the public that we see, he meets them right where they are. He blesses them. He offers them comfort. And he basically says through his words, hey, I see you. I understand your struggles. But as we look at the Beatitudes, and it says blessed are these nine different groups of people, we've got to wonder what it means to be blessed. What is it to be blessed? What is it to be blessed by God? This is something that can be misconstrued in terrible ways, and we can warp our entire theology out of a pursuit of a misunderstood blessing. So when I've understood being blessed historically, normally I kind of think of it as a time in life when you receive unreasonable favor or unreasonable access, and you didn't earn it. Someone just gifts you with it, gifts you with their favor, gifts you with their access, gifts you with this special portion of joy that you would not have otherwise experienced. I kind of think, when I think of being blessed, I kind of think of the spring of 2013. I was on staff at a church called Greystone. I had a really good friend on staff who's still a good friend to this day, a guy named Heath Hollinsworth. And Heath and his family, they have tickets to the Masters and they go every year. Now in 2013, I was not a golf fan. I didn't really keep up with it. This is to my detriment. I missed all the good Tiger years focusing on Peyton Manning and football in general. But I missed some good years, and I wasn't really a huge golf fan at the time, but Heath, in late March, picked up the phone, and he said, hey, I've got some tickets to the Masters. I'm going to go Friday of the tournament. Do you want to come with me? And now, like I said, I wasn't a golf fan at the time, but I've always been a sports fan, and I knew enough about the Masters that if someone says, hey man, you want to go to the Masters with me? You immediately answer yes. Okay? Just life advice for all of you. If you've never heard of it before, if you don't know what it is, and someone says, would you like to go to the Masters with me? Yes, immediately I would. Cancel whatever you have. I'm getting married that day. Doesn't matter. Postpone it. Go to the Masters. You can get married any day, okay? You're not going to get invited back to the Masters again. And so I'm like, yeah, I'll go. And I said, dude, are you sure, though? I don't deserve this. We have friends who are going to be really angry when they find out that you invited me. They deserve to go. They've been watching. They love the Masters. They know the lore of Augusta National, the whole deal. I do not deserve this. He's like, no, I want you to go. I like taking people who have never been before, and I really want to see you just experience it with fresh eyes. I'm like, all right, cool. So we go, and for those of you who don't know what the Masters is, it really is the greatest sporting event on the planet that you can attend in person. It really is. Maybe Wimbledon, I would put up there as like maybe that's neck and neck, but going to Augusta National and experiencing what it is to be a patron, not a fan, is amazing. And if you've seen it on your TV, on CBS with Jim Nance's soft voice, hello friends, and the birds chirping in the background, whenever they start to play the promos in like February, I get all nostalgic in my living room. I'm like, oh man, this is going to be great. And it's a beautiful, beautiful course. I just spent so much money on making it look good. It looked so good that when I got there and I stepped onto the course, I literally had to bend down and touch the grass to make myself believe that it was real. It looked that good. And you walk around all the places and you see all the things. And holes 11, 12, and 13 are called Amen Corner. And when you see it, you understand why. And I'm telling you, it looks like walking around in a painting. It's just, it's unbelievable. And the whole day I'm thinking, I don't deserve this. This is as close to heaven on earth as it possibly gets. When we get to heaven, I'll be like, this feels like hole number eight. This makes sense. The front of Augusta National, there are pearly gates. Do you understand? It's an amazing place. And I couldn't believe that I got to go there. And ever since then, I've loved golf. I play golf. I thought for the rest of my life, I want this to be a part of what I get to experience. And it really did impact me in a great way. But when I think about being blessed, I think about opportunities like that where you're walking around and I'm realizing in every moment, I don't deserve this. I don't deserve to be here. This is amazing. But then I started to dig into what being blessed really means, because I think that we probably all think about blessing being that way. When we have some unearned favor in our life, and we go, gosh, I don't deserve this, but this is great. And there's a part of that that's absolutely true and absolutely is reflective of what it means to be blessed. But when you actually study the words that Jesus was using here, and if you've been a part of Grace for a while, you know I'm not like an in the Greek pastor. That's not really my deal because what that really means is on the Google because people don't know Greek. They just Google it and then they sound smart and be like, the original Greek word is this thing I read this week. But this time it's important because the word that Jesus chose to use there really means fully satisfied. So to be blessed is to be fully satisfied. It's not to experience undue favor, although that is a part of it. It's not to experience unearned access, although I'm sure that is a part of it as well. To be blessed, and this is really how we need to understand it as we move through the series. To be blessed, according to the words that Jesus himself chose, the best we know, means to be fully satisfied. And when you think about it that way, it's a hugely powerful concept. It's a hugely powerful concept that to be blessed means to be fully satisfied. I have a friend who we make fun of for this, but he is never satisfied. We can be having the most fun. I've got this group of eight friends that I've been friends with for over, some for as long as 35 years, some for 25 years. That's still the new guy in the group. And we go on trips, we talk every day. We do all kinds of stuff. And we've had a lot of fun together. We can be in a moment where we are having apex fun. We're at the golf course. We're goofing off. We're around a lake. We're on a boat. We're in Vegas. We're wherever we are. We're having apex fun in the middle of Wrigley Field. And my buddy, Trip, will look at us and he'll say, is there anything we can do to make this more fun? And we're like, no, shut up. Like this is, what you're doing right now is making it less fun. Just soak in the moment, man. This is great. But his mind is always going, is there anything that we could be doing that would make us more satisfied than we are right now? Like, no, man, just chill out. Just enjoy it. That's what being blessed is, is to realize in this moment, in this season, in this time, I don't need anything else to be completely satisfied, to be completely happy, to be completely fulfilled. And when you think about it that way, you see that God has blessed all of us tremendously no matter what season we're in. That more often than not, if we'll just stop and look around, what we'll see is that God has given us everything we need for happiness, for peace, for contentment, to really feel as though we're experiencing blessing. I'll have these moments with Jen where we're sitting in the house and the kids are being sweet. No one's whining. No one's complaining. She and I are joking back and forth. We're laughing at something that Lily or John are doing. Those are our kids. And I'll look at her and I'll just go, who's got it better than us? And she'll go, nobody. And I'm like, no, nobody. This is so happy. This is so great. There's nothing else that could be added to this moment to make me feel more blessed. I have all the things I need in life to experience your blessing. That's why Jordan jokingly pointed to me and said, hey, you love this song. I will build my life upon your love as a firm foundation. But I do, because it reminds me that the foundation of love that God gives us in our life is a foundation of everything that we need to feel blessed, to feel fully happy and fully content and fully satisfied. Our problem is we start to look outside of the blessings of God to experience a joy that we don't need to grasp for, and we just don't see ourselves doing that, which is why this first beatitude this morning might be so helpful for us in how we frame up our thinking around blessing and around what God provides for us. So now that we understand what it means to be blessed, I want us to look at this, the fourth promise. It's the fourth blessing of the nine that Jesus gives when he says this in Matthew 5, verse 6. By the way, if you want to read the Sermon on the Mount, you can find it in Matthew 5, 6, and 7. But it says this in verse 6, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, can mean some different things. In most New Testament contexts, what that means is right standing before God. But in this context, really what it means is, I believe, it's a placeholder for God himself. God bless you. I need the Spirit today. Would you fill me for this conversation? Blessed are those who literally hunger and thirst for righteousness, for God himself, for you will be satisfied. And this beatitude and this idea in scripture is always particularly challenging to me because I'm not one to read this and think to myself, oh yeah, that's me. That's me. When I read through the beatitudes, blessed are those who mourn. I can relate to that. That one's fine. But when I see blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. I don't read this and be like, I'm blessed because I hunger and thirst. I always feel challenged by that. Don't hunger enough for God. I'm not thirsty enough for his word. And I would bet that you feel similarly. This beatitude always reminds me of a psalm, Psalm 42, where David writes, as the deer, and I memorized this when I was young, which means I did it in the King's English, not the ESV, I did it in the KJV. As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longs for you, O God, the living God. And it just makes me wonder, have you ever pantethed? Have you ever just panted because you were just so thirsty? If I don't have a drink, I really might fall out right here because I have, and I'll tell you where. I was in Johannesburg, South Africa. And some of y'all, if you were around in the fall, you know that I had the opportunity to go to South Africa and that part of coming back was I had to make a difficult decision to leave my luggage behind in Johannesburg. That particular piece of luggage had my Crocs in there, and some of y'all know that those have kind of become a part of Grace's subculture. My toothpaste-colored Crocs have been on multiple continents. Jen was elated that those were over in Africa and will never be seen again. But the good African people sent me my bag. I fetched it at RDU and the Crocs live on, baby. So you may know that I went through a couple of tenuous days there where I really thought I'd lost something special. And then the Lord in his goodness brought them back to me. But you may not know why the bag was in Johannesburg. So that's what I'm going to tell you this morning. We go to catch the flight out of Cape Town. And as we get to the Cape Town airport, we're told that our flight is delayed and we're not going to get to Johannesburg at the time that we think we're going to get there. And so we start to do the math and we realize that the window is pretty small because the two flights are not associated with each other. We're flying from Cape Town to Johannesburg on some local South African airline, and then we're flying back on Delta. So they're not associated. So I'm going to have to land in Johannesburg, go to baggage claim, get my baggage, then go back through security and whatever else, and get on the plane and recheck my bag. And that takes a long time. And so we're looking at this window and we're like, we're barely going to make it. And then the flight gets delayed and then it gets delayed and then it gets delayed. And my buddy that I was traveling with looks at me and he's like, how much do you care about what's in that bag? And I said, I mean, it's just clothes. So I guess not very much. And he's like, because you can spend the night and get a new flight or you can make this flight, but you can't do both. And I'm like, I guess we'll just leave it. So it keeps getting tighter and tighter. We are going all over the Cape Town airport to every ticket booth that they have, asking if there's a flight, if we could get on it to get to Johannesburg 20 minutes sooner, because we're starting to worry that we're going to miss our flight back home too, and now we're going to be stuck in Africa for another day. There was talk of just bailing and flying to Amsterdam and spending a day there and then flying back and then telling our wives, like, it's just how the airlines worked out. But we didn't do that. But we're very, very stressed about whether or not we're going to be able to make it home. So we get on the flight and the flight attendant walks past me and I get her attention and I said, ma'am, this particular airline I knew from flying in, they just dismissed you row by row and they asked you not to even stand until you got dismissed, which is an incredibly un-American, non-aggressive way to exit a plane and I hated it because it takes forever, you know. But I know that we're in the middle of the plane. It's going to take a long time to get off this plane and we need every second. So I grabbed the flight attendant and I said, ma'am, could you, here's the situation, could you please help me and my buddy get off the flight first? And she said, what time is your flight? And I said, I'm making these times up, I don't know. I said 9.15 and she goes, we're supposed to land at 9.05. I said, yeah, it's going to be tight. And she goes, listen, you're probably not going to make your flight. And I said, I know, but we've got to try our best, right? She's like, yeah. So she goes, tell you what, will you write down your name and his name and the flight information that you're going to be catching, and I'm going to take it to the pilot. So I'm like, yeah, sure. Here you go. So I write down her name, flight information, the Delta flight, and she takes it up to the cockpit. I'm like, oh, we're getting serious now. So she comes back, and she kneels down next to me, and she's like, okay, listen, I don't want to give you false hope. You are not going to make this flight, but we're going to do everything we can. The pilot is going to radio the pilot of the Delta flight and let them know what's going on. And if they have an extra staff member, they can send that staff member to our gate. And if that staff member wants to help you, then they can try to get you through the airport quicker so that you can get to the Delta flight. But we can't guarantee that any of this is going to work. And I'm like, all right, works for us. So the flight lands, we get to the gate. She does not help us get to the front. So we just get up and walk to the front. And everyone's staring at the Americans like, what's the matter with you? We're like, I know, we're the worst. I get it. And we stand there. The door opens. There is an African angel standing in front of us named Masi. I will never forget this in my whole life. She looked like she was early 20s. She was like 6'2". And she goes, are you so and so and so and so? And we go, yes. And she goes, come, we must hurry. And I'm like, yeah, no kidding. So she takes off through the Johannesburg airport and she is wearing heels, those kinds of heels that the flight attendants wear that are like block heels. And she's taller than both of us. And she's just gliding through this airport. And we've got our bags, and we're stubby Americans who are out of shape, and we're like just fighting along, and I'm looking at my buddy. We're laughing. I'm like, I can't keep up. I need to jog. And he's like, I know, I can't. So we kind of break into this slow jog, and we're going through these back tunnels, and she's scanning things, and people are waving at us, and I'm seeing areas of the airport that I'm not supposed to see, and we're just weaving and going through this, and I'm like, this is amazing. I can't believe this is going to work out, and then we get to security, and security's like, we need your boarding pass, so he hands the phone to her. There's the boarding pass. They scan it in, and I'm like, I don't have a boarding pass. I tried to check in when we landed. It's too late. It will not let me check in. I don't have a boarding pass on my phone. And the lady at security is like, I can't let you through, sir. And I'm like, please, can you just let me through the ticket booth? I know it's right there. I can get a boarding pass. I have one, I promise. And so we're going back and forth. And eventually, a large man walks around the corner. And he looks at me in such a way that told me very clearly, this conversation's over. And I'm like, my buddy's already through. And I look at Masi, and I'm like, Masi, is there anything we can do? And I can see the hurt in her eyes. She hurts for me. And she's like, no. And I'm like, well, what if I give you my passport and my cell phone, and my buddy checks in for me at the gate and gets the boarding pass? Can someone bring that back to me? And she goes, that might work. And I'm like, all right. She goes, give me your phone. Gave her my phone, gave her my passport. They go checking through security. And it occurs to me. And I yell at my buddy, hey. He looks at me and I go, she has my cell phone and my passport. I have nothing. And I'm in a back hallway in the Johannesburg airport. Do not leave me. And he's like, I got you, man. Okay. Little detail about the guy I was traveling with. I had only talked to him like four times in my whole life prior to it. We both went on a whim. I don't even know if I can trust this guy. He takes off, but clearly I can't. So I'm sitting there for about 15 minutes. It's like the loneliest 15 minutes of my life. I'm going through, like, I've still got my wallet. I have an ID. I can go to the U.S. consulate. Maybe I can get some money wired to me. I'm not just totally stranded. As I'm sitting there, another dude comes walking around the corner, and he says, what's your name? And I tell him, and he goes, like that. And so I get up, and I'm going through security, and he literally grabs my bag, shoves my computer in it as I'm going through security, throws it to my chest, and goes, we must run, brother. And I'm like, okay. So we take off. I strap up. I've got my belt in my hand. I'm wearing pants that are intentionally too big because I've got a 19-hour flight. I don't need the belt tucking into my belly, you know? They're a little bit bigger than they need to be. And I'm running through the Johannesburg airport, and he is just gliding, and I am not. It is everything I can do to run behind this guy. And I'm trying to keep up. I'm trying to keep up. I start to huff and puff. I'm, like to keep my pants up and I'm holding my backpack together. And I realized that I might die right here. And I'm regretting every hamburger and every day that I haven't run and every poor choice that I've made for the last two years of my life that led me to this moment of my imminent death. And he keeps stopping and turning and like waiting for me to come around a corner. And I'm, you I'm just terrible, just clotting along. I'm breathing so heavily. We finally make it to the gate. I swear it was a half mile away. On my life, I swear there was the largest distance between the two there could possibly be. We get there. I'm huffing and puffing. I'm giving people stuff. I finally get onto the plane. I get onto the plane, and my buddy's drinking champagne already. He's just standing there. Oh, hey, welcome. I'm like, what in the world's going on here? He's been on the plane for 20 minutes, I guess. First class sees me. They've kind of been alerted to the story. So they kind of like, hey, the dummy's here. And then I go and I sit in my chair and one of the flight attendants brings me this thimble of water, right? I'm huffing and puffing. I can barely breathe. I'm trying not to cough. She gives me a thimble of water. I said, you're going to need to bring me more than that. She goes, she brings me a bottle of water. I pound the bottle of water. Between that bottle of water and takeoff, I'm just trying not to cough. I can't catch my breath. I literally can't breathe. I'm sweating. I feel like the fattest oaf that everyone is staring at. And I'm just trying not to cough because I don't want to be the American that has COVID and is giving it to everyone. And all I could think about was how badly I needed water. And as soon as that plane took off, I went to the galley and just started pounding Dasanis, right? Until I couldn't drink anymore. I panteth. I was that thirsty. When is the last time you truly hungered and thirsted for righteousness? When is the last time you needed Jesus as badly as I needed water on that plane in Johannesburg that day? When is the last time someone gave you a little bit of God? You hear a Bible verse, sing a song. Somebody says something encouraging to you. You're scrolling through social media. Somebody posts something that you find spiritually nourishing. You have a small group or a church service or a good conversation. And it feels like that thimble of water they brought me. And you look at whoever gave it to you and you're like, you're going to have to give me more than this. That ain't enough. When's the last time you just took it all in as much as you could where you needed, geez, my soul longs for God. It pants for him like a deer pants for the water. When is the last time we wanted God that bad? Which is why this beatitude and verses like that always convict me. Because I rarely feel like I need God as bad as I needed water that day. And so my reaction to this beatitude from Jesus, my reaction to the psalm from David, is to just pray for a greater hunger, to pray for more thirst, to pray that I would want it more, that my soul would only be satisfied in Jesus, and to just kind of want it more. But as I thought about it this week, for me and for you, I realized something that I've never really thought about before. The body has ways of telling us when it's hungry and thirsty, right? Our body will let us know, hey, it's time to drink something. It's time to eat. Remember the last time my body told me I was hungry without me really realizing I was hungry. We were driving down the road. Jen and I were running errands, and it was getting a little bit into the early afternoon. I hadn't had lunch yet, and I hadn't had breakfast that day. And I hadn't really thought about it. I was just kind of focused on the things that we were doing, and I'm driving down the road, and all of a sudden, every restaurant looks good, right? I'm like, oh, I wish we could stop there. Could really go for whatever, marinara sauce. And then the one that got me, the one that I realized like, whoa, buddy, you're hungry, you've got a problem here, is when I saw Burger King. And I was like, I could go for a chicken sandwich. I mean, it's been a while, but they get long and flat and they kind of taste like salt. Give me some onion rings and some zesty sauce. I'll be a happy camper. And then I was like, whoa, buddy. You got an issue. There's something else going on here. You're real hungry. And I told Jen, I'm very hungry. Let's get home quick before I stop at a Burger King and make decisions I'm going to regret for a few days. Your body has ways of telling you that you're hungry, right? Sometimes it'll be the middle of the day and I'm just focused on what I've been doing and I'll start to get shaky and feel weak. That's my body saying, hey man, you're hungry. You need to eat something. Sometimes we get a headache in the middle of the day. Two or three o'clock in the afternoon, we get just a little dull headache. Maybe it's our body telling us we haven't had any caffeine. Maybe it's our body telling us, hey, you've had too much caffeine, you're dehydrated. You need to drink a little something. Our throat will get dry. It'll get scratchy. We just won't feel good. We won't feel energetic. We'll feel like we just need a little something. Our body has ways of telling us, hey, you're thirsty. You need to drink something. Hey, you're hungry. You need to eat something. And sometimes we misread the signals and we cover over them. Sometimes we're dehydrated, so we have a headache. And instead of doing what our body needs, instead of drinking water, because we have a headache, we'll take an ibuprofen, or we'll take an Aleve, and we'll make the symptom go away, but we haven't treated the problem, right? Or you hear those terrible stories of people who are lost at sea, and they're thirsty, and the only option they have is to drink the ocean water, so they drink the ocean water, but the salination in the water only makes them thirstier. And so they essentially drink themselves to death because they're drinking the wrong thing. Or we're hungry. And because we're so hungry, we lose our judgment and we eat whatever we eat, Burger King. We eat whatever we can get our hands on. And it's not really what our body needs and it's not really helping us, but it makes it go away in the moment so we can focus on other things. And at its worst, I think this is interesting. When we're starving, when we're experiencing literal famine, when our body hasn't had something to eat in such a long time, it will literally start to eat itself. It will literally start to harm itself. And in thinking about this, how God equipped our physical body with warning lights that tell us that we are hungry and we are thirsty, so did he equip our soul with the same thing. If you listen and you watch for it and you pay attention, your soul tells you when you are hungry and when you are thirsty for righteousness. We just have to learn to see the signs. If you're someone who struggles with anger, you're frustrated all the time about something. And that anger begins to leak out on the people that you love the most who are supposed to love you the most. And you're frustrated at your kids and you're frustrated at your wife and you're an ogre to be around and you're hard to keep pleased and you just think everybody around you is dumb all the time and if they could just get on your level, then life would be so much easier and you start, that anger starts to spill out on the people around you in such a way that the next morning you think to yourself, that's not who I want to be. That's not who I am. I see the way my kids cower from me. I see the way my wife or my husband tries to tiptoe around me and say just the right thing, and I don't want to make the people around me live in discomfort. What is my deal with anger? That's your soul telling you you need Jesus, that you're not living out the passage in James that says that everyone should be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to become angry because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. If you're revving, if you're redlining on anger in your life, if you're frustrated with everybody all the time, that's your soul telling you there's a check engine light going and it's saying you need Jesus, man. You need his peace and his patience and his grace in your life. You need to calm down. There's something going on in you, not everybody around you, that needs to push you closer to Jesus. If you're someone who struggles with anxiety, and I don't mean clinically diagnosed anxiety where there really is a chemical imbalance that needs to be corrected medicinally, but I mean someone who is just prone to worry. And you found yourself in a season of life where you constantly scan the horizon for the next thing to worry about, for the next thing to keep you up, for the next thing to Google, for the next lead to make you end up on WebMD. That's a warning light going on in your soul that's been calibrated to tell you, hey, you need Jesus. You've forgotten Philippians 4, 6, and 7 that says, be anxious for nothing but in everything with prayer be anxious about all the things that you were anxious about when you came in here. You don't have to let them keep you up. You don't have to let them drive your thoughts and chase you like shadows. Jesus offers you peace. That anxiety is your soul telling you that it hungers and thirsts for God. It's your soul telling you you need more of the Spirit and His peace and His presence. Those addictions that we develop, we develop an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. We have some pills that we've been prescribed, and we take them whether we need them or not. And sometimes we take them when we know we don't need them, we just want them. What can that be but your soul telling you, hey, things aren't right. You need more Jesus. You need more righteousness. And the thing is, we know it. We know we need something. We know it's not right. We know life isn't good. We know that we're not doing the right thing. But instead of listening to our soul and giving it what it needs, we do the same thing we do when we get a headache. And what we need is water, and instead we take ibuprofen. We can do the same thing with our souls, where the check engine light is going off, and it's going, hey man, you need Jesus. You need more God in your life. You need to pursue him. You need to experience the peace of the Spirit. And instead of doing that, we salve the wound with the wrong medicine. We pour another bourbon. Or we cut the grass again when it doesn't need to be cut. Or we indulge ourself. We just fall headlong into the hobby that doesn't matter because in the hobby we can escape life. If the thing you want, let me just say this, because I've walked through it and I know, if when you wake up in the morning, the thing you want most in your life is to escape your life, that's your soul saying, hey, you need Jesus. You've lost your way. You need to come back to me. What I want us to see this morning is that our souls were created to hunger and thirst for righteousness. You were made to desire God. You were made to long for him. You were made to need him. Things happen all the time in your life that ought to alert you to, oh my gosh, I need more Jesus. I'm hungry for him. I'm thirsty for him. But we've forgotten how to read those signs. And we're told this throughout scripture that our souls were made to hunger and thirst for righteousness, that our souls were made to hunger and thirst for God. I just have one example for you here, but there's myriad others. In Isaiah, he writes in chapter 26, my soul yearns for you in the night. My spirit within me earnestly seeks you, for when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness. We don't have to pray for more hunger and thirst for God. We have to pray that we would recognize it, that we would see it, that we would acknowledge it for what it is. I do not think that anybody came in this room not hungry enough for God, not thirsty enough for Jesus. I don't think anybody came here not wanting righteousness enough. I think we all came in here not realizing how badly we need it and what our souls are screaming to us. C.S. Lewis sums it up this way. I thought this was a very appropriate quote. He's a theologian and author from about the World War II period. He says, meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. I think you and I have warning lights that go off throughout our lives every day that remind us, hey, your soul was created for Jesus. Your soul was created to commune with God. And you're hungry, man. You're thirsty. You're famished. And the thing that's the hardest is when we don't recognize it for what it is, when we don't see those indicators for what they are, when we misread them and we misappropriate them, we end up handling them in some of the most damaging ways possible. We're drinking salt water, making it worse until we drink ourselves to death. At its worst, when we are most famished, the body begins to do things that harm itself just for the sake of what it believes will be survival. And really, your soul is just saying, hey, I'm in atrophy here. I have nothing. I need Jesus desperately. So my prayer and hope for you this morning is that rather than praying for a greater desire, let us learn to listen to the hunger pangs of our soul. When our soul is crying out for more Jesus, when our soul is crying out for God, and we're just drinking more salt water, we're just taking more medicine, we're just avoiding more signs, let us not pray in those moments, God, give me a greater hunger and thirst for you. No, he's given it to you. Let us pray that we see it and that our souls will only be satisfied in him. And when we hunger and thirst for righteousness, when we see what it is that our souls are telling us, what does God promise? You will be filled. What does it mean to be blessed? You will have all that you need to be fully satisfied. Let us be fully satisfied in our Jesus as we go. Let me pray for you. Father, we love you and are grateful for you. Lord, we need you. We acknowledge that you created in our very souls a hunger and thirst for you, and I pray that we would realize more and more that that can only be filled by you. I don't pray, God, that you would give us a greater desire for you, but we acknowledge that you have intrinsically written that onto our souls, and so I simply pray that we would acknowledge it, that we would see our longings for you as what they are, not salves or substances or substitutes, but that we would see the longing of our soul for exactly what it is, a longing for you. Let us run to you and seek you this morning. Let us run to you and seek you this week. Let us acknowledge that our souls do pant for you whether we realize it or not. And would you please fill us, satisfy us, bless us so that our souls will find rest in you. We ask these things in your son's name. Amen.

I was so caught up in worship and prayer that I forgot I was supposed to come up here while she was praying. Whoops. Hey guys, I'm Nate. I'm the normal pastor here. I'm just bad at stuff sometimes. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would love to get to do that in the lobby afterwards if you're up for it. Also, after the service today, we're having Discover Grace in the kids' room next door, which is an opportunity just to learn more about who we are, what we do, what makes us tick as a church. If you're new here or you've never done that and you'd like to, even if you haven't signed up for it, you're invited. We've got space for you and snacks for you. We'd love to see you over there. This morning, we are launching into our new series called The Blessed Life. I always have to double check what the title of the series is because I always tell Carly and Aaron, here's what I'm going to be talking about. In my head, I'm calling it this, but do whatever makes the most sense graphically and then just tell me what you've called it. And then I always call it the wrong thing and they always make fun of me. So this morning I looked, it's the blessed life. I see it there and that's what we're gonna go with. This is a look at the Beatitudes. Jesus's first recorded public address is the most famous sermon ever given. It's the greatest sermon ever given. As a matter of fact, a few years ago, we did a series called The Greatest Sermon, where we looked at the Sermon on the Mount. He begins the Sermon on the Mount with this series of blessings, nine blessings that we refer to as the Beatitudes. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are Georgia Tech fans, for you understand suffering. Things like that. I went to the NC State game yesterday with Lily and watched Georgia Tech play NC State in regular season college basketball. And my biggest takeaway from going to my first NC State basketball game is, everybody just calm down, all right? Just take it easy. A, it's middle of the season. B, you're NC State. Like, nothing's going to happen. What are you going to do, win the regular season? Who cares? Just relax, people. Just get a Coke, watch the game, talk to your friends. I don't understand what all the noise is for. Anyways, and I'm wearing NC State colors, incidentally. Yeah, yeah. I don't know why I told you that. But we're getting into this series, The Blessed Life. And we're looking at these blessings that Jesus opens with. And I think it's so interesting and poignant and worth pointing out that for the very first time that Jesus addresses the public that we see, he meets them right where they are. He blesses them. He offers them comfort. And he basically says through his words, hey, I see you. I understand your struggles. But as we look at the Beatitudes, and it says blessed are these nine different groups of people, we've got to wonder what it means to be blessed. What is it to be blessed? What is it to be blessed by God? This is something that can be misconstrued in terrible ways, and we can warp our entire theology out of a pursuit of a misunderstood blessing. So when I've understood being blessed historically, normally I kind of think of it as a time in life when you receive unreasonable favor or unreasonable access, and you didn't earn it. Someone just gifts you with it, gifts you with their favor, gifts you with their access, gifts you with this special portion of joy that you would not have otherwise experienced. I kind of think, when I think of being blessed, I kind of think of the spring of 2013. I was on staff at a church called Greystone. I had a really good friend on staff who's still a good friend to this day, a guy named Heath Hollinsworth. And Heath and his family, they have tickets to the Masters and they go every year. Now in 2013, I was not a golf fan. I didn't really keep up with it. This is to my detriment. I missed all the good Tiger years focusing on Peyton Manning and football in general. But I missed some good years, and I wasn't really a huge golf fan at the time, but Heath, in late March, picked up the phone, and he said, hey, I've got some tickets to the Masters. I'm going to go Friday of the tournament. Do you want to come with me? And now, like I said, I wasn't a golf fan at the time, but I've always been a sports fan, and I knew enough about the Masters that if someone says, hey man, you want to go to the Masters with me? You immediately answer yes. Okay? Just life advice for all of you. If you've never heard of it before, if you don't know what it is, and someone says, would you like to go to the Masters with me? Yes, immediately I would. Cancel whatever you have. I'm getting married that day. Doesn't matter. Postpone it. Go to the Masters. You can get married any day, okay? You're not going to get invited back to the Masters again. And so I'm like, yeah, I'll go. And I said, dude, are you sure, though? I don't deserve this. We have friends who are going to be really angry when they find out that you invited me. They deserve to go. They've been watching. They love the Masters. They know the lore of Augusta National, the whole deal. I do not deserve this. He's like, no, I want you to go. I like taking people who have never been before, and I really want to see you just experience it with fresh eyes. I'm like, all right, cool. So we go, and for those of you who don't know what the Masters is, it really is the greatest sporting event on the planet that you can attend in person. It really is. Maybe Wimbledon, I would put up there as like maybe that's neck and neck, but going to Augusta National and experiencing what it is to be a patron, not a fan, is amazing. And if you've seen it on your TV, on CBS with Jim Nance's soft voice, hello friends, and the birds chirping in the background, whenever they start to play the promos in like February, I get all nostalgic in my living room. I'm like, oh man, this is going to be great. And it's a beautiful, beautiful course. I just spent so much money on making it look good. It looked so good that when I got there and I stepped onto the course, I literally had to bend down and touch the grass to make myself believe that it was real. It looked that good. And you walk around all the places and you see all the things. And holes 11, 12, and 13 are called Amen Corner. And when you see it, you understand why. And I'm telling you, it looks like walking around in a painting. It's just, it's unbelievable. And the whole day I'm thinking, I don't deserve this. This is as close to heaven on earth as it possibly gets. When we get to heaven, I'll be like, this feels like hole number eight. This makes sense. The front of Augusta National, there are pearly gates. Do you understand? It's an amazing place. And I couldn't believe that I got to go there. And ever since then, I've loved golf. I play golf. I thought for the rest of my life, I want this to be a part of what I get to experience. And it really did impact me in a great way. But when I think about being blessed, I think about opportunities like that where you're walking around and I'm realizing in every moment, I don't deserve this. I don't deserve to be here. This is amazing. But then I started to dig into what being blessed really means, because I think that we probably all think about blessing being that way. When we have some unearned favor in our life, and we go, gosh, I don't deserve this, but this is great. And there's a part of that that's absolutely true and absolutely is reflective of what it means to be blessed. But when you actually study the words that Jesus was using here, and if you've been a part of Grace for a while, you know I'm not like an in the Greek pastor. That's not really my deal because what that really means is on the Google because people don't know Greek. They just Google it and then they sound smart and be like, the original Greek word is this thing I read this week. But this time it's important because the word that Jesus chose to use there really means fully satisfied. So to be blessed is to be fully satisfied. It's not to experience undue favor, although that is a part of it. It's not to experience unearned access, although I'm sure that is a part of it as well. To be blessed, and this is really how we need to understand it as we move through the series. To be blessed, according to the words that Jesus himself chose, the best we know, means to be fully satisfied. And when you think about it that way, it's a hugely powerful concept. It's a hugely powerful concept that to be blessed means to be fully satisfied. I have a friend who we make fun of for this, but he is never satisfied. We can be having the most fun. I've got this group of eight friends that I've been friends with for over, some for as long as 35 years, some for 25 years. That's still the new guy in the group. And we go on trips, we talk every day. We do all kinds of stuff. And we've had a lot of fun together. We can be in a moment where we are having apex fun. We're at the golf course. We're goofing off. We're around a lake. We're on a boat. We're in Vegas. We're wherever we are. We're having apex fun in the middle of Wrigley Field. And my buddy, Trip, will look at us and he'll say, is there anything we can do to make this more fun? And we're like, no, shut up. Like this is, what you're doing right now is making it less fun. Just soak in the moment, man. This is great. But his mind is always going, is there anything that we could be doing that would make us more satisfied than we are right now? Like, no, man, just chill out. Just enjoy it. That's what being blessed is, is to realize in this moment, in this season, in this time, I don't need anything else to be completely satisfied, to be completely happy, to be completely fulfilled. And when you think about it that way, you see that God has blessed all of us tremendously no matter what season we're in. That more often than not, if we'll just stop and look around, what we'll see is that God has given us everything we need for happiness, for peace, for contentment, to really feel as though we're experiencing blessing. I'll have these moments with Jen where we're sitting in the house and the kids are being sweet. No one's whining. No one's complaining. She and I are joking back and forth. We're laughing at something that Lily or John are doing. Those are our kids. And I'll look at her and I'll just go, who's got it better than us? And she'll go, nobody. And I'm like, no, nobody. This is so happy. This is so great. There's nothing else that could be added to this moment to make me feel more blessed. I have all the things I need in life to experience your blessing. That's why Jordan jokingly pointed to me and said, hey, you love this song. I will build my life upon your love as a firm foundation. But I do, because it reminds me that the foundation of love that God gives us in our life is a foundation of everything that we need to feel blessed, to feel fully happy and fully content and fully satisfied. Our problem is we start to look outside of the blessings of God to experience a joy that we don't need to grasp for, and we just don't see ourselves doing that, which is why this first beatitude this morning might be so helpful for us in how we frame up our thinking around blessing and around what God provides for us. So now that we understand what it means to be blessed, I want us to look at this, the fourth promise. It's the fourth blessing of the nine that Jesus gives when he says this in Matthew 5, verse 6. By the way, if you want to read the Sermon on the Mount, you can find it in Matthew 5, 6, and 7. But it says this in verse 6, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, can mean some different things. In most New Testament contexts, what that means is right standing before God. But in this context, really what it means is, I believe, it's a placeholder for God himself. God bless you. I need the Spirit today. Would you fill me for this conversation? Blessed are those who literally hunger and thirst for righteousness, for God himself, for you will be satisfied. And this beatitude and this idea in scripture is always particularly challenging to me because I'm not one to read this and think to myself, oh yeah, that's me. That's me. When I read through the beatitudes, blessed are those who mourn. I can relate to that. That one's fine. But when I see blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. I don't read this and be like, I'm blessed because I hunger and thirst. I always feel challenged by that. Don't hunger enough for God. I'm not thirsty enough for his word. And I would bet that you feel similarly. This beatitude always reminds me of a psalm, Psalm 42, where David writes, as the deer, and I memorized this when I was young, which means I did it in the King's English, not the ESV, I did it in the KJV. As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longs for you, O God, the living God. And it just makes me wonder, have you ever pantethed? Have you ever just panted because you were just so thirsty? If I don't have a drink, I really might fall out right here because I have, and I'll tell you where. I was in Johannesburg, South Africa. And some of y'all, if you were around in the fall, you know that I had the opportunity to go to South Africa and that part of coming back was I had to make a difficult decision to leave my luggage behind in Johannesburg. That particular piece of luggage had my Crocs in there, and some of y'all know that those have kind of become a part of Grace's subculture. My toothpaste-colored Crocs have been on multiple continents. Jen was elated that those were over in Africa and will never be seen again. But the good African people sent me my bag. I fetched it at RDU and the Crocs live on, baby. So you may know that I went through a couple of tenuous days there where I really thought I'd lost something special. And then the Lord in his goodness brought them back to me. But you may not know why the bag was in Johannesburg. So that's what I'm going to tell you this morning. We go to catch the flight out of Cape Town. And as we get to the Cape Town airport, we're told that our flight is delayed and we're not going to get to Johannesburg at the time that we think we're going to get there. And so we start to do the math and we realize that the window is pretty small because the two flights are not associated with each other. We're flying from Cape Town to Johannesburg on some local South African airline, and then we're flying back on Delta. So they're not associated. So I'm going to have to land in Johannesburg, go to baggage claim, get my baggage, then go back through security and whatever else, and get on the plane and recheck my bag. And that takes a long time. And so we're looking at this window and we're like, we're barely going to make it. And then the flight gets delayed and then it gets delayed and then it gets delayed. And my buddy that I was traveling with looks at me and he's like, how much do you care about what's in that bag? And I said, I mean, it's just clothes. So I guess not very much. And he's like, because you can spend the night and get a new flight or you can make this flight, but you can't do both. And I'm like, I guess we'll just leave it. So it keeps getting tighter and tighter. We are going all over the Cape Town airport to every ticket booth that they have, asking if there's a flight, if we could get on it to get to Johannesburg 20 minutes sooner, because we're starting to worry that we're going to miss our flight back home too, and now we're going to be stuck in Africa for another day. There was talk of just bailing and flying to Amsterdam and spending a day there and then flying back and then telling our wives, like, it's just how the airlines worked out. But we didn't do that. But we're very, very stressed about whether or not we're going to be able to make it home. So we get on the flight and the flight attendant walks past me and I get her attention and I said, ma'am, this particular airline I knew from flying in, they just dismissed you row by row and they asked you not to even stand until you got dismissed, which is an incredibly un-American, non-aggressive way to exit a plane and I hated it because it takes forever, you know. But I know that we're in the middle of the plane. It's going to take a long time to get off this plane and we need every second. So I grabbed the flight attendant and I said, ma'am, could you, here's the situation, could you please help me and my buddy get off the flight first? And she said, what time is your flight? And I said, I'm making these times up, I don't know. I said 9.15 and she goes, we're supposed to land at 9.05. I said, yeah, it's going to be tight. And she goes, listen, you're probably not going to make your flight. And I said, I know, but we've got to try our best, right? She's like, yeah. So she goes, tell you what, will you write down your name and his name and the flight information that you're going to be catching, and I'm going to take it to the pilot. So I'm like, yeah, sure. Here you go. So I write down her name, flight information, the Delta flight, and she takes it up to the cockpit. I'm like, oh, we're getting serious now. So she comes back, and she kneels down next to me, and she's like, okay, listen, I don't want to give you false hope. You are not going to make this flight, but we're going to do everything we can. The pilot is going to radio the pilot of the Delta flight and let them know what's going on. And if they have an extra staff member, they can send that staff member to our gate. And if that staff member wants to help you, then they can try to get you through the airport quicker so that you can get to the Delta flight. But we can't guarantee that any of this is going to work. And I'm like, all right, works for us. So the flight lands, we get to the gate. She does not help us get to the front. So we just get up and walk to the front. And everyone's staring at the Americans like, what's the matter with you? We're like, I know, we're the worst. I get it. And we stand there. The door opens. There is an African angel standing in front of us named Masi. I will never forget this in my whole life. She looked like she was early 20s. She was like 6'2". And she goes, are you so and so and so and so? And we go, yes. And she goes, come, we must hurry. And I'm like, yeah, no kidding. So she takes off through the Johannesburg airport and she is wearing heels, those kinds of heels that the flight attendants wear that are like block heels. And she's taller than both of us. And she's just gliding through this airport. And we've got our bags, and we're stubby Americans who are out of shape, and we're like just fighting along, and I'm looking at my buddy. We're laughing. I'm like, I can't keep up. I need to jog. And he's like, I know, I can't. So we kind of break into this slow jog, and we're going through these back tunnels, and she's scanning things, and people are waving at us, and I'm seeing areas of the airport that I'm not supposed to see, and we're just weaving and going through this, and I'm like, this is amazing. I can't believe this is going to work out, and then we get to security, and security's like, we need your boarding pass, so he hands the phone to her. There's the boarding pass. They scan it in, and I'm like, I don't have a boarding pass. I tried to check in when we landed. It's too late. It will not let me check in. I don't have a boarding pass on my phone. And the lady at security is like, I can't let you through, sir. And I'm like, please, can you just let me through the ticket booth? I know it's right there. I can get a boarding pass. I have one, I promise. And so we're going back and forth. And eventually, a large man walks around the corner. And he looks at me in such a way that told me very clearly, this conversation's over. And I'm like, my buddy's already through. And I look at Masi, and I'm like, Masi, is there anything we can do? And I can see the hurt in her eyes. She hurts for me. And she's like, no. And I'm like, well, what if I give you my passport and my cell phone, and my buddy checks in for me at the gate and gets the boarding pass? Can someone bring that back to me? And she goes, that might work. And I'm like, all right. She goes, give me your phone. Gave her my phone, gave her my passport. They go checking through security. And it occurs to me. And I yell at my buddy, hey. He looks at me and I go, she has my cell phone and my passport. I have nothing. And I'm in a back hallway in the Johannesburg airport. Do not leave me. And he's like, I got you, man. Okay. Little detail about the guy I was traveling with. I had only talked to him like four times in my whole life prior to it. We both went on a whim. I don't even know if I can trust this guy. He takes off, but clearly I can't. So I'm sitting there for about 15 minutes. It's like the loneliest 15 minutes of my life. I'm going through, like, I've still got my wallet. I have an ID. I can go to the U.S. consulate. Maybe I can get some money wired to me. I'm not just totally stranded. As I'm sitting there, another dude comes walking around the corner, and he says, what's your name? And I tell him, and he goes, like that. And so I get up, and I'm going through security, and he literally grabs my bag, shoves my computer in it as I'm going through security, throws it to my chest, and goes, we must run, brother. And I'm like, okay. So we take off. I strap up. I've got my belt in my hand. I'm wearing pants that are intentionally too big because I've got a 19-hour flight. I don't need the belt tucking into my belly, you know? They're a little bit bigger than they need to be. And I'm running through the Johannesburg airport, and he is just gliding, and I am not. It is everything I can do to run behind this guy. And I'm trying to keep up. I'm trying to keep up. I start to huff and puff. I'm, like to keep my pants up and I'm holding my backpack together. And I realized that I might die right here. And I'm regretting every hamburger and every day that I haven't run and every poor choice that I've made for the last two years of my life that led me to this moment of my imminent death. And he keeps stopping and turning and like waiting for me to come around a corner. And I'm, you I'm just terrible, just clotting along. I'm breathing so heavily. We finally make it to the gate. I swear it was a half mile away. On my life, I swear there was the largest distance between the two there could possibly be. We get there. I'm huffing and puffing. I'm giving people stuff. I finally get onto the plane. I get onto the plane, and my buddy's drinking champagne already. He's just standing there. Oh, hey, welcome. I'm like, what in the world's going on here? He's been on the plane for 20 minutes, I guess. First class sees me. They've kind of been alerted to the story. So they kind of like, hey, the dummy's here. And then I go and I sit in my chair and one of the flight attendants brings me this thimble of water, right? I'm huffing and puffing. I can barely breathe. I'm trying not to cough. She gives me a thimble of water. I said, you're going to need to bring me more than that. She goes, she brings me a bottle of water. I pound the bottle of water. Between that bottle of water and takeoff, I'm just trying not to cough. I can't catch my breath. I literally can't breathe. I'm sweating. I feel like the fattest oaf that everyone is staring at. And I'm just trying not to cough because I don't want to be the American that has COVID and is giving it to everyone. And all I could think about was how badly I needed water. And as soon as that plane took off, I went to the galley and just started pounding Dasanis, right? Until I couldn't drink anymore. I panteth. I was that thirsty. When is the last time you truly hungered and thirsted for righteousness? When is the last time you needed Jesus as badly as I needed water on that plane in Johannesburg that day? When is the last time someone gave you a little bit of God? You hear a Bible verse, sing a song. Somebody says something encouraging to you. You're scrolling through social media. Somebody posts something that you find spiritually nourishing. You have a small group or a church service or a good conversation. And it feels like that thimble of water they brought me. And you look at whoever gave it to you and you're like, you're going to have to give me more than this. That ain't enough. When's the last time you just took it all in as much as you could where you needed, geez, my soul longs for God. It pants for him like a deer pants for the water. When is the last time we wanted God that bad? Which is why this beatitude and verses like that always convict me. Because I rarely feel like I need God as bad as I needed water that day. And so my reaction to this beatitude from Jesus, my reaction to the psalm from David, is to just pray for a greater hunger, to pray for more thirst, to pray that I would want it more, that my soul would only be satisfied in Jesus, and to just kind of want it more. But as I thought about it this week, for me and for you, I realized something that I've never really thought about before. The body has ways of telling us when it's hungry and thirsty, right? Our body will let us know, hey, it's time to drink something. It's time to eat. Remember the last time my body told me I was hungry without me really realizing I was hungry. We were driving down the road. Jen and I were running errands, and it was getting a little bit into the early afternoon. I hadn't had lunch yet, and I hadn't had breakfast that day. And I hadn't really thought about it. I was just kind of focused on the things that we were doing, and I'm driving down the road, and all of a sudden, every restaurant looks good, right? I'm like, oh, I wish we could stop there. Could really go for whatever, marinara sauce. And then the one that got me, the one that I realized like, whoa, buddy, you're hungry, you've got a problem here, is when I saw Burger King. And I was like, I could go for a chicken sandwich. I mean, it's been a while, but they get long and flat and they kind of taste like salt. Give me some onion rings and some zesty sauce. I'll be a happy camper. And then I was like, whoa, buddy. You got an issue. There's something else going on here. You're real hungry. And I told Jen, I'm very hungry. Let's get home quick before I stop at a Burger King and make decisions I'm going to regret for a few days. Your body has ways of telling you that you're hungry, right? Sometimes it'll be the middle of the day and I'm just focused on what I've been doing and I'll start to get shaky and feel weak. That's my body saying, hey man, you're hungry. You need to eat something. Sometimes we get a headache in the middle of the day. Two or three o'clock in the afternoon, we get just a little dull headache. Maybe it's our body telling us we haven't had any caffeine. Maybe it's our body telling us, hey, you've had too much caffeine, you're dehydrated. You need to drink a little something. Our throat will get dry. It'll get scratchy. We just won't feel good. We won't feel energetic. We'll feel like we just need a little something. Our body has ways of telling us, hey, you're thirsty. You need to drink something. Hey, you're hungry. You need to eat something. And sometimes we misread the signals and we cover over them. Sometimes we're dehydrated, so we have a headache. And instead of doing what our body needs, instead of drinking water, because we have a headache, we'll take an ibuprofen, or we'll take an Aleve, and we'll make the symptom go away, but we haven't treated the problem, right? Or you hear those terrible stories of people who are lost at sea, and they're thirsty, and the only option they have is to drink the ocean water, so they drink the ocean water, but the salination in the water only makes them thirstier. And so they essentially drink themselves to death because they're drinking the wrong thing. Or we're hungry. And because we're so hungry, we lose our judgment and we eat whatever we eat, Burger King. We eat whatever we can get our hands on. And it's not really what our body needs and it's not really helping us, but it makes it go away in the moment so we can focus on other things. And at its worst, I think this is interesting. When we're starving, when we're experiencing literal famine, when our body hasn't had something to eat in such a long time, it will literally start to eat itself. It will literally start to harm itself. And in thinking about this, how God equipped our physical body with warning lights that tell us that we are hungry and we are thirsty, so did he equip our soul with the same thing. If you listen and you watch for it and you pay attention, your soul tells you when you are hungry and when you are thirsty for righteousness. We just have to learn to see the signs. If you're someone who struggles with anger, you're frustrated all the time about something. And that anger begins to leak out on the people that you love the most who are supposed to love you the most. And you're frustrated at your kids and you're frustrated at your wife and you're an ogre to be around and you're hard to keep pleased and you just think everybody around you is dumb all the time and if they could just get on your level, then life would be so much easier and you start, that anger starts to spill out on the people around you in such a way that the next morning you think to yourself, that's not who I want to be. That's not who I am. I see the way my kids cower from me. I see the way my wife or my husband tries to tiptoe around me and say just the right thing, and I don't want to make the people around me live in discomfort. What is my deal with anger? That's your soul telling you you need Jesus, that you're not living out the passage in James that says that everyone should be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to become angry because anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. If you're revving, if you're redlining on anger in your life, if you're frustrated with everybody all the time, that's your soul telling you there's a check engine light going and it's saying you need Jesus, man. You need his peace and his patience and his grace in your life. You need to calm down. There's something going on in you, not everybody around you, that needs to push you closer to Jesus. If you're someone who struggles with anxiety, and I don't mean clinically diagnosed anxiety where there really is a chemical imbalance that needs to be corrected medicinally, but I mean someone who is just prone to worry. And you found yourself in a season of life where you constantly scan the horizon for the next thing to worry about, for the next thing to keep you up, for the next thing to Google, for the next lead to make you end up on WebMD. That's a warning light going on in your soul that's been calibrated to tell you, hey, you need Jesus. You've forgotten Philippians 4, 6, and 7 that says, be anxious for nothing but in everything with prayer be anxious about all the things that you were anxious about when you came in here. You don't have to let them keep you up. You don't have to let them drive your thoughts and chase you like shadows. Jesus offers you peace. That anxiety is your soul telling you that it hungers and thirsts for God. It's your soul telling you you need more of the Spirit and His peace and His presence. Those addictions that we develop, we develop an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. We have some pills that we've been prescribed, and we take them whether we need them or not. And sometimes we take them when we know we don't need them, we just want them. What can that be but your soul telling you, hey, things aren't right. You need more Jesus. You need more righteousness. And the thing is, we know it. We know we need something. We know it's not right. We know life isn't good. We know that we're not doing the right thing. But instead of listening to our soul and giving it what it needs, we do the same thing we do when we get a headache. And what we need is water, and instead we take ibuprofen. We can do the same thing with our souls, where the check engine light is going off, and it's going, hey man, you need Jesus. You need more God in your life. You need to pursue him. You need to experience the peace of the Spirit. And instead of doing that, we salve the wound with the wrong medicine. We pour another bourbon. Or we cut the grass again when it doesn't need to be cut. Or we indulge ourself. We just fall headlong into the hobby that doesn't matter because in the hobby we can escape life. If the thing you want, let me just say this, because I've walked through it and I know, if when you wake up in the morning, the thing you want most in your life is to escape your life, that's your soul saying, hey, you need Jesus. You've lost your way. You need to come back to me. What I want us to see this morning is that our souls were created to hunger and thirst for righteousness. You were made to desire God. You were made to long for him. You were made to need him. Things happen all the time in your life that ought to alert you to, oh my gosh, I need more Jesus. I'm hungry for him. I'm thirsty for him. But we've forgotten how to read those signs. And we're told this throughout scripture that our souls were made to hunger and thirst for righteousness, that our souls were made to hunger and thirst for God. I just have one example for you here, but there's myriad others. In Isaiah, he writes in chapter 26, my soul yearns for you in the night. My spirit within me earnestly seeks you, for when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness. We don't have to pray for more hunger and thirst for God. We have to pray that we would recognize it, that we would see it, that we would acknowledge it for what it is. I do not think that anybody came in this room not hungry enough for God, not thirsty enough for Jesus. I don't think anybody came here not wanting righteousness enough. I think we all came in here not realizing how badly we need it and what our souls are screaming to us. C.S. Lewis sums it up this way. I thought this was a very appropriate quote. He's a theologian and author from about the World War II period. He says, meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. I think you and I have warning lights that go off throughout our lives every day that remind us, hey, your soul was created for Jesus. Your soul was created to commune with God. And you're hungry, man. You're thirsty. You're famished. And the thing that's the hardest is when we don't recognize it for what it is, when we don't see those indicators for what they are, when we misread them and we misappropriate them, we end up handling them in some of the most damaging ways possible. We're drinking salt water, making it worse until we drink ourselves to death. At its worst, when we are most famished, the body begins to do things that harm itself just for the sake of what it believes will be survival. And really, your soul is just saying, hey, I'm in atrophy here. I have nothing. I need Jesus desperately. So my prayer and hope for you this morning is that rather than praying for a greater desire, let us learn to listen to the hunger pangs of our soul. When our soul is crying out for more Jesus, when our soul is crying out for God, and we're just drinking more salt water, we're just taking more medicine, we're just avoiding more signs, let us not pray in those moments, God, give me a greater hunger and thirst for you. No, he's given it to you. Let us pray that we see it and that our souls will only be satisfied in him. And when we hunger and thirst for righteousness, when we see what it is that our souls are telling us, what does God promise? You will be filled. What does it mean to be blessed? You will have all that you need to be fully satisfied. Let us be fully satisfied in our Jesus as we go. Let me pray for you. Father, we love you and are grateful for you. Lord, we need you. We acknowledge that you created in our very souls a hunger and thirst for you, and I pray that we would realize more and more that that can only be filled by you. I don't pray, God, that you would give us a greater desire for you, but we acknowledge that you have intrinsically written that onto our souls, and so I simply pray that we would acknowledge it, that we would see our longings for you as what they are, not salves or substances or substitutes, but that we would see the longing of our soul for exactly what it is, a longing for you. Let us run to you and seek you this morning. Let us run to you and seek you this week. Let us acknowledge that our souls do pant for you whether we realize it or not. And would you please fill us, satisfy us, bless us so that our souls will find rest in you. We ask these things in your son's name. Amen.

My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. We are in the second part of our series called With, where we're going through a book by a pastor named Sky Jethani. It's a book that I read back in 2013, and I've shared with you before, caused me more times than any other book to stop and put it down and get on my knees and repent and say, God, I absolutely see these things in my life and in my heart and in my motives for following you. Please eradicate them from me. I was having a conversation with someone right before church started. Actually, full disclosure, it was after church had started and half of the congregation was still out in the parking lot. Sorry, Steve, for that. That's our bad, buddy. We'll get it better next week. Join me, guys. We'll do better next week. But I was having a conversation, and they said, gosh, I'm loving this book. I've been reading it, but I see myself in all the postures. And I said, yeah, that's kind of it. If you're paying attention, you see yourself in this book as we read it. So as we get together every week, I want to go through the postures. I want to look at the different ways that we can approach God, the different motives we have for approaching him. And then the last week, look at the right motive we have for approaching him. Really, it's five weeks of discipleship, of looking at our relationship with Jesus, the one who saved us. And one of the things we said last week is we kind of asked where we were. We did a little spiritual diagnostic test, and I kind of helped us see, I think many of us, that to be a Christian is to be in a rut sometimes. It's to see other people having this flourishing relationship with Jesus, this really seemingly intimate knowledge with Jesus, and we can't seem to hit the nail on the head. We can't seem to connect the dots for ourselves. And kind of the phrase I'm using that's driving the way we're thinking about ourselves and our walks with Jesus in this series is to say, perhaps our walk with Jesus isn't what it could be because our posture before him isn't what it should be, right? And so then last week we looked at the life under God posture. The life under God posture acknowledges that the universe is big, the world is difficult, it's bigger than me, it's challenging, there's unknown pain and suffering that I can't prevent out there, but God created everything and if I can find a way to get him on my side, if I can appease God, then he'll protect me. And so it's this exchange. If I offer you obedience and you offer me protection, it's how we regain control of an uncontrollable universe. And this week, we're looking at life over God, which is really the natural conclusion of the life under God posture. If life under God says, man, the universe can't be controlled, but God can control it, so I'm going to get him on my side so that nothing bad can happen to me, then life over God is what happens when we start to learn a little bit. It's what happens when we start to get a little bit of knowledge. It's what happens when we realize that, you know what, creation is really a machine, and there are laws to the way it works. And if I can begin to understand these laws, the way the machine works, then it becomes more controllable and more predictable. This is what it looks like in years past. If we had a road trip, we might pray to God. We might go to God and say, God, protect us on this road trip. And now with a little bit of knowledge, we just check the weather app and we do the road trip when it's not going to rain. Now we're safe. We're good. In years past, a pandemic hits and we hit our knees and we pray, God, take this away from us. Now we scramble to create a vaccine. Life has shifted. So in a lot of ways, this life over God posture is a natural conclusion. It's just another way to arrest control back to ourselves and say, God, thanks for everything. We figured out your machine now, so we're going to take it from here. Now we'll be in control again. A great picture of what life over God looks like is actually this. If you go to the Smithsonian, you can see this Bible. That's Thomas Jefferson's Bible. Famously, he took the Bible and he looked at the teachings. That's in the Gospels. He looked at the teachings of Jesus that he didn't like and he simply cut them out of his Bible. It's called the Jeffersonian Bible. And I've always looked at that and thought, what audacious arrogance would it take to begin cutting passages out of the Bible that you don't agree with? But now I tend to think, at least he's honest. At least he has the guts to admit it. Because don't we all do this? That's what life over God posture is. The life over God exchanges God for best practices. As we think about life over God, that's what it is. It just simply exchanges God. It exchanges a relationship with Jesus for best practices. It exchanges a relationship with Jesus for simply the best practices that come out of his teachings. And we know what it is to distill things down to best practices, don't we? We've all done this. This is a thing that we can all fall into. When I first became a small groups pastor, I started reading all the books about small groups. And it would have been a mistake to take one book written about small groups for a church of 20,000 people and try to do a one-to-one exchange into my church of 1,000 people at the time. It would have been a big mistake to try to do that. So I didn't do everything that the author would recommend. I just took a couple things, a couple best practices that I could apply to my situation, and I would do that. And I would take a couple best practices from over here and over here and over here, and I would amalgamate the ministry that we did. Not looking at any of the books as authoritative or any of the individuals as authoritative, but giving myself the right and the license to take best practices from all these areas and then install them in my life. This is what life over God does. It looks at the Bible as just a simple group of instructions, an instruction book for life. And we extract from it the best practices like Thomas Jefferson did, and we apply those to ourselves. And then the ones that we don't like or we don't agree with or that seem too problematic or antiquated, we do away with those. And we begin to pick and choose which portions of the Bible we want to obey. We begin to pick and choose which portions of the teachings of Jesus we want to submit to. And we exchange God for best practices. Now at its worst, this posture is atheism. God's not real. He doesn't exist. The Bible clearly is a book. I'm going to take out of it the things that apply to me. There's some good ideas in there. I'll apply those. We might even feel good about ourselves for doing that, but I'm not going to take it all wholesale. At best, it's deism. God exists. He's real. He created the universe. He created this machine. But now that I have the Bible, now that I understand some of the mechanics of this machine, I can take it from here. I understand. God, thanks. I don't need you anymore. I don't need to pray to you anymore. I don't need to pursue you anymore. I don't need the actual relationship with you. I just need your principles and practices. And now that I understand how to manipulate things under my own control, I've got it from here. That's the life over God posture. And like I said, at least Thomas Jefferson was honest about what he did. We might think that this posture is a difficult one for Christians to adopt. It might be easy to believe that as believers, we wouldn't do this. Life under God, I'm going to obey him so that he watches out for me. Sure, that makes sense in the Christian life. And the other ones, from and for, if you've read ahead or as we get to those, those are easy to apply to the Christian life. But this is the posture of all non-believers. I'm going to take the authority of myself over the authority of God, and we distill him down to best practices, if anything at all. But what's important to see is that this one is sneaky too, and it works its way into our hearts and into our motives as well. And it has for the history of all believers. We can go all the way back to Moses. Sky points this out in the book, and I think it's an appropriate example. We can go all the way back to Moses to see this life over God posture. We're not going to turn our Bibles there this morning, but in Exodus chapter 17, the people of God have been wandering through the desert led by Moses for a number of years now. And they're thirsty, and they're complaining. And they're like, at least in Egypt when we were slaves, we have water. In the desert, we have nothing. What's the deal? They were upset. And so Moses goes to God on their behalf, and he says, God, your people are thirsty. What should I do? And God says, take your staff, take Aaron's staff, and go to a rock, and I want you to strike the rock in front of the people, and water's going to come out. And that's what he did. Amazingly. The miracle. He takes Aaron, his brother's staff. He goes to the rock. He strikes the rock. Water comes out. Everybody has their fill. Speaking of water, I just got thirsty. Everybody has their fill. Then, a little while later, it happens again. They start to grumble and complain again. They start to whine again. And this time, Moses is kind of sick of it. This time, Moses is kind of tired of it because here's God. God's used Moses. They've led him out of the desert. He defeated the Egyptian army in the Red Sea. God is visibly leading them every day by cloud, every night by fire. He gives them manna to eat. He feeds them in the desert every day. And yet still God's people are saying we had it better as slaves. And I think Moses is exasperated and can't believe that people find ways to continue to complain. But if we know anything about human nature, it's that if we were there in the desert, we'd be complaining too, wouldn't we? And so Moses is frustrated. And this is what happens the second time they complain. If you want to look in Numbers chapter 20, it'll be on the screen if you want to read along with me. Verse 7, before the Lord as he commanded him. So God says, go this time. I want you to speak to the rock and water's going to come out. Then Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock, like they were told. And he said to them, here now you rebels, he's ticked, shall we bring water for you out of this rock? And Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock with his staff twice and water came out abundantly and the congregation drank and their livestock drank as well. Now, the people are thirsty again. They're grumbling again. They're complaining again. God, Moses goes back to God. Your people are complaining. What do you want me to do? And God says, I want you to go to the rock. This time, I want you to speak to it and water's going to come out. And Moses says, okay. And he goes to the rock, and he assembles the people, and he says, you want some water, rebels? Which I think is probably the nice way of saying it in the Bible. And then, instead of speaking, he strikes the rock two times. God told him, I want you to speak. Moses says, no, I don't need your direction anymore. I understand this machine. I understand how it works. I have a set of best practices. The staff has worked for me in the past. It's going to work for me now. And he hits the rock twice. And God, in his goodness, allows water to come out. But Moses exhibited the life over God posture and said, no thanks. I don't need your authority. I'm not going to follow your rules. I know the staff works. I'm just going to do it this way. I've got my best practices. I figured out your machine. I know what's best now. And as a result of that sin and usurping God's will in that way, he's not allowed to enter into the promised land. It's actually one of the more tragic scenes in the Bible when Moses allows his frustration to get the better of him in this way. But he exhibited the life over God posture. Because Moses was susceptible to it, because it's been around for thousands of years, we should know by now that we are susceptible to it as well. You may have taken this posture if you've ever in your own life chosen selective morality, chosen a portion of Scripture. There's this thing that you know is wrong, but you've just decided in your life, you know what, I don't really care. I'm just going to do it. I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine this weekend. It came to light. I have a group of friends. There's about seven or eight of us. We talk every day. And it came to light that one of my friends is one of these people that will just buy a TV for a weekend knowing he's going to return it at the end of the weekend. Or he'll buy an iPad for a couple days to use it and then take it back. And I'm like, yo, I can't believe that you do this. That's stealing. And he's like, oh, come on, you guys don't take a handful of the candied pecans at the Sprouts when you're going through there? And we're all like, no, we don't. That's theft. But he does it. And when we get to the bottom of it, what he said is, I'm not hurting anybody. It doesn't really matter. And we're all like, yeah, it's stealing. And he's like, eh, I know. And as I was getting on to him for it, he said, Nate, this may be an issue for you, and you may be able to condemn me for it, but I'm pretty sure if we looked at your life, we could find a place that I was more moral than you, and we could condemn you for that. And I thought, that's a fair point. We should probably wrap this up. Right now, I don't really want to explore this any further. We all do that. We all have these places and pockets in our life where Scripture tells us who we need to be. We know from God what He wants from our character, and we just refuse to hand those things over. We choose to keep a little bit of worry because it makes us feel like we're in control. We choose the right to be unkind or to not like people, even though we know that we don't have that right as believers. We elevate other things in our life over biblical importance in our life. If we have ever had, and I think we all have, selective morality, we've exhibited this life over God posture. Sometimes this posture takes on the form of a spiritual to-do list, of moralizing our faith, of I don't need to pursue God. I don't actually need him. If you'll just give me the best practices to be a godly parent, that's what I need. And we'll do sermon series. And listen, as I read this, I told you I had to repent. As I'm reading it this time, as a pastor, I'm having to repent, realizing I skirt the line of this often. We'll do a series on how to have better relationships. And sometimes instead of simply emphasizing our need for Jesus in our life, we'll say, if you'll do these four things, you'll have a better marriage. If you'll do these three things, you'll have a better kid. If you'll do these five things, you'll be spiritually healthy. And sometimes we under-emphasize how much we need to simply pursue Jesus and over-emphasize the things that we need to do, because this is what we like in life. We love a to-do list, don't we? We love having clear steps to accomplish our goal because we can grab onto that and we can control it. And now we're in charge of that. That's life over God posture. And we distill them down to some best practices. And God, you stay over there. I've got it from here. And what I really want us to see this morning is that when we do that, when we engage in this posture, when we exchange God for best practices, we're really making three losing exchanges that cost us so very much. When we adopt this posture, we make three losing exchanges. The first one is this, we exchange wonder for arrogance. We exchange wonder for arrogance. When we once marveled at God and his creation, when we were once at awe at him and everything that he does. The power of a thunderstorm, the beauty of a sunset, the miracle of cures. Now, with a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of understanding of how the world works, we become arrogant and difficult to impress. As I was thinking through this one this week, I was reminded that just last year, I think it was, Doug Funk, our favorite church partner and effective church mascot over there, who's now got the wonderful, if you're, listen, if you've been watching online, a whole reason to come is to see Doug's new Bob Barker haircut. It's amazing. And you need to come see it in person. And when COVID lifts, touch it. Last year, Doug got prostate cancer. He comes to me and he says, yeah, and he tells me, hey, I think I've got this thing and I'm going to get some tests. And it turned out that he had prostate cancer. And your immediate response is, oh my gosh, Doug, I'm so sorry. That's terrible. You hate to hear the C word. And he immediately says, it's prostate. It's good. They've got it isolated. They're going to run some tests on me, but they're just deciding how they're going to go get it, but they're going to go get it. And you're like, okay, great. So then you pray for wisdom for the doctors. He goes in for surgery. He gets it. You see him a little while later. Doug, did it go okay? And he says, yeah, it's good. Did I get it all? Yeah, it's great. All right, great. You're back at work. Please straighten the rows for church. Like, let's be ready. Like, let's go, right? Like, okay, great. Praise God. And then you just move on. Do you see the arrogance and the lack of wonder in what God has done? 50 years ago, that's a death sentence. 50 years ago, if you get that, you don't know you have it for a long, long time, and then you die, and we don't have Doug anymore. But because the medical community has advanced so much, because God has given us such wisdom that we can unpack the wonders of his creation, we take a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of understanding and we allow it to turn into bored arrogance so that when my friend recovers from cancer, I go, that's great, praise God. Let's get back to work. What wonder have we lost when we allow cures to pass us by like that? What wonder do we lose when we don't simply walk through nature and appreciate the breeze? When the weather feels this good and all we're thinking in our heads, because we've felt weather like this before, is, is this a false fall? How long do I get to enjoy this? Can I really break out the flannels for like months or am I going to have to wear a polo again? Instead of just going, God, this feels amazing. Thank you. When we adopt a life over God posture, we exchange wonder for bored arrogance. What a terrible way to go through life. Another exchange we make when we adopt this posture is we exchange trust for anxiety. We exchange trust and peace for worry and anxiety and stress. Because in this posture, we figured out the machine, right? We figured out how life works. We figured out what we need to do to get things to go our way. And because we have this understanding and because everything becomes predictable, we begin to heap all of the pressure and responsibility for life's unpredictability onto ourselves. We take on all the pressure. Literally, the weight of the world is on our shoulders because we've said, God, I don't need you to carry that for me anymore. I understand a little bit about how the world works, so I'm going to carry that and I'm going make things go, and I'm going to make things happen. And our souls were not created or designed to carry that weight. That's why God is constantly ushering us back to him. Come to me for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden. That's why he says that we should cast all of our cares upon him and that we should lay our burdens at his feet. That's why he says in Philippians that we should present everything to God with prayer and thanksgiving and that he will guard our hearts and our minds with a peace. He and Jesus Christ will guard our hearts and minds with a peace that passes understanding. And we exchange the peace that Jesus offers us when we walk with him and we simply trust him. And we say, God, we're in the middle of a pandemic. I don't know what to do, but you're bigger than this. I'm going to walk with you and trust you and whatever happens, happens. I'm with you. And instead, we take it and we internalize it and we think of all the different things that we need to do. I can't think of a better example of trading trust for anxiety than the way that we parent now. I can remember, I mean, we've only been parents for four and a half years. But you start to learn all these things about kids. I start to read about how a one-year-old and a two-year-old brain develops, and we're like, oh my gosh, do we use enough words in the home on a daily basis? Is the TV on too long? Should we read to her more? Should she be writing now? This kid colors in the lines. What should our kid be doing right now? Look at her. She's a disaster. This is embarrassing. And then we do coloring practice and the whole thing. Like, you worry so much. And now in a pandemic, what school do we put them in? Do we switch them to in-person? Do we keep them at home? Should we erect a bubble around our house for the rest of our lives? What is it that we should do? And we assume all the responsibility for our kids. And everything that happens, we flip out. Our mind spirals into this death spiral of anxiety where we draw the worst of conclusions. And I just wonder, parents who are given to anxiety over your kids, and this is a not fair question, all right, so I'm in this with you. What's your worry to prayer ratio? Those of us that have anxiety in our life, what's our ratio of minutes of worry and stress versus minutes of prayer and giving it back over to God? With your business, with your career, with your marriage, with your relationships, with finances, with that really difficult thing in your life, all of us, what's your ratio of minutes of worry versus minutes of prayer? When we adopt this life over God posture and we take it all on our shoulders, we trade trust in Jesus for a crippling anxiety that drowns us that we were not designed to carry. And I would simply ask you, if you feel yourself anxious, which has there ever been a time where there's more reason for that than in an incredibly divided country about myriad issues in the midst of a pandemic and all sorts of uncertainty? Is there ever more of a time for anxiety than now? Conversely, is there ever more of a time to realize that that's what we're doing and offering our trust back to God than now? What are our minutes of worry versus our minutes of prayer? The last exchange that we make that's dangerous for us is we exchange seeking for doing. We exchange seeking Jesus for doing the things that he wants us to do. We exchange pursuing the Father for an eight-step program to have a better relationship with the Father. And instead of simply craving more Jesus, instead of that passage in Psalms being true of us, as the deer pants for the water, so my soul pants for you, oh God, the living God. Instead of that being true for us, we're just asking, what do I need to do? I'm reading my Bible 30 minutes a day. I'm praying 10 minutes a day. I'm leading a small group. I go to church. I tithe and I volunteer, and yet I still don't feel like I'm really connecting with Jesus. What do I need to do next? Maybe we just need to pursue Jesus. Maybe we need to do away with the spiritual to-do list and we just need to lay prostrate before the Father and say, God, I want you to show me what that looks like. Our tendency to make these to-do lists, to grasp onto control by giving ourselves bite-sized tasks that we know we can master, is so ingrained in us that I personally believe, and now this is, let me preface this. I've said this in Bible studies before. I've never said this from stage because I feel a responsibility with what I say from stage. So I'm going to say that this is a guess. This is a pastor's best guess. I would love it if you guys would talk about this guess in your small groups this week. Chew on this. Figure out what you think. You guys have interacted with Scripture, most of you, more than me. So you figure out what you think about this. But I think that this is the reason that God waited so long to give people the Ten Commandments. You ever wonder why God waited that long? Adam comes on the scene. He gives them the one commandment. Don't eat from that tree. They're like, got it. And then they ate from the tree. Why not after that, as soon as they fall, as soon as they mess up, as soon as they're out of relationship with God, why doesn't God go, okay, you blew it. Now here are the 10 rules. If you do these things, you'll be good with me. You've already blown it. I don't know what to do about you, Adam and Eve, but maybe Cain and Abel got a chance. Why didn't he give them the law then? Say, here's what I want you to do to be right with me. Why didn't he give it to Noah? Creation floundered and it failed and he hit the reset button and now it's just Noah and his family. Why didn't he give the Ten Commandments to Noah and say, here's what I want you to do. These are the rules. Let's not let what just happened. I don't want that to happen again. Here's the rules to follow to make me happy. Why didn't he give them to Noah? Why didn't he give them to Abraham? He speaks directly to Abraham. Go to the promised land. I'm going to make you the forefather of all of my children. I'm going to make you the founder of a promise. And by the way, here are the rules that you need to teach to all of your followers that are my children. Why didn't he give them to Abraham? It wasn't until we get to Moses and his children are wandering in the desert and clamoring that he finally allows Moses to come down the mountain with the two tablets and the Ten Commandments and the law. Why did he wait so long when he could have made it so clear? This is my guess. You might have your guesses. My guess is he knows our hearts. And he knows that the second we get Ten Commandments, he's giving us a spiritual to-do list. And then we do the same thing we did last week. It makes us legalistic hypocrites. It also makes us control freaks. And now we say, good God, I don't need you anymore. I don't need to pursue you. I don't need to kind of follow this wispy idea of you. I have these set rules that I can follow. I'm good. And what we do, just like last week, is we remove the relationship from a fundamentally relational thing. And now our very relationship with Jesus no longer requires a relationship because we have the rules. We have a to-do list. Have you ever been to a wedding and after the vows, each, the husband and the wife present each other with their 10 rules for marriage? You ever seen that? Here's your rules. Jen, if you'll do these things, I'll be a good husband and I'll be happy and then she gives me my rules. And then when we have this relational issue, when we're kind of at each other's throats, I don't get to go like, what's wrong? I followed your rules. I don't understand. Because rules remove relationship from a fundamentally relational thing. That's why we don't do it in our relationships. And God didn't want to do it to his either, I don't think. He gave us these to help us, but I think he knew our hearts and he knew that we would reduce a relationship to a spiritual to-do list and remove the pursuit of Jesus from our hearts. And I think we've all done this. And like I said last week, we're going to do four weeks in things we shouldn't do. And then we're going to cap it off with what a relationship with God should really look like and what should really drive us to Jesus. And I'm excited. We're supposed to wait until next week to announce this, but forget it. Sometimes I just do what I want. I'm excited. We're going to cap this series off by taking communion together for the first time since February or March. We're going to get you ready at home. We're going to find a way to do it here. But when we talk about being with God, we're going to bring him in with us and have communion together as a church. And I'm excited about that. But this week, I would simply ask you, do you see this posture in yourself? Do we have pockets of selective morality? Do we have places where we've reduced God to a to-do list and not a relationship? Have you made the exchange of wonder for arrogance, of trust for anxiety, or of seeking for doing? And will you allow God to work in your heart this week as you pursue him, to show you where this posture exists in your life, and to begin to ask yourself the question and ready your heart for what it should look like to follow Jesus. Let's do that this week and this month as we move through this process together. Pray with me. Jesus, you are good to us. You love us. You intercede for us. God, you see in us our true motives, and you're patient with us. Father, you know that we can only offer you gross. We can only offer you messed up. We can only offer you our selfishness. But would you help our hearts to learn to beat with yours? Would you create within us an earnest desire for you? Would we not make these awful exchanges and be people who wonder at you, who trust in you and who seek you? Would you work in our hearts even this week to prepare us for what it is to truly know you and follow you. God, would you be with those who are hurting this week? Would you buoy their spirits? Would you encourage them? God, would they see you even in the struggle? And for those of us who are having good times and good weeks, would we see your joy in those moments as well? Jesus, it's in your name we pray. Amen.