Philippians

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.

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.

My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. As a pastor, it often falls on me to offer counsel and advice to people. Believe it or not, sometimes people will call the church and ask to talk to a pastor or ask to talk to me or even seek me out individually knowing full well who I am, and they will still ask me for advice on things or what to do in certain situations. And for a long time in those situations at my old church, it was a larger church in the Atlanta area, about 2,000 people. If you called that church, you got funneled to me. I was the one that you would talk to. It was a really talentless staff. So that was my role. And for a long time, my advice in those situations would pretty much default to suck it up. Like, get it together. Quit being a sissy. Let's go. Like, you just got to face the music. You got to stand up. You got to stick your chin out, and you got to take it. And I came by that advice honestly, because for a long time, that's what worked for me. Part of my story is that when I was younger, I was bullied pretty badly. For a couple years, elementary school and then in middle school, there was two kids in my neighborhood who just delighted in tormenting me. And I won't get into all the details of it, but one of the things they would do, just to give you a picture of what fifth grade looked like for Nate, is they were in middle school, so they got home before me. They would hide in the bushes at the bus stop and have an industrial strength rubber band, and they had sniffed it. So it was one big long rubber band, and then when I would get off the bus, they would pop me in the ears and in the neck and in the legs until I would cry or run, and then they would call me names. That was like most days. So we started diversion tactics. I got a letter to get off the bus at other bus stops. My mom would come pick me up at school sometimes, but that was a part of my life, and that was a part of my life for a couple of years. And at some point or another, as a kid, I just realized I can't care so much what they think about me. They would invite me over to play and I'd be like, oh good, we're friends now. And then I would get there and they would just make fun of me until I would go home. And it taught me to have a thick skin. It taught me to not let it affect me when other people pick on me. It taught me to be tough. And at some point in my adolescence, I decided I'm tired of them having this kind of control over me. I'm just going to tough it up. I'm just going to suck it up and figure out how to not care what they think. And that's what I did. And so in adulthood, when an issue came up, my thought was, suck it up. Just don't be a baby. That's what I did. Worked for me. Let's go. And that's kind of the mindset I had several years ago when I got one of those phone calls at the church that I was at. Some guy called the church and just said he was in a real tough way, needed to talk to a pastor. So pick up the phone. Hey, you know, one of the pastors here, what's going on? How can I help you? And he was 31 years old, and he had a girlfriend who had a bit of a drug issue, in his words, and she had just broken up with him. Nobody in his family liked him, liked her, but he was crestfallen over this breakup. And he wanted to know from a pastor, if there is a good God in heaven, how could he allow this girl to break my heart in this way? And I thought, are you freaking kidding me? Like, you're 31. She broke up with you. She's a drug addict. This is a good thing, dude. Get another girlfriend. There's a lot of them. Like, I could not muster any sympathy for this dude. In my life, there was a good friend of mine who had just lost her husband, and I'm comparing and contrasting these tragedies, and I'm like, bro, suck it up. Like take a day, you know, have a beer and then get back to it. It doesn't matter. Like I literally, I was nice to him. I wasn't mean. I had the hardest time caring about this guy's issue. Like the girl broke up with you, man, whatever whatever. And so a couple days after that, I had lunch with a counselor. Every now and again, a counselor will reach out to a pastor and invite you to lunch, and they're basically, they're kind of courting your reference. You want to get to know each other, and they know that I kind of funnel people into counseling, and so that's kind of how that goes. And so we went out to lunch, and we were talking, and I said, hey hey man, let me just ask you a question. So I have to counsel sometimes. Let me get a little bit of advice. I got this call the other day. How would you have handled that? And I told him about the guy's issues and my response. And he kind of thought about it a second and he said, I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, well, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that your parents are together and that you never really had to wonder if they were proud of you. And I said, that's true of me. Yeah, I would say that's true. I said, how'd you know that? And he said, it's just, you just kind of get a sense. I can just tell by the way you carry yourself. He said, I'd be willing to bet that that guy you talked to on the phone probably doesn't have a background like you. He probably doesn't have that family structure to lean on like you did. And he probably values the relationship with that girl and what it did for him and the value that it made him feel a lot more than you ever would. So your ability to detach yourself from that and move on is not the same as his. So I would probably handle that with a little bit more empathy. And I thought, whoa, this dude is smart. I'm going to give him all the referrals. How did he figure that out in 20 minutes of talking to me? I was super impressed. And it also dawned on me in that conversation, because I'm obtuse,ations are always a little bit more nuanced than they seem. And that most of the time when we're talking about issues of mental and emotional health, suck it up is really bad advice. It's really careless and thoughtless and obtuse. And since then, I've rethought about the way that I offer counsel. And that really got my wheels turning on mental health in general. It's something that I care about a lot. I care deeply about how the church engages it because I think historically the church has engaged mental health a little bit like I did. Suck it up and pray it away. Let's go. You're not a good enough Christian. If you were a better Christian, you wouldn't be so sad. So let's lean into God and let's quit being a sissy. And I just think historically that's how we've handled it and that's obtuse. That's not helpful. And more and more, it's being pressed into the national conscience. Last year, we had several athletes come out and say that they were struggling with anxiety, that they were struggling with depression. There was a very high-profile rookie in the NBA who had a terrible rookie year, and he confessed that it was because he struggles greatly with anxiety. There was an offensive lineman, a big, huge bear of a man for the Philadelphia Eagles, I believe, who missed a half of football because he was in the locker room at halftime throwing up because of anxiety attacks and could not get himself out on the field. So more and more we become aware of these things. Every time there's a shooting, then mental health and the epidemic gets thrust into the national conscience. And so as we approached this series and we said, I want a better life, and we thought through the four things that we were going to talk about, I just kind of felt like, based on all of those things, my experiences and what's going on in our culture now, that it would be good to take a Sunday and say, hey, you know what? I want a better me. I want to be more healthy. And so I wanted to take a Sunday and talk to those of you who do struggle with some sort of mental or emotional struggle. I wanted to talk to us as a church, as we encounter and engage and love people in our life who are walking through that struggle. And so as I prepared and thought through what I wanted to say and how I wanted to approach it, I actually had a conversation with my therapist. I started seeing a therapist this last summer. And normally when I tell people that I'm in counseling, I immediately tell them why I'm in counseling because I don't want them to think that I'm broken or crazy or that there's something going on. So I want to be very clear, but it's for this really good reason. But as I prepared for this sermon, I thought, I'm going to quit doing that. Because what do I care what you think about how I go to counseling? We need to destigmatize it anyways. So I had a conversation with my therapist. And he's a believer. And he's got a master's in divinity. And so he's very helpful for me. And I said, hey, man, I'm going to be doing a sermon on mental health. What does the church need to know about mental health? What do you wish pastors would say about it? And he said, well, you know, I don't really hear a lot of sermons on mental health, but the ones that I have heard tend to focus on unhealth and what that's like. And I just think that we do a disservice to the church when we don't paint a picture of what health is. So I would invest my time in that. That's interesting. How would you define health? And he defined it essentially this way. He said, a healthy person walks in a sense of security and worth. He said a healthy person, someone who's mentally and emotionally healthy and stable walks in a sense of security and worth. What he meant is, if we're going to be emotionally stable, if we're going to be mentally healthy, then we need to have a sense of security. We need to feel safe. We need to know that everything's going to be okay. If we're walking around in constant fear, a constant uncertainty, or like we've got our eyes covered and we don't know where our next step is going to go, that that's going to cause some mental instability. So we first need to feel secure, but we also need to feel valuable. We need to feel worth. We need to feel like we're enough. We need to feel like we're good enough for other people, that we have some intrinsic value. We need to understand that about ourselves and walk in an actualization and an acknowledgement of that value. So he said, to be healthy, we need to walk in a sense of security and worth. And then he said something that I thought was really interesting. He said that every person gets their boat rocked a little bit. Every person in their life, all of you, at some point or another, have had times where you felt unsafe and had times where you felt unworthy. We've all had our security compromised. We've all had the rug pulled out from under us. We've all felt like, no, this time it's not gonna be okay. And I think more predominantly in the American culture, we've all had times where we don't feel worthy. Some of us feel that pervasively right now. For some of us, the story of our life is this low simmering sense of unworthiness and lack of value and like we're not good enough. And all we've ever done is claw to show ourselves and the people around us that we are actually good enough. Everybody struggles at times to feel secure and to feel worthy. And what he said is, when that happens, healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to get themselves back on track. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to try to grope for that security and to try to grope for that value. We've seen these unhealthy coping mechanisms, right? Someone feels unsafe, their world feels crazy, and so they become hyper-controlling of their environment all the time. They become, their house has to be clean, and their house doesn't have to be clean because they like a clean house. Their house has to be clean because they've got to exert control over something. And that's not necessarily bad, but it can become unhealthy. Where we see this most is when people exhibit unhealthy coping mechanisms as we lurch for value. This is the girl that far too easily gives herself over to whatever guy will pay attention to her. Because from that guy, she is getting her sense of worth, and that's how she's coping and lurching for that. This is the grown man that still tells you how good of an athlete he was in high school. Because all he's saying is, tell me I'm valuable. Tell me I'm worthy. This is the guy that can't help but brag about whatever it was he did. It's not because he's dumb. It's because he's incredibly insecure and he's groping for value and he doesn't feel it. So he's just looking at you going, can you just tell me I'm awesome? Can you do that, please? He's a 15-year-old kid going, please tell me I'm great. We all do it. As we grow up, we find more nuanced ways to grope for this value, but we do, and it becomes unhealthy. This is where addictions start and get carried on, right? We feel unvaluable. We feel unworthy, we feel unsafe, and so we drink, we medicate, or we find a hobby to numb it, or we refuse to sit in silence. In my research, I saw a great quote from Blaise Pascal that said, all of man's problems can be summed up in his inability to sit in a quiet room alone. Some of us hate the silence. Some of us can't go more than 10 seconds without pulling out our phone to distract ourselves from the things that we don't want to think about. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to bring back and restore that sense of security and worth. And when we think about healthy coping mechanisms, I think this is a good place to insert the spiritual into the conversation as we think about what are some healthy coping mechanisms with a lack of stability or a lack of value that can bring me back to a place of true health. And as I had this conversation with my therapist, I suggested these two things. I said, I think God provides for us these senses in these two ways. And he said, yeah, that's not everything. And I just want to say very clearly, I'm not covering everything that we do and how we handle mental health this morning, but this is a very good start, I think. As we think about healthy coping mechanisms and what it means to be truly healthy, I want to suggest these two things to you, that there's really two pillars of true health. There's security in God's sovereignty and worthiness in God's love. If we want to be healthy people, truly healthy the way that we were designed, we have to walk in a sense of security anchored in God's sovereignty and a sense of worthiness brought about by God's deep and compassionate love for us. That's what true health is. And so a healthy coping mechanism is to acknowledge that God is sovereign, to acknowledge that God is in control, to acknowledge that nothing happens outside of his purview and outside of his will and feel the relief of that. A good coping mechanism is to look around at the people in your life that God has placed in your life who love you and who value you and who are telling you that you are enough and to allow that to be the truth that you hear and not the truth from the detractors. I actually think that these two pillars are some of the greatest things that Christianity has to offer. I think we undervalue the sovereignty of God. One of my favorite verses, group of verses, is Philippians 4, 6, and 7. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, through prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your requests to God, and the God of peace who transcends all understanding will, listen, guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Are you anxious? Are the things keeping you up at night? Does worry characterize you? Pray those things to God. Release them to God. And he says that his peace that passes all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. And what that means is God is saying, I've got it. I'm in control. I'm God. It's going to be okay. Rest easy in my sovereignty. He does this again in Romans 8, where it says, we know that for those who love him and are called according to his purpose, that all things work together for the good of those who love him. Everything works together for the good of those who love him are called according to his purpose. Romans 8.28 tells us everything's going to work out. Even if it doesn't work out now, it will work out eventually. It's a beautiful promise from God. I saw a clip of a pastor doing the funeral for his mother that he lost far too early. And he said some amazing things. He said, you know, with God, all of our prayers are answered. I was praying so much for my mom to live, and then she died. He said it disillusioned him for a little bit. But what he realized was he was thinking about it wrong. And it dawned on him that in God, all his prayers are answered because she knew Jesus. So as he prayed for his mom to live, the truth of it is either she's going to live or she was gonna live. She was gonna be okay or she was gonna be okay. She was gonna be with family or she was gonna go be with family. God is good or God is good. This is the sovereignty that he offers us. And one of my favorite passages that I mentioned often, Revelation 21, paints this beautiful picture where it says the end of days that we will be with God and he will be with his people and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. There is a sovereignty and a peace that God promises throughout scripture. Scripture is replete with these promises. And if we want to be healthy and cling onto a sense of stability and know that everything is okay, even when we don't see how it's going to be okay, then we cling to the sovereignty of God that is laced throughout Scripture, and we know that it's going to be okay, even if it doesn't make sense to me. And I believe that a healthy person reminds themselves of the sovereignty of God and rests easy in that and not in their own control. The next thing we do is we rest in God's love. We know the Bible tells us God loves us. We know John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life. God tells us that not even a sparrow falls to the ground without his knowledge, so how much more does he care about you that the numbers of hairs on your head are numbered? He knows you that well and that intimately. He tells us that if your earthly father knows how to give you a good gift, how much better are my gifts? He tells us that we know that we are loved because while we were still sinners, he died for us. He tells us that we are able to love him because he first loved us. From God, if you listen, is a constant, pervasive, never fatiguing voice that says, you are enough. I love you. You do not have to perform for me. You don't have to be good for me. You don't have to sell for me. You don't have to execute for me. You don't have to impress me. I love you as much as I'm ever going to love you. And to be healthy is to walk in an acknowledgement of that love and not need the accolades of others and not be so desperate for the approval of this group because I'm walking with the approval of my God. And if you give me it too, that's great, but I don't need it because God gives it to me. That's what health looks like. Have you ever met somebody who is so comfortable in their own skin that you just marvel at it? To me, that's a person who walks knowing that God loves me and I'm good. That's what health is. So if we want to be a healthy person, we need to quiet the voices that are telling us we're not enough and listen to the pervasive and persistent voice of God that tells us that we are. As we think about ourselves pursuing mental and emotional health, I think the best, most practical way to do that is to pursue health. We need to identify poor coping mechanisms in our life and pursue healthy ones. If we're going to be mentally healthy, if we're in a state this morning where we feel given towards depression, if we feel given towards anxiety, if we feel given towards just unhealth, I think a good exercise is to identify the unhealthy coping mechanisms that exist in our life. And listen, we all have them. One of the things I'm more certain of than ever, especially in being in counseling, is that we are all a bundle and an alchemy of insecurities and coping mechanisms to present ourselves as enough, all of us. So the best thing we can do is try to identify where these coping mechanisms are and pursue them and pursue healthy ones. But I don't just want to talk about us, how we pursue health. I think one of the big questions the church faces and some of us in our life faces, if I have people in my life who are not healthy, how do I love them towards health? What can we do to love other people towards emotional and mental health? I think two things I would suggest to you this morning. The first would be to offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. To offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. Hebrews tells us that Christ took on flesh, that he bore our infirmities, that he was tempted in the ways that we are tempted, so that he understood our plight, so that when we pray to our Savior, we're not praying to someone who is altogether unfamiliar with the human condition. We're praying to someone who is empathetic with us and therefore compassionate towards us. Do you realize that empathy is the birthplace of compassion? That empathy begats compassion. That the thing that happened with me and that guy that called the church that day, I had zero empathy for him. Therefore, I had zero compassion. It made no sense to me how he was that broken up about that. I could not put myself in his shoes of caring that much that I would doubt the existence of God because a girl dumped me. And so I had no compassion for him. But when I had that conversation with the counselor, and I realized the nuances of what was going on in the conversation that I had with that guy, the thought occurred to me, you know what? If I didn't grow up the way that I grew up in the house that I grew up in, it's entirely possible that I would handle that situation just like he does. And that I'm not tough. I didn't just learn to suck it up. I'm just the benefit of a good environment with good coping mechanisms. And the truth of it is, if you think about me as a little kid, I said I learned to suck it up early. No, I didn't. No, I didn't. I didn't decide as a 12-year-old to get tough. No one gets tough at 12. I was in an environment where I was loved by family and by people at church. And that reminded me of my worthiness. My parents breathed scripture into me and that reminded me of God's sovereignty. And I begun to cling to those things. And I wouldn't have articulated it like this at the time, but all that happened is I had to simply develop healthy coping mechanisms for feeling unsafe and unworthy. And the guy that I was talking to on the phone that day had never had the opportunity to develop those. So the first thing we do with people who are experiencing unhealth is we offer empathy. And we acknowledge and admit that even if we don't understand, even if we've never felt that way before, if you change the alchemy of my life and you make the circumstances the same and you run me through the ringer that they went through, there's a very good chance I would come out the other side feeling and thinking and acting the same way that they do. So don't think that we're for a second better than them or more stable than them or tougher than them or stronger than them. We have a different background than they do. And when we can acknowledge that we would be the same person they are, that produces in us empathy. And out of that empathy comes compassion, where we realize some of the worst possible advice would be to suck it up or to pray it away, that we need to first be empathetic with them and understand. And empathy is also the acknowledgement that sometimes when people are dealing with a mental health issue, it's a chemical imbalance. They are sick. Looking at someone who is depressed and telling them to suck it up is like looking at someone with the flu and telling them to run a couple miles. It's useless advice. All it does is make you look dumb and then feel bad. We've got to offer empathy, which produces in us a Christ-like compassion. To help us offer empathy, I wanted to share with you some statistics that I found in the research that I've been doing. These are from the National Mental Health Institute, Institute of Mental Health. What I learned is that a quarter or 20% of U.S. citizens exhibit some symptoms of mental illness. Now, that's a wide brush. That's mild depression all the way to extreme schizophrenia, okay? But 20%, one in five of you, look down the row within two people and one of them is crazy, right? That's a lot. It affects a lot of us. Now, here's what I think is really interesting. It says that there's 22% of women and 15% of men deal with mental health issues. Now, here's what that doesn't mean, that men have it together more than women do. What it means is they're more honest than us and you're a stubborn jerk. That's what that means. You just can't admit that you're struggling. You just fold your arms and pretend like everything's okay. And it only gets worse because 26% of millennials of 18 to 25 say that they experienced some sort of mental illness or exhibit signs of that. Only 14% of ages 50 and older. Now listen, I don't think for a second that you people who are 50 and older in this room have just have life so figured out and all your coping skills so nailed that you're the healthiest bunch in the room. Listen, if you're a dude over 50 and you're like, I don't struggle with depression. Yes, you do. You're just stubborn. Listen, all of us at some point have experienced a season of melancholy. We all have. If you haven't, you're a psychopath or you're not paying attention. All of us experience anxiety in excessive ways. Everybody in this room has had a suicidal thought. Everybody. The difference with healthy and unhealthy is how we cope with those things. I also thought it was really interesting that 50% of adolescents show sign of a mental disorder. And if we understand that health is to walk in a sense of stability and worth, is it any wonder that half of our high school students have no idea how to cling on to stability and worth? We are all of us broken. We are all of us at times weak and in need of help. There is none of us in here who is singularly and individually strong and healthy. And we need to acknowledge that as we seek to offer empathy to others. The next thing we can do to love people towards health is to celebrate courageous choices. We need to start celebrating courageous choices. When somebody makes a decision to get help, when somebody makes a decision to be vulnerable and confess, we need to praise those things. We need to celebrate those things. We don't need to deride those things. I've talked a lot about counseling in this sermon. One of the things that breaks my heart is that counseling gets such a stigma that people, when you start talking about going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that we automatically think, man, only broken people do that. What's going on in your life? What can you not get together yourself? Why do you need help that you need to go talk to a professional to do that? Are you crazy? What's wrong with you? What have you failed at? How did you ruin your marriage? When did you get fired? We just assume that when people are going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that there's something broken in them. But here's the thing, there's something broken in all of us, so we need to stop it. Sometimes, most of the time, the unhealthy coping mechanisms that we have are so deeply embedded and ingrained in us that we can't see them. We don't know how to find them ourselves. And we need a trained professional to talk with us and help us see those and then help us see a way through them. We need trained professionals who are more than pastors. I'm very quick to go, listen, I wanna try to help you as best I can. I'm gonna pray for you. You need to talk to a therapist, not because you're crazy, but because they're good at it. The other thing I've learned is when you talk to somebody who will say, I should really go speak to a counselor about this. A lot of times they won't. And at first they won't because it's a pride thing. I don't want to do that. I don't want people to see me parking at that office. I don't want people to think that there's something wrong with me. I don't want people to think that I can't handle it or that I'm weak somehow. I don't want all the stuff that goes with seeing a counselor. So I'm not gonna go do that. And it seems like pride. But when you start to peel back the layers, what you find is that it's really fear. I'm convinced that the reason, if you're thinking about seeing a counselor, getting help, working through some unhealth in your life, I'm convinced that one of the big reasons we don't do that is because we know good and well what we're going to have to walk through when we get there. We don't want to have to look at ourselves in the mirror. It is easier to cope. It is easier to demur. It is easier to distract than it is to confront. And so we keep walking away from our unhealthy selves instead of turning and allowing someone to hold up a mirror and show us and work through it and walk through it and emerge on the other side more healthy. It's often fear that keeps us from getting help, not pride. And so I want you to know this morning that I think it takes bravery to go get help. And I actually think, and I would love for our church to start thinking about it this way, that counseling is not for the broken. It's for the brave. Counseling is not for broken people. It's for brave people. If it were for broken people, then we'd all be in it because we're all broken. But at some point or another, you have to take a step and make a decision that I want some help. I want to be healthy. I want somebody else's voice in this conversation helping me identify the unhealthy pockets in my life to restoring me to my God-given sense of security and value and love. And since I can't find my way out of this mess myself, I want to get someone else to speak into it for me. And that takes bravery and courage. The counseling is not the broken. It's for the brave. My prayer is that 2020 will be the healthiest year for you in a long, long time. For those of you who are brave enough to pursue health, I think it begins with acknowledging and identifying the unhealthy ways we bring ourselves a sense of security and worth. And doing the work to replace that coping mechanism with one that pushes us towards God's sovereignty and pushes us towards God's love. If we have people in our lives this year that we're trying to love towards mental health, we need to do it with empathy and compassion. And we need to, as a church and as a Christian subculture, destigmatize what it is to get help and admit that we all need it. And it's not for the broken, it's for the brave. I hope that some of you will make courageous choices, even this week. If you do want to talk to a counselor, email me and I'll work to find you a good one. I'm not going to send you to mine, but somebody. If there's someone in your life who is struggling, please, please offer them empathy. Please offer them compassion. Please offer them understanding. Try the best you can to put yourself in their shoes and love them from that perspective. And let's make this year a healthy year. Let's pray. Father, we do love you. We thank you so much for loving us. God, if there is anybody here who feels unworthy, who feels unvaluable, who feels unloved, God, may they just feel a pervasive sense of your love and your compassion wrapping around them today. Help them to hear the voices in their life that speak for you and tell them that they are enough. God, if we feel unsafe or insecure, I pray that you would restore that sense of security with your sovereignty. God, for those here who are struggling, who are sad, or who are anxious, or dealing with a multitude of other things, help them feel your peace today. Help them feel your hope today. Remind them that that hope, your word says, will not be put to shame. God, I pray that we would be healthy, that we would walk in a sense of security in you, of value in you, and that that would enable us to love other people well on your behalf. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. As a pastor, it often falls on me to offer counsel and advice to people. Believe it or not, sometimes people will call the church and ask to talk to a pastor or ask to talk to me or even seek me out individually knowing full well who I am, and they will still ask me for advice on things or what to do in certain situations. And for a long time in those situations at my old church, it was a larger church in the Atlanta area, about 2,000 people. If you called that church, you got funneled to me. I was the one that you would talk to. It was a really talentless staff. So that was my role. And for a long time, my advice in those situations would pretty much default to suck it up. Like, get it together. Quit being a sissy. Let's go. Like, you just got to face the music. You got to stand up. You got to stick your chin out, and you got to take it. And I came by that advice honestly, because for a long time, that's what worked for me. Part of my story is that when I was younger, I was bullied pretty badly. For a couple years, elementary school and then in middle school, there was two kids in my neighborhood who just delighted in tormenting me. And I won't get into all the details of it, but one of the things they would do, just to give you a picture of what fifth grade looked like for Nate, is they were in middle school, so they got home before me. They would hide in the bushes at the bus stop and have an industrial strength rubber band, and they had sniffed it. So it was one big long rubber band, and then when I would get off the bus, they would pop me in the ears and in the neck and in the legs until I would cry or run, and then they would call me names. That was like most days. So we started diversion tactics. I got a letter to get off the bus at other bus stops. My mom would come pick me up at school sometimes, but that was a part of my life, and that was a part of my life for a couple of years. And at some point or another, as a kid, I just realized I can't care so much what they think about me. They would invite me over to play and I'd be like, oh good, we're friends now. And then I would get there and they would just make fun of me until I would go home. And it taught me to have a thick skin. It taught me to not let it affect me when other people pick on me. It taught me to be tough. And at some point in my adolescence, I decided I'm tired of them having this kind of control over me. I'm just going to tough it up. I'm just going to suck it up and figure out how to not care what they think. And that's what I did. And so in adulthood, when an issue came up, my thought was, suck it up. Just don't be a baby. That's what I did. Worked for me. Let's go. And that's kind of the mindset I had several years ago when I got one of those phone calls at the church that I was at. Some guy called the church and just said he was in a real tough way, needed to talk to a pastor. So pick up the phone. Hey, you know, one of the pastors here, what's going on? How can I help you? And he was 31 years old, and he had a girlfriend who had a bit of a drug issue, in his words, and she had just broken up with him. Nobody in his family liked him, liked her, but he was crestfallen over this breakup. And he wanted to know from a pastor, if there is a good God in heaven, how could he allow this girl to break my heart in this way? And I thought, are you freaking kidding me? Like, you're 31. She broke up with you. She's a drug addict. This is a good thing, dude. Get another girlfriend. There's a lot of them. Like, I could not muster any sympathy for this dude. In my life, there was a good friend of mine who had just lost her husband, and I'm comparing and contrasting these tragedies, and I'm like, bro, suck it up. Like take a day, you know, have a beer and then get back to it. It doesn't matter. Like I literally, I was nice to him. I wasn't mean. I had the hardest time caring about this guy's issue. Like the girl broke up with you, man, whatever whatever. And so a couple days after that, I had lunch with a counselor. Every now and again, a counselor will reach out to a pastor and invite you to lunch, and they're basically, they're kind of courting your reference. You want to get to know each other, and they know that I kind of funnel people into counseling, and so that's kind of how that goes. And so we went out to lunch, and we were talking, and I said, hey hey man, let me just ask you a question. So I have to counsel sometimes. Let me get a little bit of advice. I got this call the other day. How would you have handled that? And I told him about the guy's issues and my response. And he kind of thought about it a second and he said, I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, well, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that your parents are together and that you never really had to wonder if they were proud of you. And I said, that's true of me. Yeah, I would say that's true. I said, how'd you know that? And he said, it's just, you just kind of get a sense. I can just tell by the way you carry yourself. He said, I'd be willing to bet that that guy you talked to on the phone probably doesn't have a background like you. He probably doesn't have that family structure to lean on like you did. And he probably values the relationship with that girl and what it did for him and the value that it made him feel a lot more than you ever would. So your ability to detach yourself from that and move on is not the same as his. So I would probably handle that with a little bit more empathy. And I thought, whoa, this dude is smart. I'm going to give him all the referrals. How did he figure that out in 20 minutes of talking to me? I was super impressed. And it also dawned on me in that conversation, because I'm obtuse,ations are always a little bit more nuanced than they seem. And that most of the time when we're talking about issues of mental and emotional health, suck it up is really bad advice. It's really careless and thoughtless and obtuse. And since then, I've rethought about the way that I offer counsel. And that really got my wheels turning on mental health in general. It's something that I care about a lot. I care deeply about how the church engages it because I think historically the church has engaged mental health a little bit like I did. Suck it up and pray it away. Let's go. You're not a good enough Christian. If you were a better Christian, you wouldn't be so sad. So let's lean into God and let's quit being a sissy. And I just think historically that's how we've handled it and that's obtuse. That's not helpful. And more and more, it's being pressed into the national conscience. Last year, we had several athletes come out and say that they were struggling with anxiety, that they were struggling with depression. There was a very high-profile rookie in the NBA who had a terrible rookie year, and he confessed that it was because he struggles greatly with anxiety. There was an offensive lineman, a big, huge bear of a man for the Philadelphia Eagles, I believe, who missed a half of football because he was in the locker room at halftime throwing up because of anxiety attacks and could not get himself out on the field. So more and more we become aware of these things. Every time there's a shooting, then mental health and the epidemic gets thrust into the national conscience. And so as we approached this series and we said, I want a better life, and we thought through the four things that we were going to talk about, I just kind of felt like, based on all of those things, my experiences and what's going on in our culture now, that it would be good to take a Sunday and say, hey, you know what? I want a better me. I want to be more healthy. And so I wanted to take a Sunday and talk to those of you who do struggle with some sort of mental or emotional struggle. I wanted to talk to us as a church, as we encounter and engage and love people in our life who are walking through that struggle. And so as I prepared and thought through what I wanted to say and how I wanted to approach it, I actually had a conversation with my therapist. I started seeing a therapist this last summer. And normally when I tell people that I'm in counseling, I immediately tell them why I'm in counseling because I don't want them to think that I'm broken or crazy or that there's something going on. So I want to be very clear, but it's for this really good reason. But as I prepared for this sermon, I thought, I'm going to quit doing that. Because what do I care what you think about how I go to counseling? We need to destigmatize it anyways. So I had a conversation with my therapist. And he's a believer. And he's got a master's in divinity. And so he's very helpful for me. And I said, hey, man, I'm going to be doing a sermon on mental health. What does the church need to know about mental health? What do you wish pastors would say about it? And he said, well, you know, I don't really hear a lot of sermons on mental health, but the ones that I have heard tend to focus on unhealth and what that's like. And I just think that we do a disservice to the church when we don't paint a picture of what health is. So I would invest my time in that. That's interesting. How would you define health? And he defined it essentially this way. He said, a healthy person walks in a sense of security and worth. He said a healthy person, someone who's mentally and emotionally healthy and stable walks in a sense of security and worth. What he meant is, if we're going to be emotionally stable, if we're going to be mentally healthy, then we need to have a sense of security. We need to feel safe. We need to know that everything's going to be okay. If we're walking around in constant fear, a constant uncertainty, or like we've got our eyes covered and we don't know where our next step is going to go, that that's going to cause some mental instability. So we first need to feel secure, but we also need to feel valuable. We need to feel worth. We need to feel like we're enough. We need to feel like we're good enough for other people, that we have some intrinsic value. We need to understand that about ourselves and walk in an actualization and an acknowledgement of that value. So he said, to be healthy, we need to walk in a sense of security and worth. And then he said something that I thought was really interesting. He said that every person gets their boat rocked a little bit. Every person in their life, all of you, at some point or another, have had times where you felt unsafe and had times where you felt unworthy. We've all had our security compromised. We've all had the rug pulled out from under us. We've all felt like, no, this time it's not gonna be okay. And I think more predominantly in the American culture, we've all had times where we don't feel worthy. Some of us feel that pervasively right now. For some of us, the story of our life is this low simmering sense of unworthiness and lack of value and like we're not good enough. And all we've ever done is claw to show ourselves and the people around us that we are actually good enough. Everybody struggles at times to feel secure and to feel worthy. And what he said is, when that happens, healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to get themselves back on track. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to try to grope for that security and to try to grope for that value. We've seen these unhealthy coping mechanisms, right? Someone feels unsafe, their world feels crazy, and so they become hyper-controlling of their environment all the time. They become, their house has to be clean, and their house doesn't have to be clean because they like a clean house. Their house has to be clean because they've got to exert control over something. And that's not necessarily bad, but it can become unhealthy. Where we see this most is when people exhibit unhealthy coping mechanisms as we lurch for value. This is the girl that far too easily gives herself over to whatever guy will pay attention to her. Because from that guy, she is getting her sense of worth, and that's how she's coping and lurching for that. This is the grown man that still tells you how good of an athlete he was in high school. Because all he's saying is, tell me I'm valuable. Tell me I'm worthy. This is the guy that can't help but brag about whatever it was he did. It's not because he's dumb. It's because he's incredibly insecure and he's groping for value and he doesn't feel it. So he's just looking at you going, can you just tell me I'm awesome? Can you do that, please? He's a 15-year-old kid going, please tell me I'm great. We all do it. As we grow up, we find more nuanced ways to grope for this value, but we do, and it becomes unhealthy. This is where addictions start and get carried on, right? We feel unvaluable. We feel unworthy, we feel unsafe, and so we drink, we medicate, or we find a hobby to numb it, or we refuse to sit in silence. In my research, I saw a great quote from Blaise Pascal that said, all of man's problems can be summed up in his inability to sit in a quiet room alone. Some of us hate the silence. Some of us can't go more than 10 seconds without pulling out our phone to distract ourselves from the things that we don't want to think about. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to bring back and restore that sense of security and worth. And when we think about healthy coping mechanisms, I think this is a good place to insert the spiritual into the conversation as we think about what are some healthy coping mechanisms with a lack of stability or a lack of value that can bring me back to a place of true health. And as I had this conversation with my therapist, I suggested these two things. I said, I think God provides for us these senses in these two ways. And he said, yeah, that's not everything. And I just want to say very clearly, I'm not covering everything that we do and how we handle mental health this morning, but this is a very good start, I think. As we think about healthy coping mechanisms and what it means to be truly healthy, I want to suggest these two things to you, that there's really two pillars of true health. There's security in God's sovereignty and worthiness in God's love. If we want to be healthy people, truly healthy the way that we were designed, we have to walk in a sense of security anchored in God's sovereignty and a sense of worthiness brought about by God's deep and compassionate love for us. That's what true health is. And so a healthy coping mechanism is to acknowledge that God is sovereign, to acknowledge that God is in control, to acknowledge that nothing happens outside of his purview and outside of his will and feel the relief of that. A good coping mechanism is to look around at the people in your life that God has placed in your life who love you and who value you and who are telling you that you are enough and to allow that to be the truth that you hear and not the truth from the detractors. I actually think that these two pillars are some of the greatest things that Christianity has to offer. I think we undervalue the sovereignty of God. One of my favorite verses, group of verses, is Philippians 4, 6, and 7. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, through prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your requests to God, and the God of peace who transcends all understanding will, listen, guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Are you anxious? Are the things keeping you up at night? Does worry characterize you? Pray those things to God. Release them to God. And he says that his peace that passes all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. And what that means is God is saying, I've got it. I'm in control. I'm God. It's going to be okay. Rest easy in my sovereignty. He does this again in Romans 8, where it says, we know that for those who love him and are called according to his purpose, that all things work together for the good of those who love him. Everything works together for the good of those who love him are called according to his purpose. Romans 8.28 tells us everything's going to work out. Even if it doesn't work out now, it will work out eventually. It's a beautiful promise from God. I saw a clip of a pastor doing the funeral for his mother that he lost far too early. And he said some amazing things. He said, you know, with God, all of our prayers are answered. I was praying so much for my mom to live, and then she died. He said it disillusioned him for a little bit. But what he realized was he was thinking about it wrong. And it dawned on him that in God, all his prayers are answered because she knew Jesus. So as he prayed for his mom to live, the truth of it is either she's going to live or she was gonna live. She was gonna be okay or she was gonna be okay. She was gonna be with family or she was gonna go be with family. God is good or God is good. This is the sovereignty that he offers us. And one of my favorite passages that I mentioned often, Revelation 21, paints this beautiful picture where it says the end of days that we will be with God and he will be with his people and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. There is a sovereignty and a peace that God promises throughout scripture. Scripture is replete with these promises. And if we want to be healthy and cling onto a sense of stability and know that everything is okay, even when we don't see how it's going to be okay, then we cling to the sovereignty of God that is laced throughout Scripture, and we know that it's going to be okay, even if it doesn't make sense to me. And I believe that a healthy person reminds themselves of the sovereignty of God and rests easy in that and not in their own control. The next thing we do is we rest in God's love. We know the Bible tells us God loves us. We know John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life. God tells us that not even a sparrow falls to the ground without his knowledge, so how much more does he care about you that the numbers of hairs on your head are numbered? He knows you that well and that intimately. He tells us that if your earthly father knows how to give you a good gift, how much better are my gifts? He tells us that we know that we are loved because while we were still sinners, he died for us. He tells us that we are able to love him because he first loved us. From God, if you listen, is a constant, pervasive, never fatiguing voice that says, you are enough. I love you. You do not have to perform for me. You don't have to be good for me. You don't have to sell for me. You don't have to execute for me. You don't have to impress me. I love you as much as I'm ever going to love you. And to be healthy is to walk in an acknowledgement of that love and not need the accolades of others and not be so desperate for the approval of this group because I'm walking with the approval of my God. And if you give me it too, that's great, but I don't need it because God gives it to me. That's what health looks like. Have you ever met somebody who is so comfortable in their own skin that you just marvel at it? To me, that's a person who walks knowing that God loves me and I'm good. That's what health is. So if we want to be a healthy person, we need to quiet the voices that are telling us we're not enough and listen to the pervasive and persistent voice of God that tells us that we are. As we think about ourselves pursuing mental and emotional health, I think the best, most practical way to do that is to pursue health. We need to identify poor coping mechanisms in our life and pursue healthy ones. If we're going to be mentally healthy, if we're in a state this morning where we feel given towards depression, if we feel given towards anxiety, if we feel given towards just unhealth, I think a good exercise is to identify the unhealthy coping mechanisms that exist in our life. And listen, we all have them. One of the things I'm more certain of than ever, especially in being in counseling, is that we are all a bundle and an alchemy of insecurities and coping mechanisms to present ourselves as enough, all of us. So the best thing we can do is try to identify where these coping mechanisms are and pursue them and pursue healthy ones. But I don't just want to talk about us, how we pursue health. I think one of the big questions the church faces and some of us in our life faces, if I have people in my life who are not healthy, how do I love them towards health? What can we do to love other people towards emotional and mental health? I think two things I would suggest to you this morning. The first would be to offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. To offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. Hebrews tells us that Christ took on flesh, that he bore our infirmities, that he was tempted in the ways that we are tempted, so that he understood our plight, so that when we pray to our Savior, we're not praying to someone who is altogether unfamiliar with the human condition. We're praying to someone who is empathetic with us and therefore compassionate towards us. Do you realize that empathy is the birthplace of compassion? That empathy begats compassion. That the thing that happened with me and that guy that called the church that day, I had zero empathy for him. Therefore, I had zero compassion. It made no sense to me how he was that broken up about that. I could not put myself in his shoes of caring that much that I would doubt the existence of God because a girl dumped me. And so I had no compassion for him. But when I had that conversation with the counselor, and I realized the nuances of what was going on in the conversation that I had with that guy, the thought occurred to me, you know what? If I didn't grow up the way that I grew up in the house that I grew up in, it's entirely possible that I would handle that situation just like he does. And that I'm not tough. I didn't just learn to suck it up. I'm just the benefit of a good environment with good coping mechanisms. And the truth of it is, if you think about me as a little kid, I said I learned to suck it up early. No, I didn't. No, I didn't. I didn't decide as a 12-year-old to get tough. No one gets tough at 12. I was in an environment where I was loved by family and by people at church. And that reminded me of my worthiness. My parents breathed scripture into me and that reminded me of God's sovereignty. And I begun to cling to those things. And I wouldn't have articulated it like this at the time, but all that happened is I had to simply develop healthy coping mechanisms for feeling unsafe and unworthy. And the guy that I was talking to on the phone that day had never had the opportunity to develop those. So the first thing we do with people who are experiencing unhealth is we offer empathy. And we acknowledge and admit that even if we don't understand, even if we've never felt that way before, if you change the alchemy of my life and you make the circumstances the same and you run me through the ringer that they went through, there's a very good chance I would come out the other side feeling and thinking and acting the same way that they do. So don't think that we're for a second better than them or more stable than them or tougher than them or stronger than them. We have a different background than they do. And when we can acknowledge that we would be the same person they are, that produces in us empathy. And out of that empathy comes compassion, where we realize some of the worst possible advice would be to suck it up or to pray it away, that we need to first be empathetic with them and understand. And empathy is also the acknowledgement that sometimes when people are dealing with a mental health issue, it's a chemical imbalance. They are sick. Looking at someone who is depressed and telling them to suck it up is like looking at someone with the flu and telling them to run a couple miles. It's useless advice. All it does is make you look dumb and then feel bad. We've got to offer empathy, which produces in us a Christ-like compassion. To help us offer empathy, I wanted to share with you some statistics that I found in the research that I've been doing. These are from the National Mental Health Institute, Institute of Mental Health. What I learned is that a quarter or 20% of U.S. citizens exhibit some symptoms of mental illness. Now, that's a wide brush. That's mild depression all the way to extreme schizophrenia, okay? But 20%, one in five of you, look down the row within two people and one of them is crazy, right? That's a lot. It affects a lot of us. Now, here's what I think is really interesting. It says that there's 22% of women and 15% of men deal with mental health issues. Now, here's what that doesn't mean, that men have it together more than women do. What it means is they're more honest than us and you're a stubborn jerk. That's what that means. You just can't admit that you're struggling. You just fold your arms and pretend like everything's okay. And it only gets worse because 26% of millennials of 18 to 25 say that they experienced some sort of mental illness or exhibit signs of that. Only 14% of ages 50 and older. Now listen, I don't think for a second that you people who are 50 and older in this room have just have life so figured out and all your coping skills so nailed that you're the healthiest bunch in the room. Listen, if you're a dude over 50 and you're like, I don't struggle with depression. Yes, you do. You're just stubborn. Listen, all of us at some point have experienced a season of melancholy. We all have. If you haven't, you're a psychopath or you're not paying attention. All of us experience anxiety in excessive ways. Everybody in this room has had a suicidal thought. Everybody. The difference with healthy and unhealthy is how we cope with those things. I also thought it was really interesting that 50% of adolescents show sign of a mental disorder. And if we understand that health is to walk in a sense of stability and worth, is it any wonder that half of our high school students have no idea how to cling on to stability and worth? We are all of us broken. We are all of us at times weak and in need of help. There is none of us in here who is singularly and individually strong and healthy. And we need to acknowledge that as we seek to offer empathy to others. The next thing we can do to love people towards health is to celebrate courageous choices. We need to start celebrating courageous choices. When somebody makes a decision to get help, when somebody makes a decision to be vulnerable and confess, we need to praise those things. We need to celebrate those things. We don't need to deride those things. I've talked a lot about counseling in this sermon. One of the things that breaks my heart is that counseling gets such a stigma that people, when you start talking about going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that we automatically think, man, only broken people do that. What's going on in your life? What can you not get together yourself? Why do you need help that you need to go talk to a professional to do that? Are you crazy? What's wrong with you? What have you failed at? How did you ruin your marriage? When did you get fired? We just assume that when people are going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that there's something broken in them. But here's the thing, there's something broken in all of us, so we need to stop it. Sometimes, most of the time, the unhealthy coping mechanisms that we have are so deeply embedded and ingrained in us that we can't see them. We don't know how to find them ourselves. And we need a trained professional to talk with us and help us see those and then help us see a way through them. We need trained professionals who are more than pastors. I'm very quick to go, listen, I wanna try to help you as best I can. I'm gonna pray for you. You need to talk to a therapist, not because you're crazy, but because they're good at it. The other thing I've learned is when you talk to somebody who will say, I should really go speak to a counselor about this. A lot of times they won't. And at first they won't because it's a pride thing. I don't want to do that. I don't want people to see me parking at that office. I don't want people to think that there's something wrong with me. I don't want people to think that I can't handle it or that I'm weak somehow. I don't want all the stuff that goes with seeing a counselor. So I'm not gonna go do that. And it seems like pride. But when you start to peel back the layers, what you find is that it's really fear. I'm convinced that the reason, if you're thinking about seeing a counselor, getting help, working through some unhealth in your life, I'm convinced that one of the big reasons we don't do that is because we know good and well what we're going to have to walk through when we get there. We don't want to have to look at ourselves in the mirror. It is easier to cope. It is easier to demur. It is easier to distract than it is to confront. And so we keep walking away from our unhealthy selves instead of turning and allowing someone to hold up a mirror and show us and work through it and walk through it and emerge on the other side more healthy. It's often fear that keeps us from getting help, not pride. And so I want you to know this morning that I think it takes bravery to go get help. And I actually think, and I would love for our church to start thinking about it this way, that counseling is not for the broken. It's for the brave. Counseling is not for broken people. It's for brave people. If it were for broken people, then we'd all be in it because we're all broken. But at some point or another, you have to take a step and make a decision that I want some help. I want to be healthy. I want somebody else's voice in this conversation helping me identify the unhealthy pockets in my life to restoring me to my God-given sense of security and value and love. And since I can't find my way out of this mess myself, I want to get someone else to speak into it for me. And that takes bravery and courage. The counseling is not the broken. It's for the brave. My prayer is that 2020 will be the healthiest year for you in a long, long time. For those of you who are brave enough to pursue health, I think it begins with acknowledging and identifying the unhealthy ways we bring ourselves a sense of security and worth. And doing the work to replace that coping mechanism with one that pushes us towards God's sovereignty and pushes us towards God's love. If we have people in our lives this year that we're trying to love towards mental health, we need to do it with empathy and compassion. And we need to, as a church and as a Christian subculture, destigmatize what it is to get help and admit that we all need it. And it's not for the broken, it's for the brave. I hope that some of you will make courageous choices, even this week. If you do want to talk to a counselor, email me and I'll work to find you a good one. I'm not going to send you to mine, but somebody. If there's someone in your life who is struggling, please, please offer them empathy. Please offer them compassion. Please offer them understanding. Try the best you can to put yourself in their shoes and love them from that perspective. And let's make this year a healthy year. Let's pray. Father, we do love you. We thank you so much for loving us. God, if there is anybody here who feels unworthy, who feels unvaluable, who feels unloved, God, may they just feel a pervasive sense of your love and your compassion wrapping around them today. Help them to hear the voices in their life that speak for you and tell them that they are enough. God, if we feel unsafe or insecure, I pray that you would restore that sense of security with your sovereignty. God, for those here who are struggling, who are sad, or who are anxious, or dealing with a multitude of other things, help them feel your peace today. Help them feel your hope today. Remind them that that hope, your word says, will not be put to shame. God, I pray that we would be healthy, that we would walk in a sense of security in you, of value in you, and that that would enable us to love other people well on your behalf. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. As a pastor, it often falls on me to offer counsel and advice to people. Believe it or not, sometimes people will call the church and ask to talk to a pastor or ask to talk to me or even seek me out individually knowing full well who I am, and they will still ask me for advice on things or what to do in certain situations. And for a long time in those situations at my old church, it was a larger church in the Atlanta area, about 2,000 people. If you called that church, you got funneled to me. I was the one that you would talk to. It was a really talentless staff. So that was my role. And for a long time, my advice in those situations would pretty much default to suck it up. Like, get it together. Quit being a sissy. Let's go. Like, you just got to face the music. You got to stand up. You got to stick your chin out, and you got to take it. And I came by that advice honestly, because for a long time, that's what worked for me. Part of my story is that when I was younger, I was bullied pretty badly. For a couple years, elementary school and then in middle school, there was two kids in my neighborhood who just delighted in tormenting me. And I won't get into all the details of it, but one of the things they would do, just to give you a picture of what fifth grade looked like for Nate, is they were in middle school, so they got home before me. They would hide in the bushes at the bus stop and have an industrial strength rubber band, and they had sniffed it. So it was one big long rubber band, and then when I would get off the bus, they would pop me in the ears and in the neck and in the legs until I would cry or run, and then they would call me names. That was like most days. So we started diversion tactics. I got a letter to get off the bus at other bus stops. My mom would come pick me up at school sometimes, but that was a part of my life, and that was a part of my life for a couple of years. And at some point or another, as a kid, I just realized I can't care so much what they think about me. They would invite me over to play and I'd be like, oh good, we're friends now. And then I would get there and they would just make fun of me until I would go home. And it taught me to have a thick skin. It taught me to not let it affect me when other people pick on me. It taught me to be tough. And at some point in my adolescence, I decided I'm tired of them having this kind of control over me. I'm just going to tough it up. I'm just going to suck it up and figure out how to not care what they think. And that's what I did. And so in adulthood, when an issue came up, my thought was, suck it up. Just don't be a baby. That's what I did. Worked for me. Let's go. And that's kind of the mindset I had several years ago when I got one of those phone calls at the church that I was at. Some guy called the church and just said he was in a real tough way, needed to talk to a pastor. So pick up the phone. Hey, you know, one of the pastors here, what's going on? How can I help you? And he was 31 years old, and he had a girlfriend who had a bit of a drug issue, in his words, and she had just broken up with him. Nobody in his family liked him, liked her, but he was crestfallen over this breakup. And he wanted to know from a pastor, if there is a good God in heaven, how could he allow this girl to break my heart in this way? And I thought, are you freaking kidding me? Like, you're 31. She broke up with you. She's a drug addict. This is a good thing, dude. Get another girlfriend. There's a lot of them. Like, I could not muster any sympathy for this dude. In my life, there was a good friend of mine who had just lost her husband, and I'm comparing and contrasting these tragedies, and I'm like, bro, suck it up. Like take a day, you know, have a beer and then get back to it. It doesn't matter. Like I literally, I was nice to him. I wasn't mean. I had the hardest time caring about this guy's issue. Like the girl broke up with you, man, whatever whatever. And so a couple days after that, I had lunch with a counselor. Every now and again, a counselor will reach out to a pastor and invite you to lunch, and they're basically, they're kind of courting your reference. You want to get to know each other, and they know that I kind of funnel people into counseling, and so that's kind of how that goes. And so we went out to lunch, and we were talking, and I said, hey hey man, let me just ask you a question. So I have to counsel sometimes. Let me get a little bit of advice. I got this call the other day. How would you have handled that? And I told him about the guy's issues and my response. And he kind of thought about it a second and he said, I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, well, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that your parents are together and that you never really had to wonder if they were proud of you. And I said, that's true of me. Yeah, I would say that's true. I said, how'd you know that? And he said, it's just, you just kind of get a sense. I can just tell by the way you carry yourself. He said, I'd be willing to bet that that guy you talked to on the phone probably doesn't have a background like you. He probably doesn't have that family structure to lean on like you did. And he probably values the relationship with that girl and what it did for him and the value that it made him feel a lot more than you ever would. So your ability to detach yourself from that and move on is not the same as his. So I would probably handle that with a little bit more empathy. And I thought, whoa, this dude is smart. I'm going to give him all the referrals. How did he figure that out in 20 minutes of talking to me? I was super impressed. And it also dawned on me in that conversation, because I'm obtuse,ations are always a little bit more nuanced than they seem. And that most of the time when we're talking about issues of mental and emotional health, suck it up is really bad advice. It's really careless and thoughtless and obtuse. And since then, I've rethought about the way that I offer counsel. And that really got my wheels turning on mental health in general. It's something that I care about a lot. I care deeply about how the church engages it because I think historically the church has engaged mental health a little bit like I did. Suck it up and pray it away. Let's go. You're not a good enough Christian. If you were a better Christian, you wouldn't be so sad. So let's lean into God and let's quit being a sissy. And I just think historically that's how we've handled it and that's obtuse. That's not helpful. And more and more, it's being pressed into the national conscience. Last year, we had several athletes come out and say that they were struggling with anxiety, that they were struggling with depression. There was a very high-profile rookie in the NBA who had a terrible rookie year, and he confessed that it was because he struggles greatly with anxiety. There was an offensive lineman, a big, huge bear of a man for the Philadelphia Eagles, I believe, who missed a half of football because he was in the locker room at halftime throwing up because of anxiety attacks and could not get himself out on the field. So more and more we become aware of these things. Every time there's a shooting, then mental health and the epidemic gets thrust into the national conscience. And so as we approached this series and we said, I want a better life, and we thought through the four things that we were going to talk about, I just kind of felt like, based on all of those things, my experiences and what's going on in our culture now, that it would be good to take a Sunday and say, hey, you know what? I want a better me. I want to be more healthy. And so I wanted to take a Sunday and talk to those of you who do struggle with some sort of mental or emotional struggle. I wanted to talk to us as a church, as we encounter and engage and love people in our life who are walking through that struggle. And so as I prepared and thought through what I wanted to say and how I wanted to approach it, I actually had a conversation with my therapist. I started seeing a therapist this last summer. And normally when I tell people that I'm in counseling, I immediately tell them why I'm in counseling because I don't want them to think that I'm broken or crazy or that there's something going on. So I want to be very clear, but it's for this really good reason. But as I prepared for this sermon, I thought, I'm going to quit doing that. Because what do I care what you think about how I go to counseling? We need to destigmatize it anyways. So I had a conversation with my therapist. And he's a believer. And he's got a master's in divinity. And so he's very helpful for me. And I said, hey, man, I'm going to be doing a sermon on mental health. What does the church need to know about mental health? What do you wish pastors would say about it? And he said, well, you know, I don't really hear a lot of sermons on mental health, but the ones that I have heard tend to focus on unhealth and what that's like. And I just think that we do a disservice to the church when we don't paint a picture of what health is. So I would invest my time in that. That's interesting. How would you define health? And he defined it essentially this way. He said, a healthy person walks in a sense of security and worth. He said a healthy person, someone who's mentally and emotionally healthy and stable walks in a sense of security and worth. What he meant is, if we're going to be emotionally stable, if we're going to be mentally healthy, then we need to have a sense of security. We need to feel safe. We need to know that everything's going to be okay. If we're walking around in constant fear, a constant uncertainty, or like we've got our eyes covered and we don't know where our next step is going to go, that that's going to cause some mental instability. So we first need to feel secure, but we also need to feel valuable. We need to feel worth. We need to feel like we're enough. We need to feel like we're good enough for other people, that we have some intrinsic value. We need to understand that about ourselves and walk in an actualization and an acknowledgement of that value. So he said, to be healthy, we need to walk in a sense of security and worth. And then he said something that I thought was really interesting. He said that every person gets their boat rocked a little bit. Every person in their life, all of you, at some point or another, have had times where you felt unsafe and had times where you felt unworthy. We've all had our security compromised. We've all had the rug pulled out from under us. We've all felt like, no, this time it's not gonna be okay. And I think more predominantly in the American culture, we've all had times where we don't feel worthy. Some of us feel that pervasively right now. For some of us, the story of our life is this low simmering sense of unworthiness and lack of value and like we're not good enough. And all we've ever done is claw to show ourselves and the people around us that we are actually good enough. Everybody struggles at times to feel secure and to feel worthy. And what he said is, when that happens, healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to get themselves back on track. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to try to grope for that security and to try to grope for that value. We've seen these unhealthy coping mechanisms, right? Someone feels unsafe, their world feels crazy, and so they become hyper-controlling of their environment all the time. They become, their house has to be clean, and their house doesn't have to be clean because they like a clean house. Their house has to be clean because they've got to exert control over something. And that's not necessarily bad, but it can become unhealthy. Where we see this most is when people exhibit unhealthy coping mechanisms as we lurch for value. This is the girl that far too easily gives herself over to whatever guy will pay attention to her. Because from that guy, she is getting her sense of worth, and that's how she's coping and lurching for that. This is the grown man that still tells you how good of an athlete he was in high school. Because all he's saying is, tell me I'm valuable. Tell me I'm worthy. This is the guy that can't help but brag about whatever it was he did. It's not because he's dumb. It's because he's incredibly insecure and he's groping for value and he doesn't feel it. So he's just looking at you going, can you just tell me I'm awesome? Can you do that, please? He's a 15-year-old kid going, please tell me I'm great. We all do it. As we grow up, we find more nuanced ways to grope for this value, but we do, and it becomes unhealthy. This is where addictions start and get carried on, right? We feel unvaluable. We feel unworthy, we feel unsafe, and so we drink, we medicate, or we find a hobby to numb it, or we refuse to sit in silence. In my research, I saw a great quote from Blaise Pascal that said, all of man's problems can be summed up in his inability to sit in a quiet room alone. Some of us hate the silence. Some of us can't go more than 10 seconds without pulling out our phone to distract ourselves from the things that we don't want to think about. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to bring back and restore that sense of security and worth. And when we think about healthy coping mechanisms, I think this is a good place to insert the spiritual into the conversation as we think about what are some healthy coping mechanisms with a lack of stability or a lack of value that can bring me back to a place of true health. And as I had this conversation with my therapist, I suggested these two things. I said, I think God provides for us these senses in these two ways. And he said, yeah, that's not everything. And I just want to say very clearly, I'm not covering everything that we do and how we handle mental health this morning, but this is a very good start, I think. As we think about healthy coping mechanisms and what it means to be truly healthy, I want to suggest these two things to you, that there's really two pillars of true health. There's security in God's sovereignty and worthiness in God's love. If we want to be healthy people, truly healthy the way that we were designed, we have to walk in a sense of security anchored in God's sovereignty and a sense of worthiness brought about by God's deep and compassionate love for us. That's what true health is. And so a healthy coping mechanism is to acknowledge that God is sovereign, to acknowledge that God is in control, to acknowledge that nothing happens outside of his purview and outside of his will and feel the relief of that. A good coping mechanism is to look around at the people in your life that God has placed in your life who love you and who value you and who are telling you that you are enough and to allow that to be the truth that you hear and not the truth from the detractors. I actually think that these two pillars are some of the greatest things that Christianity has to offer. I think we undervalue the sovereignty of God. One of my favorite verses, group of verses, is Philippians 4, 6, and 7. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, through prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your requests to God, and the God of peace who transcends all understanding will, listen, guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Are you anxious? Are the things keeping you up at night? Does worry characterize you? Pray those things to God. Release them to God. And he says that his peace that passes all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. And what that means is God is saying, I've got it. I'm in control. I'm God. It's going to be okay. Rest easy in my sovereignty. He does this again in Romans 8, where it says, we know that for those who love him and are called according to his purpose, that all things work together for the good of those who love him. Everything works together for the good of those who love him are called according to his purpose. Romans 8.28 tells us everything's going to work out. Even if it doesn't work out now, it will work out eventually. It's a beautiful promise from God. I saw a clip of a pastor doing the funeral for his mother that he lost far too early. And he said some amazing things. He said, you know, with God, all of our prayers are answered. I was praying so much for my mom to live, and then she died. He said it disillusioned him for a little bit. But what he realized was he was thinking about it wrong. And it dawned on him that in God, all his prayers are answered because she knew Jesus. So as he prayed for his mom to live, the truth of it is either she's going to live or she was gonna live. She was gonna be okay or she was gonna be okay. She was gonna be with family or she was gonna go be with family. God is good or God is good. This is the sovereignty that he offers us. And one of my favorite passages that I mentioned often, Revelation 21, paints this beautiful picture where it says the end of days that we will be with God and he will be with his people and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. There is a sovereignty and a peace that God promises throughout scripture. Scripture is replete with these promises. And if we want to be healthy and cling onto a sense of stability and know that everything is okay, even when we don't see how it's going to be okay, then we cling to the sovereignty of God that is laced throughout Scripture, and we know that it's going to be okay, even if it doesn't make sense to me. And I believe that a healthy person reminds themselves of the sovereignty of God and rests easy in that and not in their own control. The next thing we do is we rest in God's love. We know the Bible tells us God loves us. We know John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life. God tells us that not even a sparrow falls to the ground without his knowledge, so how much more does he care about you that the numbers of hairs on your head are numbered? He knows you that well and that intimately. He tells us that if your earthly father knows how to give you a good gift, how much better are my gifts? He tells us that we know that we are loved because while we were still sinners, he died for us. He tells us that we are able to love him because he first loved us. From God, if you listen, is a constant, pervasive, never fatiguing voice that says, you are enough. I love you. You do not have to perform for me. You don't have to be good for me. You don't have to sell for me. You don't have to execute for me. You don't have to impress me. I love you as much as I'm ever going to love you. And to be healthy is to walk in an acknowledgement of that love and not need the accolades of others and not be so desperate for the approval of this group because I'm walking with the approval of my God. And if you give me it too, that's great, but I don't need it because God gives it to me. That's what health looks like. Have you ever met somebody who is so comfortable in their own skin that you just marvel at it? To me, that's a person who walks knowing that God loves me and I'm good. That's what health is. So if we want to be a healthy person, we need to quiet the voices that are telling us we're not enough and listen to the pervasive and persistent voice of God that tells us that we are. As we think about ourselves pursuing mental and emotional health, I think the best, most practical way to do that is to pursue health. We need to identify poor coping mechanisms in our life and pursue healthy ones. If we're going to be mentally healthy, if we're in a state this morning where we feel given towards depression, if we feel given towards anxiety, if we feel given towards just unhealth, I think a good exercise is to identify the unhealthy coping mechanisms that exist in our life. And listen, we all have them. One of the things I'm more certain of than ever, especially in being in counseling, is that we are all a bundle and an alchemy of insecurities and coping mechanisms to present ourselves as enough, all of us. So the best thing we can do is try to identify where these coping mechanisms are and pursue them and pursue healthy ones. But I don't just want to talk about us, how we pursue health. I think one of the big questions the church faces and some of us in our life faces, if I have people in my life who are not healthy, how do I love them towards health? What can we do to love other people towards emotional and mental health? I think two things I would suggest to you this morning. The first would be to offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. To offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. Hebrews tells us that Christ took on flesh, that he bore our infirmities, that he was tempted in the ways that we are tempted, so that he understood our plight, so that when we pray to our Savior, we're not praying to someone who is altogether unfamiliar with the human condition. We're praying to someone who is empathetic with us and therefore compassionate towards us. Do you realize that empathy is the birthplace of compassion? That empathy begats compassion. That the thing that happened with me and that guy that called the church that day, I had zero empathy for him. Therefore, I had zero compassion. It made no sense to me how he was that broken up about that. I could not put myself in his shoes of caring that much that I would doubt the existence of God because a girl dumped me. And so I had no compassion for him. But when I had that conversation with the counselor, and I realized the nuances of what was going on in the conversation that I had with that guy, the thought occurred to me, you know what? If I didn't grow up the way that I grew up in the house that I grew up in, it's entirely possible that I would handle that situation just like he does. And that I'm not tough. I didn't just learn to suck it up. I'm just the benefit of a good environment with good coping mechanisms. And the truth of it is, if you think about me as a little kid, I said I learned to suck it up early. No, I didn't. No, I didn't. I didn't decide as a 12-year-old to get tough. No one gets tough at 12. I was in an environment where I was loved by family and by people at church. And that reminded me of my worthiness. My parents breathed scripture into me and that reminded me of God's sovereignty. And I begun to cling to those things. And I wouldn't have articulated it like this at the time, but all that happened is I had to simply develop healthy coping mechanisms for feeling unsafe and unworthy. And the guy that I was talking to on the phone that day had never had the opportunity to develop those. So the first thing we do with people who are experiencing unhealth is we offer empathy. And we acknowledge and admit that even if we don't understand, even if we've never felt that way before, if you change the alchemy of my life and you make the circumstances the same and you run me through the ringer that they went through, there's a very good chance I would come out the other side feeling and thinking and acting the same way that they do. So don't think that we're for a second better than them or more stable than them or tougher than them or stronger than them. We have a different background than they do. And when we can acknowledge that we would be the same person they are, that produces in us empathy. And out of that empathy comes compassion, where we realize some of the worst possible advice would be to suck it up or to pray it away, that we need to first be empathetic with them and understand. And empathy is also the acknowledgement that sometimes when people are dealing with a mental health issue, it's a chemical imbalance. They are sick. Looking at someone who is depressed and telling them to suck it up is like looking at someone with the flu and telling them to run a couple miles. It's useless advice. All it does is make you look dumb and then feel bad. We've got to offer empathy, which produces in us a Christ-like compassion. To help us offer empathy, I wanted to share with you some statistics that I found in the research that I've been doing. These are from the National Mental Health Institute, Institute of Mental Health. What I learned is that a quarter or 20% of U.S. citizens exhibit some symptoms of mental illness. Now, that's a wide brush. That's mild depression all the way to extreme schizophrenia, okay? But 20%, one in five of you, look down the row within two people and one of them is crazy, right? That's a lot. It affects a lot of us. Now, here's what I think is really interesting. It says that there's 22% of women and 15% of men deal with mental health issues. Now, here's what that doesn't mean, that men have it together more than women do. What it means is they're more honest than us and you're a stubborn jerk. That's what that means. You just can't admit that you're struggling. You just fold your arms and pretend like everything's okay. And it only gets worse because 26% of millennials of 18 to 25 say that they experienced some sort of mental illness or exhibit signs of that. Only 14% of ages 50 and older. Now listen, I don't think for a second that you people who are 50 and older in this room have just have life so figured out and all your coping skills so nailed that you're the healthiest bunch in the room. Listen, if you're a dude over 50 and you're like, I don't struggle with depression. Yes, you do. You're just stubborn. Listen, all of us at some point have experienced a season of melancholy. We all have. If you haven't, you're a psychopath or you're not paying attention. All of us experience anxiety in excessive ways. Everybody in this room has had a suicidal thought. Everybody. The difference with healthy and unhealthy is how we cope with those things. I also thought it was really interesting that 50% of adolescents show sign of a mental disorder. And if we understand that health is to walk in a sense of stability and worth, is it any wonder that half of our high school students have no idea how to cling on to stability and worth? We are all of us broken. We are all of us at times weak and in need of help. There is none of us in here who is singularly and individually strong and healthy. And we need to acknowledge that as we seek to offer empathy to others. The next thing we can do to love people towards health is to celebrate courageous choices. We need to start celebrating courageous choices. When somebody makes a decision to get help, when somebody makes a decision to be vulnerable and confess, we need to praise those things. We need to celebrate those things. We don't need to deride those things. I've talked a lot about counseling in this sermon. One of the things that breaks my heart is that counseling gets such a stigma that people, when you start talking about going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that we automatically think, man, only broken people do that. What's going on in your life? What can you not get together yourself? Why do you need help that you need to go talk to a professional to do that? Are you crazy? What's wrong with you? What have you failed at? How did you ruin your marriage? When did you get fired? We just assume that when people are going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that there's something broken in them. But here's the thing, there's something broken in all of us, so we need to stop it. Sometimes, most of the time, the unhealthy coping mechanisms that we have are so deeply embedded and ingrained in us that we can't see them. We don't know how to find them ourselves. And we need a trained professional to talk with us and help us see those and then help us see a way through them. We need trained professionals who are more than pastors. I'm very quick to go, listen, I wanna try to help you as best I can. I'm gonna pray for you. You need to talk to a therapist, not because you're crazy, but because they're good at it. The other thing I've learned is when you talk to somebody who will say, I should really go speak to a counselor about this. A lot of times they won't. And at first they won't because it's a pride thing. I don't want to do that. I don't want people to see me parking at that office. I don't want people to think that there's something wrong with me. I don't want people to think that I can't handle it or that I'm weak somehow. I don't want all the stuff that goes with seeing a counselor. So I'm not gonna go do that. And it seems like pride. But when you start to peel back the layers, what you find is that it's really fear. I'm convinced that the reason, if you're thinking about seeing a counselor, getting help, working through some unhealth in your life, I'm convinced that one of the big reasons we don't do that is because we know good and well what we're going to have to walk through when we get there. We don't want to have to look at ourselves in the mirror. It is easier to cope. It is easier to demur. It is easier to distract than it is to confront. And so we keep walking away from our unhealthy selves instead of turning and allowing someone to hold up a mirror and show us and work through it and walk through it and emerge on the other side more healthy. It's often fear that keeps us from getting help, not pride. And so I want you to know this morning that I think it takes bravery to go get help. And I actually think, and I would love for our church to start thinking about it this way, that counseling is not for the broken. It's for the brave. Counseling is not for broken people. It's for brave people. If it were for broken people, then we'd all be in it because we're all broken. But at some point or another, you have to take a step and make a decision that I want some help. I want to be healthy. I want somebody else's voice in this conversation helping me identify the unhealthy pockets in my life to restoring me to my God-given sense of security and value and love. And since I can't find my way out of this mess myself, I want to get someone else to speak into it for me. And that takes bravery and courage. The counseling is not the broken. It's for the brave. My prayer is that 2020 will be the healthiest year for you in a long, long time. For those of you who are brave enough to pursue health, I think it begins with acknowledging and identifying the unhealthy ways we bring ourselves a sense of security and worth. And doing the work to replace that coping mechanism with one that pushes us towards God's sovereignty and pushes us towards God's love. If we have people in our lives this year that we're trying to love towards mental health, we need to do it with empathy and compassion. And we need to, as a church and as a Christian subculture, destigmatize what it is to get help and admit that we all need it. And it's not for the broken, it's for the brave. I hope that some of you will make courageous choices, even this week. If you do want to talk to a counselor, email me and I'll work to find you a good one. I'm not going to send you to mine, but somebody. If there's someone in your life who is struggling, please, please offer them empathy. Please offer them compassion. Please offer them understanding. Try the best you can to put yourself in their shoes and love them from that perspective. And let's make this year a healthy year. Let's pray. Father, we do love you. We thank you so much for loving us. God, if there is anybody here who feels unworthy, who feels unvaluable, who feels unloved, God, may they just feel a pervasive sense of your love and your compassion wrapping around them today. Help them to hear the voices in their life that speak for you and tell them that they are enough. God, if we feel unsafe or insecure, I pray that you would restore that sense of security with your sovereignty. God, for those here who are struggling, who are sad, or who are anxious, or dealing with a multitude of other things, help them feel your peace today. Help them feel your hope today. Remind them that that hope, your word says, will not be put to shame. God, I pray that we would be healthy, that we would walk in a sense of security in you, of value in you, and that that would enable us to love other people well on your behalf. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. As a pastor, it often falls on me to offer counsel and advice to people. Believe it or not, sometimes people will call the church and ask to talk to a pastor or ask to talk to me or even seek me out individually knowing full well who I am, and they will still ask me for advice on things or what to do in certain situations. And for a long time in those situations at my old church, it was a larger church in the Atlanta area, about 2,000 people. If you called that church, you got funneled to me. I was the one that you would talk to. It was a really talentless staff. So that was my role. And for a long time, my advice in those situations would pretty much default to suck it up. Like, get it together. Quit being a sissy. Let's go. Like, you just got to face the music. You got to stand up. You got to stick your chin out, and you got to take it. And I came by that advice honestly, because for a long time, that's what worked for me. Part of my story is that when I was younger, I was bullied pretty badly. For a couple years, elementary school and then in middle school, there was two kids in my neighborhood who just delighted in tormenting me. And I won't get into all the details of it, but one of the things they would do, just to give you a picture of what fifth grade looked like for Nate, is they were in middle school, so they got home before me. They would hide in the bushes at the bus stop and have an industrial strength rubber band, and they had sniffed it. So it was one big long rubber band, and then when I would get off the bus, they would pop me in the ears and in the neck and in the legs until I would cry or run, and then they would call me names. That was like most days. So we started diversion tactics. I got a letter to get off the bus at other bus stops. My mom would come pick me up at school sometimes, but that was a part of my life, and that was a part of my life for a couple of years. And at some point or another, as a kid, I just realized I can't care so much what they think about me. They would invite me over to play and I'd be like, oh good, we're friends now. And then I would get there and they would just make fun of me until I would go home. And it taught me to have a thick skin. It taught me to not let it affect me when other people pick on me. It taught me to be tough. And at some point in my adolescence, I decided I'm tired of them having this kind of control over me. I'm just going to tough it up. I'm just going to suck it up and figure out how to not care what they think. And that's what I did. And so in adulthood, when an issue came up, my thought was, suck it up. Just don't be a baby. That's what I did. Worked for me. Let's go. And that's kind of the mindset I had several years ago when I got one of those phone calls at the church that I was at. Some guy called the church and just said he was in a real tough way, needed to talk to a pastor. So pick up the phone. Hey, you know, one of the pastors here, what's going on? How can I help you? And he was 31 years old, and he had a girlfriend who had a bit of a drug issue, in his words, and she had just broken up with him. Nobody in his family liked him, liked her, but he was crestfallen over this breakup. And he wanted to know from a pastor, if there is a good God in heaven, how could he allow this girl to break my heart in this way? And I thought, are you freaking kidding me? Like, you're 31. She broke up with you. She's a drug addict. This is a good thing, dude. Get another girlfriend. There's a lot of them. Like, I could not muster any sympathy for this dude. In my life, there was a good friend of mine who had just lost her husband, and I'm comparing and contrasting these tragedies, and I'm like, bro, suck it up. Like take a day, you know, have a beer and then get back to it. It doesn't matter. Like I literally, I was nice to him. I wasn't mean. I had the hardest time caring about this guy's issue. Like the girl broke up with you, man, whatever whatever. And so a couple days after that, I had lunch with a counselor. Every now and again, a counselor will reach out to a pastor and invite you to lunch, and they're basically, they're kind of courting your reference. You want to get to know each other, and they know that I kind of funnel people into counseling, and so that's kind of how that goes. And so we went out to lunch, and we were talking, and I said, hey hey man, let me just ask you a question. So I have to counsel sometimes. Let me get a little bit of advice. I got this call the other day. How would you have handled that? And I told him about the guy's issues and my response. And he kind of thought about it a second and he said, I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, well, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that your parents are together and that you never really had to wonder if they were proud of you. And I said, that's true of me. Yeah, I would say that's true. I said, how'd you know that? And he said, it's just, you just kind of get a sense. I can just tell by the way you carry yourself. He said, I'd be willing to bet that that guy you talked to on the phone probably doesn't have a background like you. He probably doesn't have that family structure to lean on like you did. And he probably values the relationship with that girl and what it did for him and the value that it made him feel a lot more than you ever would. So your ability to detach yourself from that and move on is not the same as his. So I would probably handle that with a little bit more empathy. And I thought, whoa, this dude is smart. I'm going to give him all the referrals. How did he figure that out in 20 minutes of talking to me? I was super impressed. And it also dawned on me in that conversation, because I'm obtuse,ations are always a little bit more nuanced than they seem. And that most of the time when we're talking about issues of mental and emotional health, suck it up is really bad advice. It's really careless and thoughtless and obtuse. And since then, I've rethought about the way that I offer counsel. And that really got my wheels turning on mental health in general. It's something that I care about a lot. I care deeply about how the church engages it because I think historically the church has engaged mental health a little bit like I did. Suck it up and pray it away. Let's go. You're not a good enough Christian. If you were a better Christian, you wouldn't be so sad. So let's lean into God and let's quit being a sissy. And I just think historically that's how we've handled it and that's obtuse. That's not helpful. And more and more, it's being pressed into the national conscience. Last year, we had several athletes come out and say that they were struggling with anxiety, that they were struggling with depression. There was a very high-profile rookie in the NBA who had a terrible rookie year, and he confessed that it was because he struggles greatly with anxiety. There was an offensive lineman, a big, huge bear of a man for the Philadelphia Eagles, I believe, who missed a half of football because he was in the locker room at halftime throwing up because of anxiety attacks and could not get himself out on the field. So more and more we become aware of these things. Every time there's a shooting, then mental health and the epidemic gets thrust into the national conscience. And so as we approached this series and we said, I want a better life, and we thought through the four things that we were going to talk about, I just kind of felt like, based on all of those things, my experiences and what's going on in our culture now, that it would be good to take a Sunday and say, hey, you know what? I want a better me. I want to be more healthy. And so I wanted to take a Sunday and talk to those of you who do struggle with some sort of mental or emotional struggle. I wanted to talk to us as a church, as we encounter and engage and love people in our life who are walking through that struggle. And so as I prepared and thought through what I wanted to say and how I wanted to approach it, I actually had a conversation with my therapist. I started seeing a therapist this last summer. And normally when I tell people that I'm in counseling, I immediately tell them why I'm in counseling because I don't want them to think that I'm broken or crazy or that there's something going on. So I want to be very clear, but it's for this really good reason. But as I prepared for this sermon, I thought, I'm going to quit doing that. Because what do I care what you think about how I go to counseling? We need to destigmatize it anyways. So I had a conversation with my therapist. And he's a believer. And he's got a master's in divinity. And so he's very helpful for me. And I said, hey, man, I'm going to be doing a sermon on mental health. What does the church need to know about mental health? What do you wish pastors would say about it? And he said, well, you know, I don't really hear a lot of sermons on mental health, but the ones that I have heard tend to focus on unhealth and what that's like. And I just think that we do a disservice to the church when we don't paint a picture of what health is. So I would invest my time in that. That's interesting. How would you define health? And he defined it essentially this way. He said, a healthy person walks in a sense of security and worth. He said a healthy person, someone who's mentally and emotionally healthy and stable walks in a sense of security and worth. What he meant is, if we're going to be emotionally stable, if we're going to be mentally healthy, then we need to have a sense of security. We need to feel safe. We need to know that everything's going to be okay. If we're walking around in constant fear, a constant uncertainty, or like we've got our eyes covered and we don't know where our next step is going to go, that that's going to cause some mental instability. So we first need to feel secure, but we also need to feel valuable. We need to feel worth. We need to feel like we're enough. We need to feel like we're good enough for other people, that we have some intrinsic value. We need to understand that about ourselves and walk in an actualization and an acknowledgement of that value. So he said, to be healthy, we need to walk in a sense of security and worth. And then he said something that I thought was really interesting. He said that every person gets their boat rocked a little bit. Every person in their life, all of you, at some point or another, have had times where you felt unsafe and had times where you felt unworthy. We've all had our security compromised. We've all had the rug pulled out from under us. We've all felt like, no, this time it's not gonna be okay. And I think more predominantly in the American culture, we've all had times where we don't feel worthy. Some of us feel that pervasively right now. For some of us, the story of our life is this low simmering sense of unworthiness and lack of value and like we're not good enough. And all we've ever done is claw to show ourselves and the people around us that we are actually good enough. Everybody struggles at times to feel secure and to feel worthy. And what he said is, when that happens, healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to get themselves back on track. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to try to grope for that security and to try to grope for that value. We've seen these unhealthy coping mechanisms, right? Someone feels unsafe, their world feels crazy, and so they become hyper-controlling of their environment all the time. They become, their house has to be clean, and their house doesn't have to be clean because they like a clean house. Their house has to be clean because they've got to exert control over something. And that's not necessarily bad, but it can become unhealthy. Where we see this most is when people exhibit unhealthy coping mechanisms as we lurch for value. This is the girl that far too easily gives herself over to whatever guy will pay attention to her. Because from that guy, she is getting her sense of worth, and that's how she's coping and lurching for that. This is the grown man that still tells you how good of an athlete he was in high school. Because all he's saying is, tell me I'm valuable. Tell me I'm worthy. This is the guy that can't help but brag about whatever it was he did. It's not because he's dumb. It's because he's incredibly insecure and he's groping for value and he doesn't feel it. So he's just looking at you going, can you just tell me I'm awesome? Can you do that, please? He's a 15-year-old kid going, please tell me I'm great. We all do it. As we grow up, we find more nuanced ways to grope for this value, but we do, and it becomes unhealthy. This is where addictions start and get carried on, right? We feel unvaluable. We feel unworthy, we feel unsafe, and so we drink, we medicate, or we find a hobby to numb it, or we refuse to sit in silence. In my research, I saw a great quote from Blaise Pascal that said, all of man's problems can be summed up in his inability to sit in a quiet room alone. Some of us hate the silence. Some of us can't go more than 10 seconds without pulling out our phone to distract ourselves from the things that we don't want to think about. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to bring back and restore that sense of security and worth. And when we think about healthy coping mechanisms, I think this is a good place to insert the spiritual into the conversation as we think about what are some healthy coping mechanisms with a lack of stability or a lack of value that can bring me back to a place of true health. And as I had this conversation with my therapist, I suggested these two things. I said, I think God provides for us these senses in these two ways. And he said, yeah, that's not everything. And I just want to say very clearly, I'm not covering everything that we do and how we handle mental health this morning, but this is a very good start, I think. As we think about healthy coping mechanisms and what it means to be truly healthy, I want to suggest these two things to you, that there's really two pillars of true health. There's security in God's sovereignty and worthiness in God's love. If we want to be healthy people, truly healthy the way that we were designed, we have to walk in a sense of security anchored in God's sovereignty and a sense of worthiness brought about by God's deep and compassionate love for us. That's what true health is. And so a healthy coping mechanism is to acknowledge that God is sovereign, to acknowledge that God is in control, to acknowledge that nothing happens outside of his purview and outside of his will and feel the relief of that. A good coping mechanism is to look around at the people in your life that God has placed in your life who love you and who value you and who are telling you that you are enough and to allow that to be the truth that you hear and not the truth from the detractors. I actually think that these two pillars are some of the greatest things that Christianity has to offer. I think we undervalue the sovereignty of God. One of my favorite verses, group of verses, is Philippians 4, 6, and 7. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, through prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your requests to God, and the God of peace who transcends all understanding will, listen, guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Are you anxious? Are the things keeping you up at night? Does worry characterize you? Pray those things to God. Release them to God. And he says that his peace that passes all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. And what that means is God is saying, I've got it. I'm in control. I'm God. It's going to be okay. Rest easy in my sovereignty. He does this again in Romans 8, where it says, we know that for those who love him and are called according to his purpose, that all things work together for the good of those who love him. Everything works together for the good of those who love him are called according to his purpose. Romans 8.28 tells us everything's going to work out. Even if it doesn't work out now, it will work out eventually. It's a beautiful promise from God. I saw a clip of a pastor doing the funeral for his mother that he lost far too early. And he said some amazing things. He said, you know, with God, all of our prayers are answered. I was praying so much for my mom to live, and then she died. He said it disillusioned him for a little bit. But what he realized was he was thinking about it wrong. And it dawned on him that in God, all his prayers are answered because she knew Jesus. So as he prayed for his mom to live, the truth of it is either she's going to live or she was gonna live. She was gonna be okay or she was gonna be okay. She was gonna be with family or she was gonna go be with family. God is good or God is good. This is the sovereignty that he offers us. And one of my favorite passages that I mentioned often, Revelation 21, paints this beautiful picture where it says the end of days that we will be with God and he will be with his people and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. There is a sovereignty and a peace that God promises throughout scripture. Scripture is replete with these promises. And if we want to be healthy and cling onto a sense of stability and know that everything is okay, even when we don't see how it's going to be okay, then we cling to the sovereignty of God that is laced throughout Scripture, and we know that it's going to be okay, even if it doesn't make sense to me. And I believe that a healthy person reminds themselves of the sovereignty of God and rests easy in that and not in their own control. The next thing we do is we rest in God's love. We know the Bible tells us God loves us. We know John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life. God tells us that not even a sparrow falls to the ground without his knowledge, so how much more does he care about you that the numbers of hairs on your head are numbered? He knows you that well and that intimately. He tells us that if your earthly father knows how to give you a good gift, how much better are my gifts? He tells us that we know that we are loved because while we were still sinners, he died for us. He tells us that we are able to love him because he first loved us. From God, if you listen, is a constant, pervasive, never fatiguing voice that says, you are enough. I love you. You do not have to perform for me. You don't have to be good for me. You don't have to sell for me. You don't have to execute for me. You don't have to impress me. I love you as much as I'm ever going to love you. And to be healthy is to walk in an acknowledgement of that love and not need the accolades of others and not be so desperate for the approval of this group because I'm walking with the approval of my God. And if you give me it too, that's great, but I don't need it because God gives it to me. That's what health looks like. Have you ever met somebody who is so comfortable in their own skin that you just marvel at it? To me, that's a person who walks knowing that God loves me and I'm good. That's what health is. So if we want to be a healthy person, we need to quiet the voices that are telling us we're not enough and listen to the pervasive and persistent voice of God that tells us that we are. As we think about ourselves pursuing mental and emotional health, I think the best, most practical way to do that is to pursue health. We need to identify poor coping mechanisms in our life and pursue healthy ones. If we're going to be mentally healthy, if we're in a state this morning where we feel given towards depression, if we feel given towards anxiety, if we feel given towards just unhealth, I think a good exercise is to identify the unhealthy coping mechanisms that exist in our life. And listen, we all have them. One of the things I'm more certain of than ever, especially in being in counseling, is that we are all a bundle and an alchemy of insecurities and coping mechanisms to present ourselves as enough, all of us. So the best thing we can do is try to identify where these coping mechanisms are and pursue them and pursue healthy ones. But I don't just want to talk about us, how we pursue health. I think one of the big questions the church faces and some of us in our life faces, if I have people in my life who are not healthy, how do I love them towards health? What can we do to love other people towards emotional and mental health? I think two things I would suggest to you this morning. The first would be to offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. To offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. Hebrews tells us that Christ took on flesh, that he bore our infirmities, that he was tempted in the ways that we are tempted, so that he understood our plight, so that when we pray to our Savior, we're not praying to someone who is altogether unfamiliar with the human condition. We're praying to someone who is empathetic with us and therefore compassionate towards us. Do you realize that empathy is the birthplace of compassion? That empathy begats compassion. That the thing that happened with me and that guy that called the church that day, I had zero empathy for him. Therefore, I had zero compassion. It made no sense to me how he was that broken up about that. I could not put myself in his shoes of caring that much that I would doubt the existence of God because a girl dumped me. And so I had no compassion for him. But when I had that conversation with the counselor, and I realized the nuances of what was going on in the conversation that I had with that guy, the thought occurred to me, you know what? If I didn't grow up the way that I grew up in the house that I grew up in, it's entirely possible that I would handle that situation just like he does. And that I'm not tough. I didn't just learn to suck it up. I'm just the benefit of a good environment with good coping mechanisms. And the truth of it is, if you think about me as a little kid, I said I learned to suck it up early. No, I didn't. No, I didn't. I didn't decide as a 12-year-old to get tough. No one gets tough at 12. I was in an environment where I was loved by family and by people at church. And that reminded me of my worthiness. My parents breathed scripture into me and that reminded me of God's sovereignty. And I begun to cling to those things. And I wouldn't have articulated it like this at the time, but all that happened is I had to simply develop healthy coping mechanisms for feeling unsafe and unworthy. And the guy that I was talking to on the phone that day had never had the opportunity to develop those. So the first thing we do with people who are experiencing unhealth is we offer empathy. And we acknowledge and admit that even if we don't understand, even if we've never felt that way before, if you change the alchemy of my life and you make the circumstances the same and you run me through the ringer that they went through, there's a very good chance I would come out the other side feeling and thinking and acting the same way that they do. So don't think that we're for a second better than them or more stable than them or tougher than them or stronger than them. We have a different background than they do. And when we can acknowledge that we would be the same person they are, that produces in us empathy. And out of that empathy comes compassion, where we realize some of the worst possible advice would be to suck it up or to pray it away, that we need to first be empathetic with them and understand. And empathy is also the acknowledgement that sometimes when people are dealing with a mental health issue, it's a chemical imbalance. They are sick. Looking at someone who is depressed and telling them to suck it up is like looking at someone with the flu and telling them to run a couple miles. It's useless advice. All it does is make you look dumb and then feel bad. We've got to offer empathy, which produces in us a Christ-like compassion. To help us offer empathy, I wanted to share with you some statistics that I found in the research that I've been doing. These are from the National Mental Health Institute, Institute of Mental Health. What I learned is that a quarter or 20% of U.S. citizens exhibit some symptoms of mental illness. Now, that's a wide brush. That's mild depression all the way to extreme schizophrenia, okay? But 20%, one in five of you, look down the row within two people and one of them is crazy, right? That's a lot. It affects a lot of us. Now, here's what I think is really interesting. It says that there's 22% of women and 15% of men deal with mental health issues. Now, here's what that doesn't mean, that men have it together more than women do. What it means is they're more honest than us and you're a stubborn jerk. That's what that means. You just can't admit that you're struggling. You just fold your arms and pretend like everything's okay. And it only gets worse because 26% of millennials of 18 to 25 say that they experienced some sort of mental illness or exhibit signs of that. Only 14% of ages 50 and older. Now listen, I don't think for a second that you people who are 50 and older in this room have just have life so figured out and all your coping skills so nailed that you're the healthiest bunch in the room. Listen, if you're a dude over 50 and you're like, I don't struggle with depression. Yes, you do. You're just stubborn. Listen, all of us at some point have experienced a season of melancholy. We all have. If you haven't, you're a psychopath or you're not paying attention. All of us experience anxiety in excessive ways. Everybody in this room has had a suicidal thought. Everybody. The difference with healthy and unhealthy is how we cope with those things. I also thought it was really interesting that 50% of adolescents show sign of a mental disorder. And if we understand that health is to walk in a sense of stability and worth, is it any wonder that half of our high school students have no idea how to cling on to stability and worth? We are all of us broken. We are all of us at times weak and in need of help. There is none of us in here who is singularly and individually strong and healthy. And we need to acknowledge that as we seek to offer empathy to others. The next thing we can do to love people towards health is to celebrate courageous choices. We need to start celebrating courageous choices. When somebody makes a decision to get help, when somebody makes a decision to be vulnerable and confess, we need to praise those things. We need to celebrate those things. We don't need to deride those things. I've talked a lot about counseling in this sermon. One of the things that breaks my heart is that counseling gets such a stigma that people, when you start talking about going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that we automatically think, man, only broken people do that. What's going on in your life? What can you not get together yourself? Why do you need help that you need to go talk to a professional to do that? Are you crazy? What's wrong with you? What have you failed at? How did you ruin your marriage? When did you get fired? We just assume that when people are going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that there's something broken in them. But here's the thing, there's something broken in all of us, so we need to stop it. Sometimes, most of the time, the unhealthy coping mechanisms that we have are so deeply embedded and ingrained in us that we can't see them. We don't know how to find them ourselves. And we need a trained professional to talk with us and help us see those and then help us see a way through them. We need trained professionals who are more than pastors. I'm very quick to go, listen, I wanna try to help you as best I can. I'm gonna pray for you. You need to talk to a therapist, not because you're crazy, but because they're good at it. The other thing I've learned is when you talk to somebody who will say, I should really go speak to a counselor about this. A lot of times they won't. And at first they won't because it's a pride thing. I don't want to do that. I don't want people to see me parking at that office. I don't want people to think that there's something wrong with me. I don't want people to think that I can't handle it or that I'm weak somehow. I don't want all the stuff that goes with seeing a counselor. So I'm not gonna go do that. And it seems like pride. But when you start to peel back the layers, what you find is that it's really fear. I'm convinced that the reason, if you're thinking about seeing a counselor, getting help, working through some unhealth in your life, I'm convinced that one of the big reasons we don't do that is because we know good and well what we're going to have to walk through when we get there. We don't want to have to look at ourselves in the mirror. It is easier to cope. It is easier to demur. It is easier to distract than it is to confront. And so we keep walking away from our unhealthy selves instead of turning and allowing someone to hold up a mirror and show us and work through it and walk through it and emerge on the other side more healthy. It's often fear that keeps us from getting help, not pride. And so I want you to know this morning that I think it takes bravery to go get help. And I actually think, and I would love for our church to start thinking about it this way, that counseling is not for the broken. It's for the brave. Counseling is not for broken people. It's for brave people. If it were for broken people, then we'd all be in it because we're all broken. But at some point or another, you have to take a step and make a decision that I want some help. I want to be healthy. I want somebody else's voice in this conversation helping me identify the unhealthy pockets in my life to restoring me to my God-given sense of security and value and love. And since I can't find my way out of this mess myself, I want to get someone else to speak into it for me. And that takes bravery and courage. The counseling is not the broken. It's for the brave. My prayer is that 2020 will be the healthiest year for you in a long, long time. For those of you who are brave enough to pursue health, I think it begins with acknowledging and identifying the unhealthy ways we bring ourselves a sense of security and worth. And doing the work to replace that coping mechanism with one that pushes us towards God's sovereignty and pushes us towards God's love. If we have people in our lives this year that we're trying to love towards mental health, we need to do it with empathy and compassion. And we need to, as a church and as a Christian subculture, destigmatize what it is to get help and admit that we all need it. And it's not for the broken, it's for the brave. I hope that some of you will make courageous choices, even this week. If you do want to talk to a counselor, email me and I'll work to find you a good one. I'm not going to send you to mine, but somebody. If there's someone in your life who is struggling, please, please offer them empathy. Please offer them compassion. Please offer them understanding. Try the best you can to put yourself in their shoes and love them from that perspective. And let's make this year a healthy year. Let's pray. Father, we do love you. We thank you so much for loving us. God, if there is anybody here who feels unworthy, who feels unvaluable, who feels unloved, God, may they just feel a pervasive sense of your love and your compassion wrapping around them today. Help them to hear the voices in their life that speak for you and tell them that they are enough. God, if we feel unsafe or insecure, I pray that you would restore that sense of security with your sovereignty. God, for those here who are struggling, who are sad, or who are anxious, or dealing with a multitude of other things, help them feel your peace today. Help them feel your hope today. Remind them that that hope, your word says, will not be put to shame. God, I pray that we would be healthy, that we would walk in a sense of security in you, of value in you, and that that would enable us to love other people well on your behalf. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. I see you all came at once, so I hope the sermon is good. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thank you for making grace a part of your Sunday. If you're watching us online, thank you for doing that. As we continue in our Gentle and Lowly series from the book Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund, I hope it's touched you, moved your heart, compelled you towards Christ. Before I just jump in, I did want to acknowledge and praise God for the safe return of our Mexico team. We're glad that most of them are back with us. Some of y'all could have stayed in Mexico. It would have been fine with the rest of us. But for the most part, we're happy to have you. Karen, it was a good trip, I hear. Yeah. The other thing I'll tell you guys, just because we like to laugh at things, is I see Susie's here. Hi, Miss Susie. Susie Shank recently lost her husband, Mike, and we did the funeral here for that. That was just a few weeks ago. And Mike is a guy with my kind of sense of humor, so we got along very well. And he's a big Bills fan, and I'm a big Falcons fan. And last week week they played and that was the next game coming up on the schedule when I did the funeral service. It's possible that I said some disparaging things about the Bills in his service, which I was thrilled and delighted to get away with. Then the day of the game, I get a text from the deceased Mike Shank on my on my phone and I'm going what in the world and the text says this is a message from heaven go Bills screw the Falcons one of the better jokes that's ever been executed Suze that was fantastic I may have texted something back after our victory but that's neither here nor there. But yeah, that one was too good just to keep all to ourselves there. This morning, we, like I said, continue in our series, and we're going through that book, Gentle and Lowly, where we're looking at the heart of Christ. And there's a theme here that's building with the heart of Christ towards us. And next week is the final week of the series. And I'm going to land the plane in that theme. But as I was approaching this week, I chose the chapter that's entitled Rich in Mercy. It reminded me of this time in my life where I realized that my view of something, because what I want to compel us towards and where we want to land the plane today, I'll just tell you where we're going, is I want us to see how very impoverished our view of God's mercy is. And so I was trying to think of another time in my life. When did I realize, oh my gosh, I thought I understood what this was. And I really didn't until this moment. And it was, I thought I understood what love was until we had a kid. If you're a parent and you can remember back that far, you know that when your child is born, when your first child is born, there is this love that overtakes you that you never understood. And so when, when Jen and I were pregnant with Lily, like we knew that we were going to love this child. Obviously we're not psychopaths. We knew that we were going to love this kid. We knew that this was going to be a kind of love that we didn't understand. People would tell us you're going to love them so much, you're not going to believe it. And I would mentally assent to that. Yes. Yes, I'm sure that that is true. And you begin to wrap your mind around what it's like to have a child in your life and what it must be like to love them. But you really, nothing can really prepare you. You can't intellectually get there until you experience it. And I still remember the night and then the morning where we had Lily. I went to bed. Jen was very pregnant. And at about, and listen, Jen's not here this morning. I got a cold in the middle of the week and then I got over it and gave it to them. So all three of my family members are home now with a cold, sick. Jen texted me. I just made the children cry. I'm at my wits end. Please come home. Well, I got to preach, but I'll be there soon. So they're all home sick. So she's not going to know what I say here. And if I know my wife, she's not going to go back and listen to this. Okay. So this is, if is if I can trust you this is our secret she doesn't have to know I talked about this it's up to you guys jerks she her water we were sound asleep her water broke at 2 33 o'clock somewhere around there she got up got out of bed took shower. She didn't bother me. Took a shower, did her makeup, put on some nice clothes, put in earrings and a necklace. She was ready for dinner, man, at 3.30 in the morning when she woke me up. That's just the kind of girl she knew there was going to be some pictures made, you know? And so she had to be, she had to be ready. She wasn't going to be looking haggard at the, at the, at the, at the hospital. So she gets herself ready to go out to dinner at three 34 o'clock in the morning and then just gently jostles me. My water broke. We've got to go to the hospital. What? We go to the hospital. We're in labor. We is generous. She, she was very much in labor. I very much not. Um, and, and I'm sitting there, I'm sitting there next to her and we're trying to bring this baby into the world. And I'm, I'm Jen's, you know, in front of me and I'm in a chair facing this way. I'm looking at her face because I don't know, different husbands process this moment in different ways. I did not want to be facing the other way. I just, I want to be facing this way. So I was facing this way, and I'm just looking at her face. I'm holding her hand, doing the best I can to encourage her in this process. And we're sitting there. She's doing her part. And out comes this baby. And I can hear the baby crying. And then they, and it's Lily, and then they put Lily on Jen's chest. And Lily's little face is facing me. And now listen to me. I do not care what anybody says. There is no such thing as a cute newborn baby. Those things are gross and they look like space aliens. And something happens in your mind, I think from God and his sovereign design, that you in the moment as a parent, you think this is a precious child. It's not, it's disgusting. That's a gross, gross thing. But this crying, greasy alien gets placed on Jen's chest and not even looking at me because she can't look yet, just facing me. And I can see her face. And in that moment, it was like the Grinch happened in real life. My heart grew ten sizes. In that moment, I knew I would die for that little girl. And it took nothing. I'm getting worked up about it right now. It took nothing. I loved her so much with a love that I had never understood before. And for those of you, and for some of you, some of you really want to experience that love and you're not yet. And I'm so sorry because I know stuff like this is painful and I walked that journey for a while too. But before you have kids, people tell you you're going to love them. And you understand that you will. But when that space alien landed on Jim's chest, I have never felt more love in my life more instantly than I did then. Instantly, I would die for this kid. I would love her. Now my heart exists outside of my chest. And I was telling this to Kyle. He was our student pastor. Now he's our family pastor. And Aaron Winston, our former children's pastor, is now our discipleship pastor doing some other things. Some of y'all know that Kyle and I have been working together, been friends for 10 years plus. He worked for me at my previous church. And Kyle's like a little brother to me. I love him so much. And when he and his wife Ashlyn were pregnant, I was telling him, like, your heart's going to grow 10 sizes. Like, you're not ready for this. You're going to love this kid so much. And the kid's name now is Hayes, and I don't know how old Hayes is, a month and a half, two months, something like that. He might be a year old. I don't know. I'm bad. I'm bad with ages. And I told him, this is going to happen, man. And the day or the day after Hayes was born, I called him and he was crying. He said, you were right. You're right. I said, you understand it now? He goes, yeah, I understand. Your heart just, you realize how impoverished your view of love was because of how this overtakes your life all of a sudden. And then I remember when we were pregnant with John, once we started getting close to the date, I started feeling bad. I started feeling bad because I'm like, there's no way I'm going to love the second one like I loved the first one. There's no space left. And as a first child, I found that to be true. I found that to be true. Your love gradually diminishes the more children that you have. Faith and Phil Leverett, they're not even here. I'm picking on them. They've got five kids. They don't even know the fifth one's name. So I was already feeling bad because when I have John, when we had John, I was already kind of apologizing to him. Like, I'm sorry, kid. I don't know how to love you like I love Lily. I'm sure God will get me there. And then as soon as that space alien landed on my wife's chest, my heart grew again. And it expanded. And I would die for that one too. And I love it with my whole life. And there's nothing quite like that in life to acquaint you with what love really is. I realized in those moments I had an impoverished view of what I thought of was. And I bring that up because I believe, and Dane asserts in the book, that we have an impoverished view of God's mercy. We're aware of it. We're aware that God's mercy exists. Most of you in here, I would be surprised if anybody came in here this morning, even if you're just here visiting with family or you wandered in or this is your first time in church in 20 years and you consider yourself agnostic, whatever your situation is, I doubt anybody in here is surprised to hear that we as Christians, we ascribe mercy to God. We say that he is rich in mercy. We know God's a merciful God. But I'm not, and so we give mental assent to that truth, but I'm not sure that we really understand what his mercy is. And so let's see if we can't gain on it a little bit today. The way we're going to gain on it is to look in Ephesians, because Ephesians chapter two, we're just going to look at verses, we were going to look at verses 1 through 10, but we're just going to do 1 through 5. As I went through it this morning, I found a place to stop that I felt was more appropriate. So if you have a Bible, please open it up to Ephesians chapter 2. This is my favorite kind of sermon where we just go through the text and I kind of tell you how it hits me and hopefully hits us this week. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. You can open that up and we'll be in the text of Ephesians chapter two, verses one through five. Shoot, I wasn't planning on crying and make my nose run talking about my kids at the beginning. I should save that stuff for the end so I'm not sniffing the whole time. In Ephesians chapter two, Paul has this 10 verse discourse. That's one of the more famous passages in scripture. And he opens it like this. As for you, verse one, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Let's talk about this for a minute. Jim Price, would you mind giving me a tissue, please, sir? Thank you. It's going according to the flesh, gratifying its desires and thinking its thoughts. He's, he's describing a people who don't know Jesus. And because they don't know Jesus, they live according to the flesh in Pauline theology. Paul wrote the book of Ephesians. Paul two-thirds of the New Testament. Most of the letters in the New Testament were written by Paul. And so theologians have developed a theology. Oh, that's hilarious. Good. Someone apologize to Jim when he gets back from his very important errand. Jim, we found some. I'm so sorry. They were right behind here. I know. Go home. All right. Within those letters, theologians have developed a theology based around Paul. Anything that Paul did is Pauline, the Pauline epistles, Pauline theology, things like that. And so within Pauline theology, there's this idea of being dead in our transgressions and in our trespasses. And there is this idea that before we knew Jesus, we had no idea. We had no choice but to sin. We were creatures of the flesh. In Philippians, he says that they were, that their bellies were their Lord's. And they basically did whatever they craved and whatever they desired. And that's how he's describing people before they knew Jesus here in Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three. He's saying that we were dead in our transgressions because we just indulged in the flesh. There's life in the flesh in this theology, and there's life in the spirit. And life in the flesh is to live life as if God didn't exist, to just do whatever our nature wants to do. And life in the spirit is to live in light of the very real existence of God that's been infused in us and given us life and live according to God's desires and God's thoughts and God's standards. So when we're living according to the flesh, we're living according to our own standards and our own thoughts and our own desires. So think of it this way. Think of living according to the flesh is somewhat akin to living as an irresponsible college student. Okay. Now I'm not talking about the responsible college students, the ones that like go to class and take notes and study and care about their future and their GPA and are trying to get a good job or trying to get into a good grad school. I'm talking about students like me that didn't care about any of that. Students that just live for fun. What's the next fun thing we're going to do? What's the next hedonistic activity in which I can engage? And I don't want to paint the wrong picture of me as a college student because some of us, we think of irresponsible college student, our mind goes to partying and that's a thing. But that wasn't my thing. I went to Bible college. I was a pastoral ministries major. My rejection and hedonism looked like playing Madden instead of going to class or just going and playing Frisbee. Because in the early 2000s, you could not be a youth pastor if you could not throw a Frisbee. It was part of the deal. So if you were there at school, you're throwing Frisbees. You're doing all kinds of stuff, you're playing sports. I'm skipping class all the time. My GPA was incredibly low. You guys, you'll love this. I was one semester away from getting kicked out of my Bible college for poor chapel attendance, and then I became a pastor. How do you like that? And my thought is, make chapel better, and I want to go. You don't hear me guilting you into being here, do you? Some of my friends haven't been here for weeks. We all have ways in which we're irresponsible. And we remember those friends in college who were just, their Lord was their belly. They just kind of jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from activity to activity. They were unmoored by wisdom and rules and considerations of the future. They lived in the moment and they did what they wanted. And some of us were that person and some of us were friends with that person. But the reality is, in different times and ways, we've all been that person. All of us. There's nobody in this room who looks back on the last 5, 10, 25 plus years of their life and thinks to themselves, I pretty much nailed that. There was never a moment when I wavered from God's path. I can't think of a season in my life where I just meandered and I did what I want and I lived according to the flesh. Especially when we don't think of living according to the flesh simply as seeking pleasure. Because living according to the flesh can be to seek numbness or escape or stillness or comfort. And the reality of it is sometimes we did our sinning in college and then we get it out of our system. But sometimes we just figure out more nuanced ways to keep feeding that monster and frat parties become country club outings. And it's all the same motivation and it's all the same stuff. And it's still the same lack of discipline. It's the same lack of wisdom. We're still living according to the flesh. Our flesh has just found a way to adapt itself into acceptable adult society so we can still be responsible, productive members. But if we're being really, really honest with ourselves, we know we've all had seasons where when we look back at that time in our life, and maybe, maybe you're in one right now where if you're being honest, you're wandering, where you're living according to what you want to do, not what God wants you to do. We can remember times when we lived according to the flesh and its desires, and we jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from excitement to excitement, from numbness to numbness, from escape to escape. And we piddle our days away on our phone, dopamine-ing ourselves to death while we do nothing for the kingdom. There's nobody in here who hasn't had one of those seasons. And here's the thing that I want to point out. In this passage in Ephesians chapter 2, and those first verses, this is clearly a reference to people before they knew Jesus. He says, you were once like the others, following the prince of this world and the desires of your flesh. And the implication is, but now you know Jesus, and so you live according to the Spirit. And so it makes it seem like, well, before I knew Jesus, I messed up, and I lived according to the flesh, not according to the Spirit. I jumped from hedonism to hedonism, whatever it might be, and now I'm better, and now I'm saved, and now I live according to the Spirit. Except none of you in here have that experience, do you? If you've, let's do a show of hands. If you've been a Christian for over a decade, I would like for you to raise your hand right now. If in that decade, you've never once wandered away from God and lived according to the flesh. Raise your hand if since you got saved, miraculously, sin has not been a problem for you. I can't believe Bill Gentile didn't raise his hand for fun. Right? That's not our experience. But here's what's wonderful about that not being our experience is that wasn't Paul's either. And maybe the most human passage in the Bible at the end of Romans chapter 7, Paul says, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I do not want to do, I do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And what he's just claimed in Romans 6 is we are no longer slaves to sin. We are free to walk in newness of life and live life in the spirit. And then in Romans 7, he laments that he can't do it. That if Paul were sitting in this room and I had asked that question, he wouldn't have raised his hand either because he continued to sin. So it's a human passage. And I love that phrase, oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Because it's hard to be a Christian because we feel like we should be doing better and not living according to the flesh anymore and living according to the spirit. But we don't all the time. We have these pockets where we're living according to the spirit. And those are wonderful pockets and sometimes seasons. But we all walk through times when we are exactly what these verses say. We gratify the cravings of our flesh following its desires and thoughts. So, when we read this this morning, let us not render that for people prior to Christ, but let us render it to ourselves, knowing that these verses apply to us and we are in them. This is us. And this is important because of what follows. I stopped reading in the middle of verse 3 the first time. This time I'm going to read all of verse flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. Because that's us, because of the times we've lived according to the flesh and not the spirit, we are by nature deserving of wrath. Now, wrath is not a thing that we like to talk about. None of you got in the car today and said, what's the sermon about? I hope it's on wrath. That's fun. Maybe we can sneak some hell in there. We don't like talking about wrath. We don't like the reality that by our nature we deserve it. And I've laid some groundwork for this in this series, so I'm not going to belabor the point in that way here. But a few different times in the series, I've invited you to imagine what Jesus's attitude towards us could be and by all rights should be. That there's a creator God in the universe, in heaven, that creates the universe to share himself with it and with us. He creates us in his image to glory in him and for him to glory in us. And we mess it up with our sin and he sends his son to rectify the situation and we kill him. What could Jesus's right attitude be towards us? Of course it could be wrath. If you accept the Christian narrative, it only makes sense that Jesus would be wrathful towards us as would God for our rejection of him. And so by our very nature, we are objects of wrath. But let me tell you another reason why we are objects of wrath that's actually within this passage that I find very interesting this morning. This discourse ends in verse 10. Verse 10 is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. It's one that I remind you of often. It's one that I pray over my children. It's one that I pray for parents as they try to guide their children because this is our goal. And this is how this discourse ends in Ephesians chapter two, verse 10. Four, we are God's handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. The way I memorized it was the ESV and I like the word workmanship. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that we might walk in them. So here's the idea, is that God created each of you specifically and on purpose. You were not an accident. He calls it his handiwork, his craftsmanship. You were not his throwaway. He did not whittle you and go, oh, look at that. Okay. He, you were his craftsmanship. You are artisanal. You're fancy. If you were bread, you would be inside two plastic wrappers. Okay. Not the one, like the fancy bread. He made you on purpose. He made you intentionally. You're good with people because God made you that way. You like to serve because God made you that way. You're a people pleaser because God made you that way. You're an extrovert because God made you an extrovert on purpose. You're an introvert because God made you an introvert on purpose. You're an omnivore because God made you an omnivore on purpose. Do you understand? You're big and imposing because God wanted you to be big and imposing. You're small and frail because God wanted you to be small and frail. You have a big, strong voice. You have a weak voice because God wanted those things. You're shy because God wanted you to be observant. You're outspoken and boisterous because God wanted dinner parties to go well for his children. Do you understand? Everything that you have was intentionally given to you and bestowed upon you by God. It is not an accident of evolution. It is not an accident of your parents falling in love. The Bible says that he knew us before we were knit in our mother's womb, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. So every ounce of you was made on purpose by God. You are not an accident or a collision or a coincidence of biology. You were intentionally made by your creator to be exactly who you are. And the reason he made you that way is for your good works that he prepared for you before time that you might walk in them. He knit you together the way he did because he has prepared a path for you to walk of good works and it is your job to be who you created you to, he created you to be so that you might walk in the good works that he determined for you before time, which is how we know that you are not an accident of biology or people falling in love in the seventies. Do you understand? So here's the thing. If that's what God did, if he made you on purpose, if he knit you in your mother's womb, if you were fearfully and wonderfully made, and when he made you, before time, he knew the good works he wanted you to walk in in 2025. And he crafted you in such a way to prepare you to walk that exact path that he has for you. Then let's understand this. When we live according to the flesh, we pervert creation and reject God and his intentions. When we take all those things in our alchemy, that amalgamations of gifts and strengths and weaknesses, and we use that for what we want and not what God wants. When we take all of those gifts and abilities and we leverage those for ourselves to acquire for ourselves whatever it is we might want, love, fame, attention, money, power, whatever it is. When we take those gifts, God's handiwork, and we leverage those things to live according to the flesh and what we want, rather than what God wants, we pervert creation. Or maybe even worse, maybe we don't take those gifts and abilities that God gives us and leverage them for our own good, nor do we leverage them for the good of God. We just ignore them and we numb ourselves and we do nothing. It's even worse. Revelation says that because you're neither good nor bad, but lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. It's even worse to ignore the ways in which we're created and use them for absolutely nothing. But when we live according to the flesh and its thoughts and desires, using everything that God's made us to be to make ourselves happy and to keep ourselves content, rather than using everything that God has given us and made us to be to build his kingdom and to live according to the spirit, this is important. We pervert God's perfect creation. And we reject God and his intentions simply by the way that we live. This is why we are objects of wrath. Because we've taken this good, wonderful thing that he gave us and we've used it for our own ends, and we've muddied it up, and we've mucked it up. So when that passage concludes, we are like them objects, by our nature, objects of wrath, that's why, because we deserve it. Now, if we understand that and we're there together, that's what makes verses 4 and 5 all the more impactful and resounding. They say this. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. So there's a lot there. But, that's the way the verse starts. But, I always say when you're reading your Bible and you see a therefore, you have to ask, what's it there for? Romans chapter 8 says, therefore. It starts out therefore. So why is that there? Because of chapters one through seven and what was covered there because of that, this, but counteracts what was just said. You were created by God. You are children of the flesh. You live according to his desires. You used to do that. You are, you are deserving object of his wrath. But in spite of that, because of his great love for us, and there's no love to compare that to in humanity than the love of that baby landing on the chest of my wife. And knowing you have never done a single thing for me, and I will die for you. Because of his great love for us. Last week, Aaron Winston did a great job talking about how God yearns for us from the inside out, this yearning love, this pursuing love that God has for us. And because of that love, because God loves us like that, he pours out his mercy grace and mercy, and many of you can define these, but so that we're on the same page, we understand what we're talking about. Mercy is when you do not receive a punishment that you have earned, that you deserve. Grace is when you receive a gift that you did not earn and you do not deserve. Because of these countervailing forces in God, and because of his great love for you, he was compelled to make a way for you. Because of his richness and mercy, God is only described as rich in two things, grace and mercy. Dane asserts in the book that being rich in mercy is the only time in the Bible that God is described as rich in anything, which I'm sure if I could talk to him, it would make sense. I'm not trying to pick on him. I wrote down, I was going to put it on the screen, that God is only rich in mercy, but then in the same passage, it was said because of the riches of his grace. I'm like, OK, well, he's rich in grace, too. So it's those two things, grace and mercy. And listen, I want to share this thought with you. His mercy expressed and personified by Jesus has literally brought us from death to life. His mercy and his grace, expressed and personified by Jesus, has literally brought us from death to life. So we were deserving of wrath, but God, because of his great love for us, because of his richness and mercy, made a way for us to be restored to him, made a way for us to be restored to our former glory. Made a way for us to live a life without sin. To be buried with him in death and be raised to walk in newness of life. To live according to the spirit. To live as a new creation, anticipating our heavenly bodies and being restored with him. He made a way for restitution and restoration. And he did that by sending his son to die on the cross for us. His son is the personification of his mercy. And we, most of us, have heard this dozens and dozens, if not thousands of times. And we give intellectual assent to it, but I'm not sure if it clicks in what that actually means because we're numb to it. And so I was trying to think of a way that we could get just maybe a glimpse of how impoverished our view of mercy might be. And I came up with this, so we'll see if it works. Let's pretend that somewhere in high school or college, you started smoking cigarettes. Now, who among us didn't have a brief smoking phase in college? Alright, we're not here to cast aspersions. But let's say that you picked up a habit in high school or college, and you've got a best friend, really good buddy. And you start to pick it up, your buddy doesn't really say anything, They keep hanging out with you. But they notice kind of an uptick. Like it used to just be like socially or on the golf course or whatever. But now it's a little bit more. And they go, hey, I'm noticing you're smoking a lot more lately. Maybe I'm not here to make you feel bad, but maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe that's not good for you. Maybe you can cut back a little bit. And you go, yeah, you know, I hear you. I know it's not good, but it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Like, I've got it under control. Okay. So a few more months or years go by, and you and your buddy are still around, and your buddy goes, hey, listen, you really haven't tapered back. Like, This is going to become a problem. And I don't want that for you. This is not healthy. It's not good for you. Love you. It's not good for you. Maybe you want to consider making some better choices about this. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you're right. I need to quit. And so you quit. But you quit for three, four days a week. And then you start sneaking them again. And your buddy smells you. And they love you. And they go, hey, are you back on the horse? Yeah, been firing up some lung darts. Sorry about that. And you get back into the habit. And the years go by. And every now and again, your buddy gently prods. He says, hey, you should stop that, man. That's not good for you. And then once you're up to a pack or two a day, it gets real bad, and your buddy convinces you to go to rehab. I don't know if they have rehab for smokers. I'm sure the health care apparatus has figured out a way to get money for that. I don't know if you can actually do that, but in this story, you do. You go to rehab. It's really serious. You get clean. You come back and you're off. You're not smoking for a while, but eventually you start back up again. Your buddy gets your friends and family around, and they implore you, please, you're killing yourself. You've got to stop doing this. Yeah, I know, you're right. There's tears. You feel terrible. And you stop the best you can. But before you know it, you're doing it again. And you're doing it again, and you know you shouldn't. You're hiding it from your buddy because you don't want to disappoint him. But you know you're killing yourself. And then one day, you're at your house. Your buddy happens to be over. You start having a coughing fit. The last thing you remember is you're on the ground coughing and you're having a hard time breathing. And your buddy calls the ambulance and you're trying to wave him off. It's fine, I don't need it. He says, yes, you do, you're dying. And then the next thing you know, you wake up and you're in a hospital bed. And you look down and there's a scar down the middle of your chest. And the doctor comes in and you go, what happened? The doctor said, well, you were in pretty bad shape. You were living through machines. You had died. What's this scar for? You needed a lung transplant. Did I get one? Yeah, you got a lung transplant. Whose lungs are in me? What happened? Those are your buddy's lungs. Well, if these are his, how is he alive? He's not. He said it was more important to him for you to live. Not only did he want you to live, but he wanted you to experience what it was to have lungs that have never smoked. He wanted you to be able to play with your kids with lungs that could breathe really well. He wanted you to be able to experience the rest of your life as if you had never made any of those mistakes that you insisted on. And he wanted to give his life to do that. If we can get ourselves there, maybe we can grab a taste of how impoverished our view is of God's mercy. Because the truth is, that's all of us. We live lives of the flesh. We do what we want. And Jesus, our buddy, in children's church, we tell them, Jesus is your forever friend. Your forever friend walks alongside you and says, hey, that's not good for you. Hey, you're killing yourself. Hey, you're hurting yourself. Hey, you should stop. Hey, we need to get friends and family involved because your sins are not helping you. And what to me is so powerful about that illustration is that in the smoking illustration, those are choices that you made. And he warned you against over and over and over again and you kept making them. And then you wake up and there's a scar. And your buddy wanted you to live life as if you had never made any of the mistakes you did previously. Every single one of us has a scar down the center of our chest. For where Jesus died for us, because he wanted us to live a life as if none of the mistakes we made previously applied to us anymore. And he gave his life so that we didn't have to. So that we can be with our families and our children and our loved ones and our friends in such a way that we know what it is to walk in true love with them because none of our past mistakes apply to us anymore. That is the richness of God's mercy. That is the richness of His grace. We are all of us scarred and have received that transplant. So that we might experience what life is without our sins dogging us all the time. That's the richness of God's undeserved mercy. And I think that Dane sums it up best in this quote. I'm going to read it and then I'm going to pray and we're going to move into communion. Dane says this, God's mercy. It means on that day when we stand before him quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had. Oh God, may that be true. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your mercy. Thank you for finding its personification in Jesus. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for yearning for us, for loving us, for lavishing your love upon us. God, we do not deserve it. We are by nature objects of wrath, a deserved and earned wrath, a deserved frustration and anger. And you watch us run ourselves into the ground and you die for us anyways. I pray that this morning we would have just a little bit more of a rich view of what your mercy is and what it means and how wonderful and miraculous it is. Help us walk in gratitude and humility towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. I see you all came at once, so I hope the sermon is good. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thank you for making grace a part of your Sunday. If you're watching us online, thank you for doing that. As we continue in our Gentle and Lowly series from the book Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund, I hope it's touched you, moved your heart, compelled you towards Christ. Before I just jump in, I did want to acknowledge and praise God for the safe return of our Mexico team. We're glad that most of them are back with us. Some of y'all could have stayed in Mexico. It would have been fine with the rest of us. But for the most part, we're happy to have you. Karen, it was a good trip, I hear. Yeah. The other thing I'll tell you guys, just because we like to laugh at things, is I see Susie's here. Hi, Miss Susie. Susie Shank recently lost her husband, Mike, and we did the funeral here for that. That was just a few weeks ago. And Mike is a guy with my kind of sense of humor, so we got along very well. And he's a big Bills fan, and I'm a big Falcons fan. And last week week they played and that was the next game coming up on the schedule when I did the funeral service. It's possible that I said some disparaging things about the Bills in his service, which I was thrilled and delighted to get away with. Then the day of the game, I get a text from the deceased Mike Shank on my on my phone and I'm going what in the world and the text says this is a message from heaven go Bills screw the Falcons one of the better jokes that's ever been executed Suze that was fantastic I may have texted something back after our victory but that's neither here nor there. But yeah, that one was too good just to keep all to ourselves there. This morning, we, like I said, continue in our series, and we're going through that book, Gentle and Lowly, where we're looking at the heart of Christ. And there's a theme here that's building with the heart of Christ towards us. And next week is the final week of the series. And I'm going to land the plane in that theme. But as I was approaching this week, I chose the chapter that's entitled Rich in Mercy. It reminded me of this time in my life where I realized that my view of something, because what I want to compel us towards and where we want to land the plane today, I'll just tell you where we're going, is I want us to see how very impoverished our view of God's mercy is. And so I was trying to think of another time in my life. When did I realize, oh my gosh, I thought I understood what this was. And I really didn't until this moment. And it was, I thought I understood what love was until we had a kid. If you're a parent and you can remember back that far, you know that when your child is born, when your first child is born, there is this love that overtakes you that you never understood. And so when, when Jen and I were pregnant with Lily, like we knew that we were going to love this child. Obviously we're not psychopaths. We knew that we were going to love this kid. We knew that this was going to be a kind of love that we didn't understand. People would tell us you're going to love them so much, you're not going to believe it. And I would mentally assent to that. Yes. Yes, I'm sure that that is true. And you begin to wrap your mind around what it's like to have a child in your life and what it must be like to love them. But you really, nothing can really prepare you. You can't intellectually get there until you experience it. And I still remember the night and then the morning where we had Lily. I went to bed. Jen was very pregnant. And at about, and listen, Jen's not here this morning. I got a cold in the middle of the week and then I got over it and gave it to them. So all three of my family members are home now with a cold, sick. Jen texted me. I just made the children cry. I'm at my wits end. Please come home. Well, I got to preach, but I'll be there soon. So they're all home sick. So she's not going to know what I say here. And if I know my wife, she's not going to go back and listen to this. Okay. So this is, if is if I can trust you this is our secret she doesn't have to know I talked about this it's up to you guys jerks she her water we were sound asleep her water broke at 2 33 o'clock somewhere around there she got up got out of bed took shower. She didn't bother me. Took a shower, did her makeup, put on some nice clothes, put in earrings and a necklace. She was ready for dinner, man, at 3.30 in the morning when she woke me up. That's just the kind of girl she knew there was going to be some pictures made, you know? And so she had to be, she had to be ready. She wasn't going to be looking haggard at the, at the, at the, at the hospital. So she gets herself ready to go out to dinner at three 34 o'clock in the morning and then just gently jostles me. My water broke. We've got to go to the hospital. What? We go to the hospital. We're in labor. We is generous. She, she was very much in labor. I very much not. Um, and, and I'm sitting there, I'm sitting there next to her and we're trying to bring this baby into the world. And I'm, I'm Jen's, you know, in front of me and I'm in a chair facing this way. I'm looking at her face because I don't know, different husbands process this moment in different ways. I did not want to be facing the other way. I just, I want to be facing this way. So I was facing this way, and I'm just looking at her face. I'm holding her hand, doing the best I can to encourage her in this process. And we're sitting there. She's doing her part. And out comes this baby. And I can hear the baby crying. And then they, and it's Lily, and then they put Lily on Jen's chest. And Lily's little face is facing me. And now listen to me. I do not care what anybody says. There is no such thing as a cute newborn baby. Those things are gross and they look like space aliens. And something happens in your mind, I think from God and his sovereign design, that you in the moment as a parent, you think this is a precious child. It's not, it's disgusting. That's a gross, gross thing. But this crying, greasy alien gets placed on Jen's chest and not even looking at me because she can't look yet, just facing me. And I can see her face. And in that moment, it was like the Grinch happened in real life. My heart grew ten sizes. In that moment, I knew I would die for that little girl. And it took nothing. I'm getting worked up about it right now. It took nothing. I loved her so much with a love that I had never understood before. And for those of you, and for some of you, some of you really want to experience that love and you're not yet. And I'm so sorry because I know stuff like this is painful and I walked that journey for a while too. But before you have kids, people tell you you're going to love them. And you understand that you will. But when that space alien landed on Jim's chest, I have never felt more love in my life more instantly than I did then. Instantly, I would die for this kid. I would love her. Now my heart exists outside of my chest. And I was telling this to Kyle. He was our student pastor. Now he's our family pastor. And Aaron Winston, our former children's pastor, is now our discipleship pastor doing some other things. Some of y'all know that Kyle and I have been working together, been friends for 10 years plus. He worked for me at my previous church. And Kyle's like a little brother to me. I love him so much. And when he and his wife Ashlyn were pregnant, I was telling him, like, your heart's going to grow 10 sizes. Like, you're not ready for this. You're going to love this kid so much. And the kid's name now is Hayes, and I don't know how old Hayes is, a month and a half, two months, something like that. He might be a year old. I don't know. I'm bad. I'm bad with ages. And I told him, this is going to happen, man. And the day or the day after Hayes was born, I called him and he was crying. He said, you were right. You're right. I said, you understand it now? He goes, yeah, I understand. Your heart just, you realize how impoverished your view of love was because of how this overtakes your life all of a sudden. And then I remember when we were pregnant with John, once we started getting close to the date, I started feeling bad. I started feeling bad because I'm like, there's no way I'm going to love the second one like I loved the first one. There's no space left. And as a first child, I found that to be true. I found that to be true. Your love gradually diminishes the more children that you have. Faith and Phil Leverett, they're not even here. I'm picking on them. They've got five kids. They don't even know the fifth one's name. So I was already feeling bad because when I have John, when we had John, I was already kind of apologizing to him. Like, I'm sorry, kid. I don't know how to love you like I love Lily. I'm sure God will get me there. And then as soon as that space alien landed on my wife's chest, my heart grew again. And it expanded. And I would die for that one too. And I love it with my whole life. And there's nothing quite like that in life to acquaint you with what love really is. I realized in those moments I had an impoverished view of what I thought of was. And I bring that up because I believe, and Dane asserts in the book, that we have an impoverished view of God's mercy. We're aware of it. We're aware that God's mercy exists. Most of you in here, I would be surprised if anybody came in here this morning, even if you're just here visiting with family or you wandered in or this is your first time in church in 20 years and you consider yourself agnostic, whatever your situation is, I doubt anybody in here is surprised to hear that we as Christians, we ascribe mercy to God. We say that he is rich in mercy. We know God's a merciful God. But I'm not, and so we give mental assent to that truth, but I'm not sure that we really understand what his mercy is. And so let's see if we can't gain on it a little bit today. The way we're going to gain on it is to look in Ephesians, because Ephesians chapter two, we're just going to look at verses, we were going to look at verses 1 through 10, but we're just going to do 1 through 5. As I went through it this morning, I found a place to stop that I felt was more appropriate. So if you have a Bible, please open it up to Ephesians chapter 2. This is my favorite kind of sermon where we just go through the text and I kind of tell you how it hits me and hopefully hits us this week. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. You can open that up and we'll be in the text of Ephesians chapter two, verses one through five. Shoot, I wasn't planning on crying and make my nose run talking about my kids at the beginning. I should save that stuff for the end so I'm not sniffing the whole time. In Ephesians chapter two, Paul has this 10 verse discourse. That's one of the more famous passages in scripture. And he opens it like this. As for you, verse one, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Let's talk about this for a minute. Jim Price, would you mind giving me a tissue, please, sir? Thank you. It's going according to the flesh, gratifying its desires and thinking its thoughts. He's, he's describing a people who don't know Jesus. And because they don't know Jesus, they live according to the flesh in Pauline theology. Paul wrote the book of Ephesians. Paul two-thirds of the New Testament. Most of the letters in the New Testament were written by Paul. And so theologians have developed a theology. Oh, that's hilarious. Good. Someone apologize to Jim when he gets back from his very important errand. Jim, we found some. I'm so sorry. They were right behind here. I know. Go home. All right. Within those letters, theologians have developed a theology based around Paul. Anything that Paul did is Pauline, the Pauline epistles, Pauline theology, things like that. And so within Pauline theology, there's this idea of being dead in our transgressions and in our trespasses. And there is this idea that before we knew Jesus, we had no idea. We had no choice but to sin. We were creatures of the flesh. In Philippians, he says that they were, that their bellies were their Lord's. And they basically did whatever they craved and whatever they desired. And that's how he's describing people before they knew Jesus here in Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three. He's saying that we were dead in our transgressions because we just indulged in the flesh. There's life in the flesh in this theology, and there's life in the spirit. And life in the flesh is to live life as if God didn't exist, to just do whatever our nature wants to do. And life in the spirit is to live in light of the very real existence of God that's been infused in us and given us life and live according to God's desires and God's thoughts and God's standards. So when we're living according to the flesh, we're living according to our own standards and our own thoughts and our own desires. So think of it this way. Think of living according to the flesh is somewhat akin to living as an irresponsible college student. Okay. Now I'm not talking about the responsible college students, the ones that like go to class and take notes and study and care about their future and their GPA and are trying to get a good job or trying to get into a good grad school. I'm talking about students like me that didn't care about any of that. Students that just live for fun. What's the next fun thing we're going to do? What's the next hedonistic activity in which I can engage? And I don't want to paint the wrong picture of me as a college student because some of us, we think of irresponsible college student, our mind goes to partying and that's a thing. But that wasn't my thing. I went to Bible college. I was a pastoral ministries major. My rejection and hedonism looked like playing Madden instead of going to class or just going and playing Frisbee. Because in the early 2000s, you could not be a youth pastor if you could not throw a Frisbee. It was part of the deal. So if you were there at school, you're throwing Frisbees. You're doing all kinds of stuff, you're playing sports. I'm skipping class all the time. My GPA was incredibly low. You guys, you'll love this. I was one semester away from getting kicked out of my Bible college for poor chapel attendance, and then I became a pastor. How do you like that? And my thought is, make chapel better, and I want to go. You don't hear me guilting you into being here, do you? Some of my friends haven't been here for weeks. We all have ways in which we're irresponsible. And we remember those friends in college who were just, their Lord was their belly. They just kind of jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from activity to activity. They were unmoored by wisdom and rules and considerations of the future. They lived in the moment and they did what they wanted. And some of us were that person and some of us were friends with that person. But the reality is, in different times and ways, we've all been that person. All of us. There's nobody in this room who looks back on the last 5, 10, 25 plus years of their life and thinks to themselves, I pretty much nailed that. There was never a moment when I wavered from God's path. I can't think of a season in my life where I just meandered and I did what I want and I lived according to the flesh. Especially when we don't think of living according to the flesh simply as seeking pleasure. Because living according to the flesh can be to seek numbness or escape or stillness or comfort. And the reality of it is sometimes we did our sinning in college and then we get it out of our system. But sometimes we just figure out more nuanced ways to keep feeding that monster and frat parties become country club outings. And it's all the same motivation and it's all the same stuff. And it's still the same lack of discipline. It's the same lack of wisdom. We're still living according to the flesh. Our flesh has just found a way to adapt itself into acceptable adult society so we can still be responsible, productive members. But if we're being really, really honest with ourselves, we know we've all had seasons where when we look back at that time in our life, and maybe, maybe you're in one right now where if you're being honest, you're wandering, where you're living according to what you want to do, not what God wants you to do. We can remember times when we lived according to the flesh and its desires, and we jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from excitement to excitement, from numbness to numbness, from escape to escape. And we piddle our days away on our phone, dopamine-ing ourselves to death while we do nothing for the kingdom. There's nobody in here who hasn't had one of those seasons. And here's the thing that I want to point out. In this passage in Ephesians chapter 2, and those first verses, this is clearly a reference to people before they knew Jesus. He says, you were once like the others, following the prince of this world and the desires of your flesh. And the implication is, but now you know Jesus, and so you live according to the Spirit. And so it makes it seem like, well, before I knew Jesus, I messed up, and I lived according to the flesh, not according to the Spirit. I jumped from hedonism to hedonism, whatever it might be, and now I'm better, and now I'm saved, and now I live according to the Spirit. Except none of you in here have that experience, do you? If you've, let's do a show of hands. If you've been a Christian for over a decade, I would like for you to raise your hand right now. If in that decade, you've never once wandered away from God and lived according to the flesh. Raise your hand if since you got saved, miraculously, sin has not been a problem for you. I can't believe Bill Gentile didn't raise his hand for fun. Right? That's not our experience. But here's what's wonderful about that not being our experience is that wasn't Paul's either. And maybe the most human passage in the Bible at the end of Romans chapter 7, Paul says, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I do not want to do, I do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And what he's just claimed in Romans 6 is we are no longer slaves to sin. We are free to walk in newness of life and live life in the spirit. And then in Romans 7, he laments that he can't do it. That if Paul were sitting in this room and I had asked that question, he wouldn't have raised his hand either because he continued to sin. So it's a human passage. And I love that phrase, oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Because it's hard to be a Christian because we feel like we should be doing better and not living according to the flesh anymore and living according to the spirit. But we don't all the time. We have these pockets where we're living according to the spirit. And those are wonderful pockets and sometimes seasons. But we all walk through times when we are exactly what these verses say. We gratify the cravings of our flesh following its desires and thoughts. So, when we read this this morning, let us not render that for people prior to Christ, but let us render it to ourselves, knowing that these verses apply to us and we are in them. This is us. And this is important because of what follows. I stopped reading in the middle of verse 3 the first time. This time I'm going to read all of verse flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. Because that's us, because of the times we've lived according to the flesh and not the spirit, we are by nature deserving of wrath. Now, wrath is not a thing that we like to talk about. None of you got in the car today and said, what's the sermon about? I hope it's on wrath. That's fun. Maybe we can sneak some hell in there. We don't like talking about wrath. We don't like the reality that by our nature we deserve it. And I've laid some groundwork for this in this series, so I'm not going to belabor the point in that way here. But a few different times in the series, I've invited you to imagine what Jesus's attitude towards us could be and by all rights should be. That there's a creator God in the universe, in heaven, that creates the universe to share himself with it and with us. He creates us in his image to glory in him and for him to glory in us. And we mess it up with our sin and he sends his son to rectify the situation and we kill him. What could Jesus's right attitude be towards us? Of course it could be wrath. If you accept the Christian narrative, it only makes sense that Jesus would be wrathful towards us as would God for our rejection of him. And so by our very nature, we are objects of wrath. But let me tell you another reason why we are objects of wrath that's actually within this passage that I find very interesting this morning. This discourse ends in verse 10. Verse 10 is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. It's one that I remind you of often. It's one that I pray over my children. It's one that I pray for parents as they try to guide their children because this is our goal. And this is how this discourse ends in Ephesians chapter two, verse 10. Four, we are God's handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. The way I memorized it was the ESV and I like the word workmanship. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that we might walk in them. So here's the idea, is that God created each of you specifically and on purpose. You were not an accident. He calls it his handiwork, his craftsmanship. You were not his throwaway. He did not whittle you and go, oh, look at that. Okay. He, you were his craftsmanship. You are artisanal. You're fancy. If you were bread, you would be inside two plastic wrappers. Okay. Not the one, like the fancy bread. He made you on purpose. He made you intentionally. You're good with people because God made you that way. You like to serve because God made you that way. You're a people pleaser because God made you that way. You're an extrovert because God made you an extrovert on purpose. You're an introvert because God made you an introvert on purpose. You're an omnivore because God made you an omnivore on purpose. Do you understand? You're big and imposing because God wanted you to be big and imposing. You're small and frail because God wanted you to be small and frail. You have a big, strong voice. You have a weak voice because God wanted those things. You're shy because God wanted you to be observant. You're outspoken and boisterous because God wanted dinner parties to go well for his children. Do you understand? Everything that you have was intentionally given to you and bestowed upon you by God. It is not an accident of evolution. It is not an accident of your parents falling in love. The Bible says that he knew us before we were knit in our mother's womb, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. So every ounce of you was made on purpose by God. You are not an accident or a collision or a coincidence of biology. You were intentionally made by your creator to be exactly who you are. And the reason he made you that way is for your good works that he prepared for you before time that you might walk in them. He knit you together the way he did because he has prepared a path for you to walk of good works and it is your job to be who you created you to, he created you to be so that you might walk in the good works that he determined for you before time, which is how we know that you are not an accident of biology or people falling in love in the seventies. Do you understand? So here's the thing. If that's what God did, if he made you on purpose, if he knit you in your mother's womb, if you were fearfully and wonderfully made, and when he made you, before time, he knew the good works he wanted you to walk in in 2025. And he crafted you in such a way to prepare you to walk that exact path that he has for you. Then let's understand this. When we live according to the flesh, we pervert creation and reject God and his intentions. When we take all those things in our alchemy, that amalgamations of gifts and strengths and weaknesses, and we use that for what we want and not what God wants. When we take all of those gifts and abilities and we leverage those for ourselves to acquire for ourselves whatever it is we might want, love, fame, attention, money, power, whatever it is. When we take those gifts, God's handiwork, and we leverage those things to live according to the flesh and what we want, rather than what God wants, we pervert creation. Or maybe even worse, maybe we don't take those gifts and abilities that God gives us and leverage them for our own good, nor do we leverage them for the good of God. We just ignore them and we numb ourselves and we do nothing. It's even worse. Revelation says that because you're neither good nor bad, but lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. It's even worse to ignore the ways in which we're created and use them for absolutely nothing. But when we live according to the flesh and its thoughts and desires, using everything that God's made us to be to make ourselves happy and to keep ourselves content, rather than using everything that God has given us and made us to be to build his kingdom and to live according to the spirit, this is important. We pervert God's perfect creation. And we reject God and his intentions simply by the way that we live. This is why we are objects of wrath. Because we've taken this good, wonderful thing that he gave us and we've used it for our own ends, and we've muddied it up, and we've mucked it up. So when that passage concludes, we are like them objects, by our nature, objects of wrath, that's why, because we deserve it. Now, if we understand that and we're there together, that's what makes verses 4 and 5 all the more impactful and resounding. They say this. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. So there's a lot there. But, that's the way the verse starts. But, I always say when you're reading your Bible and you see a therefore, you have to ask, what's it there for? Romans chapter 8 says, therefore. It starts out therefore. So why is that there? Because of chapters one through seven and what was covered there because of that, this, but counteracts what was just said. You were created by God. You are children of the flesh. You live according to his desires. You used to do that. You are, you are deserving object of his wrath. But in spite of that, because of his great love for us, and there's no love to compare that to in humanity than the love of that baby landing on the chest of my wife. And knowing you have never done a single thing for me, and I will die for you. Because of his great love for us. Last week, Aaron Winston did a great job talking about how God yearns for us from the inside out, this yearning love, this pursuing love that God has for us. And because of that love, because God loves us like that, he pours out his mercy grace and mercy, and many of you can define these, but so that we're on the same page, we understand what we're talking about. Mercy is when you do not receive a punishment that you have earned, that you deserve. Grace is when you receive a gift that you did not earn and you do not deserve. Because of these countervailing forces in God, and because of his great love for you, he was compelled to make a way for you. Because of his richness and mercy, God is only described as rich in two things, grace and mercy. Dane asserts in the book that being rich in mercy is the only time in the Bible that God is described as rich in anything, which I'm sure if I could talk to him, it would make sense. I'm not trying to pick on him. I wrote down, I was going to put it on the screen, that God is only rich in mercy, but then in the same passage, it was said because of the riches of his grace. I'm like, OK, well, he's rich in grace, too. So it's those two things, grace and mercy. And listen, I want to share this thought with you. His mercy expressed and personified by Jesus has literally brought us from death to life. His mercy and his grace, expressed and personified by Jesus, has literally brought us from death to life. So we were deserving of wrath, but God, because of his great love for us, because of his richness and mercy, made a way for us to be restored to him, made a way for us to be restored to our former glory. Made a way for us to live a life without sin. To be buried with him in death and be raised to walk in newness of life. To live according to the spirit. To live as a new creation, anticipating our heavenly bodies and being restored with him. He made a way for restitution and restoration. And he did that by sending his son to die on the cross for us. His son is the personification of his mercy. And we, most of us, have heard this dozens and dozens, if not thousands of times. And we give intellectual assent to it, but I'm not sure if it clicks in what that actually means because we're numb to it. And so I was trying to think of a way that we could get just maybe a glimpse of how impoverished our view of mercy might be. And I came up with this, so we'll see if it works. Let's pretend that somewhere in high school or college, you started smoking cigarettes. Now, who among us didn't have a brief smoking phase in college? Alright, we're not here to cast aspersions. But let's say that you picked up a habit in high school or college, and you've got a best friend, really good buddy. And you start to pick it up, your buddy doesn't really say anything, They keep hanging out with you. But they notice kind of an uptick. Like it used to just be like socially or on the golf course or whatever. But now it's a little bit more. And they go, hey, I'm noticing you're smoking a lot more lately. Maybe I'm not here to make you feel bad, but maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe that's not good for you. Maybe you can cut back a little bit. And you go, yeah, you know, I hear you. I know it's not good, but it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Like, I've got it under control. Okay. So a few more months or years go by, and you and your buddy are still around, and your buddy goes, hey, listen, you really haven't tapered back. Like, This is going to become a problem. And I don't want that for you. This is not healthy. It's not good for you. Love you. It's not good for you. Maybe you want to consider making some better choices about this. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you're right. I need to quit. And so you quit. But you quit for three, four days a week. And then you start sneaking them again. And your buddy smells you. And they love you. And they go, hey, are you back on the horse? Yeah, been firing up some lung darts. Sorry about that. And you get back into the habit. And the years go by. And every now and again, your buddy gently prods. He says, hey, you should stop that, man. That's not good for you. And then once you're up to a pack or two a day, it gets real bad, and your buddy convinces you to go to rehab. I don't know if they have rehab for smokers. I'm sure the health care apparatus has figured out a way to get money for that. I don't know if you can actually do that, but in this story, you do. You go to rehab. It's really serious. You get clean. You come back and you're off. You're not smoking for a while, but eventually you start back up again. Your buddy gets your friends and family around, and they implore you, please, you're killing yourself. You've got to stop doing this. Yeah, I know, you're right. There's tears. You feel terrible. And you stop the best you can. But before you know it, you're doing it again. And you're doing it again, and you know you shouldn't. You're hiding it from your buddy because you don't want to disappoint him. But you know you're killing yourself. And then one day, you're at your house. Your buddy happens to be over. You start having a coughing fit. The last thing you remember is you're on the ground coughing and you're having a hard time breathing. And your buddy calls the ambulance and you're trying to wave him off. It's fine, I don't need it. He says, yes, you do, you're dying. And then the next thing you know, you wake up and you're in a hospital bed. And you look down and there's a scar down the middle of your chest. And the doctor comes in and you go, what happened? The doctor said, well, you were in pretty bad shape. You were living through machines. You had died. What's this scar for? You needed a lung transplant. Did I get one? Yeah, you got a lung transplant. Whose lungs are in me? What happened? Those are your buddy's lungs. Well, if these are his, how is he alive? He's not. He said it was more important to him for you to live. Not only did he want you to live, but he wanted you to experience what it was to have lungs that have never smoked. He wanted you to be able to play with your kids with lungs that could breathe really well. He wanted you to be able to experience the rest of your life as if you had never made any of those mistakes that you insisted on. And he wanted to give his life to do that. If we can get ourselves there, maybe we can grab a taste of how impoverished our view is of God's mercy. Because the truth is, that's all of us. We live lives of the flesh. We do what we want. And Jesus, our buddy, in children's church, we tell them, Jesus is your forever friend. Your forever friend walks alongside you and says, hey, that's not good for you. Hey, you're killing yourself. Hey, you're hurting yourself. Hey, you should stop. Hey, we need to get friends and family involved because your sins are not helping you. And what to me is so powerful about that illustration is that in the smoking illustration, those are choices that you made. And he warned you against over and over and over again and you kept making them. And then you wake up and there's a scar. And your buddy wanted you to live life as if you had never made any of the mistakes you did previously. Every single one of us has a scar down the center of our chest. For where Jesus died for us, because he wanted us to live a life as if none of the mistakes we made previously applied to us anymore. And he gave his life so that we didn't have to. So that we can be with our families and our children and our loved ones and our friends in such a way that we know what it is to walk in true love with them because none of our past mistakes apply to us anymore. That is the richness of God's mercy. That is the richness of His grace. We are all of us scarred and have received that transplant. So that we might experience what life is without our sins dogging us all the time. That's the richness of God's undeserved mercy. And I think that Dane sums it up best in this quote. I'm going to read it and then I'm going to pray and we're going to move into communion. Dane says this, God's mercy. It means on that day when we stand before him quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had. Oh God, may that be true. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your mercy. Thank you for finding its personification in Jesus. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for yearning for us, for loving us, for lavishing your love upon us. God, we do not deserve it. We are by nature objects of wrath, a deserved and earned wrath, a deserved frustration and anger. And you watch us run ourselves into the ground and you die for us anyways. I pray that this morning we would have just a little bit more of a rich view of what your mercy is and what it means and how wonderful and miraculous it is. Help us walk in gratitude and humility towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. I see you all came at once, so I hope the sermon is good. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thank you for making grace a part of your Sunday. If you're watching us online, thank you for doing that. As we continue in our Gentle and Lowly series from the book Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund, I hope it's touched you, moved your heart, compelled you towards Christ. Before I just jump in, I did want to acknowledge and praise God for the safe return of our Mexico team. We're glad that most of them are back with us. Some of y'all could have stayed in Mexico. It would have been fine with the rest of us. But for the most part, we're happy to have you. Karen, it was a good trip, I hear. Yeah. The other thing I'll tell you guys, just because we like to laugh at things, is I see Susie's here. Hi, Miss Susie. Susie Shank recently lost her husband, Mike, and we did the funeral here for that. That was just a few weeks ago. And Mike is a guy with my kind of sense of humor, so we got along very well. And he's a big Bills fan, and I'm a big Falcons fan. And last week week they played and that was the next game coming up on the schedule when I did the funeral service. It's possible that I said some disparaging things about the Bills in his service, which I was thrilled and delighted to get away with. Then the day of the game, I get a text from the deceased Mike Shank on my on my phone and I'm going what in the world and the text says this is a message from heaven go Bills screw the Falcons one of the better jokes that's ever been executed Suze that was fantastic I may have texted something back after our victory but that's neither here nor there. But yeah, that one was too good just to keep all to ourselves there. This morning, we, like I said, continue in our series, and we're going through that book, Gentle and Lowly, where we're looking at the heart of Christ. And there's a theme here that's building with the heart of Christ towards us. And next week is the final week of the series. And I'm going to land the plane in that theme. But as I was approaching this week, I chose the chapter that's entitled Rich in Mercy. It reminded me of this time in my life where I realized that my view of something, because what I want to compel us towards and where we want to land the plane today, I'll just tell you where we're going, is I want us to see how very impoverished our view of God's mercy is. And so I was trying to think of another time in my life. When did I realize, oh my gosh, I thought I understood what this was. And I really didn't until this moment. And it was, I thought I understood what love was until we had a kid. If you're a parent and you can remember back that far, you know that when your child is born, when your first child is born, there is this love that overtakes you that you never understood. And so when, when Jen and I were pregnant with Lily, like we knew that we were going to love this child. Obviously we're not psychopaths. We knew that we were going to love this kid. We knew that this was going to be a kind of love that we didn't understand. People would tell us you're going to love them so much, you're not going to believe it. And I would mentally assent to that. Yes. Yes, I'm sure that that is true. And you begin to wrap your mind around what it's like to have a child in your life and what it must be like to love them. But you really, nothing can really prepare you. You can't intellectually get there until you experience it. And I still remember the night and then the morning where we had Lily. I went to bed. Jen was very pregnant. And at about, and listen, Jen's not here this morning. I got a cold in the middle of the week and then I got over it and gave it to them. So all three of my family members are home now with a cold, sick. Jen texted me. I just made the children cry. I'm at my wits end. Please come home. Well, I got to preach, but I'll be there soon. So they're all home sick. So she's not going to know what I say here. And if I know my wife, she's not going to go back and listen to this. Okay. So this is, if is if I can trust you this is our secret she doesn't have to know I talked about this it's up to you guys jerks she her water we were sound asleep her water broke at 2 33 o'clock somewhere around there she got up got out of bed took shower. She didn't bother me. Took a shower, did her makeup, put on some nice clothes, put in earrings and a necklace. She was ready for dinner, man, at 3.30 in the morning when she woke me up. That's just the kind of girl she knew there was going to be some pictures made, you know? And so she had to be, she had to be ready. She wasn't going to be looking haggard at the, at the, at the, at the hospital. So she gets herself ready to go out to dinner at three 34 o'clock in the morning and then just gently jostles me. My water broke. We've got to go to the hospital. What? We go to the hospital. We're in labor. We is generous. She, she was very much in labor. I very much not. Um, and, and I'm sitting there, I'm sitting there next to her and we're trying to bring this baby into the world. And I'm, I'm Jen's, you know, in front of me and I'm in a chair facing this way. I'm looking at her face because I don't know, different husbands process this moment in different ways. I did not want to be facing the other way. I just, I want to be facing this way. So I was facing this way, and I'm just looking at her face. I'm holding her hand, doing the best I can to encourage her in this process. And we're sitting there. She's doing her part. And out comes this baby. And I can hear the baby crying. And then they, and it's Lily, and then they put Lily on Jen's chest. And Lily's little face is facing me. And now listen to me. I do not care what anybody says. There is no such thing as a cute newborn baby. Those things are gross and they look like space aliens. And something happens in your mind, I think from God and his sovereign design, that you in the moment as a parent, you think this is a precious child. It's not, it's disgusting. That's a gross, gross thing. But this crying, greasy alien gets placed on Jen's chest and not even looking at me because she can't look yet, just facing me. And I can see her face. And in that moment, it was like the Grinch happened in real life. My heart grew ten sizes. In that moment, I knew I would die for that little girl. And it took nothing. I'm getting worked up about it right now. It took nothing. I loved her so much with a love that I had never understood before. And for those of you, and for some of you, some of you really want to experience that love and you're not yet. And I'm so sorry because I know stuff like this is painful and I walked that journey for a while too. But before you have kids, people tell you you're going to love them. And you understand that you will. But when that space alien landed on Jim's chest, I have never felt more love in my life more instantly than I did then. Instantly, I would die for this kid. I would love her. Now my heart exists outside of my chest. And I was telling this to Kyle. He was our student pastor. Now he's our family pastor. And Aaron Winston, our former children's pastor, is now our discipleship pastor doing some other things. Some of y'all know that Kyle and I have been working together, been friends for 10 years plus. He worked for me at my previous church. And Kyle's like a little brother to me. I love him so much. And when he and his wife Ashlyn were pregnant, I was telling him, like, your heart's going to grow 10 sizes. Like, you're not ready for this. You're going to love this kid so much. And the kid's name now is Hayes, and I don't know how old Hayes is, a month and a half, two months, something like that. He might be a year old. I don't know. I'm bad. I'm bad with ages. And I told him, this is going to happen, man. And the day or the day after Hayes was born, I called him and he was crying. He said, you were right. You're right. I said, you understand it now? He goes, yeah, I understand. Your heart just, you realize how impoverished your view of love was because of how this overtakes your life all of a sudden. And then I remember when we were pregnant with John, once we started getting close to the date, I started feeling bad. I started feeling bad because I'm like, there's no way I'm going to love the second one like I loved the first one. There's no space left. And as a first child, I found that to be true. I found that to be true. Your love gradually diminishes the more children that you have. Faith and Phil Leverett, they're not even here. I'm picking on them. They've got five kids. They don't even know the fifth one's name. So I was already feeling bad because when I have John, when we had John, I was already kind of apologizing to him. Like, I'm sorry, kid. I don't know how to love you like I love Lily. I'm sure God will get me there. And then as soon as that space alien landed on my wife's chest, my heart grew again. And it expanded. And I would die for that one too. And I love it with my whole life. And there's nothing quite like that in life to acquaint you with what love really is. I realized in those moments I had an impoverished view of what I thought of was. And I bring that up because I believe, and Dane asserts in the book, that we have an impoverished view of God's mercy. We're aware of it. We're aware that God's mercy exists. Most of you in here, I would be surprised if anybody came in here this morning, even if you're just here visiting with family or you wandered in or this is your first time in church in 20 years and you consider yourself agnostic, whatever your situation is, I doubt anybody in here is surprised to hear that we as Christians, we ascribe mercy to God. We say that he is rich in mercy. We know God's a merciful God. But I'm not, and so we give mental assent to that truth, but I'm not sure that we really understand what his mercy is. And so let's see if we can't gain on it a little bit today. The way we're going to gain on it is to look in Ephesians, because Ephesians chapter two, we're just going to look at verses, we were going to look at verses 1 through 10, but we're just going to do 1 through 5. As I went through it this morning, I found a place to stop that I felt was more appropriate. So if you have a Bible, please open it up to Ephesians chapter 2. This is my favorite kind of sermon where we just go through the text and I kind of tell you how it hits me and hopefully hits us this week. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. You can open that up and we'll be in the text of Ephesians chapter two, verses one through five. Shoot, I wasn't planning on crying and make my nose run talking about my kids at the beginning. I should save that stuff for the end so I'm not sniffing the whole time. In Ephesians chapter two, Paul has this 10 verse discourse. That's one of the more famous passages in scripture. And he opens it like this. As for you, verse one, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Let's talk about this for a minute. Jim Price, would you mind giving me a tissue, please, sir? Thank you. It's going according to the flesh, gratifying its desires and thinking its thoughts. He's, he's describing a people who don't know Jesus. And because they don't know Jesus, they live according to the flesh in Pauline theology. Paul wrote the book of Ephesians. Paul two-thirds of the New Testament. Most of the letters in the New Testament were written by Paul. And so theologians have developed a theology. Oh, that's hilarious. Good. Someone apologize to Jim when he gets back from his very important errand. Jim, we found some. I'm so sorry. They were right behind here. I know. Go home. All right. Within those letters, theologians have developed a theology based around Paul. Anything that Paul did is Pauline, the Pauline epistles, Pauline theology, things like that. And so within Pauline theology, there's this idea of being dead in our transgressions and in our trespasses. And there is this idea that before we knew Jesus, we had no idea. We had no choice but to sin. We were creatures of the flesh. In Philippians, he says that they were, that their bellies were their Lord's. And they basically did whatever they craved and whatever they desired. And that's how he's describing people before they knew Jesus here in Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three. He's saying that we were dead in our transgressions because we just indulged in the flesh. There's life in the flesh in this theology, and there's life in the spirit. And life in the flesh is to live life as if God didn't exist, to just do whatever our nature wants to do. And life in the spirit is to live in light of the very real existence of God that's been infused in us and given us life and live according to God's desires and God's thoughts and God's standards. So when we're living according to the flesh, we're living according to our own standards and our own thoughts and our own desires. So think of it this way. Think of living according to the flesh is somewhat akin to living as an irresponsible college student. Okay. Now I'm not talking about the responsible college students, the ones that like go to class and take notes and study and care about their future and their GPA and are trying to get a good job or trying to get into a good grad school. I'm talking about students like me that didn't care about any of that. Students that just live for fun. What's the next fun thing we're going to do? What's the next hedonistic activity in which I can engage? And I don't want to paint the wrong picture of me as a college student because some of us, we think of irresponsible college student, our mind goes to partying and that's a thing. But that wasn't my thing. I went to Bible college. I was a pastoral ministries major. My rejection and hedonism looked like playing Madden instead of going to class or just going and playing Frisbee. Because in the early 2000s, you could not be a youth pastor if you could not throw a Frisbee. It was part of the deal. So if you were there at school, you're throwing Frisbees. You're doing all kinds of stuff, you're playing sports. I'm skipping class all the time. My GPA was incredibly low. You guys, you'll love this. I was one semester away from getting kicked out of my Bible college for poor chapel attendance, and then I became a pastor. How do you like that? And my thought is, make chapel better, and I want to go. You don't hear me guilting you into being here, do you? Some of my friends haven't been here for weeks. We all have ways in which we're irresponsible. And we remember those friends in college who were just, their Lord was their belly. They just kind of jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from activity to activity. They were unmoored by wisdom and rules and considerations of the future. They lived in the moment and they did what they wanted. And some of us were that person and some of us were friends with that person. But the reality is, in different times and ways, we've all been that person. All of us. There's nobody in this room who looks back on the last 5, 10, 25 plus years of their life and thinks to themselves, I pretty much nailed that. There was never a moment when I wavered from God's path. I can't think of a season in my life where I just meandered and I did what I want and I lived according to the flesh. Especially when we don't think of living according to the flesh simply as seeking pleasure. Because living according to the flesh can be to seek numbness or escape or stillness or comfort. And the reality of it is sometimes we did our sinning in college and then we get it out of our system. But sometimes we just figure out more nuanced ways to keep feeding that monster and frat parties become country club outings. And it's all the same motivation and it's all the same stuff. And it's still the same lack of discipline. It's the same lack of wisdom. We're still living according to the flesh. Our flesh has just found a way to adapt itself into acceptable adult society so we can still be responsible, productive members. But if we're being really, really honest with ourselves, we know we've all had seasons where when we look back at that time in our life, and maybe, maybe you're in one right now where if you're being honest, you're wandering, where you're living according to what you want to do, not what God wants you to do. We can remember times when we lived according to the flesh and its desires, and we jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from excitement to excitement, from numbness to numbness, from escape to escape. And we piddle our days away on our phone, dopamine-ing ourselves to death while we do nothing for the kingdom. There's nobody in here who hasn't had one of those seasons. And here's the thing that I want to point out. In this passage in Ephesians chapter 2, and those first verses, this is clearly a reference to people before they knew Jesus. He says, you were once like the others, following the prince of this world and the desires of your flesh. And the implication is, but now you know Jesus, and so you live according to the Spirit. And so it makes it seem like, well, before I knew Jesus, I messed up, and I lived according to the flesh, not according to the Spirit. I jumped from hedonism to hedonism, whatever it might be, and now I'm better, and now I'm saved, and now I live according to the Spirit. Except none of you in here have that experience, do you? If you've, let's do a show of hands. If you've been a Christian for over a decade, I would like for you to raise your hand right now. If in that decade, you've never once wandered away from God and lived according to the flesh. Raise your hand if since you got saved, miraculously, sin has not been a problem for you. I can't believe Bill Gentile didn't raise his hand for fun. Right? That's not our experience. But here's what's wonderful about that not being our experience is that wasn't Paul's either. And maybe the most human passage in the Bible at the end of Romans chapter 7, Paul says, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I do not want to do, I do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And what he's just claimed in Romans 6 is we are no longer slaves to sin. We are free to walk in newness of life and live life in the spirit. And then in Romans 7, he laments that he can't do it. That if Paul were sitting in this room and I had asked that question, he wouldn't have raised his hand either because he continued to sin. So it's a human passage. And I love that phrase, oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Because it's hard to be a Christian because we feel like we should be doing better and not living according to the flesh anymore and living according to the spirit. But we don't all the time. We have these pockets where we're living according to the spirit. And those are wonderful pockets and sometimes seasons. But we all walk through times when we are exactly what these verses say. We gratify the cravings of our flesh following its desires and thoughts. So, when we read this this morning, let us not render that for people prior to Christ, but let us render it to ourselves, knowing that these verses apply to us and we are in them. This is us. And this is important because of what follows. I stopped reading in the middle of verse 3 the first time. This time I'm going to read all of verse flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. Because that's us, because of the times we've lived according to the flesh and not the spirit, we are by nature deserving of wrath. Now, wrath is not a thing that we like to talk about. None of you got in the car today and said, what's the sermon about? I hope it's on wrath. That's fun. Maybe we can sneak some hell in there. We don't like talking about wrath. We don't like the reality that by our nature we deserve it. And I've laid some groundwork for this in this series, so I'm not going to belabor the point in that way here. But a few different times in the series, I've invited you to imagine what Jesus's attitude towards us could be and by all rights should be. That there's a creator God in the universe, in heaven, that creates the universe to share himself with it and with us. He creates us in his image to glory in him and for him to glory in us. And we mess it up with our sin and he sends his son to rectify the situation and we kill him. What could Jesus's right attitude be towards us? Of course it could be wrath. If you accept the Christian narrative, it only makes sense that Jesus would be wrathful towards us as would God for our rejection of him. And so by our very nature, we are objects of wrath. But let me tell you another reason why we are objects of wrath that's actually within this passage that I find very interesting this morning. This discourse ends in verse 10. Verse 10 is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. It's one that I remind you of often. It's one that I pray over my children. It's one that I pray for parents as they try to guide their children because this is our goal. And this is how this discourse ends in Ephesians chapter two, verse 10. Four, we are God's handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. The way I memorized it was the ESV and I like the word workmanship. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that we might walk in them. So here's the idea, is that God created each of you specifically and on purpose. You were not an accident. He calls it his handiwork, his craftsmanship. You were not his throwaway. He did not whittle you and go, oh, look at that. Okay. He, you were his craftsmanship. You are artisanal. You're fancy. If you were bread, you would be inside two plastic wrappers. Okay. Not the one, like the fancy bread. He made you on purpose. He made you intentionally. You're good with people because God made you that way. You like to serve because God made you that way. You're a people pleaser because God made you that way. You're an extrovert because God made you an extrovert on purpose. You're an introvert because God made you an introvert on purpose. You're an omnivore because God made you an omnivore on purpose. Do you understand? You're big and imposing because God wanted you to be big and imposing. You're small and frail because God wanted you to be small and frail. You have a big, strong voice. You have a weak voice because God wanted those things. You're shy because God wanted you to be observant. You're outspoken and boisterous because God wanted dinner parties to go well for his children. Do you understand? Everything that you have was intentionally given to you and bestowed upon you by God. It is not an accident of evolution. It is not an accident of your parents falling in love. The Bible says that he knew us before we were knit in our mother's womb, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. So every ounce of you was made on purpose by God. You are not an accident or a collision or a coincidence of biology. You were intentionally made by your creator to be exactly who you are. And the reason he made you that way is for your good works that he prepared for you before time that you might walk in them. He knit you together the way he did because he has prepared a path for you to walk of good works and it is your job to be who you created you to, he created you to be so that you might walk in the good works that he determined for you before time, which is how we know that you are not an accident of biology or people falling in love in the seventies. Do you understand? So here's the thing. If that's what God did, if he made you on purpose, if he knit you in your mother's womb, if you were fearfully and wonderfully made, and when he made you, before time, he knew the good works he wanted you to walk in in 2025. And he crafted you in such a way to prepare you to walk that exact path that he has for you. Then let's understand this. When we live according to the flesh, we pervert creation and reject God and his intentions. When we take all those things in our alchemy, that amalgamations of gifts and strengths and weaknesses, and we use that for what we want and not what God wants. When we take all of those gifts and abilities and we leverage those for ourselves to acquire for ourselves whatever it is we might want, love, fame, attention, money, power, whatever it is. When we take those gifts, God's handiwork, and we leverage those things to live according to the flesh and what we want, rather than what God wants, we pervert creation. Or maybe even worse, maybe we don't take those gifts and abilities that God gives us and leverage them for our own good, nor do we leverage them for the good of God. We just ignore them and we numb ourselves and we do nothing. It's even worse. Revelation says that because you're neither good nor bad, but lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. It's even worse to ignore the ways in which we're created and use them for absolutely nothing. But when we live according to the flesh and its thoughts and desires, using everything that God's made us to be to make ourselves happy and to keep ourselves content, rather than using everything that God has given us and made us to be to build his kingdom and to live according to the spirit, this is important. We pervert God's perfect creation. And we reject God and his intentions simply by the way that we live. This is why we are objects of wrath. Because we've taken this good, wonderful thing that he gave us and we've used it for our own ends, and we've muddied it up, and we've mucked it up. So when that passage concludes, we are like them objects, by our nature, objects of wrath, that's why, because we deserve it. Now, if we understand that and we're there together, that's what makes verses 4 and 5 all the more impactful and resounding. They say this. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. So there's a lot there. But, that's the way the verse starts. But, I always say when you're reading your Bible and you see a therefore, you have to ask, what's it there for? Romans chapter 8 says, therefore. It starts out therefore. So why is that there? Because of chapters one through seven and what was covered there because of that, this, but counteracts what was just said. You were created by God. You are children of the flesh. You live according to his desires. You used to do that. You are, you are deserving object of his wrath. But in spite of that, because of his great love for us, and there's no love to compare that to in humanity than the love of that baby landing on the chest of my wife. And knowing you have never done a single thing for me, and I will die for you. Because of his great love for us. Last week, Aaron Winston did a great job talking about how God yearns for us from the inside out, this yearning love, this pursuing love that God has for us. And because of that love, because God loves us like that, he pours out his mercy grace and mercy, and many of you can define these, but so that we're on the same page, we understand what we're talking about. Mercy is when you do not receive a punishment that you have earned, that you deserve. Grace is when you receive a gift that you did not earn and you do not deserve. Because of these countervailing forces in God, and because of his great love for you, he was compelled to make a way for you. Because of his richness and mercy, God is only described as rich in two things, grace and mercy. Dane asserts in the book that being rich in mercy is the only time in the Bible that God is described as rich in anything, which I'm sure if I could talk to him, it would make sense. I'm not trying to pick on him. I wrote down, I was going to put it on the screen, that God is only rich in mercy, but then in the same passage, it was said because of the riches of his grace. I'm like, OK, well, he's rich in grace, too. So it's those two things, grace and mercy. And listen, I want to share this thought with you. His mercy expressed and personified by Jesus has literally brought us from death to life. His mercy and his grace, expressed and personified by Jesus, has literally brought us from death to life. So we were deserving of wrath, but God, because of his great love for us, because of his richness and mercy, made a way for us to be restored to him, made a way for us to be restored to our former glory. Made a way for us to live a life without sin. To be buried with him in death and be raised to walk in newness of life. To live according to the spirit. To live as a new creation, anticipating our heavenly bodies and being restored with him. He made a way for restitution and restoration. And he did that by sending his son to die on the cross for us. His son is the personification of his mercy. And we, most of us, have heard this dozens and dozens, if not thousands of times. And we give intellectual assent to it, but I'm not sure if it clicks in what that actually means because we're numb to it. And so I was trying to think of a way that we could get just maybe a glimpse of how impoverished our view of mercy might be. And I came up with this, so we'll see if it works. Let's pretend that somewhere in high school or college, you started smoking cigarettes. Now, who among us didn't have a brief smoking phase in college? Alright, we're not here to cast aspersions. But let's say that you picked up a habit in high school or college, and you've got a best friend, really good buddy. And you start to pick it up, your buddy doesn't really say anything, They keep hanging out with you. But they notice kind of an uptick. Like it used to just be like socially or on the golf course or whatever. But now it's a little bit more. And they go, hey, I'm noticing you're smoking a lot more lately. Maybe I'm not here to make you feel bad, but maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe that's not good for you. Maybe you can cut back a little bit. And you go, yeah, you know, I hear you. I know it's not good, but it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Like, I've got it under control. Okay. So a few more months or years go by, and you and your buddy are still around, and your buddy goes, hey, listen, you really haven't tapered back. Like, This is going to become a problem. And I don't want that for you. This is not healthy. It's not good for you. Love you. It's not good for you. Maybe you want to consider making some better choices about this. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you're right. I need to quit. And so you quit. But you quit for three, four days a week. And then you start sneaking them again. And your buddy smells you. And they love you. And they go, hey, are you back on the horse? Yeah, been firing up some lung darts. Sorry about that. And you get back into the habit. And the years go by. And every now and again, your buddy gently prods. He says, hey, you should stop that, man. That's not good for you. And then once you're up to a pack or two a day, it gets real bad, and your buddy convinces you to go to rehab. I don't know if they have rehab for smokers. I'm sure the health care apparatus has figured out a way to get money for that. I don't know if you can actually do that, but in this story, you do. You go to rehab. It's really serious. You get clean. You come back and you're off. You're not smoking for a while, but eventually you start back up again. Your buddy gets your friends and family around, and they implore you, please, you're killing yourself. You've got to stop doing this. Yeah, I know, you're right. There's tears. You feel terrible. And you stop the best you can. But before you know it, you're doing it again. And you're doing it again, and you know you shouldn't. You're hiding it from your buddy because you don't want to disappoint him. But you know you're killing yourself. And then one day, you're at your house. Your buddy happens to be over. You start having a coughing fit. The last thing you remember is you're on the ground coughing and you're having a hard time breathing. And your buddy calls the ambulance and you're trying to wave him off. It's fine, I don't need it. He says, yes, you do, you're dying. And then the next thing you know, you wake up and you're in a hospital bed. And you look down and there's a scar down the middle of your chest. And the doctor comes in and you go, what happened? The doctor said, well, you were in pretty bad shape. You were living through machines. You had died. What's this scar for? You needed a lung transplant. Did I get one? Yeah, you got a lung transplant. Whose lungs are in me? What happened? Those are your buddy's lungs. Well, if these are his, how is he alive? He's not. He said it was more important to him for you to live. Not only did he want you to live, but he wanted you to experience what it was to have lungs that have never smoked. He wanted you to be able to play with your kids with lungs that could breathe really well. He wanted you to be able to experience the rest of your life as if you had never made any of those mistakes that you insisted on. And he wanted to give his life to do that. If we can get ourselves there, maybe we can grab a taste of how impoverished our view is of God's mercy. Because the truth is, that's all of us. We live lives of the flesh. We do what we want. And Jesus, our buddy, in children's church, we tell them, Jesus is your forever friend. Your forever friend walks alongside you and says, hey, that's not good for you. Hey, you're killing yourself. Hey, you're hurting yourself. Hey, you should stop. Hey, we need to get friends and family involved because your sins are not helping you. And what to me is so powerful about that illustration is that in the smoking illustration, those are choices that you made. And he warned you against over and over and over again and you kept making them. And then you wake up and there's a scar. And your buddy wanted you to live life as if you had never made any of the mistakes you did previously. Every single one of us has a scar down the center of our chest. For where Jesus died for us, because he wanted us to live a life as if none of the mistakes we made previously applied to us anymore. And he gave his life so that we didn't have to. So that we can be with our families and our children and our loved ones and our friends in such a way that we know what it is to walk in true love with them because none of our past mistakes apply to us anymore. That is the richness of God's mercy. That is the richness of His grace. We are all of us scarred and have received that transplant. So that we might experience what life is without our sins dogging us all the time. That's the richness of God's undeserved mercy. And I think that Dane sums it up best in this quote. I'm going to read it and then I'm going to pray and we're going to move into communion. Dane says this, God's mercy. It means on that day when we stand before him quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had. Oh God, may that be true. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your mercy. Thank you for finding its personification in Jesus. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for yearning for us, for loving us, for lavishing your love upon us. God, we do not deserve it. We are by nature objects of wrath, a deserved and earned wrath, a deserved frustration and anger. And you watch us run ourselves into the ground and you die for us anyways. I pray that this morning we would have just a little bit more of a rich view of what your mercy is and what it means and how wonderful and miraculous it is. Help us walk in gratitude and humility towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. I see you all came at once, so I hope the sermon is good. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thank you for making grace a part of your Sunday. If you're watching us online, thank you for doing that. As we continue in our Gentle and Lowly series from the book Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund, I hope it's touched you, moved your heart, compelled you towards Christ. Before I just jump in, I did want to acknowledge and praise God for the safe return of our Mexico team. We're glad that most of them are back with us. Some of y'all could have stayed in Mexico. It would have been fine with the rest of us. But for the most part, we're happy to have you. Karen, it was a good trip, I hear. Yeah. The other thing I'll tell you guys, just because we like to laugh at things, is I see Susie's here. Hi, Miss Susie. Susie Shank recently lost her husband, Mike, and we did the funeral here for that. That was just a few weeks ago. And Mike is a guy with my kind of sense of humor, so we got along very well. And he's a big Bills fan, and I'm a big Falcons fan. And last week week they played and that was the next game coming up on the schedule when I did the funeral service. It's possible that I said some disparaging things about the Bills in his service, which I was thrilled and delighted to get away with. Then the day of the game, I get a text from the deceased Mike Shank on my on my phone and I'm going what in the world and the text says this is a message from heaven go Bills screw the Falcons one of the better jokes that's ever been executed Suze that was fantastic I may have texted something back after our victory but that's neither here nor there. But yeah, that one was too good just to keep all to ourselves there. This morning, we, like I said, continue in our series, and we're going through that book, Gentle and Lowly, where we're looking at the heart of Christ. And there's a theme here that's building with the heart of Christ towards us. And next week is the final week of the series. And I'm going to land the plane in that theme. But as I was approaching this week, I chose the chapter that's entitled Rich in Mercy. It reminded me of this time in my life where I realized that my view of something, because what I want to compel us towards and where we want to land the plane today, I'll just tell you where we're going, is I want us to see how very impoverished our view of God's mercy is. And so I was trying to think of another time in my life. When did I realize, oh my gosh, I thought I understood what this was. And I really didn't until this moment. And it was, I thought I understood what love was until we had a kid. If you're a parent and you can remember back that far, you know that when your child is born, when your first child is born, there is this love that overtakes you that you never understood. And so when, when Jen and I were pregnant with Lily, like we knew that we were going to love this child. Obviously we're not psychopaths. We knew that we were going to love this kid. We knew that this was going to be a kind of love that we didn't understand. People would tell us you're going to love them so much, you're not going to believe it. And I would mentally assent to that. Yes. Yes, I'm sure that that is true. And you begin to wrap your mind around what it's like to have a child in your life and what it must be like to love them. But you really, nothing can really prepare you. You can't intellectually get there until you experience it. And I still remember the night and then the morning where we had Lily. I went to bed. Jen was very pregnant. And at about, and listen, Jen's not here this morning. I got a cold in the middle of the week and then I got over it and gave it to them. So all three of my family members are home now with a cold, sick. Jen texted me. I just made the children cry. I'm at my wits end. Please come home. Well, I got to preach, but I'll be there soon. So they're all home sick. So she's not going to know what I say here. And if I know my wife, she's not going to go back and listen to this. Okay. So this is, if is if I can trust you this is our secret she doesn't have to know I talked about this it's up to you guys jerks she her water we were sound asleep her water broke at 2 33 o'clock somewhere around there she got up got out of bed took shower. She didn't bother me. Took a shower, did her makeup, put on some nice clothes, put in earrings and a necklace. She was ready for dinner, man, at 3.30 in the morning when she woke me up. That's just the kind of girl she knew there was going to be some pictures made, you know? And so she had to be, she had to be ready. She wasn't going to be looking haggard at the, at the, at the, at the hospital. So she gets herself ready to go out to dinner at three 34 o'clock in the morning and then just gently jostles me. My water broke. We've got to go to the hospital. What? We go to the hospital. We're in labor. We is generous. She, she was very much in labor. I very much not. Um, and, and I'm sitting there, I'm sitting there next to her and we're trying to bring this baby into the world. And I'm, I'm Jen's, you know, in front of me and I'm in a chair facing this way. I'm looking at her face because I don't know, different husbands process this moment in different ways. I did not want to be facing the other way. I just, I want to be facing this way. So I was facing this way, and I'm just looking at her face. I'm holding her hand, doing the best I can to encourage her in this process. And we're sitting there. She's doing her part. And out comes this baby. And I can hear the baby crying. And then they, and it's Lily, and then they put Lily on Jen's chest. And Lily's little face is facing me. And now listen to me. I do not care what anybody says. There is no such thing as a cute newborn baby. Those things are gross and they look like space aliens. And something happens in your mind, I think from God and his sovereign design, that you in the moment as a parent, you think this is a precious child. It's not, it's disgusting. That's a gross, gross thing. But this crying, greasy alien gets placed on Jen's chest and not even looking at me because she can't look yet, just facing me. And I can see her face. And in that moment, it was like the Grinch happened in real life. My heart grew ten sizes. In that moment, I knew I would die for that little girl. And it took nothing. I'm getting worked up about it right now. It took nothing. I loved her so much with a love that I had never understood before. And for those of you, and for some of you, some of you really want to experience that love and you're not yet. And I'm so sorry because I know stuff like this is painful and I walked that journey for a while too. But before you have kids, people tell you you're going to love them. And you understand that you will. But when that space alien landed on Jim's chest, I have never felt more love in my life more instantly than I did then. Instantly, I would die for this kid. I would love her. Now my heart exists outside of my chest. And I was telling this to Kyle. He was our student pastor. Now he's our family pastor. And Aaron Winston, our former children's pastor, is now our discipleship pastor doing some other things. Some of y'all know that Kyle and I have been working together, been friends for 10 years plus. He worked for me at my previous church. And Kyle's like a little brother to me. I love him so much. And when he and his wife Ashlyn were pregnant, I was telling him, like, your heart's going to grow 10 sizes. Like, you're not ready for this. You're going to love this kid so much. And the kid's name now is Hayes, and I don't know how old Hayes is, a month and a half, two months, something like that. He might be a year old. I don't know. I'm bad. I'm bad with ages. And I told him, this is going to happen, man. And the day or the day after Hayes was born, I called him and he was crying. He said, you were right. You're right. I said, you understand it now? He goes, yeah, I understand. Your heart just, you realize how impoverished your view of love was because of how this overtakes your life all of a sudden. And then I remember when we were pregnant with John, once we started getting close to the date, I started feeling bad. I started feeling bad because I'm like, there's no way I'm going to love the second one like I loved the first one. There's no space left. And as a first child, I found that to be true. I found that to be true. Your love gradually diminishes the more children that you have. Faith and Phil Leverett, they're not even here. I'm picking on them. They've got five kids. They don't even know the fifth one's name. So I was already feeling bad because when I have John, when we had John, I was already kind of apologizing to him. Like, I'm sorry, kid. I don't know how to love you like I love Lily. I'm sure God will get me there. And then as soon as that space alien landed on my wife's chest, my heart grew again. And it expanded. And I would die for that one too. And I love it with my whole life. And there's nothing quite like that in life to acquaint you with what love really is. I realized in those moments I had an impoverished view of what I thought of was. And I bring that up because I believe, and Dane asserts in the book, that we have an impoverished view of God's mercy. We're aware of it. We're aware that God's mercy exists. Most of you in here, I would be surprised if anybody came in here this morning, even if you're just here visiting with family or you wandered in or this is your first time in church in 20 years and you consider yourself agnostic, whatever your situation is, I doubt anybody in here is surprised to hear that we as Christians, we ascribe mercy to God. We say that he is rich in mercy. We know God's a merciful God. But I'm not, and so we give mental assent to that truth, but I'm not sure that we really understand what his mercy is. And so let's see if we can't gain on it a little bit today. The way we're going to gain on it is to look in Ephesians, because Ephesians chapter two, we're just going to look at verses, we were going to look at verses 1 through 10, but we're just going to do 1 through 5. As I went through it this morning, I found a place to stop that I felt was more appropriate. So if you have a Bible, please open it up to Ephesians chapter 2. This is my favorite kind of sermon where we just go through the text and I kind of tell you how it hits me and hopefully hits us this week. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. You can open that up and we'll be in the text of Ephesians chapter two, verses one through five. Shoot, I wasn't planning on crying and make my nose run talking about my kids at the beginning. I should save that stuff for the end so I'm not sniffing the whole time. In Ephesians chapter two, Paul has this 10 verse discourse. That's one of the more famous passages in scripture. And he opens it like this. As for you, verse one, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Let's talk about this for a minute. Jim Price, would you mind giving me a tissue, please, sir? Thank you. It's going according to the flesh, gratifying its desires and thinking its thoughts. He's, he's describing a people who don't know Jesus. And because they don't know Jesus, they live according to the flesh in Pauline theology. Paul wrote the book of Ephesians. Paul two-thirds of the New Testament. Most of the letters in the New Testament were written by Paul. And so theologians have developed a theology. Oh, that's hilarious. Good. Someone apologize to Jim when he gets back from his very important errand. Jim, we found some. I'm so sorry. They were right behind here. I know. Go home. All right. Within those letters, theologians have developed a theology based around Paul. Anything that Paul did is Pauline, the Pauline epistles, Pauline theology, things like that. And so within Pauline theology, there's this idea of being dead in our transgressions and in our trespasses. And there is this idea that before we knew Jesus, we had no idea. We had no choice but to sin. We were creatures of the flesh. In Philippians, he says that they were, that their bellies were their Lord's. And they basically did whatever they craved and whatever they desired. And that's how he's describing people before they knew Jesus here in Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three. He's saying that we were dead in our transgressions because we just indulged in the flesh. There's life in the flesh in this theology, and there's life in the spirit. And life in the flesh is to live life as if God didn't exist, to just do whatever our nature wants to do. And life in the spirit is to live in light of the very real existence of God that's been infused in us and given us life and live according to God's desires and God's thoughts and God's standards. So when we're living according to the flesh, we're living according to our own standards and our own thoughts and our own desires. So think of it this way. Think of living according to the flesh is somewhat akin to living as an irresponsible college student. Okay. Now I'm not talking about the responsible college students, the ones that like go to class and take notes and study and care about their future and their GPA and are trying to get a good job or trying to get into a good grad school. I'm talking about students like me that didn't care about any of that. Students that just live for fun. What's the next fun thing we're going to do? What's the next hedonistic activity in which I can engage? And I don't want to paint the wrong picture of me as a college student because some of us, we think of irresponsible college student, our mind goes to partying and that's a thing. But that wasn't my thing. I went to Bible college. I was a pastoral ministries major. My rejection and hedonism looked like playing Madden instead of going to class or just going and playing Frisbee. Because in the early 2000s, you could not be a youth pastor if you could not throw a Frisbee. It was part of the deal. So if you were there at school, you're throwing Frisbees. You're doing all kinds of stuff, you're playing sports. I'm skipping class all the time. My GPA was incredibly low. You guys, you'll love this. I was one semester away from getting kicked out of my Bible college for poor chapel attendance, and then I became a pastor. How do you like that? And my thought is, make chapel better, and I want to go. You don't hear me guilting you into being here, do you? Some of my friends haven't been here for weeks. We all have ways in which we're irresponsible. And we remember those friends in college who were just, their Lord was their belly. They just kind of jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from activity to activity. They were unmoored by wisdom and rules and considerations of the future. They lived in the moment and they did what they wanted. And some of us were that person and some of us were friends with that person. But the reality is, in different times and ways, we've all been that person. All of us. There's nobody in this room who looks back on the last 5, 10, 25 plus years of their life and thinks to themselves, I pretty much nailed that. There was never a moment when I wavered from God's path. I can't think of a season in my life where I just meandered and I did what I want and I lived according to the flesh. Especially when we don't think of living according to the flesh simply as seeking pleasure. Because living according to the flesh can be to seek numbness or escape or stillness or comfort. And the reality of it is sometimes we did our sinning in college and then we get it out of our system. But sometimes we just figure out more nuanced ways to keep feeding that monster and frat parties become country club outings. And it's all the same motivation and it's all the same stuff. And it's still the same lack of discipline. It's the same lack of wisdom. We're still living according to the flesh. Our flesh has just found a way to adapt itself into acceptable adult society so we can still be responsible, productive members. But if we're being really, really honest with ourselves, we know we've all had seasons where when we look back at that time in our life, and maybe, maybe you're in one right now where if you're being honest, you're wandering, where you're living according to what you want to do, not what God wants you to do. We can remember times when we lived according to the flesh and its desires, and we jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from excitement to excitement, from numbness to numbness, from escape to escape. And we piddle our days away on our phone, dopamine-ing ourselves to death while we do nothing for the kingdom. There's nobody in here who hasn't had one of those seasons. And here's the thing that I want to point out. In this passage in Ephesians chapter 2, and those first verses, this is clearly a reference to people before they knew Jesus. He says, you were once like the others, following the prince of this world and the desires of your flesh. And the implication is, but now you know Jesus, and so you live according to the Spirit. And so it makes it seem like, well, before I knew Jesus, I messed up, and I lived according to the flesh, not according to the Spirit. I jumped from hedonism to hedonism, whatever it might be, and now I'm better, and now I'm saved, and now I live according to the Spirit. Except none of you in here have that experience, do you? If you've, let's do a show of hands. If you've been a Christian for over a decade, I would like for you to raise your hand right now. If in that decade, you've never once wandered away from God and lived according to the flesh. Raise your hand if since you got saved, miraculously, sin has not been a problem for you. I can't believe Bill Gentile didn't raise his hand for fun. Right? That's not our experience. But here's what's wonderful about that not being our experience is that wasn't Paul's either. And maybe the most human passage in the Bible at the end of Romans chapter 7, Paul says, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I do not want to do, I do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And what he's just claimed in Romans 6 is we are no longer slaves to sin. We are free to walk in newness of life and live life in the spirit. And then in Romans 7, he laments that he can't do it. That if Paul were sitting in this room and I had asked that question, he wouldn't have raised his hand either because he continued to sin. So it's a human passage. And I love that phrase, oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Because it's hard to be a Christian because we feel like we should be doing better and not living according to the flesh anymore and living according to the spirit. But we don't all the time. We have these pockets where we're living according to the spirit. And those are wonderful pockets and sometimes seasons. But we all walk through times when we are exactly what these verses say. We gratify the cravings of our flesh following its desires and thoughts. So, when we read this this morning, let us not render that for people prior to Christ, but let us render it to ourselves, knowing that these verses apply to us and we are in them. This is us. And this is important because of what follows. I stopped reading in the middle of verse 3 the first time. This time I'm going to read all of verse flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. Because that's us, because of the times we've lived according to the flesh and not the spirit, we are by nature deserving of wrath. Now, wrath is not a thing that we like to talk about. None of you got in the car today and said, what's the sermon about? I hope it's on wrath. That's fun. Maybe we can sneak some hell in there. We don't like talking about wrath. We don't like the reality that by our nature we deserve it. And I've laid some groundwork for this in this series, so I'm not going to belabor the point in that way here. But a few different times in the series, I've invited you to imagine what Jesus's attitude towards us could be and by all rights should be. That there's a creator God in the universe, in heaven, that creates the universe to share himself with it and with us. He creates us in his image to glory in him and for him to glory in us. And we mess it up with our sin and he sends his son to rectify the situation and we kill him. What could Jesus's right attitude be towards us? Of course it could be wrath. If you accept the Christian narrative, it only makes sense that Jesus would be wrathful towards us as would God for our rejection of him. And so by our very nature, we are objects of wrath. But let me tell you another reason why we are objects of wrath that's actually within this passage that I find very interesting this morning. This discourse ends in verse 10. Verse 10 is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. It's one that I remind you of often. It's one that I pray over my children. It's one that I pray for parents as they try to guide their children because this is our goal. And this is how this discourse ends in Ephesians chapter two, verse 10. Four, we are God's handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. The way I memorized it was the ESV and I like the word workmanship. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that we might walk in them. So here's the idea, is that God created each of you specifically and on purpose. You were not an accident. He calls it his handiwork, his craftsmanship. You were not his throwaway. He did not whittle you and go, oh, look at that. Okay. He, you were his craftsmanship. You are artisanal. You're fancy. If you were bread, you would be inside two plastic wrappers. Okay. Not the one, like the fancy bread. He made you on purpose. He made you intentionally. You're good with people because God made you that way. You like to serve because God made you that way. You're a people pleaser because God made you that way. You're an extrovert because God made you an extrovert on purpose. You're an introvert because God made you an introvert on purpose. You're an omnivore because God made you an omnivore on purpose. Do you understand? You're big and imposing because God wanted you to be big and imposing. You're small and frail because God wanted you to be small and frail. You have a big, strong voice. You have a weak voice because God wanted those things. You're shy because God wanted you to be observant. You're outspoken and boisterous because God wanted dinner parties to go well for his children. Do you understand? Everything that you have was intentionally given to you and bestowed upon you by God. It is not an accident of evolution. It is not an accident of your parents falling in love. The Bible says that he knew us before we were knit in our mother's womb, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. So every ounce of you was made on purpose by God. You are not an accident or a collision or a coincidence of biology. You were intentionally made by your creator to be exactly who you are. And the reason he made you that way is for your good works that he prepared for you before time that you might walk in them. He knit you together the way he did because he has prepared a path for you to walk of good works and it is your job to be who you created you to, he created you to be so that you might walk in the good works that he determined for you before time, which is how we know that you are not an accident of biology or people falling in love in the seventies. Do you understand? So here's the thing. If that's what God did, if he made you on purpose, if he knit you in your mother's womb, if you were fearfully and wonderfully made, and when he made you, before time, he knew the good works he wanted you to walk in in 2025. And he crafted you in such a way to prepare you to walk that exact path that he has for you. Then let's understand this. When we live according to the flesh, we pervert creation and reject God and his intentions. When we take all those things in our alchemy, that amalgamations of gifts and strengths and weaknesses, and we use that for what we want and not what God wants. When we take all of those gifts and abilities and we leverage those for ourselves to acquire for ourselves whatever it is we might want, love, fame, attention, money, power, whatever it is. When we take those gifts, God's handiwork, and we leverage those things to live according to the flesh and what we want, rather than what God wants, we pervert creation. Or maybe even worse, maybe we don't take those gifts and abilities that God gives us and leverage them for our own good, nor do we leverage them for the good of God. We just ignore them and we numb ourselves and we do nothing. It's even worse. Revelation says that because you're neither good nor bad, but lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. It's even worse to ignore the ways in which we're created and use them for absolutely nothing. But when we live according to the flesh and its thoughts and desires, using everything that God's made us to be to make ourselves happy and to keep ourselves content, rather than using everything that God has given us and made us to be to build his kingdom and to live according to the spirit, this is important. We pervert God's perfect creation. And we reject God and his intentions simply by the way that we live. This is why we are objects of wrath. Because we've taken this good, wonderful thing that he gave us and we've used it for our own ends, and we've muddied it up, and we've mucked it up. So when that passage concludes, we are like them objects, by our nature, objects of wrath, that's why, because we deserve it. Now, if we understand that and we're there together, that's what makes verses 4 and 5 all the more impactful and resounding. They say this. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. So there's a lot there. But, that's the way the verse starts. But, I always say when you're reading your Bible and you see a therefore, you have to ask, what's it there for? Romans chapter 8 says, therefore. It starts out therefore. So why is that there? Because of chapters one through seven and what was covered there because of that, this, but counteracts what was just said. You were created by God. You are children of the flesh. You live according to his desires. You used to do that. You are, you are deserving object of his wrath. But in spite of that, because of his great love for us, and there's no love to compare that to in humanity than the love of that baby landing on the chest of my wife. And knowing you have never done a single thing for me, and I will die for you. Because of his great love for us. Last week, Aaron Winston did a great job talking about how God yearns for us from the inside out, this yearning love, this pursuing love that God has for us. And because of that love, because God loves us like that, he pours out his mercy grace and mercy, and many of you can define these, but so that we're on the same page, we understand what we're talking about. Mercy is when you do not receive a punishment that you have earned, that you deserve. Grace is when you receive a gift that you did not earn and you do not deserve. Because of these countervailing forces in God, and because of his great love for you, he was compelled to make a way for you. Because of his richness and mercy, God is only described as rich in two things, grace and mercy. Dane asserts in the book that being rich in mercy is the only time in the Bible that God is described as rich in anything, which I'm sure if I could talk to him, it would make sense. I'm not trying to pick on him. I wrote down, I was going to put it on the screen, that God is only rich in mercy, but then in the same passage, it was said because of the riches of his grace. I'm like, OK, well, he's rich in grace, too. So it's those two things, grace and mercy. And listen, I want to share this thought with you. His mercy expressed and personified by Jesus has literally brought us from death to life. His mercy and his grace, expressed and personified by Jesus, has literally brought us from death to life. So we were deserving of wrath, but God, because of his great love for us, because of his richness and mercy, made a way for us to be restored to him, made a way for us to be restored to our former glory. Made a way for us to live a life without sin. To be buried with him in death and be raised to walk in newness of life. To live according to the spirit. To live as a new creation, anticipating our heavenly bodies and being restored with him. He made a way for restitution and restoration. And he did that by sending his son to die on the cross for us. His son is the personification of his mercy. And we, most of us, have heard this dozens and dozens, if not thousands of times. And we give intellectual assent to it, but I'm not sure if it clicks in what that actually means because we're numb to it. And so I was trying to think of a way that we could get just maybe a glimpse of how impoverished our view of mercy might be. And I came up with this, so we'll see if it works. Let's pretend that somewhere in high school or college, you started smoking cigarettes. Now, who among us didn't have a brief smoking phase in college? Alright, we're not here to cast aspersions. But let's say that you picked up a habit in high school or college, and you've got a best friend, really good buddy. And you start to pick it up, your buddy doesn't really say anything, They keep hanging out with you. But they notice kind of an uptick. Like it used to just be like socially or on the golf course or whatever. But now it's a little bit more. And they go, hey, I'm noticing you're smoking a lot more lately. Maybe I'm not here to make you feel bad, but maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe that's not good for you. Maybe you can cut back a little bit. And you go, yeah, you know, I hear you. I know it's not good, but it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Like, I've got it under control. Okay. So a few more months or years go by, and you and your buddy are still around, and your buddy goes, hey, listen, you really haven't tapered back. Like, This is going to become a problem. And I don't want that for you. This is not healthy. It's not good for you. Love you. It's not good for you. Maybe you want to consider making some better choices about this. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you're right. I need to quit. And so you quit. But you quit for three, four days a week. And then you start sneaking them again. And your buddy smells you. And they love you. And they go, hey, are you back on the horse? Yeah, been firing up some lung darts. Sorry about that. And you get back into the habit. And the years go by. And every now and again, your buddy gently prods. He says, hey, you should stop that, man. That's not good for you. And then once you're up to a pack or two a day, it gets real bad, and your buddy convinces you to go to rehab. I don't know if they have rehab for smokers. I'm sure the health care apparatus has figured out a way to get money for that. I don't know if you can actually do that, but in this story, you do. You go to rehab. It's really serious. You get clean. You come back and you're off. You're not smoking for a while, but eventually you start back up again. Your buddy gets your friends and family around, and they implore you, please, you're killing yourself. You've got to stop doing this. Yeah, I know, you're right. There's tears. You feel terrible. And you stop the best you can. But before you know it, you're doing it again. And you're doing it again, and you know you shouldn't. You're hiding it from your buddy because you don't want to disappoint him. But you know you're killing yourself. And then one day, you're at your house. Your buddy happens to be over. You start having a coughing fit. The last thing you remember is you're on the ground coughing and you're having a hard time breathing. And your buddy calls the ambulance and you're trying to wave him off. It's fine, I don't need it. He says, yes, you do, you're dying. And then the next thing you know, you wake up and you're in a hospital bed. And you look down and there's a scar down the middle of your chest. And the doctor comes in and you go, what happened? The doctor said, well, you were in pretty bad shape. You were living through machines. You had died. What's this scar for? You needed a lung transplant. Did I get one? Yeah, you got a lung transplant. Whose lungs are in me? What happened? Those are your buddy's lungs. Well, if these are his, how is he alive? He's not. He said it was more important to him for you to live. Not only did he want you to live, but he wanted you to experience what it was to have lungs that have never smoked. He wanted you to be able to play with your kids with lungs that could breathe really well. He wanted you to be able to experience the rest of your life as if you had never made any of those mistakes that you insisted on. And he wanted to give his life to do that. If we can get ourselves there, maybe we can grab a taste of how impoverished our view is of God's mercy. Because the truth is, that's all of us. We live lives of the flesh. We do what we want. And Jesus, our buddy, in children's church, we tell them, Jesus is your forever friend. Your forever friend walks alongside you and says, hey, that's not good for you. Hey, you're killing yourself. Hey, you're hurting yourself. Hey, you should stop. Hey, we need to get friends and family involved because your sins are not helping you. And what to me is so powerful about that illustration is that in the smoking illustration, those are choices that you made. And he warned you against over and over and over again and you kept making them. And then you wake up and there's a scar. And your buddy wanted you to live life as if you had never made any of the mistakes you did previously. Every single one of us has a scar down the center of our chest. For where Jesus died for us, because he wanted us to live a life as if none of the mistakes we made previously applied to us anymore. And he gave his life so that we didn't have to. So that we can be with our families and our children and our loved ones and our friends in such a way that we know what it is to walk in true love with them because none of our past mistakes apply to us anymore. That is the richness of God's mercy. That is the richness of His grace. We are all of us scarred and have received that transplant. So that we might experience what life is without our sins dogging us all the time. That's the richness of God's undeserved mercy. And I think that Dane sums it up best in this quote. I'm going to read it and then I'm going to pray and we're going to move into communion. Dane says this, God's mercy. It means on that day when we stand before him quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had. Oh God, may that be true. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your mercy. Thank you for finding its personification in Jesus. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for yearning for us, for loving us, for lavishing your love upon us. God, we do not deserve it. We are by nature objects of wrath, a deserved and earned wrath, a deserved frustration and anger. And you watch us run ourselves into the ground and you die for us anyways. I pray that this morning we would have just a little bit more of a rich view of what your mercy is and what it means and how wonderful and miraculous it is. Help us walk in gratitude and humility towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.